Five shows to see during Singapore Art Week

A gallery show for the ‘Rembrandt of the East’

This exhibition revisits the life and legacy of one of Southeast Asia’s most sought-after painters. Once described as “the Rembrandt of the East”, Basoeki Abdullah is renowned for his portraits of attractive women and political figures, with a reach that extended far beyond the region. The exhibition considers the artist-led diplomacy embedded in the circulation and aesthetics of his work, tracing his role as a high-society painter and a cultural producer attuned to the political power of his images. A particular focus is placed on his time in Singapore from 1958 to 1960, a pivotal moment marked by the island’s attainment of self-government, through two large oil paintings that he gifted to the state. The exhibition layout also recalls his studio in Singapore, evoking the environment in which these works were made.

Extending beyond the galleries, the programme features a talk by the Singaporean diplomat Kishore Mahbubani on Southeast Asian regionalism and his recollections of working at the ministry of foreign affairs when it was housed in city hall, now home to the National Gallery. During Singapore Art Week, conversations with Grace Samboh, Gie Sanjaya and Sally Texania will bring a contemporary generation of Indonesian curators into dialogue with Basoeki’s legacy, opening ways of seeing this seductive body of work anew.

• Diplomacy and Desire: Basoeki Abdullah in Singapore, until 1 February, National Gallery Singapore

Printmakers and their practices take pride of place

Where do prints sit in today’s art landscape? The Print Show is STPI’s timely response, a new platform that brings together 27 artists who integrate printmaking into their artistic practice. Featuring leading international publishers such as Cristea Roberts, BORCH Editions, Two Palms, Crown Point Press and Ota Fine Arts, the presentation spans a wide roster including artists such as Jeff Koons, Tacita Dean, Yayoi Kusama and Irfan Hendrian. By gathering works across a range of printmaking approaches and price points, the exhibition is positioning itself not only as a popular entry into collecting, but also as a vital engine of contemporary art and practice.

For STPI—a creative workshop and contemporary art gallery in Singapore—The Print Show marks a recalibration as the S.E.A. Focus fair, which it founded and has steered since 2019, and will now be organised by Art SG.

At the exhibition, STPI will lean into its long-standing strengths of cross-institutional collaboration and convening diverse artistic communities, reasserting Singapore’s role in international conversations around print. The show is accompanied by a two-day symposium, The Politics of Print: Elephant in the Room, curated by Stephanie Bailey, which will examine how print has shaped modern and contemporary art histories; speakers include Michael Craig-Martin and Salima Hashmi. There will also be a Singapore edition of Crit Club that will include a contextual performance project by Cem A., the artist behind meme account @freeze_magazine.

• The Print Show & Symposium, 22–31 January, STPI, 41 Robertson Quay, Singapore

Artists across Asia come together to create maritime-themed works

In another exciting collaboration, Rockbund Art Museum and Art SG will present Wan Hai Hotel: Singapore Strait, an evolution of the ambitious and innovative exhibition model first staged at the museum in Shanghai. This new edition expands the project’s exploration of archipelagic thinking and maritime identity through a constellation of artists from Southeast Asia, Australasia and the wider Asia Pacific. Transforming the lobby of the Warehouse Hotel into an immersive exhibition, Wan Hai Hotel draws visitors into a shifting environment of film, installation, performances and site-specific interventions.

Building on its Shanghai debut, this edition continues to feature the works of Arka Kinari, Cai Kunyu and Stephanie Comilang, while introducing new commissions and activations tailored for the local context. These include pieces by Ho Tzu Nyen, Robert Zhao, Ming Wong and Payne Zhu, as well as performances by John Clang, Bhenji Ra and Joshua Serafin, who presents a new iteration of An Eye Once Blind, originally commissioned for the project’s first staging in April. Together, these practices chart a fluid, transregional world in which storytelling, movement and ideas of the ocean meet, transforming the hotel into a living, tidal space of encounters.

• Wan Hai Hotel: Singapore Strait, 20–31 January, The Warehouse Hotel, Singapore

A Singaporean-New York co-project about the sound of interference

Ground Loops marks a dynamic new collaboration between Feelers, a Singapore-based research lab, and the School for Poetic Computation, an experimental school in New York, two organisations that are committed to the study and research of art and technology. Curated by Celine Wong Katzman, the programme takes its cue from the electrical engineering phenomenon in which multiple devices on the same circuit generate an unintended hum, but it reframes interference as the productive site of encounter rather than a technical fault. This premise shapes an exhibition featuring artists working across Singapore and New York, including Zainab Aliyu, Neta Bomani, Bani Haykal, Ong Kian Peng, Charmaine Poh and Fern Teo.

This ethos is carried into a series of accompanying workshops held across both weeks of the exhibition that aim to expand the audience’s mode of engagement. Participants are invited to create interactive browser-based sound works with workshop teacher Tommy Martinez in The Musical Web: Gestural Instruments, explore digital and relational consent with artist and teacher Melanie Hoff in her collective thought experiment Consensual Hacking, and engage in speculative writing and coding exercises with Ashley Hi in Bring Your Own Bug Spray.

• Ground Loops, 22–31 January, The TreeTop, Level 5, *SCAPE, Singapore

The Singaporean culture of ‘making do’ is turned into art

• chapalang, 22 January–1 February, Artspace @ Helutrans, Singapore

There is a particular joy to be found in chapalang, an expression that describes the random, seemingly chaotic mix of parts that should not fit together but somehow do. In Singapore, the term has come to be associated with cultural strategies of ‘making do’: improvising, repurposing and working with the materials, technologies or mismatched components at hand.

The exhibition takes chapalang seriously, not as an accident, but as an intentional methodology, a way of reprogramming the tools, systems and infrastructures we inherit to execute our own intentions. Compiled by Gunalan Nadarajan and Roopesh Sitharan, two experienced curators and educators who have shaped much of the region’s new media discourse, the exhibition builds on their earlier project menggodam at Ilham Gallery in Kuala Lumpur, which similarly explored hacking, disruption and creative remaking.

Here, they extend that inquiry, threading together a sensibility of making the heterogeneity of technologies one’s own. Each gesture signals a refusal to accept technological systems at face value, insisting instead on adaptation, subversion and vernacular ingenuity.

The artists gathered here work within this spirit of tactical reconfiguration, proposing that the ‘technological’ is never neutral or complete. In a moment when global infrastructures are increasingly hardening, this exhibition turns toward Southeast Asia’s agile, resourceful cultures of making to imagine what else, what otherwise, might be possible.