Everyday Practices

My art is doing time, so it’s not different from doing life or doing art or doing time. No matter whether I stay in ‘art-time’ or ‘life-time,’ I am passing time.”—the artist Tehching Hsieh thus describes his durational performances, which turn the banality of life and the passage of time into medium and subject for his art.

Building on Hsieh’s philosophy, the exhibition Everyday Practices examines the inventive ways artists have appropriated quotidian routines and lived experiences to express powerful statements of resilience and endurance. Through their works, we witness ongoing conflicts, humanitarian crises and asymmetrical power relationships. In this context, the gestures that the artists have employed, by dint of repetition, reveal themselves as small acts of resistance that return agency to the individual. Art, as we see here, offers a means of sense-making and coping in the face of adversity.

Drawing from the collection of Singapore Art Museum, Everyday Practices brings together artworks by diverse artists across different generations and geographies in Asia. They affirm that the collective strength found in individual actions cuts across cultural practices and conditions. The question that is universal to us all is: “In the face of life’s challenges, how do we go on going on?”.

Installation view, Sun Xun