Group Exhibition Art Fairs Marina Bay Sands Expo and Convention Centre, Singapore
VIP Preview (by invite only)
Thursday 22 Jan 2026
2pm – 6pm
Vernissage (by invite only)
Thursday 22 Jan 2026
6pm – 9pm
Public Days
Friday 23 Jan 2026: 12 – 7pm
Saturday 24 Jan 2026: 11am – 7pm
Sunday 25 Jan 2026: 11am – 6pm
ShanghART’s second participation at SEA Focus brings together works by Amanda Heng, Melati Suryodarmo, and Robert Zhao Renhui. While distinct in form and approach, the three artists are connected by a shared engagement with The Humane Agency—each exercised, sustained, and negotiated across different conditions and perspectives.
Amanda Heng’s Singirl Revisits (2011), first presented in her solo exhibition at the Singapore Art Museum, situates the persona Singirl against sites across Singapore that were already disappearing at the time of the work’s making. Conceived in deliberate contrast to the Singapore Girl—an image conceived by Singapore Airlines in the 1970s as part of its global branding—Singirl functions as a self-authored counter-image, grounded in lived experience rather than idealised projection. Viewed fifteen years on, the photographs gain renewed poignancy as records of places that may no longer exist, seen through Singirl’s enduring gaze. The persona continues to evolve across Heng’s practice, most recently in Retired Singirl (2025– ), an interactive project that transforms Singirl into an AI avatar, on view now at the National Gallery Singapore. Across these iterations, Heng asserts humane agency through revisitation, reclaiming representation as an act of care, memory, and self-determination.
The photographic documentation of Melati Suryodarmo’s I Love You (2018), a five-hour durational performance, is accompanied by sculptural works made from sisal paper and unbleached mulberry produced during her residency at STPI (2018). In the performance, Suryodarmo repeatedly utters the phrase “I love you” while grappling with an oversized rectangular pane of glass, her body gradually overwhelmed by its weight, bulk, and fragility. Like the phrase itself, glass embodies a paradox of strength and vulnerability—capable of bearing weight yet susceptible to sudden rupture. This tension extends into the accompanying sculptural works, where fragile fibres are shaped into architectural forms derived from an abandoned house. Together, the performance and objects articulate humane agency as endurance and commitment, foregrounding the emotional and physical labour required to sustain meaning, care, and memory under pressure.
Extending his long-term engagement with secondary forests, Robert Zhao Renhui presents Owl Archive (2025), a sculptural installation comprising images drawn from a long-term photographic record of a buffy fish owl inhabiting a concrete drainage system at Gillman Barracks. The four images—a feather, a World War II glass shard, a skeletal leaf, and the owl itself—are presented without hierarchy, treated as equal fragments from a single site. Rather than isolating the animal as a subject, Zhao observes how biological life, historical residue, and urban infrastructure coexist within a space engineered solely for water. The drain becomes a quiet archive where multiple temporalities settle and persist. By resisting interpretation or intervention, the work proposes humane agency as ethical witnessing—an attentiveness to forms of life that endure beyond visibility or human intent.
Together, these works frame The Humane Agency as a practice grounded in care across self, body, and environment. Presented at SEA Focus 2026, ShanghART’s selection foregrounds attentiveness, endurance, and ethical presence as subtle yet vital expressions of agency in a world shaped by loss, fragility, and transformation.
Notes:
Robert Zhao presented his solo exhibition Seeing Forest at the Singapore Pavilion during the 60th Venice Biennale (2024), while Amanda Heng will represent Singapore at its national pavilion for the upcoming 61st Venice Biennale (2026).
Melati Suryodarmo will stage a live performance of I Love You at the UBS Art Booth during Art SG on 22 January 2025, from 4 to 7 pm.
News:
Hampi, Red Rocks, and Hanuman: Atul Bhalla and Robert Zhao Renhui 01.22, 2026 -01.25, 2026
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