In an increasingly algorithmically motivated and automated world, how does one identify a real user among automated users? Are we now automated users ourselves? The CAPTCHA codes plastered across the building may be challenging to read, but when they are eventually verbalised, they ring alongside the humdrum of surrounding traffic – the colliding and skewed letters abuzz with movement of vehicles in and around.

A Wayang Spaceship has landed on our shores. Alongside the industrial, technological and ecological crises that have taken place throughout time, it also stands witness to our place in the cosmos. During the day, the Wayang Spaceship is seemingly dormant, its reflective surfaces mirroring the bustling traffic around the container seaport. Its own inactivity is interrupted by the occasional stray radio transmission relayed from another dimension.

At dusk, the Wayang Spaceship reclaims its former role as a travelling Chinese theatre, illuminating the past, present and future with an operatic symphony of light, sound and image, as though it is livestreamed from the memory of a scholar-warrior, a time travelling consciousness who moves freely between the past, present, and future. Each day, after the Singapore Art Museum closes, the Wayang Spaceship activates with light, sound and film, allowing the public to commune with this solitary figure of Chinese opera.

The Wayang Spaceship will evolve over a two-year period featuring a range of performances and access programmes. It is commissioned by The Everyday Museum, a public art initiative by Singapore Art Museum, and made possible with the generous support of Sun Venture.

The Oort Cloud and the Blue Mountain: Edition Tanjong Pagar Distripark (2022) is an installation work by Hazel Lim-Schlegel and Andreas Schlegel, in collaboration with neuewave. It refers both to Blue Mountain, an early 20th century painting by Wassily Kandinsky and the Oort Cloud, an astronomical phenomenon described as an extended shell of icy objects that exist on the outer reaches of our solar system. The distant Oort Cloud, out of reach to our capacity to experience, is the opposite of tangibility and perceptibility which the Blue Mountain represents. The work thus refers to the broader idea of senses and/or the limit of sensing, that some things can be tangible and sensed but remain distant from our comprehension.

The installation is also a reflection of the increasingly digitalised world where technology has become a key mediator of human experiences – the large-scale vinyl print of an abstract image of the Blue Mountain is generated by a computer program, animated by a series of light fixtures; a set of QR codes further extend the physical experience of the work into a virtual space. Visitors are invited to scan the QR codes for 3D micro-experiences through which they can explore and interact with the relief objects as well as capture and share their experience through the use of selfies. The digital content will be refreshed quarterly by other local artists invited by the Schlegels. This, and other potential activations, not only offer viewers new encounters with the work but also open it up to an organic and evolving process of improvisation and adaptations.

The Oort Cloud and the Blue Mountain: Edition Tanjong Pagar Distripark is commissioned with the support of Mapletree and is part of The Everyday Museum, a public art initiative by Singapore Art Museum. The first edition of the work was commissioned by the National Gallery Singapore for The Children’s Biennale 2019.

Creatif Compleks is the culmination of Michael Lee’s reflection on the function of the artist’s studio within the arts ecology of a city. The work takes the form of a diagram about a hypothetical property development consisting of various configurations of the artist’s home/studio. The use of LED rope lights, a popular fixture in advertising and interior design, alludes to latent apprehensions about the development and promotion of the arts in Singapore which today are, arguably, at a feverish pitch. Informed by myths and fantasies of artists in their studios, the work takes a speculative leap into the utopian and the absurd.

The work’s first iteration, developed during the artist’s residency at NTU CCA Singapore in 2018, is in the Singapore Art Museum Collection. This 2022 version is commissioned with the support of Mapletree and is part of The Everyday Museum, a public art initiative by Singapore Art Museum.