Research drives the Gallery’s diverse work to foster a deeper understanding, curiosity, and appreciation of art.

National Gallery Singapore positions Southeast Asian art within a global context while bringing international art to the region. As a collecting institution that collaborates and engages in comparative research in the region, we explore interdisciplinary connections that transcend national boundaries.

By profiling influential artists, the Gallery generates new research and perspectives on artistic practices that made an impact on global art history.

The Gallery creates thought-provoking encounters between artists and the public, focusing on in-depth research into local practices and works in the National Collection.

The Gallery is committed to diversity and inclusivity by prioritising new research into underrepresented fields and engaging with important societal issues through art.

Read more
avatar
It is not hard to see how art history’s emphasis on visual literacy and critical thinking becomes relevant to an increasingly visual world, and one which requires constant decoding and interpretation, whether in the interest of geo-politics or our commitment to building inclusive societies. More recently, History of Art is also referred to as Histories of Art to reflect the field’s rapidly globalizing and inclusive scope.
avatar Dr. Eugene Tan, CEO and Director of National Gallery Singapore and the Singapore Art Museum

Our research

Video | 1.5 hr

Catching Fire | Forensic Architecture in Conversation with Eugene Tan (2021)

Art and architecture are commonly associated with aesthetics and ideas. But what if they could also be marshalled to shed light on incidents of conflict and harm? Learn more about Eyal Weizman (Director of Forensic Architecture) exploring these questions in conversation with Eugene Tan (Director, National Gallery Singapore and Singapore Art Museum).

Video | 1.5 hr

The Manifold Roles of Women Artists in Singapore from the 1980s: Panel (2021)

This talk explores how the burgeoning Singapore art scene from the 1980s to 2000s compelled women artists to take on numerous roles on top of their own individual artistic practices, and how narratives of contemporary art in Singapore might recognise these less visible forms of labour and collaborative thinking.

Video | 1.5 hr

Panel Discussion: Art as Historical Method in Southeast Asia (2023)

How can contemporary art create new ways of understanding the past? This panel explored the turn toward history in Southeast Asian contemporary art practice, how it offers models for the ways in which we understand the past and the work that history can do in the world.

Video | 1.5 hr

Opening Talk | Dalam Southeast Asia: The Tailors and the Mannequins (2021)

Shabbir Hussain Mustafa, the lead curator of the UOB Southeast Asia Gallery, will open the programme with an introduction. This will be followed by an in-depth discussion with the curator of The Tailors and the Mannequins: Chen Cheng Mei and You Khin, Roger Nelson.

Video | 1.5 hr

Figuring a Scene | In Dialogue with Patrick Flores and Siddharta Perez (2024)

Curated by Dr. Patrick Flores, Dalam Southeast Asia: Figuring a Scene proposes that exhibitions hold intrinsic significance beyond historical or societal contexts. Emotions, imagination, and sensory experiences take center stage in our understanding of art, defining how we make sense of the world around us.

Video | 1 hr

Material as Method: Kwok Kian Chow in Dialogue with Teo Hui Min (2024)

By drawing upon insights from the exhibition Cheong Soo Pieng: Layer by Layer, this dialogue between Kwok Kian Chow and exhibition curator Teo Hui Min aims to examine the transformative impact of artists and art movements on the interpretation of materiality within the context of modern art in Singapore and Asia in the 1950s.

1 6

Our lead curators

The team at the Gallery is helmed by leading researchers and scholars. The individuals listed below are recognised experts in their fields of curating, art history, and education.

Patrick Flores

Patrick Flores

Chief Curator

Patrick Flores is Chief Curator of National Gallery Singapore and concurrently Professor of Art Studies at the Department of Art Studies at the University of the Philippines. He is the Director of the Philippine Contemporary Art Network. He was a Guest Scholar of the Getty Research Institute in Los Angeles in 2014. He was the Artistic Director of Singapore Biennale 2019 and Curator of the Philippine and Taiwan Pavilions at the Venice Biennale in 2015 and 2022 respectively.

His work focuses on the art and curatorial history of Southeast Asia and Philippine colonial and modern art history.

Published research

  • The Modern in Southeast Asian Art: A Reader (2022), co-editor with Kanaga Sabapathy 
  • Charting Thoughts: Essays on Art in Southeast Asia (2017), co-editor with Low Sze Wee
  • Past Peripheral: Curation in Southeast Asia (2008)

Exhibitions

  • Figuring a Scene, 2024
  • Elusive Edge: Philippine Abstract Forms, 2023
  • Ties of History: Art in Southeast Asia, 2018
Read more

Seng Yu Jin

Director (Curatorial, Research and Exhibitions) and Senior Curator

Seng Yu Jin is a Senior Curator at the Gallery. He is currently a lecturer at the National University of Singapore, and previously taught the MA Asian Art Histories and BA Fine Arts programmes at LASALLE College of the Arts.

He is interested in Southeast Asian art histories, and his research focuses on the region’s exhibition histories and artist collectives.

Published research

  • Co-author of Singapore Chronicles: Art (2019)
  • Co-editor for Histories, Practices, Interventions: A Reader in Singapore Contemporary Art (2016)

Co-curated exhibitions

  • Cheong Soo Pieng: Bridging Worlds (2010) 
  • FX Harsono: Testimonies (2010)
  • Singapore Biennale, If the World Changed (2013)
  • Awakenings: Art in Society in Asia, 1960s−1990s (2019)
Read more

Horikawa Lisa

Director (Curatorial and Collections) and Senior Curator

Horikawa Lisa is Senior Curator and Director (Curatorial & Collections) overseeing the strategic development and enhancement of accessibility for its collections including artwork and archives. She serves as Visiting Professor (Contemporary Art Practice & Visual Culture) of Kanazawa College of Art. Prior to joining the Gallery, she was Curator of Fukuoka Asian Art Museum.

Her current research interest is on comparative examination of intersecting modernisms in Southeast Asia, East Asia and beyond in the first half of 20th century.

Published research

  • Contributing editor, The Modern in Southeast Asian Asian Art: A Reader (2022)

  • Chapter contributor, Toward Updating the Concept of “Bijustu (Art)”  (2017, in Japanese) 

Co-curated exhibitions

  • Reframing Modernism: Painting from Southeast Asia, Europe and Beyond (2016)

  • Between Declarations & Dreams: Art of Southeast Asia since the 19th century (2015)

  • The 3rd and 4th Fukuoka Asian Art Triennale (2005, 2009)

  •  China Dream—Another Flow of Chinese Modern Art (2004)

Read more

Phoebe Scott

Senior Curator and Lead Curator for Art in SEA

Phoebe Scott is a Senior Curator and Curator of Research Publications. Phoebe holds a PhD in Art History and Theory from the University of Sydney, on the subject of modern art in Vietnam. She is currently also an Adjunct Lecturer in Art History at the National University of Singapore.

Her research interests include modern art within a global framework; intersections of modernism and colonialism, especially in Indochina; Socialist Realism and post-Socialist art.

Published research

  • “Entangled Modernisms: Vietnamese Modern Art and Artists in Paris,” in eds. Natalie Adamson and Richard Taws, The Wiley Blackwell Companion to French Art (forthcoming 2025)
  • Co-editor (with Yvonne Low) of “Special Issue: Rethinking Primitivisms in the Modern Art of Southeast Asia” for the journal World Art and author of “Primitivsm and Affiliation: Yeh Chi Wei’s Borneo Images” for the issue (2024).
  • Contributing editor for T.K. Sabapathy & Patrick Flores, eds., The Modern in Southeast Asian Art: A Reader (2023).
  • “Colonial or Cosmopolitan?: Vietnamese Art in Paris in the 1930s-1940s,” Southeast of Now, 3:2 (October 2019): 187-242.
  • Co-editor, with Stephen Whiteman, Sarena Abdullah, and Yvonne Low, Ambitious Alignments: New Histories of Southeast Asian Art, 1945-1990. (2018).

Exhibitions

  • Familiar Others: Emiria Sunassa, Eduardo Masferré and Yeh Chi Wei, 1940s-1970s (2022-2023)
  • Radiant Material: A Dialogue in Vietnamese Lacquer Painting, National Gallery Singapore, (2017)

Co-curated exhibitions

  • City of Others: East and Southeast Asian Artists in Paris, 1920s-40s. (forthcoming 2025)
  • Ever Present: First People’s Art of Australia, National Gallery Singapore (2022) 
  • Reframing Modernism: Painting in Europe, Southeast Asia and Beyond, National Gallery Singapore, (2016) 
  • Between Declarations and Dreams: Art of Southeast Asia Since the 19th Century, (2015- ongoing)
Read more

Adele Tan

Senior Curator and Lead Curator for Art in Singapore

Adele Tan received her PhD in art history from the Courtauld Institute of Art, London and is Senior Curator at National Gallery Singapore. Her research focuses on modern and contemporary art in Southeast Asia and China. She also lectures in Art History at the National University of Singapore. She curated the 2019 annual Ng Teng Fong Roof Garden Commission with artist Charles Lim Yi Yong and the 2023 commission by Mumbai-based artist Shilpa Gupta, and also initiated the Gallery’s site-specific commission series OUTBOUND, which featured Jane Lee, Gary Carsley, Haegue Yang and Yee I-Lann. She recently completed a major retrospective exhibition on the Singapore-born British artist Kim Lim in 2024 and is leading the DBS Singapore Gallery revamp opening in 2025. She is concurrently Assistant Director, Curatorial Programmes at the Gallery.

Exhibitions:

  • Between Declarations and Dreams: Art of Southeast Asia Since the 19th Century
  • A Fact Has No Appearance: Art Beyond the Object (2016) 
  • Yayoi Kusama: Life is the Heart of Rainbow (2017)
  • Awakenings: Art in Society in Asia (2018)
  • OUTBOUND season 1 (2018-2023)
  • Ng Teng Fong Roof Garden Commissions # 3 and #6
  • Kim Lim: The Space Between. A Retrospective

Published writings

  • Between Declarations and Dreams / Chpt 6 Re:Defining Art
  • Redza Piyadasa in the 1970s: Cerebral Maneouvres, Cultural Assertions 
  • Yayoi Kusama’s Late Requiem for the Now
  • Rhetorical Postures and the Photographic Condition: A Minor Malaysian Detour
  • AU CONTRAIRE—John Lee Joo-For (Malaysia/Australia)
  • SUBJECTS AT ODDS: Shilpa Gupta’s Untitled (2023) in four parts
  • Planting and imaging precarity in Charles Lim’s SEASTATE 9: proclamation garden
  • “Call and Response”: Asia and Kim Lim (co-written with Joleen Loh)
  • Retrieving Colour and Culture: Another View into Kim Lim
  • Conversation with Teo Eng Seng (2024)
  • From political travesties to aesthetic justice: the ugly in Teo Eng Seng's D Cells
Read more

Cai Heng

Senior Curator and Lead Curator for Ink

Cai Heng is currently a senior curator and lead curator for ink at the National Gallery Singapore. She is also the principal convenor for the Chinese art module for the NUS’ Art History Minor course. 

Cai received a PhD in Art History and Theory from the University of Sydney.

Published research:

  • “Tradition unfettered: The story of Singapore ink,” in Siapa Nama Kamu? Art in Singapore Since the 19th Century (2015)
  • Beauty beyond form: The thought and art of Wu Guanzhong” in Wu Guanzhong: Beauty Beyond Form (2015)
  • The Xiu Hai Lou Collection: A Glimpse into the Evolution of Modern Chinese Painting,” in Rediscovering Treasures: Ink Art from the Xiu Hailou Collection (2017)
  • “Transnational Development in Georgette Chen’s Early Artistic Practice” in Georgette Chen: At Home in the World (2020)
  • Editor and writer for Liu Kuo-Sung: Experimentation As Method monograph  (2023).

Exhibitions:

  • Liu Kuo-sung: Experimentation as Method (2023-2024)
  • Wu Guanzhong: Learning from the Master (2021-2022)
  • Art Nurtures Life: Celebrating 100 Years of Wu Guanzhong (2019-2020, Beijing)
  • Wu Guanzhong: Expressions of Pen and Palette (2018-2019)
  • Rediscovering Treasures: Ink Art from the Xiu Hai Lou Collection (2017).
Read more
16

Visit the Rotunda Library & Archive

Explore the rich artistic histories of Singapore and Southeast Asia at our reference library and archive, nestled in the historic Supreme Court Wing.

Explore more

Art Conservation

Art Conservation

Our Collections

Our Collections

Our Publications

Publications

Online Art Courses

Online Art Courses

Join as a Gallery member

Free admission to all exhibitions for each cardholder and 3 guests

Private film screenings, events, and workshops

Exclusive thought leadership sharing from arts professionals