Curator’s Notes

No other living politician dominates his people and his country like LKY does. Except of course Kim Jong Il and Robert Mugabe. But whereas North Korea and Zimbabwe are ranks as two of world’s poorest countries, Singaporeans ranks as one of the richest. All in a lifetime. LKY must be doing something right !! For Singaporeans, LKY has always been there and seemingly will be there forever more
But the reality is even gods pass on

For our Singapore survey this year, I wanted to prod Singaporean artists to contemplate a future without LKY. To consider it now and not wait till that dark day. I am certain the machinery of governance are well prepared for that eventuality but are the heartlanders ?

I am often asked what exactly is it that an art curator do ? First and foremost, we pose questions. Oftentimes these are esoteric questions or even questions of semantics. We asked our favourite artists to consider these questions. We know too that there is no right and wrong answers and that there are many answers and there will be even more questions. For this show,I wanted to invite senior artists like Tang Dawu, Jimmy Ong and Zai Kuning who live lives LKY would not have approved and would probably consider as failures. None has a HDB.to their name. But I also wanted to invite younger artists whose lives have been less defined by LKY and more by new technology. Most of works are created specifically for the show and we can sure there will be some very interesting answers forthcoming

Valentine Willie
Curator

Curated by Adeline Ooi, Beyond LKY was the third installment of the gallery’s annual “Singapore Survey,” timed to coincide with the nation’s 45th National Day. The exhibition functioned as a critical inquiry into the “state of the nation,” specifically questioning the “Great Man” theory of history that had long centered on Lee Kuan Yew. By inviting 19 artists to look beyond the dominant political narrative, the show explored alternative histories, forgotten figures, and personal identities that exist outside the shadow of the state’s founding mythology.

The exhibition was characterized by a strong lean toward historical revisionism and the use of the archive. Green Zeng presented works from his series The Malayan Communist, featuring a lone figure in a jungle setting—a visual intervention into the state’s sanitized historical record. Alan Oei contributed to this “myth-making” with his fictionalized accounts of a revolutionary past, while Zai Kuning continued his long-term research into the Orang Laut (sea people), asserting a pre-colonial Malay history that predates the modern city-state.

Other practitioners engaged with the physical and psychological constraints of the “Master Plan.” Tang Ling Nah and Chun Kaifeng utilized architectural motifs to investigate urban alienation, while Jason Wee explored the intersections of governance and landscape. The inclusion of Tang Da Wu, a pioneer of the Singaporean avant-garde, provided a generational anchor for the younger artists, many of whom were utilizing conceptual strategies to navigate the friction between official rhetoric and lived experience. Collectively, Beyond LKY positioned Singaporean contemporary art as a vital site for dissent and “unlearning,” challenging the perceived stability of the national identity during a period of significant social and political transition.