SAM Contemporaries: How To Dream Worlds
Installation view of SAM Contemporaries: How To Dream Worlds at SAM at Tanjong Pagar Distripark. Image courtesy of Singapore Art Museum.
Singapore, 30 July 2025 – Singapore Art Museum (SAM) presents SAM Contemporaries: How To Dream Worlds, the second edition of this biennial platform dedicated to supporting emerging practices and generative trends in Singapore art. Which opened on 1 August 2025 at SAM, the exhibition features new commissions by six Singapore artists: Chok Si Xuan, Chu Hao Pei, Lee Pheng Guan (PG Lee), Masuri Mazlan, NEO
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NEO_ARTEFACTS (Fazleen Karlan) and Syahrul Anuar. Framed as a space for collective research and critical inquiry, the exhibition brings together diverse practices that reflect the evolving conversations and approaches shaping contemporary art in Singapore today.
Detail view of NEO_ARTEFACTS’s Secrets, Sweat and Sand as part of SAM Contemporaries: How To Dream Worlds at SAM at Tanjong Pagar Distripark. Image courtesy of Singapore Art Museum.
Developed through close artistic and curatorial exchange, SAM Contemporaries foregrounds artistic process and development as critical sites of inquiry. This initiative supports experimentation and iterative exploration, enabling each artist to dive deeper into their artistic research and develop new works through sustained dialogue with SAM’s curators. This culminates in the exhibition, How To Dream Worlds, presenting deeply researched, personally grounded explorations into a range of contemporary concerns from body-machine relations and the uncovering of dominant or erased histories to the politics of how space is shaped and used.
As viewers engage with the works, they are invited to step into a slow, ongoing process of questioning the now and imagining what might be. Some artworks speculate on futures, others revisit histories or explore the everyday, drawing attention to the subtle forces that shape daily life. Ong Puay Khim, Director of Collections, Public Art & Programmes at SAM, said: "SAM Contemporaries reflects SAM’s commitment to supporting artists and their exploration of long-term and budding interests, grounded by continued conversations. Both in its first edition in 2023 and current edition, some artists of SAM Contemporaries are past residents of the SAM Residencies programme; some have been engaged through different projects; and others mark new relationships. Supporting artists at pivotal moments in their practices, this platform nurtures discursive conversations, opens up fresh modes of seeing and thinking, both artistically and curatorially with a collaborative spirit.
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Six new commissions dream up alternative worlds
Installation view of Lee Pheng Guan’s Pretty, Please (Sleep Tight) as part of SAM Contemporaries: How To Dream Worlds at SAM at Tanjong Pagar Distripark. Image courtesy of Singapore Art Museum.
The exhibition’s title, How To Dream Worlds, evokes dreaming as both method and resistance. It invites audiences to reimagine modes of living, relating, and perceiving, offering speculative, hopeful propositions that unfold within states of uncertainty and possibility. Through diverse strategies, each artist proposes new ways of seeing and sensing the world as it is, while offering pathways toward what it could still be and become.
Lee Pheng Guan’s Pretty, Please (Sleep Tight) is a multi-media installation centred on lalang (Imperata cylindrica), a hardy, invasive weed seldom visible within Singapore’s meticulously manicured and controlled urban landscapes. Thriving only in neglected pockets of the city, lalang in this work has been laboriously gathered and encased within rigid metal frames. Drawing on gardening as both metaphor and method, Lee’s work reveals the often imperceptible mechanisms of control embedded in everyday life: within landscapes, bodies, and the architecture of daily existence. It reflects on how systems of order, both ecological and social, are maintained through acts of pruning, regulating, and enclosing. The work offers a quiet reckoning: what comforts do we cling to, and at what cost?
Installation view of Chu Hao Pei’s Nasi Goreng Diplomacy #3 as part of SAM Contemporaries: How To Dream Worlds at SAM at Tanjong Pagar Distripark. Image courtesy of Singapore Art Museum.
In Nasi Goreng Diplomacy #3, Chu Hao Pei presents the third chapter of an ongoing artistic research project through an extended cooking ritual. Collaborators Fadiah Nadwa Binti Fikri, Rizki Amalia Affiat and Sharmini Aphrodite share their nasi goreng recipes, which are prepared and reflected upon across four video works. Nasi goreng (meaning “fried rice” in Malay), with its ubiquitous yet adaptable characteristics, is commonly found across Southeast Asia, yet possesses no standardised form. Set against the performative backdrop of a diplomatic roundtable, the installation humorously substitutes national debates and the intricacies of diplomacy mirrored with conversations about food, evoking relational politics and collective negotiation enacted through everyday rituals. Visitors are invited to contribute their recipes, extending this participatory dialogue around community and exchange. Masuri Mazlan’s installation can haunting be another way of enduring? draws from memories of fractured belonging – of homes that were unstable, impermanent or denied. It reimagines home as a haunted shell where belonging is never fixed but always in negotiation. Using salvaged furniture, latex skins, expanding foam, and photographic fragments, Masuri conjures spectral presences; bodies withheld sanctuary yet refusing erasure. These materials grow, peel, and distort across familiar surfaces, forming wound-like membranes and hollowed spaces that speak to both refuge and refusal. Rooted in personal memory yet resonant with collective experiences of precarity and exclusion, the work proposes haunting as a mode of endurance: a persistent flicker, a soft defiance, and a refusal to disappear.
Installation view of Syahrul Anuar’s the mountain lovers club as part of SAM Contemporaries: How To Dream Worlds at SAM at Tanjong Pagar Distripark. Image courtesy of Singapore Art Museum.
Syahrul Anuar’s the mountain lovers club invites viewers to reckon with Singapore’s artificial elevations in the absence of natural topography. Referencing the tower viewers commonly found on observation decks and viewing platforms, the installation prompts reflection on how land, development, and aspiration intersect, raising critical questions of identity and place within the island city-state. The work explores Singapore’s mountain-less landscape, now dominated by the artificial peaks of public housing estates and skyscrapers. Oscillating between the historical and contemporary, factual and fictional, it invites visitors to consider their shifting relationship with a land transformed by urban expansion, resource extraction, and the costs of economic prosperity. In Secrets, Sweat and Sand, NEO.
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Installation view of NEO_ARTEFACTS’s Secrets, Sweat and Sand as part of SAM Contemporaries: How To Dream Worlds at SAM at Tanjong Pagar Distripark. Image courtesy of Singapore Art Museum.
NEO_ARTEFACTS constructs a speculative archaeological dig at the fictional site of Gunong Perandaian. Blurring the lines between narratives of history and fiction, the installation features replicas of iconic pop culture relics such as Indiana Jones’ Holy Grail and Lara Croft’s necklace and the Triangle of Light from the Tomb Raider series. Amidst epic lores surrounding archaeological sites and relics, the work activates a critical interrogation of how the discipline has been exoticised and mythologised, and how that shapes popular understandings of civilisation. By inviting viewers to piece together an origin story for Gunong Perandaian, NEO
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NEO_ARTEFACTS asks urgently: whose stories are being told, and by whom?
Installation view of Chok Si Xuan’s solid_state as part of SAM Contemporaries: How To Dream Worlds at SAM at Tanjong Pagar Distripark. Image courtesy of Singapore Art Museum.
Finally, Chok Si Xuan’s solid state features three kinetic sculptures constructed by draping silicone and nylon over electrical components and shape-memory alloys. These hanging forms rotate, expand, and contract in ways that mimic human gestures. However, the subtle whirring of concealed motors betrays their machinic core. In the installation, two livestreams capture the internal movements and sounds of the sculptures, while a third assembles visual fragments from recorded and stock footage, highlighting the fragmented journeys of materials, whose origins are obscured by global supply chains and extractive processes. Similarly, while the sculptures take on tangible forms that we can recognise, like the human body, their internal workings remain concealed. By drawing attention to the atomisation of material culture that shapes our technological world, solid- state speculates on what remains shrouded in both body and object.
By rooting these imagined worlds in the realities of our time, How To Dream Worlds offers insight into how artists respond to the conditions around them, underscoring SAM’s belief in art as a vital space for inquiry, reflection, and change. Accompanying the exhibition is a rich line up of artist- and curator-led programmes designed to deepen engagement and expand understanding of the works. A forthcoming publication in October will document the artists’ evolving creative processes, alongside curatorial essays and creative responses. The exhibition will be shown at Gallery 3 at SAM at Tanjong Pagar Distripark from 1 August to 16 November 2025. General Admission (free for Singaporeans and PRs) applies.
About Singapore Art Museum
Singapore Art Museum opened in 1996 as the first art museum in Singapore. Also known as SAM, we present contemporary art from a Southeast Asian perspective for artists, art lovers and the art curious in multiple venues across the island, including a new venue in the historic port area of Tanjong Pagar.
SAM is building one of the world's most important public collections of Southeast Asian contemporary art, with the aim of connecting the art and the artists to the public and future generations through exhibitions and programmes. SAM is working towards a humane and sustainable future by committing to responsible practices within its processes.
For more information about the SAM Contemporaries: How to Dream Worlds exhibition and other events at the museum, please visit the site here. SAM can be found on X, Instagram, Facebook, and YouTube. Additionally, more information about SAM Contemporaries: How to Dream Worlds and its accompanying programs can be found here.
