30 Years of Gajah: A Retrospective

Teng Nee Cheong, Entrancing the October Moon, 1998, Oil and Gold Leaf on Canvas, 163 x 130 cm

Gajah Gallery marks its 30th anniversary with the launch of 30 Years of Gajah: A Retrospective at Gajah Gallery Singapore, opening during Singapore Art Week. Since its founding, the gallery has functioned as a porous space for dialogue and discovery, where creative and critical practices intersect and evolve. The retrospective traces the gallery’s history while highlighting the ideas and relationships that have shaped its identity — from early collaborations that defined its vision to new constellations of artists and practices emerging from its orbit today.

Presented in two parts, the exhibition opens with Archives, a reflective cartography of the gallery’s beginnings. Works by Bagyi Aung Soe, Affandi, Rusli, and others evoke a period when modernism in the region unfolded through porous borders and shared pedagogies. Many of these artists were linked to Santineketan, Rabindranath Tagore’s experimental ashram in India, where art was conceived as an ethical and aesthetic dialogue with nature, community, and the world at large. In parallel, figures such as Brother Joseph McNally shaped artistic education in Singapore, nurturing a generation of artists attuned to both craft and consciousness. Having long collaborated with scholars such as T.K. Sabapathy and Aminudin T.H. Siregar, the gallery continues to draw on their inquiries, which frame Southeast Asian art as a field of relations — a space of circulation, translation, and resonance. Archives extends beyond chronology: it unfolds as a living conversation, situating the gallery’s past as a living condition of the present.

The second section, Artists in Focus, brings together artists who have worked closely with the gallery over the decades; practitioners whose work continues to expand its language and imagination. This includes Yunizar’s textured lyricism, Murniasih’s candid mythologies of the body, Made Djirna’s alchemy of tradition and intuition, Chua Ek Kay’s meditations on memory and abstraction, alongside the distinct visions of Suzann Victor, Teng Nee Cheong, Mangu Putra and Vasan Sitthiket, among others. Together, they form a chorus of sensibilities bound by an insistence on curiosity and relation.

30 Years of Gajah: A Retrospective stands as a testament to the gallery’s enduring vision: affirming art’s capacity to move, connect, and continually imagine what remains possible. The exhibition runs from 23 January to 28 February 2026.