Installation view of Ming Wong’s ‘Wayang Spaceship’, as part of SAM’s The Everyday Museum, 2022;
image courtesy of Singapore Art Museum
Singapore Art Museum (SAM) officially launches The Everyday Museum, the museum’s long-term public art initiative presenting art projects and programmes across Singapore to inspire interest and curiosity in art.
In line with its vision of being a “disappearing museum”, The Everyday Museum brings artistic interventions into everyday spaces, transforming them into cultural nodes with site-specific artworks by local and international artists. Beyond bringing vibrancy and creativity into everyday life, the initiative will allow audiences across Singapore to form new experiences of places, reconsider spatial and environmental constructions, while facilitating conversations and the spirit of collectiveness. It will also provide local and international artists with a platform to create works in the public sphere, experiment with new mediums at a different scale, and forge interdisciplinary collaborations that connect different sectors and interest groups.
The Everyday Museum will be launching a series of site-specific public artworks that will radiate outwards to lived and communal spaces in various districts. In the next few years, members of the public can look forward to experiencing commissioned artworks at spaces such as neighbourhoods, public parks, spaces of work and leisure.
With The Everyday Museum beginning from the Tanjong Pagar district, Ming Wong’s Wayang Spaceship (2022) lands at Tanjong Pagar Distripark today as a site-specific work. Presented as a reimagining of a mobile Chinese opera wayang stage, Wayang Spaceship is a mixed media project exploring convergences between Chinese opera and science fiction, emerging from Wong’s enduring interest and connection with performative genres, as the artist’s most extensive manifestation of the project to date.
Situated prominently with the Singapore seaport as its backdrop, Wayang Spaceship seeks to reflect upon the intersections between the island’s cultural forms borne from migration and contemporary technology. Based on the inquiry, “Does technology drive history?”, the work inspires audiences to consider Singapore’s connections with oceanic narratives in a moment when the category of ‘contemporary culture’ shifts rapidly through a combination of received knowledge and technological advances. By day, the work seemingly remains dormant and mirrors the seaport and the movements of the post-industrial surroundings at Tanjong Pagar Distripark. At dusk, around 7.00pm each day, the spaceship is activated through an array of light, sound and moving images, evoking the colours of Chinese opera scenes and costumes from a distant space and time, conveyed through the figure of the scholar-warrior.
