Alternate Reality is the first Southeast Asia-focused group exhibition by the New Art Museum Singapore, a private museum launched in October 2023 in affiliation with Japan’s Whitestone Gallery. Featuring eight artists from Indonesia, Singapore, Thailand, and Vietnam, the show emphasises how our understanding of “reality” is fragile and subjective, shaped constantly by forces like cultural context, sensory experience, and mass media.
Curated by Bangkok-based independent curator Nim Niyomsin, the multi-medium exhibition spans diverse topics — from climate change and capitalism to politics and progress — with most of the works emerging from the artists’ long-term research on particular subjects. Within the bright, cavernous rooms of the museum’s Tanjong Pagar space, Alternate Reality allows viewers to encounter the practices of some truly outstanding regional voices, through works that dive into the past, call attention to the present, and imagine the undiscovered future.
Freezing time
In one corner of the museum, you’ll find a freezer containing a small, oddly shaped block of ice.
This is not some forgotten provision from a year-end party, but a work by Singaporean artist Anthony Chin Tze Wee, whose practice deals above all with the forms and structures of power. First created for Plural Art Magazine’s Our Heartlands project, Air Doa Selamat refers to the construction of the Causeway, in the 1920s, between Johor and Singapore — a project which required two million cubic metres of granite from Pulau Ubin quarries.
To create this work, Chin used a piece of granite from the Causeway to make a mould, filling it with quarry rainwater. Kept at subzero temperatures, the work reminds us of the surprising histories contained within the most unassuming materials. Nearby, his Point 20 Sliver reaches across the room, its LED numbers displaying the coordinates of disputed territories around the world, and its shape echoing the line drawn by Singapore in a dispute with Malaysia.
Asked about his hopes for the works, Chin expresses a wish to “bring the audience through the past, to the present, and maybe towards the future” — journeys central to Alternate Reality as a whole.
History reimagined
Other works that directly reference historical events include large, turbulent paintings by Le Quy Tong, a Vietnamese artist showing in Singapore for the first time.
For his True Gold – Dreamer (2019) and Neo Romanticism (2020–23) series, Le sourced actual images pertaining to the fall of Communism and the horrors of war respectively, then “distort[ed] and manipulate[d]” them — “flipping, filtering, inverting them to negatives and adding extra colours and texture” — till they were nearly unrecognisable.
Covered in colourful splotches and erratic black lines, the paintings are dizzy, bewildering. And yet, from the jumble, images and associations emerge — nuclear towers, glitching pixels, thronging masses, roaring flames.
Cut off from their historical referents, the images are abstracted and anonymised, nearly impossible to connect to any specific event. Instead, they become mirrors for the viewer and their times.
By contrast, Maharani Mancanagara embarks upon a specific historical inquiry into the life of her grandfather, a teacher-turned-political prisoner during Indonesia’s tumultuous mid-20th century. To create the works in Alternate Reality, Maharani read through her grandfather’s diaries, visited prison sites, and conducted interviews and archival research. She then transformed her findings into a variety of installation pieces, from charcoal drawings on wood cutouts to cases filled with mysterious objects.
Filling an entire room in the museum, the works turn history — in the artist’s own words — into “a malleable space where facts are intertwined with imagination.” On two walls hang pieces from the Unjustified Justify: Amicus Curiae series: charcoal renderings of clothing and other everyday objects, which, lifesize and nearly photorealistic yet two-dimensional, flirt with the distinction between real and unreal.
Elsewhere, charcoal figures act out private dramas, while works from the Terompet Masyarakat series allude to how prisoners might sneak in items or scrounge up materials to make ink. The room’s centrepiece is a set of desks upon which sit copies of Susur Leluri, a card game encouraging players to question the history taught in schools.
Privileging individual experiences over official narratives, complexity over tidiness, Maharani’s vision of the past is shadowy and secretive, full of stories which to us remain unknown.
Return to yourself
Meanwhile, works by Thailand’s Imhathai Suwatthanasilp and Singapore’s Chen Sai Hua Kuan invite us to pay attention to the precious (and precarious) present. Made with multiple mediums including monoprint, acrylic, charcoal, graphite, and human hair, Imhathai’s intricate canvases emerge from her hobby of walking and foraging weeds and flowers. Glimpsed from afar, her compositions resemble swirls of fireworks or human figures. Seen up close, they reveal extraordinarily delicate natural forms: feathery leaves and fronds, stems outlined using hair and tangled up like blood vessels or wires.
“I am fascinated by beautiful details and [their] fragility,” says the artist. “I think our lives are no different from these flowers.”
Just across from Imhathai’s works, viewers will find several sets of white teeth perched upon wooden stands. Press a button, and the teeth clatter noisily to life. This is Sai’s Chitter Chatter series, created using dental casts sourced during a stay in Taiwan. For Sai, the casts point to both the personal (the intimate details of an individual’s dental history) and the societal (the noisy public discourse that takes place during major events like elections).
If Chitter Chatter calls us to listen to the voices of the collective, Sound Like No. 18 quiets us down to listen to ourselves. Developed during a residency in Berlin, the piece is part of Sai’s Sound Like series, in which he uses everyday materials to create unique, interactive sound experiences.
Sound Like No. 18 consists of a labyrinthine arrangement of pipes, suspended at ear level above the floor. Step into the centre of the installation, speak into the pipe in front of you, and you should hear your own voice reflected back to you through the two pipes by your ears.
It’s an eerie experience, to imagine your voice travelling through those torturously winding halls, and hear yourself so disembodied — a second self, like the shadow the work casts on the ground. But to Sai, it’s also a potentially restorative one: “By creating a physical listening experience, the artwork carves out a moment of solitude … [It] encourages people to pause, listen, and reconnect with their own sense of identity.”
A sobering forecast
Ong Kian Peng’s AI film Disaster-Free speculates about a future where the ocean has risen to catastrophic heights. Building upon his previous installation Accidental Utopia, the Singaporean artist worked with various AI models to generate images, add motion, and create a voiceover and soundtrack.
Disaster-Free opens with a young girl sitting alone in a HDB flat, as water pools around her ankles. The voiceover narrates a tale of disaster: once a family’s dream home, the flat is now one of many swallowed by the encroaching sea.
In other shots, a yellow kayak floats through scenes of a Singapore submerged: half-buried cars, abandoned malls, and markets filled with debris. Accompanied by a rhythmic soundtrack, the film has that uncanny quality typical of AI-generated imagery, which only underscores the disquieting irony of using an energy-guzzling technology to comment on its own consequences.
But despite these apocalyptic effects, Ong explains that Disaster-Free rejects typical binaristic notions of utopia or dystopia, good or bad. ‘’Instead,” he asserts, “it is a film about human resilience, acceptance, and a future-present of the protagonist’s reality, a nuanced and pragmatic view of that world … I resist the notion that it is a story. It is a reality, just not ours, maybe not yet.”
Out of this world
But to arrange the works merely in terms of past, present, and future is too simple. Ultimately, in art as in life, the three enfold each other, tangled in configurations inextricable and strange.
This is perhaps best illustrated by the works of Indonesian artist Nurrachmat Widyasena, whose Space Age series draws inspiration from how people of the past imagined the future as an era of extraterrestrial colonies and flying cars — fantasies which appear charmingly naive from today’s point of view. Painted on reflective metal plates, the pieces present a fascinating mishmash of images: here a toylike astronaut, there a scene from Star Wars, all laid over shimmering star maps.
In creating his works, Nurrachmat calls upon childhood memories of his technologist father, sci-fi pop culture, and real-world scientific research. Nearby, the abstract, amorphous, grasping forms of another series attempt to express the physical and mathematical paradoxes of time travel.
These dreams of interplanetary and time travel, Nurrachat explains, “represent humanity’s attempts to shape its destiny,” while his works mount “both a celebration and a critique of how far we’ve come, and how far we still have to go.”
Seeing beyond
And then there is the possibility of sidestepping reality entirely — a possibility offered by Singaporean artist Debbie Ding, whose virtual reality (VR) and video works transport viewers into realms beyond the prosaic physical world.
The VR experience Lost Horizons references the tragic case of the missing MH370 plane, an incident that prompted Ding to wonder “whether there could be anywhere in the world that you could truly be lost, in this [age when] everything seems to have been thoroughly mapped.” From 3D modelling and lighting to game development and sound design, the self-described “one-woman production team” created an open-world game with no “goals, levels, or requirements to do anything” except wander.
Put on the VR headset, and suddenly you’re in a totally immersive, meticulously crafted game world. An array of scenes open before you: dust storms in a Martian landscape, architecture straight from a de Chirico painting, a pavilion with lightning through its core. In its own words, Lost Horizon poses a question asked across the centuries by religion, science, and art: “Could there be a place waiting for us just beyond the limits of the human gaze?”
The human gaze and its limits — these may just be the themes that unite the diverse works in Alternate Reality, an ambitious show about the complicated, contingent ways in which we reconstruct the past, experience the present, and envision the future. Each of the eight artists draws skilfully upon art’s power to make us look at the world upside down and inside out.
But even with all this complexity, the works also fulfil that other crucial function of art — beauty and pleasure. Expressing her wishes for the show, curator Nim Niyomsin says it well: “…I hope [audiences] begin to think, see the world, and understand things differently … But most importantly, I hope they simply enjoy the exhibition, the artworks, and being in this space.”
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Alternate Reality runs at the New Art Museum Singapore at Tanjong Pagar Distripark till 2 March 2025, with artist talks and other public programmes on 18 January, 1 and 15 February, and 1 March 2025. Find out more at newartmuseumsingapore.com.
Header image: Installation view of Nurrachmat Widseyna’s QE II N-C #1 and #2 (2023), enamel paint on resin, 110 x 80 x 9 cm ea (left); and Jembatan Einstein – Rosen #3 and #4 (2019), iron pipes and enamel paint, 193 x 140 x 5 cm ea.
This article is produced in paid partnership with the New Art Museum Singapore. Thank you for supporting the institutions that support Plural.
