This Is Not Your Standard Art Festival

In a world where art is increasingly slipping out of white cubes and into the wild, the latest edition of the Singapore Biennale 2025 (SB2025) feels right on pulse. Opening October 31 till March 29, the eighth edition of the Biennale transforms Singapore into a multi-sensory map of encounters, scattering more than 100 artworks across five main areas: the Civic District, Wessex Estate, Tanglin Halt, Orchard Road, and Singapore Art Museum at Tanjong Pagar Distripark.

Organised by the Singapore Art Museum and led by curators Duncan Bass, Hsu Fang-Tze, Ong Puay Khim and Selene Yap, this year’s theme, pure intention, invites artists and audiences alike to strip things back: to notice how meaning hides in the mundane, and how art can bloom in the unlikeliest of corners. Forget the hushed gallery experience: SB2025 takes art outdoors, into shophouses, school fields, train stations and shopping malls where real, unfiltered life happens.

The festival also arrives at a symbolic moment: Singapore’s 60th year of independence. That sense of reflection runs through many of the works, which touch on how we live together, remember, and reimagine community in a rapidly evolving city. The Biennale echoes global conversations about art as civic glue, prioritising sustainability, co-creation, and emotional honesty over spectacle. It’s less about the selfie moment, and more about the subtle shift that happens when you see your city (and yourself) differently.

So where should you start? Here are 10 works and installations across the city to check out:

1. With Hate from Hong Kong by Adrian Wong

Adrian Wong’s With Hate from Hong Kong digs into his grandfather (and famous composer) Eddie Wang’s legacy—300+ film scores for Hong Kong cinema—and riffs on the wild, patchwork production methods of 60s kung fu flicks. Wong remixes footage from his earlier soap-opera–inspired project With Love From Hong Kong with new stunts performed by lookalikes, flipping the script: his female lead delivers the kind of over-the-top violence usually reserved for martial arts heroes. It’s nostalgia turned chaotic, and more than a little bit badass.

Find it at: 48 Tanglin Halt Road, #01-337

2. The laugh laughs at the laugh, The song sings at the song by Joo Choon Lin

This work by veteran Singapore artist Joo Choon Lin is an ever-changing space where sound, balloons, and modular “film objects” move and shift around you. Everyday materials like paper, plastic, and wood become part of a living performance, with the front room transforming between installation and stage to let you experience the artist’s feelings firsthand.

Find it at: 47 Tanglin Halt Road, #01-327

3. The Filipino Superwoman X H.O.M.E. Karaoke Living Room by Eisa Jocson

Step into Eisa Jocson’s Bidyoke (Filippino-style karaoke gatherings) a living room at Lucky Plaza turned karaoke haven. Music videos made by H.O.M.E. (Humanitarian Organization for Migration Economics) members celebrate resilience, feminine power, and chosen family, blending epic-poetry traditions with personal anthems. From Superwoman KTV to Pasyoke, the work turns everyday domestic and caregiving labour into performance, reminding visitors of the joys, sacrifices, and bonds that shape life across generations.

Find it at: Lucky Plaza, #03-52, 304 Orchard Road

4. entropy study & cloud gazing (americium) by Yuri Pattison

At Far East Shopping Centre, Yuri Pattison presents entropy study, using architectural scale models originally made for Chinese real estate projects (the artist bought the models from second-hand markets after they were made redundant, thanks to the country’s ongoing property crisis). Above them, cloud gazing (americium) shows a real-time animated sky, with shifting clouds driven by a quantum random number generator (a tool producing unpredictable results), echoing an ancient form of divination. The installation invites visitors to reflect on financial speculation, climate prediction, and humanity’s age-old urge to anticipate the future.

Find it at: Far East Shopping Centre, #04-08, 545 Orchard Road

5. Light Keeper by lololol

Light Keeper transforms Fort Canning Park into an immersive journey of sound, video, and light. Visitors follow a GPS-guided trail to five sites, experiencing sonic vignettes inspired by lighthouses, their keepers, and crypto-linguists (experts in coded communication). At the Fort Canning Lighthouse, a programmed light display shimmers like “secret scripture,” echoing a lightkeeper’s dream of perfect illumination. The work invites reflection on how humans navigate technology, memory, and the environment in a world shaped by digital currents.

Find it at: Fort Canning Park, Fort Canning Lighthouse, 30 River Valley Road

6. Garden City (Orchidaceae) by Alvaro Urbano

Alvaro Urbano’s sculptures turn plants into characters in a theatrical story. Inspired by 19th-century illustrations of local plants and crops like nutmeg, pepper, and coffee, he imagines them growing alongside orchids—poetic hybrids that link Singapore’s colonial past with its modern use of orchids in diplomacy. Made entirely from stainless steel, the work contrasts Singapore’s carefully designed gardens with the wild beauty of tropical nature.

Find it at: Gallery 1, Singapore Art Museum at Tanjong Pagar Distripark, 39 Keppel Road, #01-02

7. Metabolic Container by CAMP

CAMP’s Metabolic Container emulates the look of a 20-foot shipping container while turning it into a dynamic, moving system. Inside, 400 boxes of everyday goods—things that travel weekly from Batam to Singapore—are arranged to mix, interact, and generate unexpected combinations, from sambals and crackers to perfume and mystery imports. Visitors enter one at a time to experience this “metabolising” container, where the rhythms of shipping, everyday life, and constant movement are transformed into a poetic, immersive environment.

Find it at: Outside Singapore Art Museum at Tanjong Pagar Distripark, 39 Keppel Road, #01-02

8. Pelvis and Rhizome by Kei Imazu

Kei Imazu’s Hainuwele series is inspired by a myth from Seram Island: the goddess Hainuwele is killed and buried, and her body eventually birthed the community’s staple crops. The works explore themes of death, rebirth, and cycles of life, connecting the myth to Imazu’s own experience of childbirth and the Javanese tradition of burying the placenta. A translucent female figure floats over a blue wash that recalls colonial-era paintings of Gunung Sumbing volcano, while tigers hint at colonial power and land control. Other pieces reference the crops that grew from Hainuwele’s body, echoing Imazu’s personal placenta ritual. Across the series, myths, history, and imagery blend together, showing that memory and stories are always shifting, never fixed.

Find it at: 20 Anderson Road, School Hall, Former Raffles Girls’ School

9. PRIMAL INSTINCT by Hothouse

PRIMAL INSTINCT explores what happens when art stops being polite and starts getting raw. Instead of tidy theories or neat answers, it looks at the messy, emotional ways we react to the world today — the chaos, the urgency, the beauty in breaking form. The curators at Singapore-based art collective Hothouse see “nature” not as something perfect and balanced, but as full of cracks — places where new ideas, strange growths, and alternative ways of seeing can take root. It’s a reminder that disorder can be creative, and that art can grow wild when freed from control.

This theme comes alive through three works: Tini Aliman and Cristiana Cott Negoescu’s Field Notes & The Ecology of Chance, which uses sound recordings and archives to explore how colonial history shaped the way we listen to nature in Singapore; Elizabeth Gabrielle Lee’s TOTAL-PLEASURE-SUITE, which explores how desire is shaped, controlled, and repressed within engineered environments; and Salad Dressing’s Square Forest, an outdoor installation that questions what it really means to “rewild” a city, exploring how imported plants and restored green spaces reflect ideas of control, belonging, and survival.

Find it at: 20 Anderson Road, Field, Former Raffles Girls’ School

10. HNZF IV by Jacqueline Kiyomi Gork

Jacqueline Kiyomi Gork’s HNZF (Harsh Noise Zen Fountains) turns old WWII airplane parts, water pumps, and microphones into loud, experimental fountains. Instead of being calm like a normal “zen” fountain, these sculptures make disruptive, intense noise. HNZF IV connects this sound to history: it draws on Okinawa’s limestone caves, where civilians hid during the war, and Fort Canning, which was once a military base. The echoing water sounds remind visitors of the experiences of people affected by war—from Okinawans and Japanese-Americans to Singaporeans during the Japanese occupation.

Find it at: Fort Canning Park, Fort Gate