Exposure_Exposure unfolds as a constellation of public works by five local artists. Occupying the outdoor margins of Objectifs Centre for Photography, these encounters are placed within eyeshot of the busy intersection of Middle Road and Waterloo Street. Exposure_Exposure hopes to hijack, interrupt and reframe the everyday encounter. What may seem a light serendipitous encounter, unravel into layers of friction through form. Together, they shape a field of meetings, offering new ways of sensing and encounter.

Four planes form an axis
2026
Excavated clay, acrylic vitrine and metal base
150 x 37 x 37 cm

*Presented with site specific interventions*

Clay is a material in flux. Composed of fine sedimentary particles deposited by water, it is transitional, unstable, and unfixed. In its unfired state, clay resists resolution. It remains soft, pliable, collapsible. Rehydrated, dewatered, then rehydrated again, its state cycles rather than concludes. Clay moves between phases, forming through accumulation, not intention. It fills cavities, assumes contours, compresses into form. It does not initiate structure but conforms to enclosure. It crumbles, becomes dust, becomes slip. It is neither object nor raw matter—it is a suspended material condition.

In Four planes form an axis, the axis is not a line imposed, but a vertical field of emergent tension. The four planes of the vitrine do not merely contain; they orient. Their verticality generates an axial condition, not through form but through suspension. Within this structure, clay—unfired, sedimented, formless—is not composed but accumulated, stacked in clumps that retain geological memory and material instability.

The axis here is not fixed. It is an interval, a space in which movement settles temporarily into structure, as described by Per Bak’s critical point: the moment a system self-organises, not by design, but through conditions that produce stasis. This is not permanence, but paused flux. The clay body rests in partial formation. It folds and collapses, melds and resettles. The vitrine becomes not display but process, a bounded cavity where disorder performs order.

Water condenses, insects traverse, gravity pulls. These are not disturbances but agents of articulation. Axis is not centrality or symmetry; it is relational verticality, arising from the four bounding planes that frame but do not fix. The column is not a monument. It is a site of contingency where the break, the pause, the enclosure – marks a temporary threshold between states.

In this context, Four planes form an axis does not declare structure. It proposes a spatial and material condition of earth held in tension, not to be resolved, but to be observed as it organises and disorganises itself within a constrained vertical field. Not a sculpture. Not land art. Not specimen. But a system of relations—between material, enclosure, ground—where form is always arriving.

Installation images by Lavender Chang taken on 12 January 2026 and 2 March 2026

Special thanks to Benson Ng / Jalan Bahar Clay Studios for the excavated raw clay

Three Works with Singapore Earth

A trilogy of works that engages clay not as medium but as situated material condition—geological, architectural, and ontological.

Across  \ transverses the space, Textile wall – woven space, woven time, and Four planes form an axis, the trajectory of clay moves not from raw to refined, but from sediment to axis, from debris to field, from surface to suspension.

Each work begins with 'terra in-situ'—earth extracted from Singapore’s terrain. Shaped into bricks during the height of post-independence urbanisation, this clay once stabilised through fire, is returned to a pre-architectural condition for the works in the first two instalments. In the third instalment, the work departs from the brick’s post-fired solidity and returns to the pre-object condition of clay—unfired, pliable, sedimented, unformed. 

Together, the three works form a spatial triad—the diagonal, the woven wall, and the vertical column. Each registers a different logic of containment and formation. What connects them is not formal continuity, but the sustained activation of clay as site, axis, and sediment.

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Textile wall - woven space, woven time continues a line of inquiry into salvaged matter and sedimented memory, presenting the second instalment in a series of works composed from crushed local brick debris. Here, the brick is not treated as inert material, but as a form of terra in situ – a ground-specific matter imbued with historical density and geo-cultural trace.

The bricks, fabricated from clay extracted from Singapore’s own terrain, bear witness to a time when the island’s earth was actively shaped into its built environment. The local brick industry, once thriving on what was described as an “abundant supply of suitable raw materials,” gained traction during the rapid urbanisation following Singapore’s post-1965 independence. Geologically, Singapore comprises three major rock types; it is the sedimentary formations in the western region, specifically a reddish-purple clay, variously known as red clay, brick clay, or shale that served as the principal resource for domestic brick production. This clay is composed of large-sized particles mixed with sand and pebbles, offering a distinctive texture and chromatic register.

The brick debris used in this work originates from the demolished walls of a condominium unit at Hillcrest Arcadia, with bricks manufactured by both Asia Brick Factory and Bin Keow Brickworks, likely in the 1970s. Despite their shared origin, the bricks differ subtly in hue and aggregate composition. Their surfaces are flecked with white, sand-like particles, and reveal a heterogeneity that resists uniformity. It is precisely this variability that exerts the brick as a material of tension – not merely evidence of a construction past, but as sedimented presence: layered, disrupted, and enduring.

The work takes the form of a woven architectural structure, recalling both partition and screen. Brick dust is pressed into 5 x 5 cm paper squares, which are slotted between intervals of hanging stainless steel cables, and weighted with broken brick pieces at the base. In format and gesture, it recalls the earlier 2023 piece Textile wall, in which the act of weaving was proposed as an origin of tectonic articulation, an architecture not built from mass, but from interlace and relation.

Here, the weaving of space becomes a weaving of time: a temporal-material fold where historical construction, domestic ruin, and architectural abstraction intersect. As a structure assembled from terra in situ, earth held in place, not displaced – the work resists the erasure of locality. Instead, it proposes a poetics of groundedness, where material remains not as debris, but as a living archive of soil, industry, memory, and form.

Textile wall - woven space, woven time
2025
Dimensions variable
Cotton pulp watercolour paper squares with brick dust and archival PVA adhesive, stainless steel 316 ropes, nickel-plated brass sleeves, steel rebar with galvanising paint and salvaged brick debris (ASIA and BIN KEOW)

Photography by Lavender Chang with selected images by the artist

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The Lie of the Land: Sediments, a special edition of FOST Gallery’s annual National Day group exhibition. This year marks both Singapore’s 60th anniversary and a timely occasion to reflect through art on what continues to hold, accumulate, displace, or erode in this city’s complex formation.

As sediment accumulates over time, being transported by water, weather, and force, so too has this island been shaped by waves of arrivals, dispersals, and settlements. Beneath the apparent stability of its compact 735 km² lies a continual layering of difference—indigenous presence, migrant memory, national fictions, and speculative futures.

Sediment, however, is not static. It shifts, dislodges, reforms. Erosion and deposition are also part of the logic of becoming. Grace Tan’s \ transverses the space is a site-specific gesture of tension assembled from salvaged demolition debris, a locally made brick with clay mined from Singapore’s earth.

\ transverses the space further develops the diagonal figure first introduced in Tan’s solo exhibition, A CUBE IS A CUBE IS A CUBE. In that context, the diagonal suggested a latent condition—something happening beneath the surface—a sign that things are not as they seem. It marked a state of unfolding, a dislocation. Critically, the diagonal became a figure of instability and a trace of becoming, evoking the moment when the cube begins to collapse, distort, or lose its stable form.

In \ transverses the space I and \ transverses the space II, these site-specific installations take the form of a single diagonal line on the floor of the inner gallery. This gesture does not merely divide the space; it activates it. The diagonal marks the architecture by heightening the relationship between body, space, and perception. In doing so, the diagonal becomes phenomenological. It alters how we navigate the gallery, how the artworks within are revealed, and how space itself is experienced.

The accumulation and precarious piling of brick debris reinforces this diagonal condition. The structure hovers at a point of criticality—just stable enough to hold, yet always on the verge of collapse. Here, the diagonal becomes a milieu: not a position, but a threshold. It is neither subject nor object, neither purely formed nor entirely formless. It is a field of emergence—a relational zone in which matter is in flux and presence coexists with absence.

Within this milieu-threshold, the salvaged brick debris collected from demolition serves as a medium of latent potential. It materializes a paradox: where the act of destruction is simultaneously one of creation. In this tension, \ transverses the space evokes a space of perpetual becoming, a quiet but insistent gesture of diagonal transcendence.

Developed alongside \ transverses the space, ultrafine brick dust collected from the process of breaking down debris was refined and sedimented by water into pigment. In \ dissects the square, this transformed matter becomes image: the diagonal emerges as a fissure across the paper plane, cutting through its strata. It is both a line of weakness, barely holding the two halves together, and a hinge of critical intervention that rearticulates the whole. The fracture opens a new dimension—as the form folds, the two sides converge. The square becomes two triangles; the surface becomes an object; stasis becomes movement. What we see—and what we know—is always already incomplete.

\ transverses the space I
2025
Approx. H7 x 100 x 7.6 cm
Crushed brick debris [approx. 30 – 15mm], galvanized mild steel and neodymium magnets

\ transverses the space II
2025
Approx. H7 x 100 x 7.6 cm
Crushed brick debris [approx. 23 – 10mm], galvanized mild steel and neodymium magnets

\ dissects the square I, II, III
2025 - ongoing
Approx. H20 x 20 x 4 cm
Cold pressed 640gsm watercolour paper, brick dust [< 190 micron] and aqueous acrylic binder

Images courtesy of FOST Gallery and Lavender Chang

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A group exhibition where every artwork is no larger than one metre in any dimension. Conceived in 2007 by FOST Gallery, the first edition of the exhibition runs from 10 May to 21 June 2025. 

Using rice as a material, RICE DISCS is a series of new works made with glutinous rice [mochiko] paste mixed with paper pulp and marble pit lime. They were conceptualised for The Feast collaboration with Native in March 2025. Powdered rice bran and curd, a by-product ingredient from Native were also used in some works. Made in the form of circular discs with the addition of historic pigments like natural lapis lazuli, gosu [cobalt-based pigment], gunjo [synthesized lead-free azurite pigment], ink and natural earth pigment, these works are an extension of Tan's stacked discs pigment and paper works from 2015 to 2016 and her interest in the materiality of pigments. 

Exhibition images courtesy of FOST Gallery

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Images courtesy of The Feast / 74tharts. Photography by Zenn Ye.

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Sea of flags engages with the history and identity of Tanjong Pagar and is a tribute to the memory of the district’s massive development over two centuries. The flags that make up the installation are an assemblage of almost 400 material swatches colour-matched with the landscape and architecture as well as natural and man-made materials that have defined the vicinity’s industries of the past. Moving like a ripple with the wind, Sea of flags' presence on the reclaimed land where Tanjong Pagar Distripark stands today signifies the fleetingness of the physical world where spatial boundaries are indeterminate. Constantly shifting and blurring, they evoke the capricious movement of the surrounding sea. Further extending the colour compendium of Tanjong Pagar through alluring visuals of the nutmeg is The fruit of deceit which alludes to the nutmeg’s slighted history in Singapore’s development. A site-specific response to the history of Tanjong Pagar and its evolving identity, The fruit of deceit foregrounds the notion of nature as a commodity against the physical site of the old Keppel Harbour and present-day Tanjong Pagar Distripark—logistical nodes from different eras that facilitate the circulation of materials, goods, ideas, people and capital.

Sea of flags and The fruit of deceit is part of Port/raits of Tanjong Pagar, a public art trail commissioned by The Everyday Museum, a public art initiative of Singapore Art Museum made possible through venue partnership with Mapletree Investments Pte Ltd.

View the film here. 

Source: Singapore Art Museum

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View additional information and Exhibition Dossier 

The geometric principles of shape and their potential to evolve into a progression of forms have been central to Grace Tan’s aptly named artistic practice, ‘kwodrent’, spanning two decades. From her earlier works, which employed paper, plastic and textile to explore the possibilities of sequence and structure, Tan has expanded her oeuvre by investigating how the properties of materials intersect with her fascination for reimagining forms derived from a shape or object’s fundamental characteristics.

In this exhibition, Tan engages with materials such as metal, marble and light, harnessing their intrinsic qualities to construct new forms. Taking the cube as her focal subject, she challenges conventional notions of its immutability, probing new possibilities for how it can be reimagined and perceived. The 12 works presented chart her experimentation with the cube through a series of creative gestures: splitting it at right angles to recompose its parts, exploring the interplay between two- and three-dimensional perspectives of the cube, and using repetition to generate shapes that, while appearing distinct, remain rooted in the cube’s essence. In some pieces, tessellated cube components create illusory effects, altering perceptions of the cube itself. Other works investigate the act of viewing, examining how spatial context can transform visual perception.

The exhibition invites viewers to reconsider the identity of a cube: Is a cube simply a cube? Under Tan’s meticulous manipulation, the cube is dissected, reassembled, and reframed, encouraging us to explore its lines, proportions, patterns, and perspectives anew. Through this process, she expands our understanding of the cube as both a collection of parts and an interconnected whole, with infinite possibilities for reformulation. By reimagining the cube as a medium of flux, she challenges us to rethink our own views on solidity and stability.

Source | FOST Gallery

Exhibition Identity by Hanson Ho | H55

Images courtesy of FOST Gallery with photography by Lavender Chang

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Presenting two works conceived in response to John Tung's curatorial statement 'Disconnected Contemporaries' for S.E.A. Focus 2025. These works consider how material inquiry navigates a region and moment in flux. Drawing from crystalline lattices and the interdependence of interlocking systems, they reflect on a state held in tension—how balance forms and shifts as limits are approached. At this threshold, stability becomes contingent and new possibilities surface, underscored by the structure balancing against a piece of marble: an intentional, precarious negotiation between support and vulnerability.

Held in tension / Something tangible
2024
Polypropylene and polyamide cable ties with Carrara marble
~ H33 x W29 x D24 cm

A trajectory of deflection / In stasis
2024
Polyamide cable ties with Carrara marble
~ H18.5 x W48 x D33 cm

Images by Wong Jing Wei

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Sculpture commissioned to commemorate Yale-NUS College [2013 - 2025], a pioneering four-year residential liberal arts college in Asia, jointly founded by the National University of Singapore and Yale University.

Sitting on top of the hill, the library looks into the garden.

The Campus Green, a cloistered garden of learning.

It houses an elusive Margaritaria indica, the only known mature individual found in Singapore.

The site is an aboretum; a refugium.

Standing rooted on the slope is a cube.

A human-made object with straight lines and flat planes.

Its presence in the garden is odd and surreal, yet strangely compelling.

Could it be a minimalist scholar’s rock?

Or perhaps an asteroid chunk from another planet?

Its symmetry is articulated by the layered construction of weathering steel sheets.

An intricate mitered joinery pattern is revealed where the plates meet.

As the metal cube reacts to moisture in the environment, a layer of oxide forms on its surface.

While the corrosion is deemed to weaken the steel, the rust in this case, becomes a sheath - protecting and preserving.

Enveloped by a patina, the cube ages from a bright yellow ochre to a red ochre, a burnt sienna, and then to a very dark brown.

Through this process, the hues of the earth are depicted.

And an industrial material naturalised.

The cube is hollow.

The opening is a portal, a conduit, or an oculus.

It is both here and there.

Linking the past, present, and future.

It looks to infinity.

Framing and capturing a memory, or a vision.

Like a ring, it binds and strengthens.

A symbol of commitment.

Bringing people together, and holding things in place.

Within the cube encloses an illusory square.

It traces the outline of a gap that transverses the four sides.

An angled quadrangle, a geometric figure with four equal edges and right angles.

A perfect square.

A two-dimensional construct.

While its geometry is obscured in our three-dimensional world, the square is undoubtedly present.

The knowledge of its existence is an enlightenment.

In this instance, the unseen subverts the tangible earthly matter destined for entropy.

Freed from this fate, the intangible persists, transcending time and place.

A closer look at the cube reveals a fragmented form made up of two equal parts.

A gap runs between them.

Could it be a fracture, an interstice, or a void?

Or what if the cube is a seed pod?

Once again, the imagery of a flourishing garden comes to mind.

The seed of knowledge.

A learning landscape.

A nourishing ground.

Photography by KHOOGJ

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The sum of many parts.

The becoming of things.

Creation and transformation.

From point to line to pattern to structure.

An arrangement, a construct, an ecosystem.

The form emerges.

Matter reveals itself.

The Sum of Many Parts is an arrangement of prisms based on the eponymous Cannage design of the Lady Dior. Taking reference from children’s building blocks, the hand-finished Carrara marble units transform the two-dimensional Cannage pattern into a three-dimensional structure. Amplified by the play of light and shadows on the geometric faces, the indentations and extrusions of the marble composition reveal the intrinsic materiality of the metamorphic marble as a dynamic creation of nature.

Images courtesy of Dior and Juliana Tan

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