The title of the 8th of the Singapore Biennale, Pure Intention, can come across as both sarcastic and deeply sincere. It reflects the role and function of art and large-scale exhibition-making in a time when the art world is experiencing biennale fatigue, while still seeming to overlook the interests of a wide-ranging general audience.
The biennale, led by a curatorial team from the Singapore Art Museum—comprising Duncan Bass, Hsu Fang-Tze, Ong Puay Khim, and Selene Yap—aims to challenge conventional narratives surrounding Singapore’s economically-driven policies and utilitarian social engineering strategies. These strategies have contributed to the establishment of a technocracy focused on specific and efficiency-oriented goals.
Pure Intention adopts a softer approach to critique by framing its inquiry from the periphery rather than through a centralized, heavily footnoted exhibition. The curatorial strategy employs a dispersal method, featuring over 100 artworks across five geographical clusters, including public parks, historic houses, shopping malls, community libraries, and museums. This approach not only resists the typical institutional model of hierarchical agenda-setting often associated with such exhibitions but also creates more opportunities for the public to engage with and recognize the diverse, intricate aspects of Singaporean society and urban spaces. These aspects reflect how they have evolved and been shaped by a variety of influences and cosmopolitan desires.
Contemplating this cadence of entanglements, two new multi-location commissions by Taiwanese artist Huang Po-Chih and Malaysian artist Izat Arief offer particularly astute observations that serve as keys to unpacking the Singapore condition.
Huang’s Momocha (2025) is an extension of his long-term research project, which focuses on community engagement and cultural entrepreneurship. This project has redirected art world capital into the everyday agrarian economies of his native Xinpu, Taiwan. Momocha consists of bottles of kombucha brewed using cash crops from the artist’s hometown, which were also historically cultivated in Singapore. The beverages are available for purchase in vending machines and over the counter at several biennale locations. By using fermentation as a broader symbol for social and ecological processes of change, Huang Huang devises new tasting experiences that highlight histories of hybridity, capital, and agroecological migrations that connect East and Southeast Asia.
Izat’s work, In Loving Memory (2025), features clever critiques of the desire for upward social mobility, expressed through wry quips painted on ten Terrazzo benches located throughout Singapore. The work draws attention to the contrast between the lasting presence of public infrastructure and the ongoing struggles associated with class advancement in a rapidly evolving urban landscape. Izat’s aphorisms range from good-natured jibes, such as “No need to feel poor anymore,” to sharper, more biting irony, like “Sit down here to cry for any ‘struggling’ upper-middle-class ‘native’ boy.” This artistic approach repositions the conversation around social class and public space within the lived experiences of Singapore’s urban environment.
Elsewhere, questions of memory and legacy emerge as the central concern. In the grand hall of the former Raffles Girls’ School, a video installation by Korean artist Young-jun Tak is displayed alongside three paintings by Japanese artist Kei Imazu. Both the video and the paintings explore the complex relationship between knowledge production and dissemination and the body, serving as a means for activating historical consciousness through different modalities.
In Tak’s Love Was Taught Last Friday (2025), a co-commission with the Taipei Biennale 2025, the exploration of how embodied knowledge is transferred across generations serves as a unifying theme between two intercut segments. One segment features a father-and-son woodcarving duo in northeast Italy who are creating religious idols. The other segment showcases a collaborative dance piece by Canadian choreographer Christopher House, performed with two former students at Berlin’s Veterinary Anatomy Theater.
Unfurling to a soundtrack of classical music, Tak’s poignant examination of the gestures involved in technical skills highlights the vast amount of trust and practice necessary for this inheritance. The work reveals the simultaneous fragility and tenacity of craft as a form of somatic practice, which, despite being delicate, endures due to its relational ties. The piece also subtly comments on the fate of the premises that once housed one of Singapore’s first all-women educational institutions, which has since relocated due to economic pressures on this prime location real estate.
In the same space, three works from Imazu’s ongoing Hainuwele series, each mounted on movable scaffoldings, probe the relationship between myth, memory, history, and knowledge. Inspired by a creation myth from Seram, the largest island in the Maluku province of eastern Indonesia, the paintings reference the story of the murdered and buried body of the eponymous mother goddess, which became the source of staple crops for the island’s indigenous community. Each piece recreates and expands upon an episode from the myth, incorporating graphic and narrative elements drawn from the artist’s research.
In Memories of the Land/Body (2020), for example, a spinal column set against a light blue wash reimagines colonial representations of native geographies such as Dutch explorer Franz Wilhelm Junghuhn’s drawing and lithographic studies of the Gunung Sumbing volcano through a corporeal lens, locating divine providence as the landscape itself. Set against dislocated and digitally distorted iconographies—such as tigers, banana leaves, and Japanese wartime propaganda—that have historically been essential to rendering the Indonesian environment into legible and alienable components for imperial exploitations. Ultimately, the painting itself serves as a proxy record enabling a rich contextual history of Indonesian environmental and bio-social history to be constructed, while also prompting a reevaluation of the fixed narratives of history.
In the part of the exhibition hosted by the Singapore Art Museum, key questions arise from Singapore’s economic and urban history, prompting a reevaluation of technology’s role in shaping the visions and experiences of progress. This exploration is showcased through newly commissioned works by Spanish artist Álvaro Urbano and Chinese artist Cui Jie.
In Urbano’s Garden City (Orchidaceae) (2025), a delicate yet sprawling stainless steel sculpture sets the scene for a botanical theatre where the main characters are plants—or more precisely, cash crops that have served as the backbone for Malayan and Singaporean economies throughout the colonial period along with the experimentally bred orchids that have become a symbol of Singaporean botanical genomics and diplomatic prowess. By placing common historical agricultural products as the host and substrates for the high-end modern floral accessories, Urbano hints at how agro-capital—a combination of industrialized agriculture and economic planning—has played a crucial role in shaping the political subjectivity on which Singaporean modernity is founded. Additionally, the work explores the connection between environmental management and social engineering techniques, highlighting how the Singaporean state has cultivated gardens, greenbelts, and community parks as a political green screen through which progress and prosperity can be enacted.
Next to Urbano’s work, Cui’s painting Thermal Landscapes (2025) occupies a similar register, where the artist identifies the locus of Singapore-style modernity in the performativity and aesthetics of its architecture. Cui’s work draws from studies of watchtowers that were built for neither surveillance nor reconnaissance but for observing and presenting the scale and speed of Singapore’s urbanization. She adeptly isolates and modulates the typological vocabulary of the standard issue skyscraper into an expansion of the kitsch souvenir keepsake economy where iconicity becomes a shorthand for development and politico-economic aspirations. Further eroding the presence of land and grounding in her composition, Cui instead arranges the subjects of her painting—seven building-like forms—as figures suspended in a blue plane that are connected at their bases by almost diagrammatic etchings that represent flow and networks. These graphics signify the pathways that facilitate the movement of ideologies, capital, and latent potential.
Labyrinthine to navigate, with several works yet to be completed at the time of its opening, Pure Intention seems to be buffeted by an abundance of intentions. These range from the Biennale’s scalar pivot in expanding across even greater swathes of public spaces as part of state-led Diamond Jubilee initiative SG60, to its universalist approach in “inviting audiences of all walks of life to experience Singapore’s many layers built by all of those who have been a part of its history” as described in prominent wall texts. It may be relevant to consider what ‘purity’ actually means within the context of the city-state’s saturated and well-funded cultural calendar. Could there be (political) naïveté and hope still, underneath the shells of bureaucracy? Or should we take purity straight, as in pure audience engagement? What is the line between ingénue and ingenuine?
Pure Intention is most elegant and effective at its most pared down, that is, at the scale of an individual artwork’s conversation with its neighbour. The show seems to struggle when it tries to propose a spatial and discursive argument that runs through an entire exhibition space, which feels as scattered and fragmented as the distribution of works. In some ways, the title seems to foresee this. While purity in substances is harder to control and maintain at larger volumes, purity itself has also always been a relational measure. At the 8th Singapore Biennale, intentions might very well be a relative matter too. Now that you have seen the art, sat on it, maybe even tasted it, there is no going back. If the road to hell is paved with good intentions, where then is the destination of a road paved with pure intentions? It might just be found in Singapore—or at least, its biennale. ∎
Alfonse Chiu is a curator, designer, and writer. Working across contemporary art, architecture, performance, and cinema, their research-based practice seeks to identify how regimes of power and knowledge manifest through the production and circulation of visual, material, and spatial cultures to structure social definitions of value, property, and desire in post-colonial Asia and the Pacific Rim.
Cover image: Salad Dressing, Square Forrest (2025) commissioned as part of the curatorial contribution by Hothouse. All photos: Rafal Niemojewski / Biennial Foundation.