Cover Rockbund Art Museum’s presentation of “Wan Hai Hotel: Breaking the Waves” (2024) in Shanghai (Photo: Leo/Rockbund Art Museum)
Rockbund Art Museum’s presentation of “Wan Hai Hotel: Breaking the Waves” (2024) in Shanghai (Photo: Leo/Rockbund Art Museum)
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Curated by X Zhu-Nowell, Art SG’s new performance art sector slows the fair’s tempo—positioning duration, intimacy and lived encounter at the heart of Southeast Asia’s leading contemporary art platform
The art fair unfolds as a choreography of motion. Visitors drift between booths, attention glides from work to work, and objects reveal themselves through proximity and flow. To walk a fair is to step into a concentrated rhythm—one that privileges immediacy, circulation and exchange. Yet, as Southeast Asia’s global contemporary art fair Art SG returns for its fourth edition—from January 23 to 25, with a VIP preview and vernissage on January 22 at the Sands Expo and Convention Centre in Marina Bay Sands—that rhythm is being deliberately interrupted by stillness, slowness and time itself.
At the centre of this recalibration is X Zhu-Nowell, executive director and chief curator of Shanghai’s Rockbund Art Museum (RAM), appointed Art SG’s film and performance art curator. Their brief marks the formal introduction of a dedicated performance art sector at the fair—a structural reorientation that positions performance, film and other time-based practices not as supplementary programming, but as a core curatorial language embedded within the fair’s architecture.
Zhu-Nowell is candid about their initial scepticism. Performance inside an art fair, they note, risks being absorbed into spectacle, its critical edges dulled by the surrounding commercial intensity. But their thinking shifted after encountering Croatian artist Dora Budor’s Manicomio! in New York. The work demonstrated how performance could operate as a counter-mechanism, interrupting the organisation of attention rather than decorating it.
“An art fair is already a kind of involuntary stage,” Zhu-Nowell observes, describing it as “hyper‑visible, transactional and crowded with competing temporalities”. Their ambition for Art SG is not to present isolated performances, but to introduce what they call “temporal architectures”—works that unfold, drift, or quietly recalibrate how visitors inhabit the fair.
In case you missed it: Art SG 2026: Magnus Renfrew on how Southeast Asia is reframing the global art conversation
Above X Zhu-Nowell, executive director and chief curator of Shanghai’s Rockbund Art Museum, appointed Art SG’s film and performance art curator
X Zhu-Nowell, executive director and chief curator of Shanghai’s Rockbund Art Museum, appointed Art SG’s film and performance art curator
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This approach is shaped by Zhu-Nowell’s broader institutional practice. At RAM, they have long tested exhibition models that blur boundaries between architecture, performance and collective study, reimagining the museum as a fluid structure. That thinking now migrates to Singapore, where the Art SG fair itself becomes a site for experimenting with duration and embodied presence.
Within the performance art sector, Singaporean artist John Clang, presented by Fost Gallery, brings together three interrelated works—Reading by an Artist, Nine Chairs and Table of Inquiry—that collectively resist the optics of spectacle. Instead, they unfold through domestic gestures, handwritten exchanges and one‑to‑one encounters, grounded in the Purple Star Astrology, a complex traditional Chinese metaphysical art used to chart a person’s destiny.
Clang’s practice has long navigated dual realities: between Singapore and New York, between photography and film, between the factual and the surreal. In these performances, that duality is distilled into a form of portraiture without images. “I’m very interested in people,” he says. After years of working through the camera lens, he sought a way to move beyond representation towards something internal and enduring—“portraiture without camera, without film or printed material”—one created through dialogue rather than devices, and carried away “right inside their hearts”, where it becomes more permanent.
Above An installation view of John Clang’s “Reading by an Artist” (2023) (Photo: John Clang)
An installation view of John Clang’s “Reading by an Artist” (2023) (Photo: John Clang)
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Above Clang’s “Nine Chairs” (2025) (Photo: John Clang)
Clang’s “Nine Chairs” (2025) (Photo: John Clang)
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Reading by an Artist unfolds as a one-to-one encounter lasting up to an hour. Participants sit opposite Clang as he interprets their Purple Star Astrology chart, a system he has studied rigorously for more than a decade. The exchange is precise rather than theatrical; Clang is careful to frame the practice not as fortune-telling but as a structured method for understanding identity, patterns and potential. “There’s nothing superstitious about this,” he explains, referring to the system scholars once used to discuss how emperors governed a kingdom. The result is often an intense, embodied experience. After a session with Clang, participants frequently report feeling physically unsteady when they stand, as if recalibrated by the density of information exchanged.
Nine Chairs extends this logic into space. Each chair is borrowed from a different household and carries the quiet residue of domestic life. “Chairs quietly witness what unfolds within a family,” Clang reflects. Slowly rotated throughout the day, the chairs are turned towards auspicious directions, registering time almost imperceptibly. For Zhu-Nowell, the work is emblematic of how minimal temporal shifts can alter perception. “This small adjustment makes visible the everyday recalibrations through which we orient ourselves within structures that usually move too quickly to register.” Visitors are invited to sit, rest or simply observe—whether fatigued by the fair or seeking a moment of alignment—allowing domestic stillness to enter a high-energy environment not as refuge, but as recalibration.
If Reading by an Artist is about presence, Table of Inquiry is about accumulation. Questions submitted anonymously are answered by Clang in handwritten form on a growing tabletop surface. Over time, the table becomes an archive of collective concern—weighted by stones, questions and responses. He describes it as “a collaboration between the participant and myself”, one that allows individuals to encounter not only their own questions, but those of others, refracted through time.
Above Singaporean artist John Clang (Photo: John Clang and Fost Gallery)
Singaporean artist John Clang (Photo: John Clang and Fost Gallery)
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The performance art sector also includes improvisatory interventions by Brian Fuata, a Samoan artist born in Aotearoa and based in Australia, whose appearances ebb and flow “through the fair like weather—sometimes present, sometimes withdrawing”. Zhu‑Nowell describes Fuata’s work as introducing “a different temporal mode”, one that responds directly to the social and physical conditions of the fairgrounds, further unsettling expectations of what performance at a fair can be.
Extending this attention to duration beyond the live encounter, Zhu-Nowell’s film programme for Art SG—“Would You Tell Me a Story Until I Fall Asleep?”—reimagines the cinema as a space of contemplation. Conceived as a place for drifting, it is, in their words, “an invitation to dream or take a nap” inside the ArtScience Museum—a radical proposition within the logic of an art fair.
In the darkness, images unfold slowly. Basma Alsharif’s Deep Sleep drifts through trance and geography; Haig Aivazian’s You May Own the Lanterns, but We Have the Light (Ep 1) turns blackout into a meditation on illumination and unseen infrastructures. Works by Lêna Bùi, Marcel Odenbach and Rebekka Friedli move between reincarnation, historical rupture and fragile light, while Sim Chi Yin, Geoffrey Pugen, Samson Young and Lo Lai Lai Natalie probe memory, belief and grief. Collectively, they remind us that images—like sleep—are lived communally, not alone.
Above Still from Singaporean artist Sim Chi Yin’s “Time Travels with a Rotten Suitcase” (2025) (Photo: Sim Chi Yin and Zilberman Gallery)
Still from Singaporean artist Sim Chi Yin’s “Time Travels with a Rotten Suitcase” (2025) (Photo: Sim Chi Yin and Zilberman Gallery)
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Beyond the fair itself, Zhu‑Nowell’s curatorial logic expands through Wan Hai Hotel: Singapore Strait, a collaboration between RAM and Art SG running concurrently from January 22 to 25. Transforming the lobby of The Warehouse Hotel on Robertson Quay into an immersive exhibition environment, the project marks the first presentation of this model outside Shanghai and introduces hospitality as an integral part of exhibition-making.
“A hotel is an in-between space—intimate yet anonymous, domestic yet public,” Zhu-Nowell notes. In such a setting, time slows, visitors engage with film or performance on their own terms, and the experience feels open and welcoming rather than controlled or instructive.
The exhibition brings together artists from Southeast Asia, Australasia and the Asia Pacific whose practices engage with archipelagic thinking and maritime identity. Works by Stephanie Comilang, Ho Tzu Nyen, Wantanee Siripattananuntakul, Ming Wong, Robert Zhao, Dawn Ng and Hoo Fan Chon unfold alongside performances by Joshua Serafin, Bhenji Ra and John Clang. Film programmes, site-specific installations and artist-led gatherings activate the hotel as a living structure rather than a neutral container.
Read more: Singapore Art Week 2026: how Southeast Asia rewrites the language of contemporary art
Above Filipino artist Joshua Serafin’s “Relics An Eye Once Blind” (2025) (Photo: Rockbund Art Museum)
Filipino artist Joshua Serafin’s “Relics An Eye Once Blind” (2025) (Photo: Rockbund Art Museum)
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For Clang, performing within a hotel introduces a different emotional register. Removed from the conventions of the white cube, the work may initially be mistaken for a familiar ritual before revealing its seriousness and depth. “You think it could be fun,” he says, “and then you sit down and realise how serious it is.” That moment—when expectation gives way to attention—is precisely where meaning accumulates. Participants, he observes, often leave having “walked out with a very profound discovery of your life”, an experience that lingers well beyond the encounter itself.
Across both Art SG and Wan Hai Hotel: Singapore Strait, context becomes a critical variable. The same work registers differently within the compressed temporality of a fair and the durational atmosphere of a heritage hotel. Chairs become sites of rest; tables become archives; conversations become portraits. Value emerges not through possession, but through presence.
Above A visitor at the 2025 edition of Art SG, Southeast Asia’s leading international art fair (Photo: Art SG)
A visitor at the 2025 edition of Art SG, Southeast Asia’s leading international art fair (Photo: Art SG)
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At a broader level, Zhu-Nowell’s interventions signal a recalibration within Southeast Asia’s art ecology. As Art SG continues to mature—now co-presenting Sea Focus and convening more than 100 galleries from over 30 countries and territories—the formalisation of performance reframes what an art fair can be—more than a marketplace, it becomes a site of sustained encounter, risk and reflection.
The most pressing curatorial questions, Zhu-Nowell suggests, are no longer about what is shown, but how, where and for whom art unfolds. In reimagining the fair as a temporal structure—one that shapes how art is encountered—they invite collectors and audiences alike to slow down, to listen, and to reconsider what it means to be present.
As Senior Editor of Tatler Singapore, Hashirin champions and refines the storytelling across platforms—curating and crafting compelling profiles, cover stories and features that spotlight visionaries shaping culture, business and impact. Driven by curiosity, she draws inspiration from the artists, changemakers and trailblazers she encounters through her work. Beyond the pages of Tatler, she is an avid supporter of local theatre and delights in seeking out art in every city she visits.
