LGBT art in Singapore, or queer art in Singapore, broadly refers to modern and contemporary visual art practices that draw on lesbian, gay, bisexual, and transgender+ imagery and themes, addressing topics such as LGBT rights, history and culture in Singapore. Such queer art practices are often by Singaporean or Singapore-based visual artists and curators who identify as LGBT+ or queer.
The Singapore Art Museum is an art museum with multiple venues across Singapore. It is the first fully dedicated contemporary visual arts museum in Singapore with one of the world’s most important public collections by local, Southeast and East Asian artists. It collaborates with international art museums to co-curate contemporary art exhibitions.
Nanyang Academy of Fine Arts is a publicly-funded post-secondary arts institution in Singapore, and a constituent college of the University of the Arts Singapore (UAS) from 2024.
The Singapore Biennale is a large-scale biennial contemporary art exhibition in Singapore, serving as the country’s major platform for international dialogue in contemporary art. It seeks to present and reflect the vigour of artistic practices in Singapore and Southeast Asia within a global context, fostering collaboration and engagement between artists, arts organisations, and the international arts community.
Donna Ong is a Singaporean artist. She is known for her installation works, which often feature environments created with assemblages, found objects, and sculpture. Her practice draws upon notions of botany, landscaping, and representations of nature in both European and Chinese art.
Group 90 is an informal arts group in Singapore, committed to the study and interpretation, and promotion of the human nudity as an art form. It was founded the late Brother Joseph McNally, along with founding members S. Namasivayam, Chia Wai Hon and Sim Tong Khern, who subscribe to the European art tradition of using the human body in developing artistic mastery in depicting form, perceptual acuity and fluency in drawing.
Han Sai Por is a Singaporean sculptor. A graduate of the Nanyang Academy of Fine Arts (NAFA), East Ham College of Art, Wolverhampton College of Art, and Lincoln University, New Zealand, she worked as a teacher and later as a part-time lecturer at NAFA, the LASALLE-SIA College of the Arts, and the National Institute of Education, Nanyang Technological University, before becoming a full-time artist in 1997.
S. Chandrasekaran is a Singaporean contemporary artist known for his pioneering work in performance art in 1980s Singapore. He has held executive positions as Head of School at the Nanyang Academy of Fine Arts and LASALLE College of Arts.
The 5th Passage Artists Limited, commonly known as 5th Passage or 5th Passage Artists, was an artist-run initiative and contemporary art space in Singapore from 1991 to 1994. As a registered, artist-led non-profit organisation, it was one of the earliest of its kind for early-1990s Singapore, with its initial space located at Parkway Parade, a shopping centre in the east of the city. The "meteoric existence" of 5th Passage has been noted alongside other art collectives and alternative spaces existing in 1990s Singapore, such as The Artists Village, The Substation, Plastique Kinetic Worms, and Trimurti.
Juliana Yasin was a Singaporean contemporary artist and curator whose practice spanned painting, installation, video, and performance art. Her works examined notions of identity, subjectivity, and community practices. Pedagogy and research further complemented her artistic practice, with Juliana having taught fine art at Kolej Bandar Utama in Kuala Lumpur and worked as a Singapore-based researcher for the Asia Art Archive, Hong Kong.
Suzann Victor is a Singaporean contemporary artist based in Australia whose practice spans installation, painting, and performance art. Victor is most known for her public artworks and installations that examine ideas of disembodiment, the postcolonial, and the environmental in response to space, context and architecture.
Susie Lingham is a Singaporean contemporary artist, writer, curator, art theorist, and educator. Her practice often incorporates writing, sound, performance, and installation, synthesising interdisciplinary ideas related to the nature of the mind across different fields, from the humanities to the Sciences.
Plastique Kinetic Worms (PKW) was a Singapore-based artist-run space and contemporary art collective, co-founded in 1998 by Singaporean artists Vincent Leow and Yvonne Lee. PKW was one of the few artist-run spaces in Singapore when it opened in the late 1990s, with the 1990 closure of the Ulu Sembawang site of Singapore's first artist colony, The Artists Village, and the disbanding of artist-run space and initiative, 5th Passage, after 1994. Originally organised around a collective of 10 artists, PKW's membership would vary, with around 15 to 20 members at various points of its active years.
Ming Wong is a Singaporean contemporary artist who lives and works in Berlin, known for his re-interpretations of iconic films and performances from world cinema in his video installations, often featuring "miscastings" of himself in roles of varied identities.
Lim Tzay Chuen is a Singaporean contemporary artist known for his conceptual works that involve designing or constructing subtle interventions within systems, leading viewers to re-evaluate their perceptions and assumptions of social, economic, cultural and political processes.
Erika Tan is a London-based Singaporean contemporary artist and curator whose research-led practice emerges from her interests in anthropology and the moving image. Her recent research examines the postcolonial and transnational, working with archival artefacts, exhibition histories, received narratives, contested heritage, subjugated voices, and the movement of ideas, people and objects. She is a lecturer at the Central Saint Martins, University of the Arts London.
Thiagarajan Kanaga Sabapathy, better known as T.K. Sabapathy, is a Singaporean art historian, curator, and critic. Sabapathy has written, researched, documented, and supported contemporary visual art in Singapore and Malaysia for four decades. He has held positions at the National University of Singapore, Nanyang Technological Institution, and National Institute of Education as a lecturer of art history. Sabapathy further established and headed pioneering art research facilities in Singapore, such as the Contemporary Asian Art Centre (2001–2004) and subsequently, Asia Contemporary (2015–).
The visual art of Singapore, or Singaporean art, refers to all forms of visual art in or associated with Singapore throughout its history and towards the present-day. The history of Singaporean art includes the indigenous artistic traditions of the Malay Archipelago and the diverse visual practices of itinerant artists and migrants from China, the Indian subcontinent, and Europe.
Kumari Nahappan is a Malaysian-born Singaporean contemporary artist best known for her large-scale public sculptures that often depict natural subjects such as fruit, seeds, and spices. Aside from sculpture and public art, Nahappan's interdisciplinary practice also spans installation and abstract painting.
