OPENING RECEPTION
Across practices in Asia-Pacific, the exhibition examines acts of maintenance such as erasing, washing, ordering, and archiving as gestures embedded within systems of power and care. These are approached not as neutral, but as processes of selection and transformation tied to governance, modernisation, and spatial control. Across postcolonial contexts in the Asia-Pacific, such gestures take on particular urgency, from the regulation of street economies and the clearing of informal settlements to the disciplining of public space and the shaping of historical narratives.
These operations move between restoration and repression, intimacy and control. They unfold in the domestic labour of caregiving and upkeep, often unseen, as much as in state- led campaigns of urban renewal, education policies, and cultural framing. In cities across the region, where rapid development sits alongside layered histories, acts of maintenance are entangled with questions of belonging, visibility, and displacement.
Across the exhibition, these conditions are made tangible through artistic practice. For example, Works by Alecia Neo and Delia Prvački attend to care, endurance, and repetition, while Sutee Kunavichayanont and Wang Guofeng engage the construction of historical and political narratives. Maharani Mancanagara and Nurrachmat Widyasena surface questions of memory and erasure, as Debbie Ding and Colin Villapa reflect on urban space, trace, and residue. What is removed, what remains, and who determines these conditions emerge as central questions, where the twenty invited artists reveal how acts of removal can also expose what resists being erased.
Artists: Patricia Amorim (Australia), Desmond Mah (Australia / Singapore), Lia McKnight (Australia), Colin Villapa (Australia), Wang Guofeng (China), Gardika Gigih (Indonesia), Maharani Mancanagara (Indonesia), Nurrachmat Widyasena (Indonesia), Sutee Kunavichayanont (Thailand), Chen Sai Hua Kuan (Singapore), Debbie Ding (Singapore), Hong Shu Ying (Singapore), Alecia Neo (Singapore), Delia Prvački (Singapore), Milenko Prvački (Singapore), Superlative Futures (Singapore), Moses Tan (Singapore), Wang Ruobing (Singapore), Ezekiel Wong (Singapore), and Yan Jie (Singapore).