Art Remembers: The Past, Seen Through A Different Lens

By Jessica Ye (Jessica Yap)

Old photographs. Wartime propaganda. A fish. An iPhone.

They may seem like unlikely subjects for an exhibition about remembering, but at National Gallery Singapore, they come together to tell stories about how history is recorded, retold and sometimes forgotten.

Opening on 21 August, Art Remembers brings together 20 works by artists from Singapore and Southeast Asia, including new commissions and works from the National Collection. Spanning photography, painting, print, video and digital media, the exhibition looks at archives not simply as records of the past, but as materials that can be questioned, rearranged and given new meaning.

Take Malaysian artist Ahmad Fuad Osman’s Recollections of Long Lost Memories (2007). The artist digitally places a contemporary figure, dressed in modern clothing and caught in rather amusing poses, into sepia-toned photographs from Malaysia’s post-independence period.

The result is deliberately strange. A familiar image of the past suddenly has an unexpected visitor.

Through this playful intervention, Fuad Osman draws attention to the way national histories are constructed, preserved and remembered, while bringing lesser-known stories back into view.

Singaporean artist Robert Zhao Renhui takes an altogether different route with The Fish Does Not Know The War Is Over (2025).

Here, the protagonist is a tilapia.

Introduced to Singapore during the Japanese Occupation, the fish was later brought to Taiwan after the war, where it became an important part of the country’s food culture. Through photographs and video, Zhao follows its unlikely journey to explore migration, belonging and the traces that history leaves behind in both people and the natural environment.

Then there is Mendjelang Hari Gemilang (Towards a Glory Day) by Yogyakarta-based printmaking collective Krack!, which is considerably harder to miss.

The large-scale mural takes the form of a giant octopus, with archival pages spread across its tentacles. Drawing from satirical Russo-Japanese War imagery by ukiyo-e artist Kobayashi Kiyochika and wartime propaganda from the Japanese-sponsored magazine Djawa Baroe, the work examines how printed images were used to influence public consciousness during the Japanese Occupation.

It is a striking reminder that the images preserved in an archive do not necessarily tell the whole story. Who created them, who circulated them and whose perspective they represented matter just as much.

Some artists featured in Art Remembers turn instead to personal memory.

In Fading Marks (2015), Hmong Australian artist Vanghoua Anthony Vue paints scenes from archival footage documenting United States activities in Laos during the Vietnam War. The grainy images are filtered through his own childhood memories, creating a work that sits somewhere between historical record and personal recollection.

Indonesian artist Tintin Wulia similarly revisits the representation of Balinese culture in Bali, Foreground of War: A Critical Restaging (2026). Drawing from historical archives, Wulia considers the way Balinese artists and traditions were presented through an outsider’s gaze, bringing questions of cultural agency and memory into the picture.

The exhibition becomes even more interesting when the archive moves into the digital world.

Singaporean artist Ho Tzu Nyen’s The Critical Dictionary of Southeast Asia, an ongoing work that began in 2017, uses an algorithm to continuously recombine texts, images and sounds connected to Southeast Asia.

There is no single version of the work. The combinations keep changing.

And then there is Malaysian artist Ismail Zain’s Digital Collage series from 1988. He was exploring similar ideas much earlier with this series, using a Macintosh computer to combine images from mass media and popular culture. His work was an early example of digital image-making in Malaysia, while also bringing together contemporary technology with traditional Malay poetic forms.

Across Art Remembers, the artists take very different routes into the past. Some alter archival photographs. Others revisit wartime imagery, personal memories or stories that have rarely found their way into official records. Technology becomes another means of preserving, changing and connecting those memories.

The result is an exhibition that does not treat history as something finished and filed away.

Instead, Art Remembers gives artists the opportunity to look again. And sometimes, just by looking again is enough to uncover an entirely different story.

Art Remembers runs from 21 August to 18 October 2026 at the Singtel Special Exhibition Gallery 1 and City Hall Chamber, National Gallery Singapore. General Admission is required, with free entry for Singaporeans and Permanent Residents.

National Gallery Singapore
1 St Andrew’s Road
Singapore 178957