Michael Lee

@hongerootooties #abodyimproper @rkfineart @gillmanbarracksart

[Invitation to attend talk] Join the 4 of us—Arielle Lau (@arielle.lau_ ), Michael Lee (@leehonghwee ), Laura Kee (@laurakeelt ), and Tan Wan Sze (@re_wind_ing )—in this public sharing on our immersion trip to South Korea last year! We are the Singaporean participants of Creative Connections: Korea–Singapore Exchange Project, funded by the National Arts Council (NAC) (@nacsingapore ) Singapore and co-launched with the Korean Foundation for International Cultural Exchange (KOFICE) to mark the 50th anniversary of diplomatic ties between Singapore and South Korea. Arielle will talk about artist residencies as alternative ecologies of cultural exchange. I will share on the forms and functions of peer support in the Korean contemporary art scene. Laura will share on how South Korea's cultural infrastructure sustains its performing artists. Wan Sze will offer a guide on trans-Asian performing arts in and beyond South Korea. 📅 Date: Tue, 24 Feb 2026 ⏰Time: 7.30-9pm (SGT) 🏠 Venue: 42 Waterloo St (Black Box) and Zoom (this is a hybrid session) 🏎️ Free with registration: bit.ly/creativecxns (or click linkinbio) Details of the session: https://lnkd.in/gZMd6jq4 About the project: https://lnkd.in/gGiYPEJW 📸 1. Poster of 24 Feb 2026 sharing event 2. @baesungho_ at @chapterii_ 3. Parsimmon tree on the way to studio of @chris_____ro @yunimkim_works 4. @karts.global 5. Opening reception at @miro._.center , Gwangju 6. @lee.bul 7. Peaceful street protest in Seoul 8. @nslasha.kr 9. @mmcakorea Seoul 10. @kofice_next office

@thestrangearchive.sg curated by @adriantanpc 37 (not 39) Keppel Road #04-01D 📸 1. @wongkelwin 2. @superlative_everything 3-4. @_akai_theartist

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@bernytlm x @supperhousesg @journeyeast

Andrée Weschler (@andreeweschler ) 'Your Majesty' 2025 Installation of original rejection letters from kings, photo print on vinyl stickers, and framed print of a past performance (2004) Artist's collection Special thanks to: Chua Ka-Inn Jeremy Hastings Michael Lee Roger Haffele Sebastian Glasse "Andrée Weschler [...] interrogates cultural framings of the human body, particularly the line between the socially acceptable and repulsive. As an art student in Singapore, she encountered the legend of the Hairy Virgin, a child born fully covered in hair, in Pierre Boaistuau’s 'Histoires prodigieuses' (1560). During the period 2003–2021, she has embodied this figure in performances in six global cities (Seoul, Singapore, Tokyo, Berlin, Paris, and Santiago). Each performance was a reactivation of an image once used to provoke fascination and fear. Her new work 'Your Majesty' (2025) develops this project in ironic ways. Nine royal rejection letters, declining Hairy Virgin’s request for an audience, are displayed alongside a framed historical etching (from Boaistuau’s book) depicting her meeting with King of Bohemia (now the Czech Republic). On the adjacent wall, a large-scale photograph restages this encounter, with Weschler as Hairy Virgin and an actor as king. The image offers a double fantasy: first, that the meeting took place; second, that power is inverted, with the 'monstrous' enthroned. High up but still within the image hangs a small documentation photograph of her 2004 MRT performance, recalling Hairy Virgin’s earlier disruptions of propriety in Singapore’s public space." —Michael Lee, "Tender Returns", 2025 Part of the exhibition, 'Towards Happiness, Prosperity and Progress: Reflections on the Singapore Spirit', held at The Private Museum (@theprivatemuseum ) till 7 Dec 2025. 📸 courtesy of @theprivatemuseum

Chow and Lin (@chow_and_lin ) 'Decentralised Value Systems' 2025 Wood, paint, canned sardines 202 x 40 x 28 cm Artist's collection "Known for harnessing data to interrogate global issues, the duo has an ongoing photo series, “Equivalences”, in which a single non-food item is placed adjacent to, or amidst, a hundred or thousand other food items. By setting different utilitarian equivalencies against one another, Chow and Lin expose the social structures and individual agencies embedded in global consumption. Their new work, 'Decentralised Value Systems' (2025), brings together Ayam Brand canned sardines—introduced to Singapore in 1892 by French entrepreneur Alfred Clouet—and the Swedish furniture brand IKEA’s ubiquitous Billy bookcase. Both are staples of domestic life, but also nodes in global trade, where value circulates unevenly. On the back of the bookcase, the purchase receipts for the bookcase and twelve cans of sardines are displayed side by side, providing evidence of equal cost yet vastly different functions." —Michael Lee, "Tender Returns", 2025 Part of the exhibition, 'Towards Happiness, Prosperity and Progress: Reflections on the Singapore Spirit', held at The Private Museum (@theprivatemuseum ) till 7 Dec 2025. 📸 courtesy of @theprivatemuseum

Cynthia Delaney Suwito (@cynthiadsuwito ) 'Potted Pots' 2025 Photo print on paper, pots, and other media (3 sites) Dimensions variable Artist's collection "Responding to the everyday with humour, Cynthia Delaney Suwito has been transforming her personal failure, specifically, her inability to keep plants alive, into generative projects. In an earlier iteration, 'Belongings' (2024), she reimagined photographic images of the belongings of a house owner’s daughter as “artificial plants.” 'Potted Pots' (2025) continues this impulse by revisiting flowerpots abandoned after futile attempts at high-rise gardening. These uncanny paper plants, composed of digitally stitched photographs of the very pots they occupy, mimic real plant species yet remain resolutely artificial: forever alive, yet never quite living. At once familiar and strange, they return life to what has been forsaken, embodying an urban longing for nature that forever eludes the artist. In this playful act, failure blossoms into flourish, irony into quiet renewal." —Michael Lee, "Tender Returns", 2025 Part of the exhibition, 'Towards Happiness, Prosperity and Progress: Reflections on the Singapore Spirit', held at The Private Museum (@theprivatemuseum ) till 7 Dec 2025. 📸 courtesy of @theprivatemuseum

gideon-jamie (@gideon_jamie_ ) 'This is a non-commissioned piece of design' 2025 Double-sided risograph print on recycled paper Takeaway stack of edition of 500 under the dimensions 59 x 41 cm Artist's collection "Since 2021, [gideon-jamie] have been developing the 'ADVERTISEMENT' series, which playfully subverts the logic of promotional material. 'Please (do not) work with us' (2021) lists things they do not do as designers, offering a sharp commentary on the graphic design scene. For this exhibition, they turn their attention to their own belated entry into Singapore’s art context, despite having exhibited overseas. 'This is a non-commissioned piece of design' (2025) responds to their first formal invitation to show as artists in Singapore. Taking the form of a two-sided poster advertising their design services, the work is both pragmatic and tongue-in-cheek, fashioned as a “Singaporean” artwork by virtue of its practicality, yet distinctly “un-Singaporean” in its self-declared role-blurring autonomy. By “smuggling” design into the space of art, they reveal with quiet humour how institutional boundaries are policed in the name of propriety, even as creative survival often depends on gently slipping across them." —Michael Lee, "Tender Returns", 2025 Part of the exhibition, 'Towards Happiness, Prosperity and Progress: Reflections on the Singapore Spirit', held at The Private Museum (@theprivatemuseum ) till 7 Dec 2025. 📸 courtesy of @theprivatemuseum

Jason J S Lee (@jason.jslee ) 'Island-Life 4.0: Pandan Without Borders' 2021 Performance (video documentation) 16 min 55 sec Artist's Collection "Jason J S Lee transforms his observations of changes to the urban environment into visual symbols in the forms of photography, installation, and performance. His 'Island-Life 4.0: Pandan Without Borders' (2021) centres on a single plant species: pandan, an aromatic leaf ubiquitous in Southeast Asian kitchens. In this performance, he crawls across the floor, pushing a pail of water while clutching pandan leaves. At one point, he ties the leaves into knots, as cooks do to release their fragrance, before offering them to the audience to smell and take home. The performance ends with Lee pressing the pandan leaves over his face, covering his eyes. It is as if he were blinding himself with their scent, or dissolving into it. The gesture responds to a question the artist often receives in Taiwan: “What is Singapore like?” His answer, delivered through scent and motion rather than words, is an act of revisiting his homeland through memory and the body. In Lee’s hands, pandan becomes more than an ingredient: it is a vehicle of exchange, humility, and belonging." —Michael Lee, "Tender Returns", 2025 Part of the exhibition, 'Towards Happiness, Prosperity and Progress: Reflections on the Singapore Spirit', held at The Private Museum (@theprivatemuseum ) till 7 Dec 2025. 📸 courtesy of 1-3. @jason.jslee 4. @theprivatemuseum

Jimmy Ong (@ayearinjava ) 'Raffles Chunam (Tamil)' 2020 Chunam (river sand, water, lime, egg whites, tayir, ghee and bellapum) plaster on paper mache, wire mesh, rattan stand, plaster and lime on paper marche with wireframe 110 x 50 cm Artist's Collection "Even as Singapore neither officially glorifies nor denounces its modern founder, Sir Stamford Raffles, his name has endured as a brand synonymous with excellence across sectors. These include education (e.g., Raffles Girls’ School), aviation (Raffles Class of Singapore Airlines), and hospitality (Raffles Hotel). Meanwhile, unlike nations that topple statues of colonial figures, Singapore has filed Raffles neatly into history: acknowledged, but rarely scrutinised. This pragmatism sustains a telling silence, sidestepping critical engagement with the violences of colonisation. Jimmy Ong rejects such silence. He does so by bringing Raffles down from his plinth. In 'Raffles Refuse / CatchAll Containers' (2019) and 'Raffles Refuse / Plastic Bag' (2019), Raffles’ headless, feet-less figure is remade as bins and bag holders: objects for storage, not reverence. In 'Raffles Chunam (Tamil)' (2020), shown here, his effigy becomes a skin of papier-mâché, flattened and coated in Indian chunam plaster once prized for its marble sheen. This traditional material is here replaced by a contemporary consumer-brand version, Raffles. Fitted onto a found rattan stand, the work functions as a plaster sampler, turning the monumental into the domestic, permanence into the provisional. If empire’s icon can be remade into containers and samplers, Ong suggests, its symbolic authority can hardly be absolute." —Michael Lee, "Tender Returns", 2025 Part of the exhibition, 'Towards Happiness, Prosperity and Progress: Reflections on the Singapore Spirit', held at The Private Museum (@theprivatemuseum ) till 7 Dec 2025. 📸 courtesy of 1-4. @theprivatemuseum 5. @leehonghwee

John Low (@ogekkie ) Study for 'Peach Blossom Spring' 2025 Ink and colour on rice paper 176 x 70 cm (each) Artist's Collection "John Low’s work in this exhibition continues his NTU-CCA residency (2018–2019) exploration of the nature of contemporary Chinese ink practices. Low’s Study for ‘Peach Blossom Spring’ (2025) was developed from an earlier “landscape-not-landscape” series to its current extension, “cliff-face-not-cliff-face”. The work revisits Tao Yuanming’s fable of a fisherman who chances upon a hidden valley where people live in quiet harmony with nature. Transposed to Singapore, this search for refuge becomes a meditation on connection amid excess. The city-state is, for Low, too dense to experience fully, where malls, kopitiams, and HDB blocks multiply beyond comprehension. “I might be the only S’porean who hasn’t been to her 1,001 shopping malls, nor sat in all her thousands of kopitiams,” the artist remarks in astonishment. “It’s like I could never ever touch all and every single HDB block on this tiny red dot.” His drawing, built from layers of dots and curved lines, hovers between form and dissolution, mapping not what is seen but what eludes encounter. The work becomes an act of reaching, toward a landscape that withdraws even as one approaches. What remains is a network of absence and yearning: a tender attempt to reunite with a world that resists communion." —Michael Lee, "Tender Returns", 2025 Part of the exhibition, 'Towards Happiness, Prosperity and Progress: Reflections on the Singapore Spirit', held at The Private Museum (@theprivatemuseum ) till 7 Dec 2025.