Drawing inspiration from the text “This is Not a Pipe” in René Magritte’s renowned painting The Treachery of Images, the design redefines the form and function of a bench. By employing ambiguous shapes and a complementary colour scheme, the concept involves the creation of “duo benches.” These benches aim to challenge the conventional notion of a singular bench, offering users the opportunity to explore diverse postures and engage with sitting in innovative and dynamic ways. It encourages individuals to experiment and play with various sitting positions, opening up new possibilities for interaction and reimagining the bench.

By the river bank, the contour and façade of buildings form a magnificent and natural backdrop for a stage. In A Micropolyphonic Stage, the artist calls for a moment of repose and contemplation. It invites the sitter to watch, listen, share, ponder, rest, experience, and reflect, just like the emotions that an excellent play, an outstanding music performance, or virtuosic dance arouse in us, playing out their microcosmos and shared memories. In the shape of a left inverted comma and a comma, the bench's dual design evokes a polyphonic texture that reflects the rhythmic tension and patterns of the stories weaved by the sitter.

This artwork not only marks itself spatially between the Asian Civilisations Museum and the centuries-old Singapore River, but also temporally among the antique Peranakan furniture collection in the former and the sampans (small wooden boats) of yesteryear on the latter. How might this art bench simultaneously mark the transition of space and passage of time for place-making in the Civic District

Part sculpture, part furniture and part landmark, this art bench is simultaneously conceptual (yet formal), digital (yet physical), and AI-generated (yet hand-made). It is one outcome of many digitally generated designs from a custom-developed AI model trained with 2D imagery of furniture and sampans found in the museum’s collection. It combines a fine-tuned text-to-2D Diffusion model, and a modified view-to-3D NeRF (Neural Radiance Fields) model, generating a novel 3D form blending concepts belonging to Asian benches and sampans, while reconfiguring itself to its site.

In 1819, Bengalese labourers clearing land uncovered a pair of sandstone slabs standing at the mouth of the Singapore River. Dubbed the Singapore Stone, they were adorned in an unknown script, and weathered indecipherable by the environment and time. Destroyed in 1843 to make space for Fort Fullerton, some of the fragments with more legible cuneiforms were broken apart and saved. The remaining fragments, however, were completely destroyed when the sea wall was built around the fort.

In this artwork, the artist attempts to repair a granite stone slab. Using brass staples to stitch back the broken fragments, the repair reflects on our attempts to come to terms with the damage and scars of history. Installed near the site of the destroyed Singapore Stone, the stitched stone presents the scars of the past as something not to be disguised and hidden, but embraced and cherished.

This playful artwork offers passersby a glimpse of the rich heritage of the former Satay Club at the Esplanade. Once a famous and popular open-air hawker centre for delicious skewered meat grilled over charcoal, many couples dated along this scenic seafront promenade.

Inspired by the traditional hot charcoal pit and satay seller’s bench, the artwork invites you to take a break, sit with your loved one and enjoy the warmth of each other’s company.

Be part of the different generations of love birds at this very spot. Share stories of your favourite food and life’s sweet memories. Watch the sunset together and dream the night away!

Internet culture, specifically meme culture, rests on a closed loop between the meme’s creator and its decoder-distributor. Its humour, insight and information rests on a visual language that depends on a referentiality that is internal to those who understand the interplay or contradistinction between the meme’s original source material and any subsequent tweaks and additions. In other words, if you know you know. This artwork is a nugget of Internet slang written out in Morse code, that is, in a sequence of dots and dashes. It’s a playful mix of two codes that originate in two different centuries, alternating between the familiar and unfamiliar to different generations.