Talking Objects

Talking Objects examines the meanings that quotidian objects and everyday representations amass through use and circulation. Casting daily encounters in new light, the artists in the exhibition explore the emotions and value we accord to the material and visual world around us.

Presented in unexpected or unsettling contexts, commonplace objects are imbued with human experience and emotions, revealing ambiguous histories and memories. By the actions of artists, the mundane is transformed into incisive instruments of expression—words become gestures, language turns visual, the intangible is rendered material and the inanimate comes to life.

Drawn primarily from the collection of Singapore Art Museum, the works in Talking Objects encourage us to take a close look at the world we inhabit and seek new ways of seeing, thinking and meaning-making. As we face an entropy of images, information and values, how do we talk with and about objects, and what do objects say of us?

Talking Objects is presented in parallel with The Living Room in the Collection Gallery. Together, the two exhibitions invite reflection on how art is experienced, interpreted, and carried through time and space.

Image credits: Myat Kyawt, details from series of still life paintings, 2003.

about the artists

Christine Ay Tjoe
Christine Ay Tjoe (b. 1973, Indonesia) started her career as a graphic artist where her experiment with drypoint technique led her to create intricate, layered paintings. Intrigued by human emotions and the relationship between humanity and the cosmos, Ay Tjoe often conveys feelings and inner complexities such as melancholy, struggle, pain and happiness in her works. Her works also gesture to universal human experiences and how mythology and spirituality affect emotions. A more direct connection to the human body figures prominently in her recent work, offering a visceral sense of physicality and alludes to both physical and metaphysical states of being. Her work underscores the interconnectedness of the mind, body and soul, while exploring their inherent fragility.

Simryn Gill
Simryn Gill (b. 1959, Singapore) works with a wide range of methods for thinking and making, including writing, drawing, photography, printmaking, creating collections of things, altering objects and publishing. Collecting materials and images from her immediate surroundings, Gill generates poetic and philosophical explorations into the places that we inhabit and carry within us. With Tom Melick, she runs Stolon Press, a publisher in Sydney that makes books and pamphlets, and organises occasional meals and conversations between people working in different modes and practices.

Subodh Gupta
Subodh Gupta (b. 1964, India) is known for sculptures and installations that incorporate everyday objects commonly seen in India, such as mass-produced stainless-steel household utensils and bicycles with milk pails. His works reflect on the social and political economies of his homeland. Elevating ubiquitous items as art, he explores the symbolisms and transformative powers of these objects and is interested in the effects of cultural translation and dislocation and what inevitably disappears in the process of change. His ideas have taken shape in a variety of different media: from film, video and performance to steel, bronze, marble and paint. Gupta employs these media for both their aesthetic properties and conceptual significance and connotations.

Nilo Ilarde
Nilo Ilarde (b. 1960, Philippines) is an artist and curator whose work navigates the intersections between image and word, drawing and writing, and surface and painting. Using both found and constructed objects, he assembles image and text to comment on both the formal and conceptual conditions of art and language. Often, Ilarde’s practice involves giving form to emptiness through unpainted paintings that considers the space of the gallery as a readymade. He is interested in exploring themes that revolves around the relationship between art objects and space, with a meticulous and fastidious approach to planning which ironically necessitates an embracing of errors that may arise as part of the creation process. His installations challenge traditional notions of artmaking and engage viewers in a dialogue with the exhibition space.

Myat Kyawt
At the core of Myat Kyawt’s (b. 1966, Myanmar) artistic philosophy lies a dedication to the nuances of daily life—a celebration of life’s simple pleasures. An artist who embraces experimentation, he constantly seeks new approaches to conventional styles and technique to explore diverse forms of expression. Through his works, often bold and vibrantly coloured, exuding a child-like wonder and whimsical portrayal of the mundane, the artist invites viewers to share in his explorations, reminding us of the enchantment that resides in our daily experiences.

Nguyễn Huy An
Nguyễn Huy An (b. 1982, Vietnam) reflects on the emotive associations of everyday materials, exploring themes of memory and isolation in his practice. Expressed as installations, paintings, sculptures and performance, his works mediate the artist’s desire to trace the interiority of self and the psychology of human behaviour. He is known for performances that are almost meditative. Undertaken with precision, the artist measures, captures and consolidates what is intangible, formless and conceptual, using the humblest of materials: strands of hair, threads of textile, coal, ink and dust, etc., to convey a yearning for bygone times lost in the brutal tides of modernity. In 2010, Nguyễn Huy An co-founded the performance art collective Phu Luc (The Appendix Group) with Vietnamese artists Vũ Đức Toàn and Hoàng Minh Đức.

Nguyễn Phương Linh
Nguyễn Phương Linh’s (b. 1985, Vietnam) multidisciplinary practice spans video, sculpture and installation. She is concerned with geographic cultural shifts, traditional roots and the fragmented history of Vietnam. Tracing a complex network of ethnicities, religions and cultural and geo-political influences, her works contemplate visible versus invisible truths, and form and time. Other thematic areas of her focus include the experience of alienation and dislocation, and the ephemeral. Nguyễn Phương Linh often conducts field research, collecting artefacts from historical sites of exchange. She then transforms these materials to construct alternative perspectives, and interpretations of histories, personal narratives and memories. In 2013, she co-founded and co-directed Nhà Sàn Collective, an initiative for artistic exchanges, fostering a “just-do-it” attitude.

Po Po
One of Myanmar’s pioneering contemporary artists, Po Po (b. 1957, Myanmar) is best known for his conceptual, often abstract drawings based on Buddhist core concepts of spirituality and philosophy. His work also references Myanmar’s fraught political history, framing and challenging the country’s socio-political landscape through an idiosyncratic interpretation of his environment. More recently, he incorporates documentation of contemporary Burmese society into his work, often with an element of humour. Po Po was amongst the first Burmese artists to embrace the modes and methods of conceptual art in the late-1980s and in the 1990s, was one of the first Burmese artists to exhibit internationally. Since then, he was shown widely across Asia-Pacific and Europe.

Alwin Reamillo
Alwin Reamillo (b. 1964–d. 2023, Philippines) developed an artistic practice centred on the pedagogy of creative play and mixed media experimentations. A multifaceted artist, his work spanned painting, sculpture and installation, and he often initiated projects that intersected these mediums with video and performance. After migrating to Australia in 1995, he began exploring ideas about memory and mobility, examining how cross-cultural interactions can change ways of thinking. His later works dealt with the intertwined themes of colonisation, migration and the globalisation of culture. Reamillo had facilitated projects with diverse communities across Australia and overseas, creating participatory “social sculptures” that responded to local contexts and histories. The projects were often developed through a process of “hunting and gathering,” which the artist considers as a “hunting” for found materials and resources, and a “gathering” of people.

Sim Chi Yin
Sim Chi Yin (b. 1978, Singapore) uses artistic and archival interventions to contest and complicate historiographies and colonial narratives. Working across photography, film, installation, performance and book-making, she combines research with storytelling to explore issues relating to history, conflict, memory and extraction. Since 2015, she has examined and engaged with the historiographies of the Malayan Emergency (1948–1960) through photographs, video and sound installations, oral histories as part of her ongoing project One Day We’ll Understand. Developed as a counter archive in three parts, the project challenges official histories, allowing for a generative response to gaps and absences in these master narratives.

Gerardo Tan
Working with a variety of media including found objects, painting and sculpture, artist books, collages, video and sound, Gerardo Tan (b. 1960, Philippines) engages with issues of representation and conceptual play, blurring the line between transcription and transformation in vision and process, giving way to new, itinerant meanings. Exploring the nature of art and how forms and materiality can be articulated in ideas and concepts, Tan often references works from the world of art and mass media to probes material and medium, and questions the reproducibility of images and their spatial and temporal authenticity.

Suzann Victor
The works of Suzann Victor (b. 1959, Singapore) prospect the contours of human sensorial experience, perception and phenomena by rekindling materials derived from the body, the elements of light and water, science of physics, alongside engineered components and the readymade. Through performances of vulnerability, acts of collective labour and installations, Victor underscores the significance of sites, spaces and architecture by transforming them into immersive environments that draw awareness to the viewer’s own body as an investigative tool for apprehending the world at large. A significant figure in Singapore’s contemporary art scene, Victor was Co-founder and Artistic Director of Singapore’s first corporate-sponsored feminist artist-initiative, 5th Passage (1991–1996) and was the only female artist among the four artists who represented Singapore at its first national pavilion at the Venice Biennale in 2001.

artwork highlights

related events

check out the line-up of free and ticketed events below!

GUIDED TOUR

Join us on a guided tour and gain insights on artworks presented in Talking Objects. 

Curator Tour  | Various dates and timings | Level 3, Gallery 4

How do objects speak? And what happens when a work refuses to be bound to an object at all?

Join our SAM Curators on a tour of the latest showcase of Singapore Art Museum Collection, Talking Objects and The Living Room, which explore parallel approaches to what it means to encounter and present art.

• Sat, 7 Mar 2026, 3 - 4:30pm

• Sat, 18 Jul 2026, 3 - 4:30pm

*This tour will be conducted in English with Singapore Sign Language (SgSL) interpretation by Equal Dreams. This tour is suitable for participants aged 6 and up. Children must be accompanied by an adult.

DROP IN ACTIVITY

Art Cards
Have you ever felt a connection to an object? Before exploring the exhibition, pick a card of an object that resonates with you the most. Find out which artwork the object refers to and take your card home as a personal keepsake.

Stick with SAM
Join us for a Stick with SAM adventure by collecting stickers from our exhibitions, events or programmes and making memories with us!