Performance art never sits still. Belonging to time, it vanishes just as it happens – leaving behind questions, afterimages, even a bit of chaos. But what if what remains is not merely a trace, but an opening for something else?
The Living Room explores how museums might collect, care for, and re-present performance-based practices. Like the living room in a home, this exhibition considers what it means to create a space that is private yet shared, settled yet always in flux. More than a metaphor, it becomes a way of being: a model for how an exhibition might gather people, hold ideas, and remain open. Here, The Living Room invites us to think of performance traces not merely as static records, but as elements in a shifting space of encounter and exchange.
This show completes a three-part collaboration between Singapore Art Museum (SAM), Seoul Museum of Art (SeMA), and Queensland Art Gallery | Gallery of Modern Art (QAGOMA). It brings together works from the collections of the three institutions alongside invited artists. Through ephemeral gestures, participatory encounters, unrealised proposals, and archival fragments, The Living Room reflects on the afterlives of performance – not as endings, but as openings for reactivation, relation and return.
The Living Room is presented in parallel with Talking Objects in the Collection Gallery. Together, the two exhibitions invite reflection on how art is experienced, interpreted, and carried through time and space.
about the artists
Chia Chuyia
Chia Chuyia (b. 1970, Malaysia) works with performance and installation to explore themes of environmental responsibility, food and identity, and human connection. She is particularly interested in how performance, as an ephemeral art form, can engage with questions of sustainability, presentation and collection. Combining performance with craft, moving image and installation, her work fosters new ways of thinking across disciplines. Chia is also a co-founder of the performance art collective Communication Laboratory/ComLab Sweden, through which she initiates and presents collective actions in public space. She lives and works in Gothenburg, Sweden.
Brian Fuata
Brian Fuata (b. 1978, Aotearoa/New Zealand) creates live improvisational performances that unfold in the moment. Drawing on lived experience, social discourse, and customary knowledge, his work incorporates a diverse array of performance and communication modalities, including spoken word, concrete poetry, authentic movement (dance), correspondence, clowning, glossolalia (speaking-in-tongues), and sound. Humour and ambiguity are central to his practice, which probes shifting relationships between body, place, self, and other. His charged and enigmatic performances open spaces of uncertainty, heightened presence, and transformation. Often adopting the role of trickster, Fuata blurs the lines between autobiography and fiction, audience and performer, art and the everyday.
Jeremy Hiah
Jeremy Hiah (b. 1972, Singapore) is a visual artist whose practice spans painting, print, installation and performance. Originally trained as a painter, he was introduced to performance art and drawn to its immediacy and its potential beyond conventional art structures. Since the late 1990s, Hiah has played a key role in advancing performance art in Singapore. He contributed to several iterations of Future of Imagination, founded and helmed the Fetter Field Performance Art Event (2006–2012) and co-organised the Wuwei Performance Art Series (2018–ongoing). Hiah also co-founded Your Mother Gallery (2004–2025), Singapore’s longest-running independent art space, operated out of his own living quarters.
Tehching Hsieh
Tehching Hsieh (b. 1950, Taiwan) is a seminal figure in performance art, renowned for endurance-based works that dissolve the boundaries between art and life. Beginning in the late 1970s, Hsieh created five “One Year Performances,” each involving extreme physical and mental constraints, followed by a “Thirteen Year Plan” where he made art without public exhibition. Through long durations, severe restrictions and simple documentation, Hsieh forged one of the most radical approaches to contemporary art, making art and life inseparable. Since 2000, his work has been exhibited globally at major institutions including the Guggenheim, Museum of Modern Art (New York), Tate Modern (London), and Neue Nationalgalerie (Berlin). At the 2017 Venice Biennale, he represented Taiwan with his solo exhibition Doing Time.
Kim Ga Ram
Kim Ga Ram (b. 1984, South Korea) is an artist whose practice spans installation, performance and media. Kim’s work explores tensions between morality and entertainment, using playful experimentation to provoke reflection on social and ethical issues. Her socially engaged projects often invite active viewer participation, highlighting shifts in perception and values. Through her practice, she creates spaces for connection, questioning, and reimagining the boundaries between personal experience and broader societal concerns. Kim received her BA in Fine Arts from Ewha Womans University and an MA from Chelsea College of Art and Design.
Lee Kun-yong
Lee Kun-Yong (b. 1942, South Korea) is a pioneering figure in performance and avant-garde art in Korea. A founding member of the influential Space & Time Group and a leading figure in the Korean Avant Garde Association, Lee has explored the body’s relationship to space, time, and audiences since the 1970s. He is best known for his Bodyscape paintings—created by tracing bodily movements across the canvas—and for works that document the body’s physical gestures. Today, Lee continues to expand on series that he began early on in his career, using his own body as both subject and medium in an ongoing dialogue with audiences.
Nam Hwayeon
Nam Hwayeon (b. 1979, South Korea) is an artist whose practice explores the performativity of research and the paradoxes of choreography shaped by absence. Her work engages with the fragility and contingency of presence, and with temporal interventions that disrupt linear time. Through the use of performance, installation and video, Nam examines how recorded time re-emerges in the present through shifting rhythms and cycles across bodies, nature and history. Drawing attention to the ephemeral and inscrutable aspects of existence, her practice invites new encounters with the past and the fleeting nature of the present.
Ezzam Rahman
Ezzam Rahman (b. 1981, Singapore) is known for his interest in the body and for using unconventional, everyday materials in his work. Working across sculpture, installation, digital media and performance, he creates works that are often autobiographical and ephemeral, engaging with themes of body politics, identity and abjection. These concerns frequently take shape in his performances, which he has presented widely in Singapore and internationally. In 2015, he received the People’s Choice Award and was the joint winner of the Grand Prize for the President’s Young Talents organised by SAM. In 2016, he was awarded the prestigious Young Artist Award by the National Arts Council (NAC).
Rim Dong-sik
Rim Dong-sik (b. 1945, South Korea) is a seminal figure in Korean contemporary art and a key contributor to the development of nature art in Korea. Emerging from the 1970s avant-garde movement, he co-founded the experimental performance art group Yatoo, which was dedicated to site-specific engagements with nature. His time in Germany—where he studied and encountered the Fluxus movement—further shaped his integration of art and life. Rim is known for creating paintings that recollect and reinterpret his outdoor performances and that capture the landscapes of his surroundings, offering a contemplative view of nature.
Wong Hoy Cheong
Wong Hoy Cheong (b. 1960, Penang) is one of Malaysia’s foremost contemporary artists, known for his deep engagement with socio-political activism and issues reflecting the historical and social trajectories of Malaysia’s post-war development. Unrestrained by style or medium, his diverse body of work spans drawing, painting, installation, photography, performance and film. He examines Asian and global history, society and politics through the lens of Malaysia’s colonial and post-colonial experiences, and explores the intersection of history, politics, culture and ethnicity. Wong earned a BA in literature from Brandeis University in 1982, an MEd from Harvard University in 1984, and an MFA in painting from the University of Massachusetts, Amherst in 1986.
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 The Living Room.
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 Objectsand 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
Action Cards
Pick up a prompt and perform a small action in the space. Some prompts are offered by the artists, extending their engagement beyond their artworks. Each action adds to the ways The Living Room is experienced.
Response Activity
Share your thoughts in response to the questions posed by the artworks. Your words may be shared as part of the exhibition, becoming part of conversations that The Living Room holds.
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!
Full-length leek garment, video and sound; Garment: 165 x 139 cm; Video: Single-channel, 4:3 aspect ratio, colour and sound, 60 min; Collection of Singapore Art Museum
Full-length leek garment, video and sound; Garment: 165 x 139 cm; Video: Single-channel, 4:3 aspect ratio, colour and sound, 60 min; Collection of Singapore Art Museum
What happens when an object in a collection reaches the end of its life? What happens when, despite our best efforts to preserve it, a work continues to shift and fade?
In Knitting the Future, Chia Chuyia performed an extraordinary act of perseverance and care. Over five weeks, for six days a week and six hours a day, she sat inside a glass gallery, knitting not with yarn but with bright green threads of leek. Dressed in black, she worked patiently as thousands of strands passed through her hands to form a full-length garment that she called a “body armour,” a gesture of protection for the body and, by extension, for the land that sustains it. On the final day of her performance, Chia put on the completed garment and offered it with quiet pride to the crowd gathered outside, who returned her gesture with warm applause.
The garment, together with a video and audio log of the performance, entered the museum’s collection as a record of the work. However, the organic nature of the garment meant that its lifespan was always an uncertain one. Over the years in storage, its vivid greens and yellows have darkened to brown and black as the garment has become increasingly fragile, resisting efforts to keep it unchanged.
How might we honour not just the making of a work, but also its unmaking as well? What does it mean to care for an artwork even as we prepare to let it go?
As part of this exhibition, the artist will return in January 2026 to perform a closing ritual. Through this final act, she will tend to the garment’s final moments and offer it rest.
Installation view of Chia Chuyia's 'Knitting the Future' (2016). Image courtesy of Singapore Art Museum.
Jeremy HiahPerformance Journal Scroll
2018
Charcoal on paper; 110.5 x 1014 cm; Collection of Singapore Art Museum
What does it mean to remember a performance through drawing instead of photography—when memory is filtered not through the lens but through the hand?
Unfurling across ten metres of paper, Performance Journal Scroll offers a whimsical, hand-drawn account of Jeremy Hiah’s two-decade-long engagement with performance art. Using charcoal as his medium, the artist has mapped out some of his most memorable works, including (from left to right) 1 Die 1000 Grow, Coward, White Angel Crocodile, Metamorphosis, and Man Eat Man—performances shaped by curiosity, humour and a deep grounding in the everyday.
Part journal and part dreamscape, the scroll drifts between the artist’s lived moments and surreal imaginings. Gestures from past performances are sketched alongside strange creatures that tread their way across its length. Unlike photographs which capture a moment in time, drawing allows memory to flow, mixing what was seen with what was felt, imagined or remembered differently.
The scroll is accompanied by The Albino Circus, a nearly hour-long video and photo montage of the artist’s performances in various settings—from galleries, to public spaces and even in the artist’s own living room. The montage offers a glimpse into the fluid life of performance as it is shaped and reshaped by context and time.
What stories do you carry across time? And how might you draw them?
Installation view of Jeremy Hiah’s 'Performance Journal Scroll’ (2018). Image courtesy of Singapore Art Museum.
Kim Ga RamACS#2: The AGENDA Hair Salon, 2016 Düsseldorf-Project
2016
Video: Single channel, 16:9 aspect ratio, colour and sound, 57 min 30 sec; Collection of Seoul Museum of Art
How much of your hair are you willing to give up for what you believe in? A strand? A lock? All of it?
These questions lie at the core of Kim Ga Ram’s ongoing project The AGENDA Hair Salon, first conceived in 2014. Each time it is staged, the work takes the form of a pop-up salon where Kim offers free haircuts in exchange for conversation. Participants begin by choosing a cutting cape printed with a slogan on a social issue, and then decide how much hair to part with. The more committed they feel, the more hair they give—ranging from a trim to a full shave.
The video presented here documents the 2016 staging of the work in Düsseldorf, Germany, which unfolded across six locations. There, the issues featured on the capes spoke to the city’s immediate concerns—migration, feminism, labour and surveillance—demonstrating how the project adapts to each local context. As a professionally trained hairdresser, Kim performed each cut with care and precision, inviting participants to share their views and turning the salon into a temporary public space for protest, vulnerability and dialogue.
What issue would you choose to wear on your sleeve? How far would you let it shape how you look, speak or act?
The artist will be reactivating this performance from 24 to 27 January 2026, offering haircuts to interested participants. Details on how to register will be shared closer to the date.
Installation view of Kim Ga Ram’s 'ACS#2: The AGENDA Hair Salon, 2016 Düsseldorf-Project’ (2016). Image courtesy of Singapore Art Museum.
Nam HwayeonEhera Noara
2020, 2025
Performance, photography, text, video and sculpture; Collection of the artist
How do we remember and preserve a performance that survives only in fragments?
In Ehera Noara, Nam Hwayeon brings back the Japanese premiere performance of Korean dancer Choi Seunghee from 1934. At a time when Korea was under Japanese colonial rule—and women’s bodies were subjected to systemic control—Choi was a Korean woman performing in the capital of the country that had colonised her home. The original Ehera Noara (Dance of the Carefree), now remembered only through several photographs and a few eyewitness accounts, was a lively dance inspired by the swaying, bowing gestures of middle-aged men at drinking parties. Disguised in traditional Korean male attire (the gat and dopo), Choi reimagined these movements through her own body, navigating an exotic gaze tied to both spectacle and empire.
Nam reconstructs the “vanished time” between Choi’s frozen poses, adding her own layers—Indian poetry and music influenced by flamenco—that echo Choi’s global influences. In the gallery, an archival photograph of Choi is displayed alongside a sculptural “shell” of cut and folded fabric, inviting viewers to inhabit the space her garment once held. Two accompanying essays—one inscribed on cloth, the other framed—address future audiences, proposing that such fragments might be woven into a shared memory.
The work is a live archive that grows each time it is staged. Performed now by Nam and Chung Ji Hye, it will later be entrusted to appointed custodians, ensuring that Ehera Noara continues to move across bodies, generations and time.
When only fragments remain, what will you preserve and what will you reinvent? How might these gestures change in your hands?
Ehera Noara will be performed at 3pm daily in the gallery from 28 to 31 January 2026.
Installation view of Nam Hwayeon’s 'Ehera Noara’ (2020,2025). Image courtesy of Singapore Art Museum.
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