Singapore is quietly but unmistakably shifting from cultural waypoint to regional art node, drawing repeat visits from international audiences. Its art calendar has transitioned from episodic marquee events to a more steady, continuous rhythm, featuring an expanding constellation of ambitious institutional projects, commercial platforms, and increasingly confident homegrown practices that signal a more rooted, self-sustaining ecosystem.

Anchored by SG60, Singapore’s diamond jubilee, 2025 saw institutions scale up while reframing national legacies within global contexts. The National Gallery Singapore opened “Singapore Stories: Pathways and Detours in Art,” a new permanent exhibition that re-examines the local canon through more inclusive lenses. Meanwhile, “City of Others: Asian Artists in Paris, 1920s–1940s” highlighted Asian artists’ overlooked influence in interwar Paris, recasting modernism as cross-cultural exchange rather than Western export though still centering Paris as the arbiter of artistic value and visibility. At STPI – Creative Workshop & Gallery, “Wifredo Lam: Outside In” struck a parallel note, presenting the Cuban-Chinese artist’s 
late-career prints that fused modernist forms with a creolized visual vocabulary that fractured modernism’s universalist claims.

At the Singapore Art Museum (SAM), the emphasis was on bridging established and emerging voices. Robert Zhao Renhui’s 2024 Venice Biennale presentation was expanded into a sprawling homecoming exhibition of secondary forest ecologies; a Heman Chong survey showcased his incisive, conceptually rigorous practice; and “SAM Contemporaries 2,” the museum’s biennial platform for research-driven artist-curator collaborations, spotlighted the work of six younger artists.