Lucid Dreams in the Reverie of the Real is an exhibition of works by Lee Wen, a multidisciplinary artist and one of Singapore's most internationally recognised contemporary artists. His earliest known work, a book entitled A Waking Dream (1981) with texts and drawings preceded the manga generation of today and showed evidence of his inclination in using dreams, metaphors and myth-making to create narratives of our perception of life and reality.

Best known for his Yellow Man series of work, Lee is also one of the pioneers of performance art in Singapore. Through various constructed personas, his works allow visitors an insight into his roles as artist and provocateur, whose very being is motivated by a strong conviction of justice and idealism, with a persistence to stay true to the self in a highly structured world.

The exhibition presents Lee's key works spanning an illustrious two-and-a-half decade-long artistic career, continuing some earlier series alongside more recent ones. The vast selection includes installations, photographs, videos and documentations. Lee will also perform 'live' during selected exhibition periods and talk about his experiences and personal development as an artist, covering subjects such as memories and myth-making.

Not Against Interpretation is an experimental platform to nurture an appreciation for contemporary art. The projects created on this platform exploit the ‘openness’ of contemporary art, the fact that it can be interpreted in many ways, as an opportunity to engage with people from varied backgrounds.

The first artwork to be presented under this series is A Flog of Birdies by Singaporean artists Jason Lim and Vincent Leow. The work was an artistic collaboration between them as part of UTOPIA (United Together to Organise and Produce Interesting Art). UTOPIA was an artist-run space in Singapore in the early 1990s managed by the pair, together with a third artist, Yvonne Lee, as a platform to exhibit works by younger artists. A Flog of Birdies was first presented at the TheatreWorks Black Box in 1994, followed by 9^th Indian Triennial of Contemporary Art in 1997 and at the Nokia Singapore Art Exhibition in 1999.

SAM invited our museum volunteers to give their interpretation of this iconic artwork. Make your way to SAM to see how these responses differ from those by SAM curators!

Contemporary art is often a dialogue with the social, economic and cultural issues of the present. The explosion of art produced in Asia since 2000 can thus be a window allowing us a view or vista into the epochal changes happening around us. Cultures melt into each other, while urbanisation has transformed once familiar landscapes beyond recognition. At the same time, local communities and localities have responded to these homogenising forces with re-assertions of local identity and distinctiveness. Debates and discussions are taking place in various localities across the globe, and at ‘fibre-optic’ speeds through the Internet which no longer allow us the possibility of living in isolated silos.

PANORAMA offers a wide lens to examine our world and chart some of the issues pervading contemporary art-making in Asia today - the negotiation over values, social and political change, escalating urbanisation and the subsequent pressures on nature. Artists such as Agnes Arellano remind us of the power of myth and its role in constructing tradition and identity. Agus Suwage tracks the power of media images and how their mass circulation in our consumer society has shaped our perceptions of the world. Nalini Malani recalls the contest of values that has led to many conflicts in the world, while :phunk points us to ‘electricity’, as a symbol of the creative energy that has propelled the growth of modern global cities like Singapore.

Drawn entirely from the contemporary art collection of the Singapore Art Museum, this first edition of PANORAMA features 24 artists from 8 Asian countries working in painting, sculpture, drawing, photography, video and installation. PANORAMA part II is scheduled for 2013/2014.

This exhibition, entitled Seeing the Kite Again, is inspired by the late master Wu Guanzhong’s metaphor of a kite and how it expresses the connection between an artist, his life and the people around him. By bridging Chinese and Western aesthetics, Wu blazed the trail for the modernisation of Chinese art. In 2008, the internationally acclaimed artist donated his largest gift of 113 important works to the National Heritage Board. Selected paintings from the donation has been presented since 2009 by the National Art Gallery, Singapore. The current exhibition showcases some of Wu’s most outstanding works produced from 1960s to 2000s in the oil and ink medium.

These are special research exhibitions by the National Art Gallery, Singapore, held on the premises of SAM.

The Learning Gallery presents artworks selected to promote engagement and discussion of broader issues through contemporary art.

Everyday Objects at SAM at 8Q invites visitors to take a second look at familiar things through the eyes of artists from Singapore and Southeast Asia, where everyday things we know and sometimes take for granted are portrayed in a different light, making us think twice about their function and their relation to other objects.

People And Places at SAM showcases twenty Southeast Asian contemporary art works from the Singapore Art Museum's permanent collection that look at the people, places and spaces around us. Revolving around ideas of identity, urbanization, globalisation and the environment, these works raise pertinent issues on urban living in the modern cityscape and prompt us to consider how the artists have translated their visions about these issues into works of art.