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) is known for her intricate layered paintings and thought-provoking installations. Intrigued by human emotions and a subsequent interest in the relationship between humanity and the cosmos, Ay Tjoe’s work often expresses inner feelings such as melancholy, struggle, pain and happiness at the same time gestures to universal human experiences and the affects of mythology and spirituality. A more direct connection to the human body figures more prominently in her later work, offering a visceral sense of physicality and alluding 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 to incorporate everyday objects commonly seen throughout India such as mass-produced steel household utensils, bicycles milk palis, exploring 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, which Gupta employs for both their aesthetic properties and as conceptual signifiers carrying a wealth of connotations. The mass-produced and found objects, when transformed into breathtaking sculptures, strikes a dialogue between the found and the built as he manipulates accoutrements of daily life to harness the multitudes of definitions and circumstances of contemporary India, regardless of social and economic statuses.

Nilo Ilarde
Nilo Ilarde’s (b. 1960, Philippines) 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 that 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 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 revealing the nuances of daily life—a celebration of simple pleasures. An artist who embraces experimentation, he constantly seeks new approaches to conventional styles and techniques to explore diverse forms of expression. Often bold and vibrantly coloured, his works exuding child-like wonder and whimsy, inviting 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) uses his work to reflect on the emotive associations of everyday materials and their insights into memory and isolation. His works mediate a desire to trace the interiority of self and the psychology of human behaviour. Known for performances that are almost meditative in the precision they are undertaken with, Nguyễn measures, captures and consolidates what is intangible, formless and conceptual, using the most humble of materials: strands of hair, threads of textile, coal, ink, dust, etc. to convey a yearning for fading times in the face of brutal modernity. In 2010, Nguyễn co-founded the performance art collective Phu Luc (The Appendix Group) and has participated, either solo or with Phu Luc, in exhibitions and performance art festivals across Asia and Europe.

Nguyễn Phương Linh
Nguyễn Phương Linh’s (b. 1985, Vietnam) multidisciplinary practice spans video, sculpture and installation. Her practice 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, form and time, and conveys a pervasive sense of alienation, dislocation, and the ephemeral. Nguyen often travels for field research and to collect artifacts from historical sites of exchange. She transforms these materials to construct alternative perspectives and interpretations of histories, personal narratives, and memories. In 2013, she co-founded Nha San Collective, an initiative for exchanges, expansions and 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, work drawing on core concepts of spirituality and philosophy, particularly from Buddhism. 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. His recent work incorporates documentation of contemporary Burmese society in 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 Myanmar artists to exhibit internationally. Since then, he was shown widely across Asia-Pacific and Europe.

Alwin Reamillo
The artistic practice of Alwin Reamillo (1964–2023, Philippines) centred on an interest in experimenting with mixed media and the pedagogical exploration of creative play. His work spanned painting, sculpture and installation and had initiated projects that intersect 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 and his later works 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’ in response to local contexts and histories. Projects are often developed through a process of ‘hunting and gathering’, which the artist considers as a ‘hunting’ for found materials/resources and a ‘gathering’ of people.

Sim Chi Yin
Sim Chi Yin’s (b. 1974, Singapore) research-based practice uses artistic and archival interventions to contest and complicate historiographies and colonial narratives. Working across photography, film, installation, performance, and book making, her works combine 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 ongoing project One Day We’ll Understand. Developed as a counter archive in three parts, the project challenges official histories and allows for a generative response to gaps and absences in master narratives.

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

Suzann Victor
Suzann Victor (b. 1959, Singapore) prospects 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 emboldens 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 a Co-founder and Artistic Director of Singapore’s first corporate-sponsored feminist artist-initiative, 5th Passage (1991–1996) and is the only female artist among the four artists representing Singapore at its first pavilion at the Venice Biennale in 2001.

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, 11 Oct 2025, 1 - 2:30pm

• 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.