The Living Room

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.

Image credits: Brian Fuata, image courtesy of SeMA; Chuyia Chia, Knitting the Future (2016), and Ezzam Rahman, Allow Me to Introduce Myself (2015), images courtesy of SAM; Kim Garam, the AGENDA hair salon (Aug 2015, Düsseldorf), Tehching Hsieh, One Year Performance 1978–1979 (1978–1979), and Jeremy Hiah, Metamorphosis (2022), images courtesy of the artist; Wong Hoy Cheong, Lalang – Archives (1994), image courtesy of NHB.

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, Malaysia) 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.

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 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.