Han Sai Por: Sculptor turns Padang into forest at Light To Night fest

A 9m-high installation on a patch of the Padang is the closest Singaporean sculptor Han Sai Por has got to her dream project, as the 81-year-old has always wished she could make a landscape work the size of a football field.

- Clement Yong

The petite artist has spent her career punching – or rather hammering and chiselling – above her weight. The Cultural Medallion recipient's rugged hands bear the marks of her practice, which involves whipping tough materials like stone and granite into hefty works of public art that can weigh on the mind.

Despite a recent hospitalization from a lung infection, Han is still finding ways to chase scale. Her newest work, Travelling Through The Tropical Rainforest, was meant to be twice its current size if not for budget constraints. It nonetheless stands as her largest work.

"The Padang is quite a big space," she tells The Straits Times at the National Gallery Singapore. "I want people to walk underneath, around the sculpture and see the scale and volume like they are walking through a forest."

The six-piece installation is a centrepiece of the annual Light To Night festival, which runs from Jan 17 to Feb 6 as part of Singapore Art Week. In line with the 2025 theme of Do You See Me?, Han magnifies the minutiae of natural forms in a counterpoint to the geometric colonial edifice of the National Gallery Singapore.