SAM Contemporaries returns with 6 installations

Second edition of art incubator programme presents emerging artists' works under the title How To Dream Worlds

- Clement Yong

A recreation of a sandy excavation site with pop culture relics like Indiana Jones' Holy Grail. An eerie home occupied by tubular latex and a shower cubicle periodically spraying red mist. And 40kg of dried lalang corralled into metal frames.

Singapore Art Museum's (SAM) second edition of its biennial platform, SAM Contemporaries, returns on Aug 1 with six large-scale installations by emerging artists being shown under the title How To Dream Worlds, in Tanjong Pagar Distripark.

SAM Contemporaries is an incubator programme that attaches two to three curators to each artist for more than a year to conceptualise, discuss and make work—a rare, resource-intensive process that had its inaugural presentation in 2023.

This is an institutional boost that has promoted Singapore artists such as Anthony Chin, Priyageetha Dia and Khairulddin Wahab—who have since secured other gallery or commercial exhibition platforms—while exposing SAM curators to how artists think and work.

The six artists selected for this iteration are Chu Hao Pei, Lee Pheng Guan, Masuri Mazlan, Syahrul Anuar, NEO_ARTEFACTS—an initiative by Fazleen Karlan—and Chok Si Xuan.

Lead curator Joella Kiu says of the selection process: "Emerging here doesn't necessarily mean youth. It could be emerging in the sense that their research ideas haven't come to their final point or final conclusion yet."