The Private Museum (TPM) Singapore is pleased to present Search and Discover: The Joy of Collecting – Selections from the Yeap Lam Yang Collection. TPM revisits its foundation of bridging the private and the public in this year’s final and largest exhibition that forms part of the museum’s 10th anniversary programming, featuring an array of private collections in Singapore.
Co-curated by Aaron Teo and Beverly Yong, the exhibition features 65 carefully selected works by 35 artists from the Asia-Pacific region from the Yeap Lam Yang collection, spanning over three decades. While the works are categorically small—the exhibition’s curatorial theme intentionally limits the size of the works to 60 cm by 60 cm—there is nary a “smallness” in their significance. Each work is precious and treasured, each a symbolic step into the collector’s foray into the art world as a patron and supporter of the arts.
Search and Discover: The Joy of Collecting unravels the process of exhibition-making and reveals the joy of collecting; discovering and revisiting artists, a rekindling of old relationships, and a forging of new ones. Yeap Lam Yang’s apt reminder that “there is good art everywhere waiting to be uncovered” is an invitation to all viewers to chart their individual, personal journeys in search and discovery of art and artists, new and familiar.
“Building, structure, edifice. Home, office, organisation. Community, city, country. Shelter, safety, comfort. Identity, memory, history. 99-year lease, freehold, 3+3+3, Master Plan.”
The Private Museum Singapore (TPM) is pleased to present 3+3+3: On Condition—a group exhibition curated by Andrea Fam. This marks the third edition of TPM’s Guest Curator Platform—collaborating with guest curators to support and experiment with independent curatorial practice through the presentation of different perspectives of our world. This interdisciplinary exhibition will feature both new and ongoing works by five artists and architects including artist duo Finbarr Fallon & Claire Goh, Geraldine Kang, Michael Lee, Mervin Loh and Isabella Teng Yen Lin.
Our governing bodies, architects, invisible labour, civilians, new and temporary residents have seamlessly infused their own histories and intimate memories into the foundational and poignant blueprints of our small island nation. Borrowing its namesake from the commercial lease agreement under the Singapore Land Authority (SLA), 3+3+3 explores these unseen psycho-spatial associations and the complexities of our urban planning while musing on the ephemeral nature of space and place-making in our land-scarce city.
Through preparatory sketches, utopian models, performative engagements and satirical ‘white papers’, this exhibition is an open-ended invitation to reflect on our ever-evolving relationships with our urban environment. Engaging our different senses, these works contemplate notions of nostalgia and transience while considering the overlooked inhabitants of Singapore.
Having served as an independent arts platform for the past 11 years, 3+3+3 marks TPM’s last exhibition in our home at 51 Waterloo Street. Such is the life of built spaces in our metropolis—though they bestow us with character, identity and heritage, we confer them with impermanence and dispensability, provocating the question, “If buildings retain the lived histories imbued into them, shouldn’t we consider their embodied human spirit?”