Curated by Lexing Zhang
SG60:
TO BUILD A SWING
15 August- 30 September 2025
LOY Contemporary Art Gallery presents a collective exhibit entitled “SG60: To Build a Swing” in Singapore.
Featuring Akai Chew, Joanna Maneckji and Wan Kyn Chan.
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As Singapore’s 60th anniversary approaches, the three artists of SG60: To Build a Swing are deep in
the process of shaping their contributions. These are works not only bold in concept and material,
but deeply personal. Drawing from memories, architectural histories, walking paths and inner
landscapes, each artist offers a unique vision of what it means to belong, to remember and dream
forward. Their works are meditations on hope, concern, ambition and care, for a place they call home.
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Together, the artworks are united by their focus on Singapore’s evolving physical, emotional and
cultural topography. Whether looking back at what’s lost, mapping the present in motion, or
imagining the sacred in everyday life, the artists offer their own tools: data, texture, narrative,
vision. Just as Hafez’s poem urges us to gather “golden saws, silver hammers… strong silk rope,”
these artists contribute their own materials and invitations to help us build—and rebuild—the
swing. The future is not pre-written. It is a structure we’re all part of shaping.
Akai Chew: The Future Lies in Ruins
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Akai Chew’s work explores Singapore’s architectural memory and urban identity. With a background in urban planning, Chew considers how rapid redevelopment risks erasing not just buildings, but the visions they once embodied. Drawing on thinkers like Jacques Derrida and Fredric Jameson, his work
reflects on how cities are shaped by both past ambitions and future anxieties.
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For SG60, Chew presents Dreams of Postmodern Ruins (2019), a photographic series; Reclamation and Redemption (2022), a video-based work; and sculptural pieces including All Our Futures. These works are rooted in his reflections on the Golden Mile Complex, built in 1974 as a bold architectural vision. Through image, sound and material, Chew asks: what are we preserving, what are we losing—and what ghosts are we creating for the future?
Joanna Maneckji: Divine Selves
Joanna Maneckji’s specially prepared new series is a celebration of resilience and creative renewal. Rooted in her 25-year journey in Singapore, Joanna’s collage work, rich with found materials
and symbolic imagery, continues to explore the experience of female forms, and to encourage all of us to dream big, never shy away from challenges and changes. The new works brought back the newsprint faces first seen in her award-winning piece That Blessed Mood (2024). For Maneckji, Singapore has offered sanctuary in nature, space for growth and the strength to heal.
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Her three new works—Rhea’s Dream, Nature Spoke Truth and Divine Self—draw on spiritual iconography, particularly the halo, which first appeared in the 300s BC in Zoroastrian depictions of Mithra, god of light. In these pieces, haloes, florals and textured fabrics elevate her subjects into saintly forms. Through this visual language, Maneckji invites viewers to find the sacred in the everyday.
Wan Kyn Chan: Walking Memory, Shifting Light
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Walkways, a new installation by Wan Kyn Chan, transforms GPS data from personal walking routes into a glowing sculptural form. Made from layered acrylic panels with a soft, frosted finish, and illuminated by internal projection mapping that visually traces each route, the work captures movement, memory and light in a delicate interplay between structure and emotion.
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As part of SG60, this immersive piece invites viewers to experience Singapore’s spaces through a different lens—where architecture meets memory and past paths illuminate future journeys. It materialises personal and collective experiences into a tangible form, acting as a spatial archive of movement. Chan’s work reminds us that the story of a city is carried not only in its skyline, but in the quiet traces of those who walk it.
