Inscribing the Child in the National Gallery Singapore
Pedagogy and Futurity at Gallery Children’s Biennale 2025
My Own Words is a monthly series which features personal essays by practitioners in the Southeast Asian art community. They deliberate on their locality's present circumstances, articulating observations and challenges in their respective roles.
Fantasy by CO2 Karbondioksida. Image courtesy of the artist and National Gallery Singapore.
One must approach the 2025 iteration of the Gallery Children’s Biennale not merely as an exhibition, but as a significant curatorial proposition that consolidates the National Gallery Singapore’s evolving institutional identity. Staged under the thematic rubric “Tomorrow We’ll Be…,” the event represents a deliberate mobilisation of the museum’s apparatus towards pronounced pedagogical and civic ends. The theme itself, with its suggestive ellipsis, signals an open-ended yet directed inquiry into futurity–a future that is to be authored, imagined, and constructed by its designated subject: the child. In this framing, the Gallery Children’s Biennale emerges as a critical site for examining how a national institution mediates the intricate relationship between modern and contemporary art, pedagogy, and the scripting of a future citizenry. It poses fundamental questions about the evolving function of the art museum in the 21st century, particularly within a nation-state where cultural infrastructure is often intrinsically linked to national development.
The impetus for such an undertaking is located within the Gallery’s explicit and coherent strategy of audience development and civic engagement. To view the Gallery Children’s Biennale as a standalone event is to miss its deep integration into this overarching institutional logic. For decades, the archetypal museum functioned as a temple of muses, a repository of cultural artifacts demanding quiet reverence from a public expected to arrive with pre-existing cultural capital. The threshold of access was high, often positioning the institution as a remote arbiter of taste. The Gallery Children’s Biennale is the apotheosis of a trajectory that aims to decisively dismantle this model. It seeks to reconfigure the museum’s very threshold for its youngest demographic, transforming the institution from a site of perceived passive spectatorship into a dynamic zone of active, formative engagement.
This ambition crystallises into a central, transformative thesis: the child is no longer merely a visitor but is positioned as a co-creator, a central protagonist in the museum’s narrative. This ontological shift from passive observer to active agent is the Biennale's most compelling proposition, one that redefines the very nature of the artwork and the exhibition experience. The artwork, in this context, ceases to be a static noun - a finished object for contemplation - and becomes an activated verb, an unfolding process contingent on the child's presence and participation. This shift is not incidental; it is systematically demonstrated through the operational logic of its key artworks, each functioning as an apparatus for interaction and co-creation.
“This ambition crystallises into a central, transformative thesis: the child is no longer merely a visitor but is positioned as a co-creator, a central protagonist in the museum’s narrative.”
Colour Play by Fern Wong. Image courtesy of the artist and National Gallery Singapore.
This repositioning is made immediately explicit in the praxis of the Singaporean artists commissioned for the Biennale. Consider Fern Wong’s Colourful Play. The installation presents the visitor with a large-scale, intricate papercut framework, visually rich in its potential but intentionally unresolved. Wong provides the aesthetic syntax - the lines, shapes, and patterns - but it is the child who authors the specific chromatic sentences by physically placing patterned magnets onto the surface. In this simple yet profound haptic act, the child transitions from viewer to collaborator, completing the work's aesthetic circuit. The narrative here is one of co-authorship, where the artist's design and the child's choice become indistinguishable in the final, ever-changing composition. The “Joy” that the work aims to foster is not derived from passively observing a joyful object, but from the joyful act of making itself, a foundational lesson in creative agency.
I WE THEM by Vicente Delgado. Image courtesy of the artist and National Gallery Singapore.
This logic is compounded in the work of Spanish-born, Singapore-based artist Vicente Delgado, whose installation I WE THEM functions as a veritable theatre of sociality. The space is populated by anthropomorphised chairs as sculptural agents that immediately reconfigure audiences' relationship to the utilitarian object. They are not inert items for seating; they are characters awaiting direction. By engaging these forms, the child becomes a director, choreographing social scenarios and giving physical form to abstract concepts of selfhood, partnership, and community. The artwork’s inherent narrative is further scaffolded by the child, as the protagonist, layers it through their play. Furthermore, a tactile “flower bed” of soft sculptures provides a terrain for pure sensory inquiry, grounding the conceptual encounter in the immediacy of material and texture. Here, the values of “Love” and “Joy” are co-created - love through the exploration of relationships, and joy through the pleasure of social play and sensorial freedom.
Dance Dance Chromatics by Wyn-Lyn Tan. Image courtesy of the artist and National Gallery Singapore.
Similarly, Wyn-Lyn Tan’s Dance Dance Chromatics functions as a sophisticated phenomenological apparatus that remains entirely inert without its protagonist. The child’s body becomes the very medium of creation. An AI-generated video wall, algorithmically linked to the artist’s own painterly style, forms a dormant technological field that awakens only when activated by the child’s kinesthetic energy. Every leap, turn, and gesture is translated in real-time into bursts of colour and fluid forms on the screen. The resulting “digital painting” is a direct, ephemeral trace of the child's presence, a narrative authored by the rhythm of their dance. In this feedback loop of action and reaction, the child is posited as the sole generator of the aesthetic event, experiencing a powerful and immediate manifestation of their impact on their environment.
Imaginary Peach Garden by Yeseung Lee. Image courtesy of the artist and National Gallery Singapore.
This principle of co-creation extends seamlessly to the international artists, who employ different medium to achieve the same end of centring the child as a protagonist. In South Korea’s Yeseung Lee’s Imaginary Peach Garden, the child is explicitly cast as a mythmaker. Drawing on folkloric traditions from both Korea and Southeast Asia, the installation provides a set of symbolic components and a digital canvas. It does not simply retell old myths; it empowers the child to construct new narratives and creatures, becoming the protagonist in a story of their own making. The work functions as a generative engine to produce new cultural forms, positioning the child not as a recipient of tradition but as an active agent in its contemporary re-imagining. This aligns with the Biennale's value of “Dream,” fostering the capacity to envision worlds that do not yet exist.
Lessons In Being Kind by Souliya Phoumivong. Image courtesy of the artist and National Gallery Singapore.
Even in works with a stronger didactic or therapeutic function, the child's role as protagonist remains essential for the artwork’s conceptual and affective completion. The narrative arc of Laos’ Souliya Phoumivong’s Lessons In Being Kind begins within the gallery walls but is designed to culminate far beyond them. The short claymation film presents an ethical lesson, but its purpose is only fulfilled when its young viewer internalises this imperative. The work positions the child as the protagonist who must carry the narrative forward, enacting the lessons of “Kindness” in their own life. The artwork’s success, therefore, is measured by its real-world impact, an impact entirely dependent on the agency of its primary audience.
Kindness Garden by Hiromi Tango. Image courtesy of the artist and National Gallery Singapore.
Likewise, Hiromi Tango's Kindness Garden requires the child's sensory engagement to fulfil its function as a therapeutic environment. The oversized, tactile flowers and calm, lavender-scented domes are not merely to be looked at; they are spaces to be inhabited and experienced. The child's interaction with the textures, sounds, and scents animates the space, making them the central figure in a communal narrative of empathy and well-being. The inclusion of Braille and features catering to neurodiversity further underscores this commitment, ensuring that every child can be a protagonist in their own way. The “Love” and “Kindness” the work espouses are not abstract concepts but embodied experiences, generated through the child's own exploration.
Finally, the work of the Malaysian artist collective CO2 Karbondioksida, Fantasy, situates the child as the main character in a critical dialogue about futurity. By constructing a dreamscape from reclaimed clothing and discarded plastic toys, the collective presents a startling vision of a world built from the detritus of consumer culture. The children are then invited to become co-creators, using these same repurposed materials to build their own structures. They are not merely playing; they are actively participating in a speculative design process. They are tasked with the "Dream" of imagining a sustainable future, becoming co-authors of a narrative that grapples directly with the ecological challenges they will inherit.
Across these diverse installations, the unifying thread is the strategic empowerment of the child, systematically dismantling the traditional hierarchy of artist, object, and viewer. The artworks are intentionally porous, requiring the visitor’s presence, choice, and action to become fully realised. This collaborative praxis, where an artist’s autonomy is channelled to fulfil the Biennale’s educational ambit, marks a significant shift in the model of artistic commission. It is not a carte-blanche creation but a problem-based intervention, where the "problem" is how to best engage and empower a young audience.
In doing so, the museum itself is transformed from a static repository of culture into a dynamic platform for experience, a narrative stage where every child is invited to be the lead. This institutional strategy does not exist in a vacuum. It must be situated within a wider discursive field concerning the evolving function of the museum in the 21st century. It represents a deliberate pivot from the model of the biennale as a survey of contemporary, often critically astringent, artistic practice aimed at a specialised art world, such as those in Venice or Kassel. This is a biennale as a platform for social and developmental investment, operating in concert with the Gallery’s other major public-facing initiatives, like Light to Night Singapore, to constitute a comprehensive strategy for interpolating diverse publics into the national cultural discourse.
“This institutional strategy does not exist in a vacuum. It must be situated within a wider discursive field concerning the evolving function of the museum in the 21st century.”
What, then, is the ultimate problematic that “Tomorrow We’ll Be…” presents? It proposes a vision of the future rooted in a profoundly optimistic, even utopian, gesture of agency, creativity, and positive self-actualisation. However, this celebratory reading must be tempered by a critical inquiry into the nature of the ‘becoming’ that is being fostered. The Biennale furnishes the tools and the space for this imaginative projection, effectively sanctioning the child’s capacity to envision and shape what is to come. But is there a risk that this highly curated, positive environment, with its focus on “good” values, might produce a sanitized version of creativity? Does it steer the child towards institutionally approved forms of citizenship - creative, empathetic, sustainable - while sidestepping the more complex, disruptive, or critical modes of inquiry that art is also uniquely positioned to provoke?
I would argue that this question does not diminish the project's significance. In its 2025 edition, the Gallery Children’s Biennale solidifies its position as a major phenomenon in the Singaporean cultural landscape. It is not simply an exhibition for children. It is a complex, institutionally driven project that recasts the museum as a primary agent in the socialisation and education of its future public. Through a carefully calibrated fusion of art and play, it inscribes the child as a vital subject within the national narrative, presenting a compelling field of study for anyone concerned with the evolving, and increasingly crucial, relationship between the art institution and the society it is mandated to serve.
Gallery Children’s Biennale 2025: Tomorrow We’ll Be runs from 31 May 2025 to 29 March 2026. More information here.
