Director’s Message

DIRECTOR’S

MESSAGE

Dear friends,

The start of a new year is always brimming with hope and anticipation. It’s a time for us to take stock of the events of the past year and see how we can move forward. This is no different for the Gallery, and I’m excited to share what is coming up next.

Over the past few months, we’ve been hard at work on a suite of innovations that will enhance your experience with us. In the Basement Concourse, a new space known as The Spine Hall has taken over what used to be our ticketing counters. This leads to the Imagination Gallery, located in the Supreme Court Wing. Both these spaces offer inspiring, introductory art experiences for all visitors, and will be refreshed regularly to showcase new artworks and programmes. These will follow a theme, the first of which is “Social Sculpture.”

To create a more seamless and personalised experience, we’ve also introduced several selfservice options that make it easier for you to plan, customise and embark on your visit to the Gallery. These include new ways of getting your Gallery passes via interactive kiosks, a web app where you can curate your own art journey anytime and anywhere, and other exciting offerings which you’ll learn more about in the following pages.

We’ll also be kicking off 2022 with a bang with our annual Light to Night Festival, which returns for its 6th edition. A headline event of Singapore Art Week (14–23 January), this edition of the festival presents a slew of physical experiences in the Gallery and around the Civic District, paired with a broad selection of online activities. Centred around the theme “New Ways of Thinking, Seeing and Being,” Light to Night Festival 2022 illuminates the ways the world around us has evolved, and inspires audiences to seek out new perspectives and states of mind as we face the year ahead.

Before the end of the first quarter of the year, do be sure to visit our special exhibition Nam June Paik: The Future is Now before it closes on 27 March. Nam June Paik is considered a pioneer of video art and a visionary who foretold how our relationship with technology would transform, decades before technology caught up with his predictions. This exhibition is the first major retrospective of Nam June Paik in Southeast Asia and our largest exhibition of the past year, surveying over five decades of his practice, showcasing a host of truly awe-inspiring artworks and archival materials that you won’t want to miss.

We hope these new experiences offer you new and exciting ways of interacting with the Gallery, while also allowing you to connect more deeply with the art that you love. We look forward to welcoming you to the Gallery soon.

Eugene Tan

Director, National Gallery Singapore