“You know, this is my grandfather being buried...
It’s not the laying of bricks for your HDB flats...
Let me remind you, sir, there are two hundred people standing and waiting there at the cemetery with my grandfather lying there in his big coffin without a hole to get into”
— excerpts from “The Coffin is Too Big for the Hole” (1984) by Kuo Pao Kun
In Kuo Pao Kun’s seminal monologue, the protagonist wants to bury their grandfather, but can’t. The problem is with the late patriarch’s outsized coffin, leading Kuo’s character to draw a parallel between the standard-sized HDB flat and the standard-sized burial plot. The protagonist bemoans the monotony of a life lived through a series of rectangular confines, but a compliant, conformist life has been inevitable for some time now. To live in Singapore is to swap one rectangular box for another, hole to hole, cradle to grave. Over the past few months, I made my way through a litany of such block-like rooms at a major event on the local arts calendar: the Singapore Biennale 2025.
Decommissioned classrooms, declining shophouses, ageing malls, former colonial housing, and repurposed defence headquarters—the biennale, subtitled “pure intention”, unfolds over five months and five key neighbourhoods, each offering us varying configurations of the standardised box. We are invited to consider the aspirations that guided the city’s initial development and transformation, acquainting ourselves with the past as a way to re-encounter and appraise the present. The biennale gathers over 100 existing and newly commissioned artworks from over 80 artists and collaborators across the world. From domestic minutiae to site-specific spectacles, Singapore Art Museum (SAM) curators Duncan Bass, Hsu Fang-Tze, Ong Puay Khim, and Selene Yap have recontextualised these works in the urban sprawl of the boxy units that shape our everyday life.
As I walked between these blocks and boxes, it felt like I was doing a condensed walkthrough of my life in Singapore. These spaces were a representation of my years in school, the flat I’ve always lived in, the vicinity of my first full-time job, the mall I found my favourite jacket in. It was a jarring experience, both familiar and strange, making my way through the building blocks of an exhibition that could easily take the place of any box unit in the country. To accustom and acquaint myself with the artworks in these uncanny sites, I spent time lingering in, sometimes revisiting, these exhibits over the course of five months in order to make sense of art and its place in a city that prides itself on being ruthlessly, at times performatively, practical.
