Singaporean artist Robert Zhao Renhui and curator Haeju Kim were selected to represent Singapore at the 60th Venice International Art Exhibition in 2024.
The appointment followed a commissioning process involving representatives from the arts community and studio visits.
Secondary forests as sites of regeneration
Zhao works across installation, photography, video and sculpture.
For approximately eight years, he had examined Singapore’s secondary forests and the ways nature and culture overlap within landscapes shaped by human intervention.
Projects including The Forest Institute, Untimely Meditations and Albizia considered non-human life, historical objects and the potential of disturbed environments to regenerate.
The planned Venice presentation was described as an immersive interdisciplinary installation extending this ecological research.
A curator working across body, time and ecology
Haeju Kim, a senior curator at Singapore Art Museum, had developed exhibitions and performance programmes concerned with the body, time, memory, locality and coexistence.
Her experience included serving as artistic director of the 2022 Busan Biennale and curating projects across South Korea and Europe.
The collaboration joined Zhao’s long-term field research with Kim’s interest in how local histories connect with planetary questions.
The Singapore Pavilion was to appear in the Arsenale under the wider Biennale theme Foreigners Everywhere, curated by Adriano Pedrosa.
The appointment marked Singapore’s 11th presentation at the Biennale. Its strongest promise lay in moving beyond a national showcase toward an ecological installation about shared environments, multiple species and the forms of life that develop outside planned urban order.