Art Labor: Angin Cloud / Vong Phaophanit and Claire Oboussier: Eidolon

National Gallery Singapore is proud to present two new OUTBOUND commissions for 2025. Inaugurated in 2018, OUTBOUND is an initiative that reimagines key entrances and circulation spaces at the museum through a series of unique artwork commissions, developed in collaboration with leading artists from around the world, to provoke critical reflection, curiosity, and playfulness. This year, the museum has commissioned ambitious and site-specific art works by the Vietnam-based art collective Art Labor and London-based artist duo Vong Phaophanit and Claire Oboussier.

Presented from January to November 2025, Angin Cloud is a multi-floor installation by Art Labor. It includes Jrai wood sculptures at street level, suspended pillars that reference farming structures used in peppercorn plantations and hammocks to recline in the museum’s basement.  The installation was developed with vn-a (visual network art and architecture) an architecture studio working at the cross sections of architecture, art and urban planning based in Da Lat, Vietnam and Berlin, Germany and with Jrai artists, Puih Glơh, Romah Aleo, Rahlan Loh, Rcham Jeh, Siu Kin, Puih Han, Siu Lon and Siu Huel. Angin Cloud is part of Art Labor’s almost decade-long collaboration with the Jrai community. It is the third instalment of a research-led project, after Jrai Dew and JUA. 

The Central Highlands have been shaped by environmental extraction tied to colonisation, war and economic development. Since the 1980s, the development of industrial farming of commodity crops, like pepper, has reshaped the highlands’ landscape. The hanging installation of pillars, designed with vn-a, resembles a cloud descending on the museum, raining a simulacra of brutalist cement pillars and farming instruments. The hanging installation is a sculptural intervention that visually transplants a hillside to the space between the two colonial buildings that constitute National Gallery Singapore: the former City Hall (opened in 1929) and Supreme Court (opened in 1939). “Angin,” a Jrai concept, refers to the dynamic potential for change found in the natural elements of water and air. Taking inspiration from Jrai cosmology and recalling the aesthetics of minimalism and land art, Angin Cloud presented in former seats of colonial and national power, advances a radical museological intervention that advocates for a pluralistic rendering of art history.   

Launched in April 2025, within the City Hall Courtyard, artists Vong Phaophanit and Claire Oboussier have conceived an image that evokes a simultaneous interplay between the abstract and the concrete. Set against the skylight, Eidolon is composed of two parallel rows of beaded link-chains connecting opposite corners. The metallic chains belie their industrial character to form a delicate asymmetrical screen that divides the space. Intended as an intervention extending from the courtyard’s interior, the work resists easy definition; Eidolon is neither a hanging mobile nor a suspended sculpture. The artists draw on the cultural ubiquity of beads, which have been worn for adornment, used in prayer, or exchanged in trade. In Eidolon, these beads suggest forms of connection and meaning intended beyond language or specific cultures.  

Its title, derived from the Greek word for “phantom,” gestures to the intangible, while its root eidos, “that which is seen”, suggests presence. The work can be seen as a kind of veil or mirage, something that sits between what is suggested and what is seen. As the vertical lines overlap visually, they produce a moiré effect resulting in a dynamic visual effect that keeps shifting between transparency and opacity, lightness and density. Eidolon solicits constant movement from the viewer to explore its illusive materiality and presence. Through the work, the symmetries of the building’s neoclassical lines are still visible, but gently diffused. As a counterpoise to the cultivated histories of the space—a museum, a municipal building, and a private residence across different periods—Eidolon brings attention to what is visible, but also what lies beneath, inviting the viewer to experience the space anew. 

The two commissions will be supplemented with public programmes till March 2026. More information can be found on the museum’s website.

Art Labor
Founded in 2012 by Thảo Nguyên Phan, Trương Công Tùng, and Arlette Quỳnh-Anh Trần, Art Labor is a collective based in Ho Chi Minh City. Working across the visual arts as well as social and life sciences, the collective develops iterative artworks, exhibitions and events through long term and sustained collaborations with various communities, such as the Jrai people. Their recent solo exhibition, Cloud Chamber was presented at Para Site, Hong Kong in 2024.

They have been exhibited widely in Vietnam and international, notably in Paradise Kortrijk, Triennial for contemporary art, Belgium (2021); Carnegie International 57th (2018), Bangkok Art Biennale (2018), A beast, a god, and a line at Dhaka Art Summit, Para Site and Modern Art in Warsaw (2018); Cosmopolis #1: Collective Intelligence at Centre Pompidou, Paris; Asian Art Biennial, Taiwan; Salt of the Jungle at KF Gallery, Korea, (2017); Jrai Dew Sculpture Garden in Central Highlands of Vietnam (2016-17); The Adventure of Color Wheel at Pediatrics Department, Eye Hospital HCMC (2015); Unconditional Belief at Sàn Art, Ho Chi Minh City (2014). 

Vong Phaophanit and Claire Oboussier
Born in Savannakhet, Laos in 1961, Vong Phaophanit was educated in Paris where as a teenager, following the political events in Laos, he became a refugee under the Geneva Convention. He went on to study at the Ecole des Beaux Arts, Aix en Provence, France where he met and married Claire Oboussier while they were both students. Born in London in 1963, Claire Oboussier studied French in the School of African and Asian Studies at the University of Sussex, graduating in 1986. In 1991 Oboussier was awarded the Dyment and Thomas Scholarship for Doctoral Research in the Arts and Humanities at the University of Bristol where she taught French Feminist Literature and Theory and set up and ran the Interdisciplinary Critical Theory seminar for faculty.

From the late 1990s the duo began the process of formally unifying their practices and went on to create their current shared studio. Today, Phaophanit and Oboussier work as a duo, with an integrated studio practice. Their work, encompassing large-scale installations and sculptural works, films, books and socially engaged public commissions, explores issues on language, dislocation, memory, and deterritorialization and forms of meaning-making that exceed national, cultural and social borders.