Flesh and Bones: The Art of Anatomy

Flesh and Bones: The Art of Anatomy at ArtScience Museum, Singapore. Opening on March 21, 2026, Flesh and Bones: The Art of Anatomy approaches anatomy not as a static catalogue of scientific certainties but as a shifting meditation on how humans come to imagine, know and inhabit the body.

Presented to mark ArtScience Museum’s 15th anniversary and developed in conversation with the Getty Research Institute, Los Angeles, the exhibition brings together more than 160 works including historical atlases, woodcuts, rare books, medical specimens, and contemporary installations. Together, they suggest that the impulse to visualise the body has always been entangled with the desire to reflect upon its mysteries.

Rather than affirming anatomy as a universal framework, the exhibition emphasises its multiplicity, beginning with the écorché—the flayed figure that has historically bridged artist studio and operating theatre—taking this as a starting point for curatorial explorations at the intersection of art and science. From this fulcrum, the exhibition expands beyond the customary Western arc of Renaissance empirical study to include Traditional Chinese Medicine and Ayurveda. Within these traditions, the body emerges not as a mechanical assemblage but as a site of circulation, resonance, and cosmic correspondence. Positioned alongside European anatomical drawings, these diagrams, implements and scrolls form not just a comparative display but an expanded field—a reminder that anatomy is shaped by differing modes of sensing and thinking, each with its own emotional and philosophical textures.

This broadened frame shifts the focus from distanced observation to the poetics of inquiry, where viewers encounter overlapping invitations to perceive the body anew. Anatomy becomes less a map of interior structures than an evolving record of how cultures attempt to describe the unseen, to approach interiority without dissolving its wonder.

Contemporary artworks extend this sensibility into new terrain, with Chiharu Shiota’s site‑specific installation, woven from dense accumulations of thread, reimagining the body as a tensile tapestry of connections; where threads of memory, attachment, and presence intertwine. Works by Bill Viola and Barbara Hammer introduce cinematic and phenomenological dimensions, foregrounding the body’s gradual transformations and its vulnerability to time. Artists such as Melanie Manchot, Amanda Heng, and Richard Sawdon Smith return the exhibition to lived experience, articulating the body through gestures of care, ritual practice, and vulnerability. Through their works, anatomy becomes a space of encounter: between sensation and reflection, between self, world, past and present.

A further register surfaces around a section featuring artefacts from the Lee Kong Chian School of Medicine, where anatomy manifests as both pedagogical practice and respectful ritual. Here, images of student doctors reciting an anatomy pledge and a small book of student reflections reveal a quiet and unseen practice of empathy, service and dignity.

Across Flesh and Bones, anatomy emerges not as a definitive truth but as an evolving practice of attention. To know the body, the exhibition suggests, is not to master it but to remain open to its shifting forms, its fragility, and its capacity for renewal. Anatomy becomes a way of thinking with the body rather than about it—a reflection on the delicate proximity between flesh and meaning.

Running from March 21 to August 16, 2026, Flesh and Bones: The Art of Anatomy invites visitors to consider the ways we have pictured the body over time, and how we might understand it in a future shaped by accelerating medical technologies. As gene editing, biomaterials, neural interfaces and AI‑driven diagnostics redraw the boundaries of care and capacity, what becomes of embodiment, consent, and repair? How might cultural and ethical frameworks keep pace with technological possibilities? And what new anatomies—of data, prosthesis, augmentation, and collective health—are we willing to imagine? The exhibition ask: at a time of rapid transformation what kinds of new bodies are emerging, and how will we live with and amongst them?