Opening of Amanda Heng Liang Ngim: A Pause

Commissioned by the National Arts Council, Singapore, supported by the Ministry of Culture, Community and Youth, and organised by the Singapore Art Museum, A Pause; a site-specific installation by Singaporean artist Amanda Heng Liang Ngim, curated by Selene Yap, opens at the Singapore Pavilion at the 61st Venice Biennale.

"A Pause begins with our need to rest. The pavilion invites each visitor to find their own way of slowing down. There is no fixed path; each person moves through it differently. In that time, I hope there is a chance to notice how we carry ourselves, and what it means to pause." —Amanda Heng Liang Ngim.

Amanda Heng Liang Ngim transforms the Singapore Pavilion into a space for rest and observation. A Pause brings together photographs made over three decades ago, a new video work filmed across Venice and Singapore, and an architectural intervention in larch wood, the same timber historically used for the Arsenale’s floorboards and Venice’s foundations, allowing the intervention to assimilate into the architecture.

Stepped platforms ranging in width have been angled to follow the lean of the historical building’s walls. The steps rise through the space and end at the windowsills, transforming windows into doorways. The dimensions invite varied postures of rest. Visitors can lean, sit, or lie, deciding where to pause and how long to stay. These minor decisions, seemingly ordinary, become the substance of the work. In this way, Heng shifts the work to the act of inhabiting it, where meaning is produced through presence, not instruction.

A Pause (2025-26), a new dual-channel video, follows people in moments of everyday activity: watering plants, preparing breakfast, walking, looking up at the sky. Filmed in both Venice and Singapore, the video shows Heng in Singapore and Venetian residents in their homes and neighbourhoods. Shot in real time with long, static takes and available light, the camera holds and follows participants' pace, allowing time to unfold. Rather than presenting recognisable cityscapes, the work attends to quiet corners and subtle gestures, finding commonality across both cities through the rhythms of ordinary existence. Daily tasks themselves become forms of pause and renewal, acts through which people draw life and negotiate stillness within dense urban environments.

Leaning against the pavilion walls are nine photographic prints from Parts of My Body (1990, reprinted 2026). The images isolate fragments of Heng’s body: an elbow, the curve of a shoulder, the delicate creases of a hand, the hollow of a clavicle. Direct and unadorned, these close-ups transform the body into landscape. First made in 1990 when the artist was in her thirties, the photographs have been reprinted at a larger scale for this presentation. Across three decades, the work registers how bodies carry time and change through their surfaces.

For four decades, Heng has worked with the body through everyday gestures and unscripted encounter. In early performances like Let's Chat (1996–ongoing) where she invited people to sit at coffee shop tables, share tea, and remove tails from bean sprouts, and Walk with Amanda (2000) where she laid tablecloths on hawker food center tables—she established a method that blurred art and everyday life, examining how public and domestic spaces are shaped, gendered, and negotiated. The Venice presentation continues this inquiry, but where early works placed the body among audiences, contingent on live encounter, the pavilion turns attention inward.

Heng came to art in her early thirties, after years as a tax officer. She enrolled in art school in the late 1980s with questions already forming about gender, culture, language, and Singapore's social conditions. A co-founder of The Artists Village (1988–2015), one of Singapore's earliest artist-run collectives, she has been foundational in shaping Singapore's contemporary art landscape and performance art discourse in Southeast Asia. She received the Cultural Medallion (2010), Singapore's highest arts honour, the Benesse Prize (2020), and was inducted into the Singapore Women's Hall of Fame (2023).

A monograph, Amanda Heng: On and On, accompanies the exhibition. Conceived and produced by Sydney-based publisher Stolon Press and pavilion curator Selene Yap, and co-published with the Singapore Art Museum, the book reveals the full range of Amanda Heng’s visual experiments over nearly forty years, from early drawings and performance documentation to photographic studies and video work. Essays by architectural theorist Lilian Chee, writer and critic Lee Weng Choy, curator Anca Rujoiu, anthropologist Souchou Yao, and Yap illuminate different aspects of Heng’s practice.

A Pause marks Singapore’s 12th participation at the International Art Exhibition of La Biennale di Venezia. The exhibition is on display from 9 May to 22 November 2026 in Venice. It will move to Singapore in January 2027 for a second iteration at SAM at Tanjong Pagar Distripark.

Media Kit

Media queries
International: Mae Cuthbertson (Flint Culture)
Singapore and Southeast Asia: Farah Aqilah (Tate Anzur) and Teo Zhi Xin (SAM)