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Before tackling the third Singapore Biennale (SB2011), I settled down on a sofa at the Dome coffee shop at SAM (Singapore Art Museum) to take stock. That day, in The Straits Times (4 April 2011), there was a photograph of evacuees from Fukushima, Japan, living out of partitioned cardboard-box spaces they had erected in a centre that otherwise offered little privacy. I suddenly realised the dissimilarity between Australia’s recent flood victims, who tended to bed down side-by-side in public halls, and Japan’s earthquake survivors who, being from a densely populated nation, have learned to nurture personal space. With this in mind—the specificity of cultures and their customs—I turned to the Short Guide to ‘The Singapore Biennale 2011: Open House’. The theme of ‘Belief’ in 2006, the previous Biennale I had seen, seemed apt at the time, especially considering Singapore’s numerous churches and those buildings with a religious mandate. But other pressing matters have emerged, and the question of how people navigate a modern urbanised world ‘crossing thresholds, transaction and exchange, daily actions and forms of movement, from one place or state to another’ also informs current artistic practice in this particular place and further afield.1
‘Open House’ is one instance of Singapore’s importance to our region in terms of contemporary art. Not only is this city-state comparatively easy to travel to, it is establishing an enviable number of museums and art venues that are well worth visiting on a regular basis. More importantly, the collecting and exhibition focus of SAM is that of Southeast Asia post-1970. SAM organised this latest edition of the Biennale and included the Museum’s colonial building (formerly St. Joseph’s Institution) and SAM’s less grand ‘outreach’