Spectres: They Dream in Time
Tan Wei and Foo Hui En
Group Exhibition
22 – 31 May 2026, 12pm – 7pm
"Spectres: They Dream in Time" is an interdisciplinary exhibition that explores the latent emotional and ecological traces embedded within Singapore’s urban landscape. Bringing together a constellation of works by Foo Hui Wen and Tan Wei, the exhibition foregrounds photography, moving image, and installation as mediums of excavation, unearthing the intangible yet deeply felt presences that haunt the city’s spaces.
Through a series of poetic gestures, the exhibition reflects on Singapore’s enduring “garden city” narrative while inviting audiences to consider the affective and material legacies inscribed within the built environment. Spectrality in the exhibition gestures toward what lingers at the threshold of perception: emotional atmospheres, ecological residues, and fragments of memory that persist despite the city’s continual transformation. Engaging with both affect (emotional resonance) and effect (material impact), the exhibition asks what remains buried beneath carefully manicured greenness. What memories resist erasure? What unseen forces shape the ways we inhabit and remember a city?
About the Artist(s)
Tan Wei (b. 1997, Singapore) is a curator and visual artist whose practice centres on lens-based media and the multifaceted nature of image-making. Working spatially across diverse formats, her practice and research are a continuous inquiry into the constructs of being, translated through the reconstruction of everyday observations. By shaping these observations into a "theatre of the mind," she invites audiences to contemplate the synchronicities—or lack thereof—within the mundane. Through this facilitation, she aims to establish resonant entry points for the public, encouraging a collective contemplation that utilises the shared language of the image to collapse the barriers between strangers.
Foo Hui Wen (b.1997, Singapore) main interest lies in how nature is processed and translated. Her artistic practice delves into the notion of naturalisation and examines how we understand and recognise our surroundings by attributing qualities to the things around us. Her work often seeks visual/conceptual coincidences in nature to investigate how humanistic intentions tend to mutate through zoological instances which can often be found in our use of language, metaphors or even, interactions with our environment. Through this lens, she reflects on the tension between different cognitive frameworks, considering how language, as a dominant system, shapes perception and informs the meanings we construct around us.