Art Encounters is a mobile artist's studio, gallery and public engagement space housed in repurposed shipping containers, presented by Art Outreach Singapore in partnership with the Singapore Tourism Board. Conceived to bring visual art programming beyond Singapore's established art precincts and into the rhythms of daily life, the programme commissions artists to create site-specific works in full public view, offering rare insight into the creative process often concealed in traditional exhibitions.

The inaugural edition, launched during Singapore Art Week 2020 on Orchard Road, featured renowned French contemporary artist Lionel Sabatté. Intrigued by humanity's relationship with the living world and the transformation of matter through time, Sabatté collects materials discarded by society (dust, ashes, charcoal, dead skin, tree stumps) and combines them to create delicate and poetic beings. His most iconic works include a pack of wolves made of dust for the Natural History Museum in Paris and large goats made entirely of Pu'er tea in Beijing.

For Art Encounters, Sabatté continued a project begun inside the UNESCO-protected cave of Bédeilhac in France, where he sculpted human figures and a goat in concrete in response to Palaeolithic paintings made over 20,000 years ago. Bringing this work to Singapore, a city he describes as representing the future, Sabatté crafted a family of three prehistoric concrete goats, a material he sees as perpetually "under construction", connecting the sculptures to both humankind's storied past and its ever-progressing present.

As organiser and presenting institution, Art Outreach initiated and produced Art Encounters as a year-round platform for integrating contemporary art into public life across Singapore — reflecting the organisation's commitment to expanding access to the arts beyond traditional gallery contexts and creating unexpected encounters between artists and diverse audiences.