leaking fishtank is a group exhibition that reflects on the evolving relationships a group of young artists have cultivated with life under water. Through speculative narratives, performative gestures, and technologically-augmented artworks, the show explores agency, transformation, and the shifting role of the human artist in an increasingly post-human world. The exhibition proposes an alternative way of thinking—one that reaches beyond utilitarian rhetorics of animal conservation and instead nurtures kinship with non-human life.

Presenting a diverse array of new and old works, leaking fishtank transforms the gallery into a site of convergence where independent lines of creative research across LASALLE and NAFA graduates come together. The exhibition not only reveals each artist’s distinctive approach to aquatic life, but also sparks a conversation about potential futures, new collaborations, and shared ecologies of thought.

This exhibition traces the interlocking ideas of ecological imbalance, speculative care, and embodied ritual through contemporary artistic practices grounded in Southeast Asia. Drawing from marine life, religious mythology, queer ecology, and personal labour, the works of Siew Guang Hong (Guang), 2point013, Luna Chang and Nathan Tan explore what it means to hold, observe, consume, and control animals, particularly fish, across layered temporal, cultural, and emotional terrains.

Guang’s 72-hour durational performance anchors the exhibition in lived, bodily intensity. “I eat more than I drink, mostly on Mentos pastilles, otherwise I’ll have to keep going toilet if I keep drinking water,” he laughs, pointing to the careful bodily calculations behind such prolonged performance. The action of cutting paper fish nonstop for 72 hours becomes a quiet, aching articulation of the Buddhist concept of life release. “When people do charity for other groups, sometimes what really happens is that the intentions do not match the consequence.”

Through this extended gesture, Guang considers the dissonance between public virtue and ecological impact. “So when I cut, it is about the articulation of the cut, the emptiness of the paper. There’s a fetish of labour, where I focus only on the good, while the fish slip off the table and out of my sight.” For a durational performance, the act itself is the art, and any documentation merely archive, alongside the paper negatives of the fish preserved, representing a ‘certificate’ of having released so many fish. The paper fish themselves are discarded, echoing the hollowness of good intentions in ritualistic animal release practices. “It’s not waste if it was used for artwork,” he says.

Guang’s performance is less about theatrical spectacle than about witnessing. “The act of viewing, seeing, and the reaction to the mess on the floor — whereas all I see is the good deeds I do.” Audience responses shift throughout the 72 hour period. “People see me from outside and it’s like, this guy crazy lah, cutting fish at 2, 3 a.m.” The accumulation of fatigue, slips in precision, and trance-like repetition reveal the emotional and physical toll of the work:

Nathan Tan’s silkscreen works transform scientific research into a tactile meditation on the ethics of pet fishkeeping. A former aquarist himself, Nathan’s work is rooted in a critical awareness of how ornamental fish are bought for aesthetics or convenience. As Guang explains: “People put fish in a tank and they don’t realise that a lot of fishes predate on each other because they’re so territorial.”

Each composition is derived from fish tank silhouettes, with CMYK printing dots visible upon close inspection, evoking the artificiality and constructed perfection of aquarium life. The distorted, mirrored images reference not only tank reflections but also the commercial displays in fish shops. “From far, you think that it’s symmetrical, but when you go closer, you realise the symmetry is not perfect. He wanted to think about the breaking apart of the perfectness,” Guang adds.

This illusion of symmetry and perfection is disrupted by the intentional asymmetry and laser-cut holes. “The sense of claustrophobia is contained in odd shapes. The creatures are stunted, distorted.” Nathan’s work probes the boundaries of domesticity, control, and ecological naivety in our relationship with the non-native species that populate pet tanks.

Koh Kai Ting, part of the 2.013 collective, weaves mythology, AR technology, and indigenous memory into a layered conversation about care and displacement. Her work Manu Antara uses augmented reality to allow viewers to cradle a virtual fish in their palm, echoing the Hindu myth of Manu, the first human, who saved a divine fish that later saved humanity. “This gesture of carrying… makes us human. In Malay, we call humans manusia — child of Manu,” she says. But she questions whether our current interactions with fish — as pets, as commodities — still carry that same kindness. “Are we still keeping fish as kindness? Or now it’s like our human desire to take control over nature?”

One of the hands depicted is her grandmother’s, a symbolic bridge between generations. “From young to old… human time.” Her fish paintings, based on years of research across Malaysia’s west coast, explore hybrid forms, false crabs, and mythic eels that defy taxonomic order. “I like this idea called carcinisation, about how some animals evolve to become crab.” With humour and poignancy, she collapses scientific logic and animist myth, referencing real and speculative species.

The use of polyester mesh instead of canvas highlights the fragility and transparency of such systems. “Usually when you see illustrations, you’re like — oh this is what the animal is. But she pronounces the fact that it’s not.” Fish rendered in unnatural blues, wrapped in bondage rope, become both icons of desire and critique of entertainment culture: “They feed the fish so fat… just to entertain the game fishers.”

Her lived connection to coastal communities also grounds her work in socio-political realities. Having grown up near Orang Kuala villages, she reflects on forced relocation and identity erosion. “I see how their identities kind of got washed when they moved to the land.”

Returning to Guang, his sculptural installation Yellow Fish evokes the aesthetics of dried fish strung up in wet markets, rendered instead in sleek 3D printed resin. “The models are derived from Ikan Kuning, from Nasi Lemak,” he explains. Each shelf becomes a serialised display, referencing batch numbers, resin types, S-hooks, a rigorous logic of repetition and standardisation.

But beneath the minimalist precision is a deeper queering of value and form. “With a lot of my work, I actually deal with queer ecology, almost like the idea of bodies being replaceable, the yellow body specifically as something that can be repeated, modular, flat.” The serial numbers draw from minimalist art, yet the slight imperfections and subtle shifts highlight the limits of industrial replication. “There are some that are not perfect, and it’s these idiosyncrasies that come about only with industrial processes.”

The piece is also about shadows, a hidden dimension that Guang turned to as the exhibition evolved. “So now the pond is not so grey, and the shadow re-accentuates the assembly line effect. They’re almost in a cage.” Through the layering of materials, shadows, and serialised parts, the installation implicates mass production in the erasure of difference and the standardisation of life.

Also included is Luna Chang, who turns to the ocean as a metaphorical space for introspection and healing in [[[sea]]]. Employing emulsion transfers and decoupage, her new series reflects on deeply personal connections to water as a site of memory, grief, and transformation. In addition to her visual works, Luna will also present a durational performance examining the politics and poetics of oceanariums, using the gallery itself as a container for long-form reflection and shared time.

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Together, the exhibition forms a fragmented ecology of care and contradiction. Across performance, print, sculpture, and digital media, each artist interrogates how fish — as symbol, body, and subject — are framed, consumed, and transformed. As Guang puts it, “The fish slip off the table and out of my sight.” But in that act of slipping — from ritual to ecology, from mythology to marketing — we glimpse the deeper questions about the lives we touch, the systems we perpetuate, and the gestures we repeat, often without noticing.

leaking fishtank also invites independent collective Paper Flesh (Luna Chang and Jovin Lee) into the exhibition space for two days of open collage-making workshops on 17 and 18 May, 12–7PM. Originating from a shared desire to slow down and rediscover the joy of hand-making, Paper Flesh encourages visitors to create works in response to the exhibition’s themes, forming tactile dialogues between image, memory, and imagination. This collaborative hearth not only presents converging and diverging outcomes of artistic inquiry into aquatic life, but offers an evolving platform for emergent voices to convene, reflect, and speculate together.

leaking fishtank runs from 16th to 25th May 2025 at Art Outreach, 5 Lock Road, #01-06, Gillman Barracks Singapore 108933. More information available here