At the National Museum of Singapore this December, visitors are invited into a world that feels at once startlingly surreal and intimately familiar. SKULLPANDA CAGE-UNCAGE, the international debut of the cult-favourite character’s immersive showcase, asks a disarming question: What cages do we build for ourselves—and what keeps us from leaving them?

For its creator, Chinese artist Xiong Miao, Singapore was always the right place for this question to be asked out loud. “This city balances tradition with innovation, structure with creativity,” she says. “It’s a fitting venue for an exhibition about the tension between opposing ideas.”

It’s a tension that sits at the heart of SKULLPANDA, whose monochrome, otherworldly form has captivated collectors around the world. But here, the character becomes more than a figurine. It becomes a guide, leading visitors through an evocative maze of mirrors, keys, cages, and contradictions designed to reflect the many layers of the self.

The National Museum is often a place where Singapore’s shared histories are told. But CAGE-UNCAGE turns the gaze inward, swapping chronological timelines for personal introspection.

The exhibition continues the museum’s exploration of contemporary collectible culture, an interest first sparked by its well-received 2024 showcase Play:Date – Unlocking Cabinets of Play. This new showcase moves beyond nostalgia, instead using collectibles as portals into questions of identity, agency, and the quiet dilemmas that shape our everyday choices.

Every path inward must begin somewhere, and here, it begins with a keyhole. Visitors lean toward a small opening in the wall, a seemingly child-like act, and find themselves gazing into a ten-sided prism of mirrors. Fragmented keys hover inside, multiplying into infinity. The room refuses to show itself all at once, shattering the idea that a key belongs to a single lock.

Instead, The Key hints at a truth that will echo throughout the showcase: the boundaries between reality and imagination are always softer than we think, and every choice fractures into countless possible selves.

The path opens into Emotion, a chamber where familiar metaphors dissolve. Locks and keys no longer fit together but orbit each other instead. A floating sphere, reminiscent of SKULLPANDA’s signature astronaut helmet, drifts overhead. Its surface is etched with lock-and-key motifs that scatter light across the floor. The shadows it casts appear like emotional threads: tangled in one moment, harmonious the next. Here, perception and truth are not opposites but dance partners, forever shifting their weight.

Freedom, as Direction suggests, is rarely a straight line. Transparent book pages rise from the centre of the room, each printed with hand-drawn symbols of imprisonment; thorns, shackles, webs. As visitors flip through them, the images shift and open, revealing new pathways, new interpretations, new escapes.

Along the wall, a giant picture frame pulses with moving light and shadow, tying the narrative together with Xiong Miao’s recurring butterfly motif—the exhibition’s quiet guide through chaos, constraint, and release.

In Fortune, the air glitters. Crystal chandeliers and mirrored surfaces blur into a fractured constellation, casting reflections that seem both enchanting and serrated. Entering the enclosed cabinet at the centre, visitors find their own faces reshaped by the play of light, a meditation on how wealth can dazzle even as it confines, sharp as it dazzles.

Time and discipline take centre stage in Rules, where objects teeter dangerously on the boundary between order and collapse. A spinning top whirls endlessly, refusing to rest. Beside it, a delicate scale reacts to the slightest motion in the room. The installation becomes a reminder that structure is both lifeline and burden—always seeking balance, always seconds from tipping over.

In Life, the world slows. Sand pours rhythmically through suspended glass globes containing miniature schools of fish and flocks of birds. Each globe becomes a tiny universe where home, movement, time, and memory coexist. The effect is meditative, as life unfolds in both breadth and depth, urging visitors to reconsider what it means to grow, settle, drift, and return.

The final zone, Exploration, asks visitors to touch, to play, to disrupt. Inside a symbolic cage stands a set of rotating blocks that can be rearranged to create new patterns. Every twist alters the meaning. Every configuration births a new perspective. Exploration then is something we must always build with our own hands.

At the centre of the labyrinth stands The Room, the core of CAGE-UNCAGE. On the outside, it appears finite, with just four walls, one door, two sculptures. But step inside, and you’re swallowed by an infinite maze of reflections. Two SKULLPANDA figures sit back-to-back, each holding a key, embodying the dual weight of restraint and liberation.

Visitors find themselves multiplied in the mirrored chamber, becoming both watcher and watched; a reminder that every cage has two perspectives: the one keeping us in, and the one keeping something out.

The journey culminates in a Singapore-exclusive installation that pays homage to bird-singing culture, a quiet but enduring tradition in local housing estates. Suspended bird cages cradle prototype figurines from The Paradox Series, while a video artwork follows Xiong Miao’s butterfly emblem as it drifts past familiar neighbourhood landscapes. It becomes a tender tribute to community, ritual, and the beauty of shared obsessions, of collecting, whether rare songbirds or contemporary art collectibles.

SKULLPANDA is ultimately, a wanderer. A character who slips between personas and universes, each time shedding and reclaiming parts of itself. Its journey is one of perpetual transformation and an ongoing search for authenticity, what Xiong Miao describes as “the shape of infinity.”

Xiong herself is no stranger to reinvention. Trained in game concept design and founder of North Studio, she brings over a decade of world-building experience to her creations. SKULLPANDA is her most personal invention: a character that pushes boundaries even as it questions them.

By the time visitors step back into the sunlight, the journey feels like having undergone a quiet pilgrimage into your soul. Each zone has gently prodded the same question: What cages have we accepted, and which ones are we ready to unlock?

In a world that constantly oscillates between structure and possibility, SKULLPANDA CAGE-UNCAGE offers not answers, but an invitation. A chance to stop, to look inward, and to choose, again and again, what kind of freedom we seek. But before you leave and exit through the gift shop, make sure to add a SKULLPANDA to your collection to remind you of this spiritual journey of art and meditation.

Images courtesy of National Museum of Singapore and POP MART

SKULLPANDA CAGE-UNCAGE Singapore officially opens its doors to the public at the National Museum on 12th December 2025 and will run till 22nd February 2026. Both Early All Access and Standard All Access tickets are now available for sale. An exclusive SKULLPANDA CAGE-UNCAGE Singapore gift will be given to the first 4,500 visitors to the showcase.

Tickets can be purchased at this link or through the showcase’s ticketing partner, Trip.com. Admission to SKULLPANDA CAGE-UNCAGE Singapore will be by timed entry to ensure a comfortable visitor experience. Visitors are encouraged to book their preferred time slot early when purchasing tickets online. 

Showcase-exclusive merchandise will be available for purchase at the Gallery Theatre retail zone to ticket holders only and is subject to eligibility and purchase limitations. Additional POP MART merchandise can be purchased at the POP MART POP-Up store at the museum’s Longer Concourse, which is open to the general public.

Visitors can look forward to a special θ SKULLPANDA Plush Doll-Cage-Uncage, and POPOP, POP MART’s jewellery line making its Singapore debut at the showcase for a limited time only. Details on available showcase-exclusive merchandise can be found at this link. Details on purchase conditions may be found at this link.