If printmaking still conjures images of editions locked behind glass, STPI is intent on changing that perception. Launching during Singapore Art Week 2026, The Print Show & Symposium Singapore positions print firmly at the centre of contemporary culture. Hosted at STPI’s riverside space at Robertson Quay, The Print Show brings together works by 27 internationally renowned artists, from household names such as Jeff Koons, Louise Bourgeois, David Hockney, Yayoi Kusama, and Takashi Murakami, to influential figures including Tacita Dean, Chris Ofili, Julie Mehretu, Do Ho Suh, and Rirkrit Tiravanija, alongside key regional voices such as Kim Lim, Dinh Q. Lê, Hilmi Johandi, and Natee Utarit. Conceived as a dialogue rather than a survey, the exhibition highlights how artists use print not simply to reproduce images, but to experiment, provoke, and transform ideas, supported by leading international publishers and galleries and presented free to the public.

If the exhibition is about looking, the symposium is about thinking. Titled The Politics of Print: elephant in the room, the two-day programme convenes artists, curators, museum directors, and market leaders to examine print’s political histories and its contemporary afterlives, from radical printmaking in Asia to NFTs, memes, and digital reproduction. Ambitious, occasionally confrontational, and unafraid to ask uncomfortable questions, the platform positions Singapore as a site for serious cultural debate about art’s past, present, and future.

We spoke to Nathaniel Gaskell, Assistant Director of Exhibition Programming and Content Development at STPI, about why print matters now, and what this new initiative hopes to set in motion. Read the interview in full below:

Bakchormeeboy: Print has often been framed as secondary to painting or sculpture. What felt urgent about launching a platform that puts print back at the centre of contemporary artistic discourse now?

Nathaniel Gaskell: While prints and multiples have always been important to artists across art’s histories and geographies, perceptions of print have evolved over time. Some of the most well-known contemporary artists today— Yayoi Kusama, Jeff Koons and Takashi Murakami who are all in the Print show — are working in the medium, and there has been a lot of innovative and interesting work made. There is also an increase in demand—fuelled by younger collectors, online sales and the strength of the mid-section of the market—and prints are today recognised as important and desirable artworks. Along with these developments, print has become especially relevant amid 21st century discussions around NFTs, AI and digital media in the arts, given its unique properties that contest ideas of originality, value, authorship and access. Altogether, these trends create a moment for STPI to explore the contemporary landscape of print through this new project.

Bakchormeeboy: How did you approach structuring conversations that move between historical print politics and contemporary phenomena like NFTs, memes, and social media circulation?

Nathaniel: I felt it was important to really explore the breadth of what print is, as an expanded field, that connects disciplines and histories across time and space: as both an artistic medium, and a mode of popular communication. Print, after all, is defined by its reproducibility: its very nature is democratic, insofar as it resists the gilded cage of the singular, fetishised object.

You can see this across art history, which is something we will explore throughout the two days. Whether thinking about the centrality of print to an artist like Zao Wou-Ki, whom Dr Wu Mo will speak about, which relates to the communities that formed around print as a practice— something Wifredo Lam exemplified in his later years, when print became the foundation upon which he could work collaboratively, which is a politics in and of itself. Or considering how print functioned as a means for artists to engage with one another, like a proto-form of social media, let’s say, with publications that functioned as open and ongoing discussions—something Kathleen Ditzig will dig into in the context of Cold War Southeast Asia and Ozge Ersoy will expand upon in the context of Asia Art Archive; and which the panel Radical Printmaking in Asia will explore as a whole.

Thinking about print within this context, as a form of networked communication, it made total sense to think about memes and NFTs within this lineage. I hope to really get into this during our Crit Club session, given we have some of the leading thinkers and practitioners in the arts debating NFTs in the first ever edition of this debate club, conceived by artist Cem. A, in Singapore, including Audrey Ou, founder of TR Lab, which has been doing some really interesting work with NFTs in the institutional field, and Chris Fussner, the founder of Tropical Futures.

Then we have our conversation with Cem A. who runs the popular meme account @freeze_magazine, and Al Hassan Elwan, the founder of POSTPOSTPOST. Cem has talked about the 20th-century artist John Heartfield, the German visual artist, who created amazing collages in resistance to fascism, in the context of his own meme work; while Al Hassan’s practice covers the entire spectrum of print as posting, with films, fashion, and publications steeped in avant-garde cultures that engage with art as a form of sociopolitical critique. To state the obvious, everything is connected.

Bakchormeeboy: The symposium’s title ‘The Politics of Print: elephant in the room’, suggests unresolved tensions. What do you see as the “elephants” the art world still avoids when it comes to printmaking?

Nathaniel: The idea for coining the phrase ‘elephant in the room’ came about through conversations with the artist Cem A. who is behind the Crit Club section of the Symposium, and is also the collaborator for the scenography. We thought about how prints in the art world have sometimes been decontextualised, and perceived as solely art objects rather than means of political expressions or popular forms of communication. The symposium thus seeks to address this other facet of printmaking and papermaking. Another ‘elephant’ we’d want to address are biases and gaps within the art world in general, and in printmaking, where the focus has tended to be on prints by Old Masters or Modern artists recognised in the Euro-American art traditions.

Within the context of Asian, or specifically Southeast Asian art, there is also an inclination to diminish and homogenise the region’s printmaking scene as reactive, and responsive to its sociopolitical realities of conflict and unrest, eclipsing their longer print histories of circulation. The symposium actively seeks to challenge these assumptions about agency and context in Internal printmaking, presenting possibilities of an alternative moment beyond postcolonial and national frameworks.

Bakchormeeboy: Print is historically tied to circulation, protest, and mass access. How do those legacies translate into today’s digital image economy?

Nathaniel: Print’s histories of circulation and protest find clear parallels in today’s digital image economy, where images move rapidly across platforms and publics, shaping opinion and collective action. Memes, reposts, and viral images function much like earlier printed matter— pamphlets, posters, and zines—as tools of dissent, solidarity, and mass communication. At the same time, the speed and immateriality of digital circulation throws print’s material specificity into sharper relief, making tactility, process, and context newly significant. In this sense, print and digital images are not oppositional, but part of a something that continually renegotiates access, authorship, and political agency.

Bakchormeeboy: This initiative brings together artists, publishers, market leaders, and institutions. Where do you see productive friction emerging between artistic values and market realities in print today?

Nathaniel: Dealing with market realities is a consequence of making art which is impactful, original and resonates with contemporary culture; and subsequently making the decision to sell it. At STPI, we wish to cultivate firsthand the pursuit of artistic values during the artist’s residencies, which is the prime focus of the Workshop, and the market demand tends to follow after.

Bakchormeeboy: Many of the artists involved use print not as reproduction, but as experimentation. What does this shift tell us about how artists are redefining authorship and originality?

Nathaniel: Artists have historically used printmaking as a way to experiment and explore, so we see printmaking as an extension or proliferation of their practice rather than a reproduction of it. Of course reproduction is one part of print’s history and premise, but even then, the reproduction has its own life and nuance. In STPI’s context, and for some of the print workshops we are collaborating with such as BORCH Editions and Crown Point Press, printmaking is a site of deep originality, experimentation, process and technique, as well as a space for conceptual exploration. The other interesting thing about authorship is the collaborative aspect of printmaking, and the relationship between the artist and the printmaker, which challenges the idea of the singular artistic hero.

Bakchormeeboy: The programme embraces confrontation, with debates on value and digital reproduction. Why was it important for the symposium to feel risky rather than purely academic?

Nathaniel: One thing I always remind people is that in the arts, we are actually unburdened by the constraints of academia, and that is an important thing to remember when we share and talk about our research and practices within the public realm. Artists and arts workers are creative people, systems thinkers, and space makers: we think in forms as much as through patterns and have the ability to synthesise influences from vast sources, using a variety of different languages, whether visual or otherwise. This is what makes the arts unique, and I wanted to celebrate that in a symposium that is anchored to a single idea: what can we learn and unlearn when we think, listen, and speak together? What new ideas or forms of knowledge could emerge, if we really drill down on what makes the arts tick, which is ideas and how they manifest as living realities?

Bakchormeeboy: Much of the symposium foregrounds Asia’s radical print histories. What perspectives or narratives from the region do you feel are still underrepresented in global discussions on print?

Nathaniel: In general, print continues to be a sidelined medium, whether you’re looking at it from the East and West, and this symposium is really just a point of departure to start digging deeper. Many of the contributors will be producing texts for STPI’s new online journal, print_screen, following the gathering, and I’m particularly excited by a series of texts we are going to be working on with Bishal Yonjan, a researcher from the collective Kala Kulo in Nepal, who has been doing some incredible work tracing the use of print among artists from the 20th century Nepalese avantgarde, which inevitably maps a fascinating history of Global South Asia during the modern era.

Bakchormeeboy: Nathaniel, your curatorial background spans photography, publishing, and education. How have those experiences shaped the way you think about print as both an object and a knowledge system?

Nathaniel: I began my career working for the photography dealer, Eric Franck. He dealt a lot with midcentury social documentary work, so the idea of the photograph as a means of communication and document–or a knowledge system–as well as an object in the market, is something I’ve always been interested in. I love the physicality of analogue photographs, but then I’m also attracted to the democratic aspect of photography and its non-art status. I was doing my masters at the same time as working for Eric, and my research was around the role of the photograph in Conceptual Art and Land Art in the mid-60s to 70s–both as something to document a conceptual happening, but also becoming the art object in itself (and the contradiction of this is considering Conceptual Art’s aspiration to dematerialise the art object).

I came to other forms of printmaking later, but very much informed by my love of the photographic objects and the questions they raise. Prints share these connotations with being a Internal democratic, reproducible and challenging ideas around originality in art. Yet at the same time, even more than photographs, they have this tangible, gestural and incredibly nuanced surface, with a level of skill which belies their multiplicity.

Bakchormeeboy: Rather than a chronological survey, the exhibition is framed as a dialogue across generations and geographies. What kinds of conversations between artists did you most want audiences to notice?

Nathaniel: It’s always a challenge to group works together without the risk of labelling or categorising them in the process. I think the best moments in the show are where the works stand very independent but then interesting things happen through shared space. An example would be the first room in the show, where we have a monumental work by Julie Mehretu, placed opposite a more intimate scaled work by Irfan Hendrian, in an otherwise empty space. Both artists reflect on cultural histories and narratives, addressing issues of identity, migration, and belonging, with an interest in materiality, layers and abstraction. Hendrian’s Unearthly Matter 4 reflects his search for his Chinese roots on the island of Java, suppressed under Indonesia’s New Order regime, through layered references and an accumulation of traces. Mehretu’s print is part of her Slouching Towards Bethlehem series, and is created by abstracting images of antiimmigration protests in America in 2019/2020. Whereas Mehretu is political in response to an external crisis, Hendrian’s is more personal an inward looking of his own identity, and the collision of the personal and political in the room is–we hope–interesting.

Bakchormeeboy: Positioned within Singapore Art Week, how do you hope this project reframes Singapore’s role as both an arts market hub and a site for critical conversations about contemporary art?

Nathaniel: This project fits well with SAW which has a great balance of the commercial art world–with the fairs, as well as being a space for criticality–with all the great exhibitions and talks programmes across the city. I think what we are also bringing to the table through STPI, and the other print Internal workshops and publishers we’re partnering with, which is the focus on the making of art (and especially the collaborative aspect of this) – spotlighting creative and technical processes.

Bakchormeeboy: STPI has long been known for technical excellence in print. With The Print Show, how are you rethinking the institution’s role?

Nathaniel: Part of what’s so exciting about STPI is that it straddles various different worlds in the art ecosystem. From the creation of work in the Workshop, to being a platform for sales via our presence in international art fairs, and then as a public gallery that shares the work of artists with audiences.

It’s not so much that we’re rethinking our role by adding the Print Show & Symposium Singapore to our programme–as our mission stays the same, but we are strengthening all the verticals in their own ways, and thinking more about new audiences, leaning into print’s accessible promise. At the heart of what we do is collaboration, and I think it’s natural for us to collaborate with other print workshops and galleries, curators and thought leaders, in the same way we collaborate with artists. Our role is to celebrate and advance contemporary art through print making and connect it to audiences – but the programmes we do to realise this should continue to evolve.

The Print Show & Symposium Singapore 2026 runs from 22nd to 31st January 2026 at STPI, Robertson Quay & Mohamed Sultan Road. The exhibition is free, while ticket sot the symposium can be purchased from SISTIC