What does it mean to remember? At National Gallery Singapore’s latest exhibition, the answer begins with a collection of art that both complicates and interrogates that very question. Opening 21 August, Art Remembers brings together 20 works by artists from Singapore and Southeast Asia who approach the concept of an archive as something that can be questioned, disrupted, reassembled and even invented.

Spanning photography, film, print, painting, textiles and digital media, the exhibition asks visitors to look again at histories they may think they already know, and to consider whose memories have been preserved, whose have been left out, and what happens when artists take those fragments into their own hands.

While it may initially appear to be about the past, the exhibition gradually reveals itself to be about the present: about the technologies we use to record our lives, the stories we inherit, and the choices we make about what deserves to be remembered. Its most interesting proposition is that an archive is never quite finished. Every generation can add to it, question it or rewrite the way it is understood.

The exhibition begins by making the familiar feel strange. One of the most playful examples is Malaysian artist Ahmad Fuad Osman’s Recollections of Long Lost Memories (2007). Using archival photographs from Malaysia’s post-independence history, Osman digitally inserts a contemporary figure into the scenes, dressed in modern clothing and appearing in deliberately comic poses. The intervention is funny at first, but the joke quickly becomes more unsettling: once an obviously contemporary figure appears inside a supposedly historical image, the photograph can no longer be read as an uncomplicated record of the past.

That disruption is precisely the point. Osman is altering old photographs partially for comic effect, but more importantly, exposing how easily our sense of history depends on the images and narratives that have been handed down to us. The archive can look authoritative because it has the appearance of evidence, but every archive has been selected, framed and preserved by someone. By inserting the present into these images, Osman makes that process visible. Such an effect is particularly useful as an opening gesture for Art Remembers. Instead of asking visitors to accept history as something fixed, the exhibition immediately gives them permission to interfere with it, at least imaginatively.

Indonesian artist Tintin Wulia takes this question into the territory of cultural representation with Bali, Foreground of War: A Critical Restaging (2026). The work responds to Bali, Background for War: The Human Problem of Reoccupation, a 1943 exhibition at The Museum of Modern Art that presented Balinese art and anthropological material within the context of wartime representation.

Wulia’s response is not simply an exercise in revisiting an old exhibition. Through the dance-lecture War is Beyond a Century: Teruna Jaya and the textile installation Parts of Us That Couldn’t Forgive, she considers how Balinese dance can function as a form of memory and cultural transmission. More importantly, she questions what happens when a culture is preserved in an archive primarily through the eyes of outsiders.

Her work shifts the position of the Balinese artist from subject to agent. That distinction is central to the exhibition as a whole: Art Remembers is interested not only in what archives contain, but in who has historically been given the authority to interpret what they contain.

That question becomes particularly physical in Mendjelang Hari Gemilang (Towards a Glory Day) (2024–2026), a new work by Yogyakarta-based printmaking collective Krack!. The enormous mural draws together imagery from wartime print culture, including propaganda material from the Japanese-sponsored magazine Djawa Baroe and satirical Russo-Japanese War imagery by ukiyo-e artist Kobayashi Kiyochika. Its archival fragments are arranged across the tentacles of a giant octopus, turning what could have been a conventional display of historical material into an immersive visual field.

The huge scale matters; standing in front of the work, propaganda no longer feels like something safely contained on a page in a textbook. It becomes an entire environment. Images overlap, compete and accumulate, making it possible to experience something of the visual density through which wartime narratives were communicated to the public.

Krack! is interested in how images can manufacture collective memory and how those same images can later be taken apart and looked at differently. The mural’s combination of archival pages, wheatpaste, banners and video gives the material a contemporary visual language, while its references reach back through multiple layers of Asian wartime history.

It is also one of the clearest examples of how Art Remembers avoids treating archival material as precious simply because it is old. These artists are willing to cut into it, enlarge it, rearrange it and make it strange. The archive becomes raw material.

Some of the exhibition’s most unexpected stories emerge when artists look beyond conventional historical documents altogether. In Singaporean artist Robert Zhao Renhui’s The Fish Does Not Know the War Is Over (2025), the unlikely protagonist is the tilapia. The fish was introduced to Singapore during the Japanese Occupation and later brought to Taiwan after the war, where it eventually became so culturally significant that it is regarded as a national treasure.

Zhao traces this journey through photographs and video, turning the movement of a species into a story about war, migration, commerce and belonging. The premise has a slightly absurd charm; a fish, after all, cannot know that a war has ended, but the longer one considers it, the more profound it becomes.

The tilapia survives the political events that surround it. It moves between countries, gets renamed, acquires new associations and becomes part of different communities. The natural environment therefore becomes an archive of human history, carrying traces of events without necessarily recording them in the conventional ways we expect.

Zhao’s work is a good example of why Art Remembers is more engaging when experienced as a series of discoveries rather than as a straightforward lesson in Southeast Asian history. You may enter the exhibition expecting photographs, documents and artworks about memory. Instead, you find yourself thinking about a fish, and suddenly questions of migration, empire and belonging become much more tangible.

A similar sense of fragility appears in Hmong Australian artist Vanghoua Anthony Vue’s Fading Marks (2015). Vue paints scenes from a Hmong television documentary about US activities in Laos during the Vietnam War, but the source footage has already become entangled with his own childhood memories. The paintings deliberately retain something of the graininess and indistinctness of the original footage. They do not restore the past to perfect clarity. Instead, they make visible the way memories themselves fade, distort and merge with personal experience.

That is significant because the conflict in Laos remains comparatively underrepresented in mainstream accounts of the Vietnam War. Vue’s work therefore becomes a form of counter-archiving: a way of preserving a history that might otherwise remain marginal to official narratives, while also acknowledging that personal testimony has its own ambiguities. Painting goes beyond illustrating history, and holds a functional purpose as a form of memory.

The exhibition’s interest in alternative archives also extends to the materials of everyday life. This becomes particularly apparent in the work of Singaporean artist Ho Rui An, whose Fuelling Apocalypse (2024–2025) approaches the Vietnam War through images and visual associations that complicate the idea of historical accounting. Rather than offering a definitive reconstruction, the work draws attention to the ways images themselves shape what we think we know about the past.

That matters because archives do not exist independently of the images that circulate around them. Photographs, films, media reports and reproduced images can become historical evidence, but they can also influence which versions of events become dominant. Ho’s work asks viewers to remain aware of that gap between an event and the visual record through which we subsequently encounter it. This concern links the historical works in the exhibition to its later exploration of digital technology. The same question persists: if images can shape memory, what happens when the volume of images being produced becomes almost impossible to comprehend?

The exhibition’s technological section begins earlier than one might expect. Malaysian artist Ismail Zain’s Digital Collage series (1988) is an especially revealing starting point. Created on a Macintosh computer, the works combine images drawn from mass media and popular culture, using early digital tools to manipulate and reorganise familiar visual material.

Seen today, the works have acquired a curious double life. They were technologically experimental when they were made, but they now look like early attempts to grapple with a condition that has become completely ordinary: the ability to endlessly copy, alter and recombine images.

Zain was effectively treating popular culture as an archive before the language of digital archives had become commonplace. His works also draw on the traditional Malay poetic form of the pantun, bringing together older cultural structures and emerging digital technology. The result is not a rejection of tradition in favour of the new, but an argument that cultural memory can be continually reformatted. That makes the work particularly resonant in an exhibition that keeps asking what an archive is allowed to look like.

Singaporean artist Ho Tzu Nyen takes that idea considerably further with The Critical Dictionary of Southeast Asia (2017–ongoing). The work uses an algorithm to continuously recombine texts, sounds and images associated with Southeast Asia, generating new relationships between them. There is no single, definitive version of the work. It keeps changing.

It is an appropriately unstable archive for a region whose histories are themselves difficult to reduce to a single narrative. Southeast Asia contains multiple languages, colonial histories, national identities, migrations and competing memories. Ho’s work responds by refusing the idea that these materials need to settle into one coherent story.

Instead, the algorithm keeps producing new combinations. The experience feels like watching an enormous collective memory rearrange itself in real time. Something that appears unrelated can suddenly become connected to something else. A word, image or piece of music can take on a different meaning depending on what it is placed beside. In this sense, the work makes one of the exhibition’s central arguments almost literally visible: archives are not only about preservation, but also about relationships.

Josh Kline’s Powdered iPhone (2025), making its debut presentation here, brings the exhibition’s questions back into everyday life. The premise is almost brutally simple. The iPhone is one of the objects most closely associated with contemporary personal memory: it contains our photographs, messages, locations, searches and fragments of daily life. Kline takes that familiar device and pulverises it, turning it into handmade paper.

The transformation is both literal and conceptual. Paper has traditionally been a material for recording history. The smartphone, meanwhile, is one of the primary places where contemporary life is stored. By turning an iPhone into paper, Kline collapses those two ideas together. It prompts an unexpectedly unsettling question: what will our technologies become when they themselves are historical artefacts?

The work also brings the exhibition back to the individual visitor. Most of us carry some kind of personal archive in our pockets. We photograph meals, birthdays, journeys, conversations and people; we accumulate years of messages and images without necessarily thinking of ourselves as archivists. Kline’s work asks us to imagine those devices from the perspective of someone looking back at our era in the future. Suddenly, the archive is no longer something housed in a museum. It is in your pocket.

There are plenty of exhibitions about history, memory and archives. What makes Art Remembers particularly engaging is that this isn’t just a history exhibition, but a means of using art to demonstrate how historical narratives can be pulled apart and reconsidered. From manipulating a photograph to a wartime archive becoming a giant octopus, a fish bearing witness to migration to an algorithm turning the internet into an endlessly shifting dictionary, these are all different ways of asking who and what gets to remember and be remembered.

The exhibition is therefore at its best when approached with curiosity rather than the expectation of finding a single historical account. Its works often leave gaps, contradictions and unresolved questions. That is part of their point. Memory is rarely complete, and archives are never as neutral as they might appear.

There is also pleasure in the unexpectedness of the exhibition. You do not need to arrive with an extensive knowledge of Southeast Asian art history to find a way into it. The works offer entry points through humour, technology, animals, family memory, popular culture and striking visual forms. The more familiar subjects of war, migration, colonialism, nationalism, are approached through details that make them newly tangible.

That may ultimately be the exhibition’s greatest strength. Art Remembers presents remembering as an active process, one in which artists can challenge what has been preserved, give shape to what has been forgotten, and imagine what future generations might find when they look back at us. Rather than a room full of things that have already happened, the exhibition presents history as something that continues to change each time we look at it.

As Dr Eugene Tan, CEO and Director, National Gallery Singapore, and Project Director of the exhibition, puts it, “Through Art Remembers, National Gallery Singapore presents archives as art and centres artists as important interpreters and storytellers of history and memory. This exhibition builds on the Gallery’s ongoing commitment to deepening understanding of how our region’s art histories are shaped, remembered, and shared. We hope audiences will rediscover familiar histories from fresh perspectives and experience how artists’ creative practices can illuminate lesser-known narratives, foster reflection and connection, and inspire us through the enduring power of art to remember.”

And perhaps that is why it is worth seeing in person: because the most interesting archives are not necessarily the ones that give us all the answers, but the ones that make us want to look again.

Art Remembers runs from 21st August to 18th October 2026 at National Gallery Singapore’s City Hall Wing, Level 3, Singtel Special Exhibition Gallery 1 and City Hall Chamber. General Admission ticket required, free for locals. More information available here