上海外滩美术馆 Rockbund Art Museum

上海外滩美术馆于新加坡呈现最新展览项目“环海旅社：星洲海峡”，作为“环海旅社”在上海以外语境下的首次延续。

艺术家：Arka Kinari、本吉·拉（Bhenji Ra）、Tati au Miel、蔡坤宇、黄慧莲（Dawn Ng）、 埃斯文·阿拉尔孔·林（Esvin Alarcón Lam）、符芳俊（Hoo Fan Chon）、潘逸舟（Han Ishu）、何子彦（Ho Tzu Nyen）、伊旺·艾迈特和蒂塔·萨利娜（Irwan Ahmett & Tita Salina）、汪春龙（John Clang）、宋祖承（Joshua Serafin）、黄汉明（Ming Wong）、佩恩恩（Payne Zhu）、米格尔·科瓦鲁维亚斯（Miguel Covarrubias）、赵仁辉、斯蒂芬妮·康米兰（Stephanie Comilang）、塔落伊·哈维尼（Taloi Havini）、谭婧和婉塔妮·西帕塔娜伦塔宫（Wantanee Siripattananuntakul）。

“环海旅社”项目最初于2024年在上海外滩美术馆呈现，将美术馆一楼空间被打造成了一个限时的“酒店”。如今，“环海旅社”重新抵达新加坡海域——延续关于“海洋景观认识论”（seascape epistemology）的新思考：躯体如何跨越水域——通过商业交换，也通过生存、欲望、血缘与抵抗。其构想也提出了新的语汇：新加坡海峡并非只是地缘政治的通道，而是融合了航运、金融、劳工迁徙、监控机制与采掘经济的高密度地带。以海洋的方式思考新加坡，就意味着要认识到海事环境长期被如此种种权力的日常施行所塑造，而不再将海洋（再）抽离成纯粹的象征空间。

项目的核心思想源自汤加学者艾培力·郝欧法（Epeli Hau‘ofa）的宏阔视野。郝欧法挑战将太平洋理解为“远海中的岛屿”的狭隘观念，转而提出“岛屿之海”的愿景：海洋是彼此连通的广阔网络，承载着共同的历史、多维的关系，以及持续的流通。这种海洋式的存在方式抵抗殖民主义强设、固化的宏大叙事，拒绝殖民的整合力量将流动的身体压缩进固定边界、将大洋分割成围栏圈定的土地，并切断百年迁徙纽带的行径。“环海旅社”与郝欧法展开思想对话，将海洋视作生成的空间：身份并非再围合中确立，而是在流动中浮现。

“环海旅社：星洲海峡”将新加坡河畔的一间由仓库改建而成、仍在运营的精品酒店——仓库酒店（The Warehouse Hotel）重新搭建成铺陈幻想的舞台。这片由船工、秘密结社与红灯区经济塑造的区域冲刷着劳工与亲密关系的潮汐。如今，酒店规范化的礼宾空间得到重新调度，成为一座思辨装置，在十天的时间里容纳关于 “中断”的集体排演。前台、大堂、吧台、书房、餐厅和边缘空间汇集二十位艺术家与关于浪潮、海峡、迁移路线和海事基建的艺术实践。

在为期十二天的展期中，来自亚太地区的二十余位艺术家与团体将作品带入仓库酒店，通过装置、表演、对谈和声音介入的激活，并试问：身体如何不仅仅横渡水域，也跨越权力？当一切事物都成为闭锁的同谋，亲缘、渴望与忍耐如何延续？

“环海旅社：星洲海峡”由上海外滩美术馆馆长及首席策展人朱筱蕤（X Zhu-Nowell）策划，上海外滩美术馆策展人钱诗怡协助策展。作为新加坡艺术周（Singapore Art Week）期间呈现的项目之一，本次展览由ART SG与上海外滩美术馆联合主办，并获新加坡国家艺术理事会、新加坡旅游局及洛克·外滩源的支持，场地合作为新加坡仓库酒店。

The Rockbund Art Museum (RAM) is delighted to announce the premiere of Wan Hai Hotel: Singapore Strait, the first iteration of RAM's ongoing Wan Hai Hotel project outside Shanghai.

Artists in this edition include: Arka Kinari (Nova Ruth and Grey Filastine), Bhenji Ra, Tati au Miel, Cai Kunyu, Dawn Ng, Esvin Alarcón Lam, Hoo Fan Chon, Han Ishu, Ho Tzu Nyen, Irwan Ahmett & Tita Salina, John Clang, Joshua Serafin, Ming Wong, Payne Zhu, Miguel Covarrubias, Robert Zhao Renhui, Stephanie Comilang, Taloi Havini, Tan Jing, and Wantanee Siripattananuntakul.

Originally staged at RAM in 2024, during which the museum’s ground-floor was transformed into a fabulous, speculative hotel, Wan Hai Hotel now continues its oceanic voyage through to the Singapore Strait: a historical epicenter of sea-bound commerce where cargos, bodies, and desires continue to flow. In this incarnation, the exhibition seeks to address the Singapore Strait not merely as a geopolitical passage, but as a dense zone where shipping, finance, labor migrations, surveillance, and extractive economies converge. Instead of seeing the ocean as a purely symbolic space, it engages Singapore as a maritime environment that has been structured by these daily rehearsals of power through the form of a hotel: a social and spatial structure very much shaped by the specific oceanic, historical, and logistical conditions of its locale.

Transforming the historic architecture of The Warehouse Hotel, a warehouse-turned-boutique-hotel, originally constructed by a Chinese shipping magnate on the south bank of the Singapore River at the turn of the 20th century, into a space of reflection, Wan Hai Hotel: Singapore Strait enters a site historically defined by tides of labor and intimacy—a district once shaped by boat workers, secret societies, and red-light economies—and draws into view the fundamental premises of hospitality as not simply a service, but a shared condition that fluctuates and allows histories, movements, and encounters to remain active.

Over the course of twelve days, works and performances by over twenty artists and collectives from across Singapore, Southeast Asia, and the Asia-Pacific will inhabit the premises of The Warehouse Hotel and draw on it as a vessel for a collective rehearsal on interruption:

In the reception area, audiences will encounter works by Bhenji Ra, Esvin Alarcón Lam, and Payne Zhu that investigates the complex legacies of the US military tourism industrial complex in Southeast Asia, transcontinental migrations between Asia and the Americas, and financial imaginaries of the ocean through the ecological phenomenon of the 'whale pump', respectively. Meanwhile, across the lounge, bar, and restaurant, moving images and installations by Cai Kunyu, Arka Kinari, Irwan Ahmett and Tita Salina, Ming Wong, and Hoo Fan Chon each examines different valencies of flow and currency in the transmission of ways of life, ritualistic knowledge, developmentalist ideologies, colonial imaginaries, and piscine products as a conduit of social structures and memories.

At the main stage in the ground floor lobby, a dynamic installation of chairs that are rearranged to reflect optimal fortune every hour by John Clang serves as seating to a looping programme featuring six moving image works by Ho Tzu Nyen, Stephanie Comilang, Han Ishu, and Taloi Havini that each stretches the seams between official and unofficial histories, tracing the rhythms and cadences of time as an affective substance, punctuated by performances by Joshua Serafin. Nearby, in the study, audiences are invited to slow down and engage with works by Tan Jing, Dawn Ng, and Robert Zhao Renhui that focus on material presence, opacity, and time, as well as with a variety of archival materials including reference books and past issues of the speculative broadsheet Wan Hai Times. On the second floor, visitors can register for an intimate performance with John Clang where a zi wei dou shu—a metaphysical system that emerged in imperial China which combines astronomy, philosophy, and temporal calculation into an instrument of divination—reading may reveal new destinies and discoveries of one's true self in a camera-less long-exposure portrait.

In every hotel room, guests will have access to moving images by Wantanee Siripattananuntakul: an episode of grieving kickstarts a broader reflection on the intersection of personal and public memories. Meanwhile, spaces around the hotel are activated by maps drawn by Miguel Covarrubias that place the Pacific Ocean at the center of the frame, shifting attention away from continental hierarchies, proposing the ocean not as a void separating distant lands but as a connective field structured by movement, exchange, and relation, and at set times, by performances devised by Bhenji Ra in collaboration with Tati au Miel that draw on mythology, collective memory, and the sonic histories of Singapore’s shadow economies to invoke an enbedded infrastructure of trans-feminine care and hospitality since erased from the public consciousness.

Finding anchorage in the thoughts of Tongan thinker Epeli Hau‘ofa, Wan Hai Hotel: Singapore Strait seeks to ask: How do bodies traverse not only water but power? How do kinship, longing, and endurance persist when everything conspires toward enclosure?

Wan Hai Hotel: Singapore Strait is curated by X Zhu-Nowell, Executive Director and Chief Curator of Rockbund Art Museum, with support from Sam Shiyi Qian, Curator at Rockbund Art Museum. Presented as part of Singapore Art Week, Wan Hai Hotel: Singapore Strait is organised by ART SG and Rockbund Art Museum, supported by the National Arts Council, Singapore Tourism Board, and ROCKBUND, and presented with venue partner The Warehouse Hotel.