Synopsis:

New creative writing from the cohort of Writing Lab 2025, developed through sustained encounters with NUS Museum's collections.
Over one evening and three sessions, Writing Lab: Public Reading presents excerpts of new creative writing from the cohort of Writing Lab 2025, developed through sustained encounters with NUS Museum's collections. Moving across poetry, prose, and playwriting, these readings unfold within the museum's galleries, tracing how writing can act as creative inquiry—imaginatively extending the narrative worlds of the subjects and objects within the museum's orbit.

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Session 1: A Room of Relations
Time: 7pm to 7:45pm

Venue: NUS Museum, Radio Malaya: abridged conversations about art (Concourse Level)

The writings of Zhixin Sheng, Ho Yi Lin, and KQH Faith respond to a chamber of Radio Malaya: abridged conversations about art, entering into close dialogue with archival photographs by Amanda Heng and Jimmy Ong, and artworks by Ho Soon Yeen, Lin Hsin Hsin, and Michael Lee. Their works probe and complicate the act of looking and making, attending to the presences of writer, artist and viewer in the encounter with the visual work.

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Session 2: Tides that Bind
Time: 8:00pm to 8:50pm

Venue: NUS Museum, prep-room: the hull and the rig (NX3 Gallery, Concourse Level)

Marliini Heikkonen, Wee Yi Li Grace, Ahmad Syarif, and Wong Yang trace and retrace shifting bonds and allegiances to places and communities, extending from the anecdotal accounts of islander communities once residing on Singapore's offshore islands featured in prep-room: From Jurong Island to Selat Sembilan and a series of boat models from prep-room: the hull and the rig.

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Session 3: Lives in Correspondence
Time: 9:00pm to 9:30pm

Venue: NUS Museum, Outside Resource Library (Top Level)

Drawing from the archives of art historian T.K. Sabapathy, Dia Hakim Khaeri and Tricia Sin unspool latent narrative threads within selected archival texts. Extending Sabapathy's own mode of writing-as-thinking, their works propose other practices of writing—forms that bear witness to the quiet motions of personal life as they press against the contingencies of parent states, figures, and the complexities of lineage, inheritance, and influence.