Singapore Art Archive Project (Koh Nguang How) in collaboration with David Lee
IG: @nguanghow
FB: @koh.nguanghow
Biography
Koh Nguang How (b. 1963) worked at the National Museum Art Gallery as a Museum Assistant/Curatorial Assistant from October 1985 to January 1992. His artistic practice began in 1988 and encompasses photography, collage, installation, performance, documentation, archiving, and curating. He has been associated with the art collective The Artists Village since 1989.
Koh began exhibiting art archives in 1992 during Performance Week at Gallery 21, Singapore, and initiated his Singapore Art Archive Project (SAAP) in 2005. Since then, he has presented more than 15 thematic works and exhibitions under the SAAP in Singapore and abroad.
Notable projects include Artists in the News during the 3rd Singapore Biennale (2011); Art Places at the Jendela Visual Arts Space (2015); On the Cusp: Early Contemporary Art Activities in Singapore (1976–1996), Documentation from the Koh Nguang How Archive Collection at SAM Curve, Singapore Art Museum; Artists Crossing Borders – from the Archives of Singapore Art Archive Project, part of Returns, an exhibition in the Gwangju Biennale (2018); and Time Show: Archiving Performance Art in the Singapore Art Archive Project, part of State of Motion 2020: Rushes of Time, Singapore Art Week 2020.
Artworks
Timeline of Equator Art Society Exhibitions (1956–1974)
2026
Archival materials with brass inlays on table
Variable dimensions
This work draws from the Singapore Art Archive Project (SAAP) and extends Koh Nguang How’s long-running archival practice, functioning conceptually as a “Part Two” to Errata (2004). At its centre is an act of rediscovery: the correspondence between the woman depicted in Chua Mia Tee’s National Language Class (1959) and the sitter in Lee Boon Wang’s Portrait of a Lady (1960).
This double appearance points to a figure who moved fluidly across artistic, cultural, and student communities in the late 1950s. She is positioned alongside archival materials gathered by Koh on the Asian-African Conference (Bandung, 1955) and the Asian-African Students’ Conference (Bandung, 1956). Presented on tables as palimpsests of layered images and research traces, the materials mark the build-up toward EAS 70, a collaborative, generative AI–based work developed with designer David Lee.
In collaboration with DAVID LEE
EAS 70
2026
Installation
Variable dimensions
For The Strange Archive, Koh extends this act of retrieval into a speculative mode. Working with designer David Lee, the project uses generative AI and virtual exhibition-making tools to reconstruct the unrealised 2002 Fukuoka Art Museum exhibition on the Equator Art Society, for which Koh served as a researcher.
In this digital restaging, archival fragments and curatorial possibilities are recombined to imagine what might have been, placing National Language Class and Portrait of a Lady at the conceptual core. EAS 70 operates as both rediscovery and counterfactual exhibition—a pseudo-commemorative show for the artists’ group born out of the correspondence between artist-archivist and designer.
For Koh, it extends his archival methodology, where correspondences, omissions, and unrealised futures take new form. For Lee, it is an exercise in speculative design, exploring how exhibitions might be assembled when history is approached as an open field rather than a closed record.