Each artist’s practice contributes to this rethinking of the archive. Koh Nguang How, working with designer David Lee, started from revisiting an overlooked figure who appears in two significant paintings from the 1950s, including canonical paintings “Siapa Nama Kamu’ (National Language Class) by Chua Mia Tee and Portrait of a Lady by Lee Boon Wang. Koh extends this inquiry through the re-staging of an Equator Art Society exhibition that was imagined but never fully realised. In doing so, the artist and designer engaged in conversation and over time, each chat exposes the vulnerabilities and inconsistencies embedded within institutional memory, much in the same way that Koh’s long-term project, the Singapore Art Archive Project (SAAP), operates as an independent and evolving archive that continually questions how histories are assembled.

Superlative Futures, a transdisciplinary design and research studio, contributes through the practice of Wong Zi Hao, who gathers Stories of Ground from newspaper fragments, cartographic reinterpretations, and speculative seed architectures to imagine alternative ecologies forming new “memory palaces” to recall the substrate of ground from beneath the rigid surfaces of the modern city. The work includes sculptural forms and handcrafted maps highlighting the overlooked local histories that continue to grow in the interstices of urban life, proposing speculative worlds rooted in the material traces of place.

Ezekiel Wong studies the gestures, symbols, and survival strategies of secret societies and subcultural figures, considering how their logics persist within contemporary social life. In a city that continually rewrites itself, the Ah Beng and Ah Lian appear in his work as echoes of a particular time and attitude. His large-scale figurative charcoal drawings interrupt the archive’s tendency to sanitise or simplify the complexity of such informal networks, allowing their shadow histories to resurface with immediacy, force, and tenderness.

With a background in architecture, Akai Chew integrates planning documents and urban development records with AI-generated maps that waver between representation and speculation. His installations engage with the loss of space brought about by redevelopment, suggesting a Singapore unfolding across multiple temporalities at once. These works offer glimpses into trajectories and environments that might have developed under different historical or political conditions, holding erased neighbourhoods and vanished cadastral spaces in speculative tension.

Together, these artworks do not reinforce the archive as a definitive structure. Instead, they fracture it, revealing its uncertainties and its capacity to generate new speculative meanings. The archive becomes a verb rather than a noun, a site of continual negotiation rather than a final repository of knowledge. The Strange Archive becomes a playground, a testing ground, and a resonant space where public memory can be re-read, re-traced, and re-made.