At the 61st International Art Exhibition of La Biennale di Venezia, curated under the posthumously realized theme “In Minor Keys,” some of the most resonant national presentations are not the loudest ones. Instead, they unfold quietly, almost imperceptibly, asking visitors to slow their pace, recalibrate their senses, and pay attention to gestures often overlooked in everyday life.
While vastly different in form, both pavilions reject spectacle in favor of rhythm, atmosphere, and intimacy. In a Biennale marked by geopolitical anxieties and increasingly monumental installations, they propose another possibility for contemporary art: one rooted in attentiveness.
Amanda Heng’s Space for Rest and Reflection
Singapore Pavilion artist Amanda Heng Liang Ngim and curator Selene Yap. Image courtesy of Singapore Art Museum.
The Singapore Pavilion, titled A Pause, is among the most affecting presentations in Venice this year. Conceived by curator Selene Yap and centered on the work of pioneering artist Amanda Heng Liang Ngim, the exhibition transforms the Sale d’Armi into what feels less like an exhibition space than a breathing environment.
For nearly four decades, Heng has developed a practice grounded in the body, in repetitive gestures, and in the social choreography of everyday life. Emerging from Singapore’s performance art scene of the late 1980s, she has long explored how ordinary actions walking, chatting, carrying, waiting can become vehicles for memory, care, and resilience.
The pavilion itself has been architecturally reconfigured using larch wood, the same timber historically used for the foundations and flooring of Venice’s Arsenale. Angled wooden platforms rise slowly through the space, following the irregular geometry of the building before reaching the windowsills, which become thresholds rather than frames. Visitors are invited not simply to look at the work, but to inhabit it: to sit, lean, lie down, or remain still.
This physical invitation to rest becomes the conceptual core of the exhibition. In a global art world increasingly driven by acceleration, image production, and performative visibility, Heng proposes slowness as both resistance and necessity.
Everyday Rituals Become Acts of Resistance
Installation view of “Parts of My Body (1990, reprinted 2026),”
Singapore Pavilion, Biennale Arte 2026. Image courtesy of
Singapore Art Museum.
The dual-channel video installation A Pause (2025–26) deepens this meditation. Filmed in both Singapore and Venice using long static takes and natural light, the work follows individuals engaged in small acts of daily life: watering plants, preparing breakfast, walking through neighborhoods, gazing at the sky. Nothing dramatic happens, yet the work becomes deeply absorbing precisely because it allows time to unfold without interruption.
Rather than emphasizing the iconic imagery of either city, Heng focuses on their quiet corners and unnoticed rituals. Venice and Singapore—two dense maritime cities shaped by trade, migration, and urban pressure become linked through shared rhythms of survival and renewal. The work suggests that pause is not inactivity but a form of recalibration, a way for the body to negotiate contemporary life.
Equally powerful is the re-presentation of Parts of My Body (1990, reprinted 2026), a series of enlarged black-and-white photographs depicting fragments of Heng’s body: a shoulder, a clavicle, the curve of a back. Installed leaning casually against the pavilion walls, the images transform the body into landscape, carrying traces of aging, memory, and continuity across decades.
Kingsley Ng and Angel Hui Explore Memory Through Atmosphere
Kingsley Ng, “Laundry Nocturne.” ©Hong Kong Museum of Art.
The Hong Kong Pavilion operates in a similarly understated register, though with a more urban and sensory approach. Titled Fermata: Hong Kong in Venice, the exhibition brings together artists Kingsley Ng and Angel Hui in the city’s first dual-artist presentation at Venice since 2007.
The title itself references the musical notation “fermata,” a symbol indicating that a note should be prolonged beyond its standard duration. The metaphor is apt. Like Singapore’s pavilion, Hong Kong’s exhibition asks viewers to remain longer within moments that usually disappear unnoticed.
Curated by the Hong Kong Museum of Art in collaboration with the Hong Kong Arts Development Council, the exhibition transforms everyday objects from Hong Kong into an atmospheric choreography of light, sound, and shadow.
Fleeting Atmosphere of Urban Life
Angel Hui, “I Would Like to Open a Window for You.” ©Hong Kong Museum of Art.
Kingsley Ng, known for his immersive installations using light and environmental perception, contributes works that evoke the fragile temporality of urban existence. Angel Hui, whose practice draws from traditional gongbi painting and delicate spatial interventions, introduces window-like forms and suspended structures that oscillate between intimacy and estrangement.
The result is a pavilion that feels suspended between memory and disappearance. Windows glow red in darkened rooms, shadows drift across walls, and ordinary materials become emotionally charged. Rather than presenting Hong Kong through overt political symbolism or grand narratives, the exhibition focuses on sensory memory: the texture of light through apartment windows, the soundscape of dense urban life, the emotional architecture of the city itself.
In many ways, the Hong Kong and Singapore pavilions embody the spirit of “In Minor Keys” more successfully than some of the larger national presentations. They understand that the minor key is not about withdrawal but modulation. It is about nuance, hesitation, and emotional depth.
Kingsley Ng, “Sometimes, There Are Clouds in Puddles.” © Hong Kong Museum of Art.
