Walking through the ‘Everyday Practices’ exhibit, which opened in August 2024 at the Singapore Art Museum (SAM), one would encounter a quiet yet powerful invitation to find acts of resistance, survival, and hope in the ordinary and everyday. The exhibition Everyday Practices brings together works by 20 artists from Southeast and East Asia, using mundane gestures, daily routines, repetition, and endurance to confront the trauma of political oppression, personal suffering, and collective upheaval.
Tehching Hsieh’s One Year Performance (1978–1979)
At the heart of the show is the work of Tehching Hsieh, whose radical, durational performance art, most famously his one-year confinement in a self-constructed cell (1978–79), transforms time itself into an act of defiance. Hsieh’s approach becomes a lens through which all the other works are framed, the everyday becomes a medium, endurance becomes expression, and repetition becomes a form of protest against instability.
Htein Lin’s Soap Blocked (2016)
Surrounding Hsieh’s legacy are confronting and deeply human pieces. Htein Lin’s Soap Blocked (2016), for example, arranges hundreds of soap blocks carved while in political prison into a map of his homeland, Myanmar, each tiny block holding a huddled figure, showing personal suffering and collective oppression. Another, the intensely physical video performance Mon Boulet (2011) by Svay Sareth, documents dragging an 80 kg metal ball for 250 km, a devastating metaphor for historical trauma under the Khmer Rouge. Meanwhile, intimate grief and memory are rendered in The Flower Field (2012) by Imhathai Suwatthanasilp, thousands of “flowers” woven from different hair donated by cancer patients, a tribute to her father and a meditation on loss and hope.
Svay Sareth Mon Boulet (2011) Imhathai Suwatthanasilp The Flower Field (2012)
What is most impressive is how the exhibition reframes what we think of as meaningful art. Often, we expect great gestures, spectacle, or overt protest. But here, through simple objects, repetitive acts, small sacrifices, artists mark time, struggle, pain, and also resilience. It also “highlights the power of individuals, and the collective impact of their resilience” (Teng Yen Hu). Those histories through artists’ eyes also provide a lesson in human fortitude, recalling the Audre Lorde poem Litany for Survival, which concludes: “So it is better The curatorial themes of “everyday,” “repetition,” and “endurance” show that survival itself can be the most radical kind of optimism, that subtle, patient acts, whether drawing with a paralysed hand, carving soap under incarceration, or dragging a heavy ball across kilometers, speaks louder than any shouted slogan.
In today’s world, where many of us experience uncertainty, displacement, political or social upheaval, this exhibition feels deeply relevant. It urges us to consider the small rituals in our daily lives, perhaps mundane, but potentially important. Art, in this sense, becomes not just commentary, but companion, witness, solace. It reminds us that in adversity, persistence matters, that defiance need not always roar, sometimes it whispers in steady rhythm. Ultimately, Everyday Practices doesn’t just showcase art. It reframes human dignity. It reminds us that even when systems try to diminish people, the simple act of continuing to breathe, creating, and remembering can be radical.
https://www.singaporeartmuseum.sg/Art-Events/Exhibitions/Everyday-Practices