SHANGHAI.- The Rockbund Art Museum announces the premiere of Wan Hai Hotel: Singapore Strait, the first iteration of RAM's ongoing Wan Hai Hotel project outside Shanghai.

Artists in this edition include: Arka Kinari (Nova Ruth and Grey Filastine), Bhenji Ra, Tati au Miel, Cai Kunyu, Dawn Ng, Esvin Alarcón Lam, Hoo Fan Chon, Han Ishu, Ho Tzu Nyen, Irwan Ahmett & Tita Salina, John Clang, Joshua Serafin, Ming Wong, Payne Zhu, Miguel Covarrubias, Robert Zhao Renhui, Stephanie Comilang, Taloi Havini, Tan Jing, and Wantanee Siripattananuntakul.

Originally staged at RAM in 2024, during which the museum’s ground-floor was transformed into a fabulous, speculative hotel, Wan Hai Hotel now continues its oceanic voyage through to the Singapore Strait: a historical epicenter of sea-bound commerce where cargos, bodies, and desires continue to flow. In this incarnation, the exhibition seeks to address the Singapore Strait not merely as a geopolitical passage, but as a dense zone where shipping, finance, labor migrations, surveillance, and extractive economies converge. Instead of seeing the ocean as a purely symbolic space, it engages Singapore as a maritime environment that has been structured by these daily rehearsals of power through the form of a hotel: a social and spatial structure very much shaped by the specific oceanic, historical, and logistical conditions of its locale.

Transforming the historic architecture of The Warehouse Hotel, a warehouse-turned-boutique-hotel, originally constructed by a Chinese shipping magnate on the south bank of the Singapore River at the turn of the 20th century, into a space of reflection, Wan Hai Hotel: Singapore Strait enters a site historically defined by tides of labor and intimacy—a district once shaped by boat workers, secret societies, and red-light economies—and draws into view the fundamental premises of hospitality as not simply a service, but a shared condition that fluctuates and allows histories, movements, and encounters to remain active.

Over the course of twelve days, works and performances by over twenty artists and collectives from across Singapore, Southeast Asia, and the Asia-Pacific will inhabit the premises of The Warehouse Hotel and draw on it as a vessel for a collective rehearsal on interruption:

In the reception area, audiences will encounter works by Bhenji Ra, Esvin Alarcón Lam, and Payne Zhu that investigates the complex legacies of the US military tourism industrial complex in Southeast Asia, transcontinental migrations between Asia and the Americas, and financial imaginaries of the ocean through the ecological phenomenon of the 'whale pump', respectively. Meanwhile, across the lounge, bar, and restaurant, moving images and installations by Cai Kunyu, Arka Kinari, Irwan Ahmett and Tita Salina, Ming Wong, and Hoo Fan Chon each examines different valencies of flow and currency in the transmission of ways of life, ritualistic knowledge, developmentalist ideologies, colonial imaginaries, and piscine products as a conduit of social structures and memories.

At the main stage in the ground floor lobby, a dynamic installation of chairs that are rearranged to reflect optimal fortune every hour by John Clang serves as seating to a looping programme featuring six moving image works by Ho Tzu Nyen, Stephanie Comilang, Han Ishu, and Taloi Havini that each stretches the seams between official and unofficial histories, tracing the rhythms and cadences of time as an affective substance, punctuated by performances by Joshua Serafin. Nearby, in the study, audiences are invited to slow down and engage with works by Tan Jing, Dawn Ng, and Robert Zhao Renhui that focus on material presence, opacity, and time, as well as with a variety of archival materials including reference books and past issues of the speculative broadsheet Wan Hai Times. On the second floor, visitors can register for an intimate performance with John Clang where a zi wei dou shu—a metaphysical system that emerged in imperial China which combines astronomy, philosophy, and temporal calculation into an instrument of divination—reading may reveal new destinies and discoveries of one's true self in a camera-less long-exposure portrait.

In every hotel room, guests will have access to moving images by Wantanee Siripattananuntakul: an episode of grieving kickstarts a broader reflection on the intersection of personal and public memories. Meanwhile, spaces around the hotel are activated by maps drawn by Miguel Covarrubias that place the Pacific Ocean at the center of the frame, shifting attention away from continental hierarchies, proposing the ocean not as a void separating distant lands but as a connective field structured by movement, exchange, and relation, and at set times, by performances devised by Bhenji Ra in collaboration with Tati au Miel that draw on mythology, collective memory, and the sonic histories of Singapore’s shadow economies to invoke an enbedded infrastructure of trans-feminine care and hospitality since erased from the public consciousness.

Finding anchorage in the thoughts of Tongan thinker Epeli Hau‘ofa, Wan Hai Hotel: Singapore Strait seeks to ask: How do bodies traverse not only water but power? How do kinship, longing, and endurance persist when everything conspires toward enclosure?

Wan Hai Hotel: Singapore Strait is curated by X Zhu-Nowell, Executive Director and Chief Curator of Rockbund Art Museum, with support from Sam Shiyi Qian, Curator at Rockbund Art Museum.