If you have walked past Tanjong Pagar Distripark recently, you might have noticed something different. Three new artworks have quietly taken up residence across the complex, commissioned by Singapore Art Museum (SAM) as part of The Everyday Museum — a long-term public art initiative that positions everyday urban spaces as sites for creative encounter.
The Everyday Museum has been part of SAM’s broader mandate to extend art beyond gallery walls and into the rhythms of daily life. Rather than asking audiences to travel to a museum, it brings the museum to them — woven into the spaces where people work, rest and move through the city.
Three New Commissions at Tanjong Pagar Distripark
Tanjong Pagar Distripark has its own layered history. Once a busy port shaped by the movement of goods, trade and labour, it has evolved into a mixed-use complex that still carries traces of its industrial past. The three new commissions respond to this specific character — the site’s restlessness, its invisible histories, and the people who continue to move through it today.
Daniel Chong’s Insomniac States (2025) is installed within the Distripark and reflects on the site’s sense of perpetual motion — a place that never fully rests. Chong, whose practice often examines the gaps between public and private, asks visitors to slow down and look again at the textures of a space that most people pass through without pausing.
Joyce Beetuan Koh’s OASIS (2025) offers a different kind of intervention — a moment of respite within a working environment. Koh has long explored how natural and organic forms can be introduced into built spaces to create a sense of pause. OASIS invites visitors to consider the Distripark not just as a transit point, but as a space capable of sustaining quiet and contemplation.
Kapilan Naidu’s Salintar Dreams of a Tranquil Sea (soliloquy_tpd) (2025) draws on the cultural and personal histories embedded in this landscape. Working in sound, text and spatial installation, Naidu creates works that honour overlooked voices and experiences. Here, the Distripark becomes a site for remembering — and for imagining — the communities that have shaped it.
What The Everyday Museum Is About
The Everyday Museum was conceived as a way of demonstrating that art does not need to sit inside a white-cube gallery to carry meaning. By commissioning artists to create site-specific works in transit nodes, streetscapes and everyday environments, SAM aims to cultivate curiosity and foster a relationship between the public and contemporary art that does not require a museum ticket or a special occasion.
At Tanjong Pagar Distripark specifically, the works are spread across different locations within the complex. This means a visit is less about standing in front of a single centrepiece and more about exploring — noticing how the artworks sit in relation to the architecture, the workers, and the everyday rhythms of the place.
How to Visit
Tanjong Pagar Distripark is accessible from Tanjong Pagar MRT (EW15) or Cantonment MRT (CC36). The artworks are free to view and are sited within the public areas of the complex. For more information about The Everyday Museum and a full listing of its current commissions, visit theeverydaymuseum.sg.
If you are looking for other things to explore around the neighbourhood, we have also rounded up things to do in Singapore and covered other upcoming events worth putting on your radar.
