Writing Lab 2025: Public Reading

Over one evening and three sessions, Writing Lab: Public Reading presents excerpts of new creative writing from the cohort of Writing Lab 2025, developed through sustained encounters with NUS Museum’s collections. Moving across poetry, prose, and playwriting, these readings unfold within the museum’s galleries, tracing how writing can act as creative inquiry—imaginatively extending the narrative worlds of the subjects and objects within the museum’s orbit.

Click here to read the Writing Lab 2025 compendium: https://bit.ly/47VWDCi

Session 1: A Room of Relations

Date and Time: 13 Nov, Thu, 7pm to 7:45pm
Venue: NUS Museum, Radio Malaya: abridged conversations about art (Concourse Level)
Free with registration

The writings of Zhixin Sheng, Ho Yi Lin, and KQH Faith respond to a chamber of Radio Malaya: abridged conversations about art, entering into close dialogue with archival photographs by Amanda Heng and Jimmy Ong, and artworks by Ho Soon Yeen, Lin Hsin Hsin, and Michael Lee. Their works probe and complicate the act of looking and making, attending to the presences of writer, artist, and viewer in the encounter with the visual work.

Session 2: Tides that Bind

Date and Time: 13 Nov, Thu, 8:00pm to 8:50pm
Venue: NUS Museum, prep-room: the hull and the rig (NX3 Gallery, Concourse Level)
Free with registration

Marliini Heikkonen, Wee Yi Li Grace, Ahmad Syarif, and Wong Yang trace and retrace shifting bonds and allegiances to places and communities, extending from the anecdotal accounts of islander communities once residing on Singapore’s offshore islands featured in prep-room: From Jurong Island to Selat Sembilan and a series of boat models from prep-room: the hull and the rig.

Session 3: Lives in Correspondence

Date and Time: 13 Nov, Thu, 9:00pm to 9:30pm
Venue: NUS Museum, Outside Resource Library (Top Level)
Free with registration

Drawing from the archives of art historian T.K. Sabapathy, Dia Hakim Khaeri and Tricia Sin unspool latent narrative threads within selected archival texts. Extending Sabapathy’s own mode of writing-as-thinking, their works propose other practices of writing—forms that bear witness to the quiet motions of personal life as they press against the contingencies of parent states, figures, and the complexities of lineage, inheritance, and influence.

How can writers draw from museums, collections, and archives to shape creative work?

Situated within NUS Museum and engaging with its art and archival collections, Writing Lab is a semester-long programme running from September to November 2025 that offers eight emerging writers a museum-based structure for cultivating multifaceted creative writing practices.

Over the course of the programme, participants will encounter a range of visual and textual objects drawn from NUS Museum’s holdings and exhibitions—including prep-room: From Jurong Island to Selat Sembilan, Radio Malaya: Abridged Conversations About Art, and the T.K. Sabapathy Archives. Writing in response to such materials invites a different kind of attention that is shaped by frameworks of display and the echoes of multiple tellings.

These museum-based encounters serve as springboards for writing, reflection, and imagination, encouraging participants to approach archival and anecdotal materials not as static repository of fact, but as sites of lived entanglements where history unfolds through gestures, correspondences, and contradictions.

Through creative writing workshops led by playwright Jean Tay, artist-writer ila, and theatre practitioner Chong Gua Khee, participants will be introduced to a range of critical and creative strategies for developing their practice. In their creative writing journey, they will be invited to consider how personal experiences, inherited memory, and broader narrative frameworks intersect. Each participant will independently develop a piece of creative writing, to be shared in a public reading in early November 2025 and collated into a digital reader published later by NUS Museum.

Application Opens: 11 August 2025

Application Deadline: 25 August 2025

Confirmation of Participants: 1 Sep 2025

For more information, visit here.