Wan Hai Hotel: Singapore Strait
The Warehouse Hotel, Singapore
January 20 – 31, 2026
Group exhibition
Curated by X Zhu-Nowell

For twelve days, The Warehouse Hotel will transform into Wan Hai Hotel: Singapore Strait, a speculative space where hospitality becomes both an offering and a question. Featuring over twenty artists from across Singapore, Southeast Asia, and the Asia-Pacific, this exhibition explores archipelagic thinking, maritime identity, and oceanic forms of relation through site-specific installations, performances, conversations, film screenings, and curated menus.

Taking its title from the name of a modest motel located in the Chinatown of Penang, Wan Hai Hotel draws on the the writings of Tongan thinker Epeli Hau’ofa, who posits the vast Pacific ocean as not so much “islands in a far sea” but rather a “sea of islands” as a conceptual key for how we may understand the ocean not as something that divides and separates, but as a living space full of movement, relation, and memory.

Originally staged at the Rockbund Art Museum in Shanghai 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. Here, it 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 transforms the hotel’s architecture of regulated hospitality into a space for reflection.

Over the course of the exhibition, The Warehouse Hotel will become a vessel for a collective rehearsal on interruption; its reception, lounge, bar, study, restaurant, and marginal spaces the convening points for artists whose practices think with tides, straits, migratory routes, and maritime infrastructures. By activating installations, performances, conversations, and sound mappings, the project asks: How do bodies traverse not only water but power? How do kinship, longing, and endurance persist when everything conspires toward enclosure?

We hope you enjoy your stay.

Participating Artist: 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.

Reading by an Artist, Nine Chairs, Table of Inquiry
Live performance, activated in conjunction with Wan Hai Hotel: Singapore Strait

Performance documentation: Courtesy of the artist