SINGAPORE.- NTU Centre for Contemporary Art Singapore presents Kent Chan. Three Acts of the Sun, the first solo exhibition for the Amsterdam-based artist in his home country since 2019. The exhibition captures a significant chapter of Chan’s artistic trajectory, focusing on the growing entanglement of his tropical imaginaries with the escalating climate crisis. Featuring a newly commissioned film, performance, and print series alongside a selection of recent works, Three Acts of the Sun charts the tension between the reality of a planet increasingly dominated by heat and Chan’s desire to imagine the tropics in the future tense. It is from this vantage point of impending change that the artist looks forward and summons worlds to come.
Set in unspecified futures, the artworks included in the exhibition envision scenarios of advanced global warming where the climate demarcations of today have dissolved into a sweeping tropicalisation of the Earth. Framing this climatic shift through the prism of the embodied human experience, Chan’s narratives speculate on environmental migrations, the burden of intergenerational injustice, and the hubris of technological mastery of weather, all haunted by memories of climates extinct but not forgotten.
The centrepiece of the exhibition is the newly commissioned moving-image installation titled Weather Casting. By conflating prediction and actualisation, weather lore and techno-agency, divination and doom, the work builds upon the evolution of human relations to the weather from a history of reverence, adaptation, and survival towards one of technologically empowered intervention. It addresses the rising ambitions for an engineerable Earth, delving into the radical shift from forecasting the weather to casting weather into reality through geoengineering: large-scale interventions in the Earth’s climate system. In this speculative era of ‘Tropics_Domain’, the technological mastery of weather is enacted by AI-driven systems, which are named after ancient local deities once believed to preside over the elements and natural harmony. Programmed to clear the clouds, harness the winds, and rule over rainfall in service of human needs, these “deities” ultimately give voice to geopolitical antagonisms, environmental disruptions, and existential crises.
For this presentation, the exhibition space—situated on the verge of a secondary tropical rainforest—relinquishes climate control, allowing Singapore’s heat and humidity to become atmospheric contributors to the exhibition. Through the deliberate shift from climate control to air circulation, the artworks become immersed in the tropical temperature they are informed by, bringing viewers to experience the core concerns of this project not just visually, sonically, and intellectually, but in the flesh of their bodies.
Three Acts of the Sun serves as a portal into the speculative climate futures conjured by the artist, transporting the public into possible worlds ahead where the tales and the songs of our descendants reveal stories of human life as it unfolds on a heated planet.
This project contributes to NTU CCA Singapore’s Climates.Habitats.Environments., a long-term line of inquiry aimed at the holistic understanding of this vital triangulation. Initiated in 2017, it focuses on environmentally engaged artistic practices and interdisciplinary collaborations to foster critical thinking and public awareness about the ecological complexities and the escalating climate crisis of our time.
Kent Chan. Three Acts of the Sun is curated by Dr Anna Lovecchio, Curator, Programmes, NTU CCA Singapore.
Kent Chan (b. 1984, Singapore) is an artist, curator, and filmmaker based in The Netherlands. Working across moving-image, text, performance, and exhibition-making, his practice centers on encounters between art, fiction, and cinema yielding works that are porous in form, content, and context. He holds particular interest in the tropical imaginary, the past and future relationships between heat and art, and contestations to the legacies of modernity.
