Kent Chan | Three Acts of the Sun at NTU CCA Singapore

ai. is pleased to share that Kent Chan will present Three Acts of the Sun at the NTU Centre for Contemporary Art Singapore from 18 January to 1 February 2026. This marks the artist's first solo exhibition in Singapore since 2019.

Three Acts of the Sun captures a significant chapter in Chan’s practice, focusing on the deepening entanglement between the artist’s tropical imaginaries and the accelerating climate crisis. Bringing together a newly commissioned film, performance, and print series alongside recent works, the exhibition gathers speculative visions of a planet transformed by heat.

The project examines global warming as a planetary process with far-reaching ecological, social, and emotional consequences. Chan charts the tension between the reality of an increasingly heated planet and his desire to imagine the tropics in the future tense. Set in unspecified futures, the works envision a sweeping “tropicalisation” of the Earth, where climate boundaries dissolve and human life is reshaped by environmental migrations, intergenerational injustice, geoengineering, and memories of lost climates. The exhibition becomes a portal into these speculative worlds, offering narratives of how life might unfold on a heated planet.

At the centre of the exhibition is the new moving-image work Weather Casting. Conflating prediction and actualisation, weather lore and techno-agency, the film explores a future in which geoengineering transforms weather from something forecasted to something produced. Fictional news presenters report on engineered weather along the Asian-Pacific monsoon route, while AI-driven climate systems — named after ancient local deities — attempt to command rainfall, wind, and cloud. Their interventions ultimately expose geopolitical tensions and climatic disruptions. For this presentation, the exhibition space — situated beside a secondary tropical rainforest — will relinquish climate control, allowing Singapore’s heat and humidity to shape the experience of the works. Viewers encounter the exhibition not only visually and sonically, but physically, as the surrounding climate becomes an active agent in the installation.

Three Acts of the Sun forms part of NTU CCA Singapore’s long-term research platform Climates.Habitats.Environments., initiated in 2017 to foster interdisciplinary dialogue on ecological complexity and the escalating climate crisis.

Three Acts of the Sun is curated by Dr Anna Lovecchio, Curator, NTU CCA Singapore and is part of Singapore Art Week 2026. 

This project is supported by the National Arts Council Singapore and Mondriaan Fund.

Dates

18 January – 1 February 2026

Hours
Monday to Sunday
12:30 – 6:30pm

Saturday, 24 January 2026
12:30 – 10:00pm

Closed on Monday 19 January 2026

Opening
Saturday, 17 January 2026
4:00 – 7:00pm

Location

The Hall, NTU Centre for Contemporary Art Singapore
Gillman Barracks, 6 Lock Road, #01-09
Singapore 108934