Wan Hai Hotel: Singapore Strait

Synopsis

Welcome to Wan Hai Hotel!

Wan Hai Hotel: Singapore Strait marks the second appearance of the Wan Hai Hotel, a recurring exhibition project that resurfaces across maritime geographies, each time reconstituting a speculative 'hotel'. Like a mirage, Wan Hai Hotel emerges in different contexts with shifting contours. Each reappearance produces a new site for thinking about how we come to know the ocean, an epistemological locale for 'unmooring' and dismantling the borders that have long harnessed the waters we depend upon.

In this iteration, the project recasts The Warehouse Hotel, a fully operational boutique hotel on the Singapore River that used to be a warehouse, into a stage for generative fabulations. 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 speculative dispositif.

For ten days, the hotel will become a vessel for a collective rehearsal for interruption; its reception, lounge, bar, study, restaurant, and marginal spaces the convening points for twenty artists whose practices think with tides, straits, migratory routes, and maritime infrastructures. By activating installations, performances, conversations, and sonic interventions, the exhibition asks:

How do bodies traverse not only water but power?

How do kinship, longing, and endurance persist when everything conspires toward enclosure?