Sullivan+Strumpf is thrilled to celebrate the new year with Tending ground, opening at their Singapore gallery during the city’s Art Week. This group exhibition features artists who draw upon deep material and contextual knowledge to care for communities, environments, and more-than-human relationships.

Yanyun Chen’s work offers a powerful critique of power dynamics between local labour and global privilege, while celebrating the beauty of intergenerational storytelling and inherited knowledge within close-knit Asian communities. This narrative of displaced power finds resonance with Mangala Bai Mavi, making a welcome return to the gallery. Her striking monochrome paintings preserve intangible cultural heritage of the Baiga community in central India through Godna – traditional tattoos that record life stories and possess healing properties when correctly applied, honouring the women who bear them.

Also returning is Wisnu Auri, whose teakwood works feel like fragments of a memory itself, personal stories carved into physical form. These pieces create a compelling dialogue with Lynda Draper’s ceramic wall sculptures and Seth Birchall’s bold, gestural landscapes. Together, this trio explores how personal history surfaces through visual interpretation and recollected memory, revealing a profound attentiveness to their surroundings and the delicate relationships between self and environment.

The exhibition features powerful statement pieces from Lindy Lee, Angela Tiatia and Irfan Hendrian – internationally acclaimed artists whose technical mastery intertwines with deep introspection. Tiatia and Hendrian turn the lens of community care inwards, exploring critical socio-political issues in their home countries, while Eko Nugroho and Yang Yongliang expand these concerns through their own distinct visual languages.