A Living Museum for Bukit Gombak (2025)

​Interactive Public Installation, Bukit Gombak MRT Viaduct Space, as part of Singapore Art Week 2025

Commissioned under NAC X LTA Art Under Viaduct Spaces initiative, supported by Land Transport Authority (LTA), National Arts Council (NAC) and Singapore Mass Rapid Transit (SMRT) and in partnership with People’s Association (PA). 
A Living Museum for Bukit Gombak is a public art initiative that transforms viaduct columns into community cabinets of curiosities. By reimagining urban infrastructure as vessels for storytelling, the artwork invites residents to elevate everyday objects and personal memories into meaningful cultural artefacts that inspire exploration and discovery. Inspired by the meaning of 'gombak' in Malay, which translates to "a collection of something," each cabinet intertwines the narratives of Bukit Gombak's community life through shared everyday experiences, facilitating the exchange of new discoveries in the neighbourhood through its material culture.  

​This project is led by artist Quek Jia Qi, as part of the first artist commission for NACxLTA Art Under Viaduct Spaces, as featured in multiple press release and media.

The project responds to a larger question of who gets to narrate the city, and where those narratives are allowed to live. By working with residents and neighbourhood histories, the project challenged the idea that civic space is only functional, proposing instead that it can also hold memory, imagination, and belonging. A Living Museum for Bukit Gombak reimagines the space beneath an MRT viaduct as a site for neighbourhood memory, authorship, and shared cultural life. Rather than treating infrastructure as neutral background, the project approaches it as a public threshold where local stories, material culture, and everyday experience can be made visible.

Its development involved listening to the site, engaging with community stories, and translating these into participatory forms that residents could encounter and contribute to. The final work is therefore not simply installed in the neighbourhood, but shaped through it, shifting the terms through which public art/space is experienced, valued, and collectively authored. 

A digital archive is also live and accessible via the artwork: www.alivingmuseumforbukitgombak.com