Bring Your Own Racket (BYOR)
Interactive Public Installation, Discover Tanjong Pagar Community Green as part of Singapore Art Week 2026
in collaboration with Aaron Lim, supported by National Arts Council
46m x 2.6m
BYOR reimagines public art as a way to redesign how we behave, play and gather in the city.
Installed in the heart of Singapore’s Central Business District during Singapore Art Week 2026, Bring Your Own Racket (BYOR) transformed the familiar badminton net into a large-scale participatory sculpture for public play and encounter. Co-created with spatial designer Aaron Lim, the work used the visual language of urban infrastructure to open up an unlikely space for joy, improvisation, and shared authorship within a district typically defined by productivity and flow. Through BYOR Play Test, the artwork became a live civic platform: participants were invited to bring their own rackets or improvised objects, invent new rules and tactics, and collectively expand a growing playbook around the sculpture. This shifted the project beyond installation into activation, demonstrating how public art can function as a framework for collective making, behavioural experimentation, and social connection. BYOR reached 20,000+ people onsite and approximately 84,000 online.
Installed in the heart of Singapore’s Central Business District during Singapore Art Week 2026, Bring Your Own Racket (BYOR) transformed the familiar badminton net into a large-scale participatory sculpture for public play and encounter. Co-created with spatial designer Aaron Lim, the work used the visual language of urban infrastructure to open up an unlikely space for joy, improvisation, and shared authorship within a district typically defined by productivity and flow. Through BYOR Play Test, the artwork became a live civic platform: participants were invited to bring their own rackets or improvised objects, invent new rules and tactics, and collectively expand a growing playbook around the sculpture. This shifted the project beyond installation into activation, demonstrating how public art can function as a framework for collective making, behavioural experimentation, and social connection. BYOR reached 20,000+ people onsite and approximately 84,000 online.
BYOR: Bring Your Own Racket reimagines the city as a site for spontaneous play, encounter, and co-authorship. Installed within Singapore’s CBD, the work borrowed from the visual language of urban infrastructure to create a subtle but striking interruption in a district shaped by speed, efficiency, and routine. The project began with an interest in how a minimal spatial gesture might alter social behaviour in public space. Rather than introducing play as spectacle, the work tested how a line in space could invite people to slow down, look up, improvise, and negotiate new rules together. In this way, play became both an artistic medium and a social method.
The process involved studying the material language of the site, observing movement and tempo within the district, and developing a structure that could feel at once familiar and gently disorienting. Public activation was central to the work: participants were invited to invent their own rackets, games, and forms of interaction, shifting the public from audience to active contributors.
For Singapore Art Week 2026, BYOR was presented as a free public artwork at Discover Tanjong Pagar Community Green. What emerged was not only a sculpture, but a temporary civic framework for shared imagination. BYOR asks what becomes possible when public space is designed not only for transit and productivity, but for relation, invention, and collective permission.
The process involved studying the material language of the site, observing movement and tempo within the district, and developing a structure that could feel at once familiar and gently disorienting. Public activation was central to the work: participants were invited to invent their own rackets, games, and forms of interaction, shifting the public from audience to active contributors.
For Singapore Art Week 2026, BYOR was presented as a free public artwork at Discover Tanjong Pagar Community Green. What emerged was not only a sculpture, but a temporary civic framework for shared imagination. BYOR asks what becomes possible when public space is designed not only for transit and productivity, but for relation, invention, and collective permission.
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