Open Assignment (2025- Ongoing)
Participatory Exhibition @ Art Outreach Singapore, Gillman Barracks, Singapore
in collaboration with Aaron Lim and co-authors of assignments
Open Assignment is an evolving participatory exhibition framework that invites people to create, respond to, and circulate small assignments for others to try. Shifting the public from audience to contributor, the project rethinks artistic authorship as a shared and distributed act, and explores how knowledge can be generated, extended, and exchanged through collective participation.
The Collective Call
What makes a good assignment?
Learning has always been relational. Generative. A way of making meaning together. Open Assignment grew out of that curiosity. In a way, it is an experiment in rethinking how we approach instructions, drawing from a long lineage of instruction-based artworks. Think Yoko Ono’s Grapefruit, John Cage’s scores, Sol LeWitt’s sentences on conceptual art. In this exhibition, the focus is not only the art object, but on the act of proposing: of offering something small and unfinished for someone else to take up.
Knowledge that resides in all of us, and that we have the capacity to write assignments of our own to imagine learning not as consumption, but as collaboration. Open Assignment is a continuation of that impulse, scaled into a public, collective space, to ask: What if we treated assignments not as obligations, but as invitations to shape the way we learn and live? Could an assignment be a gift, a provocation, a gesture of care?
Guided by the same spirit of invitation, the space is imagined as a working room, a site of shared authorship and living framework — open, adaptable, and responsive to the contributions of its participants. Visitors are invited not only to view but to contribute and inhabit the space with their ideas. This exhibition is made possible thanks to every contributor whose spirit of play and inquiry lives on in these pages. Try an assignment or create your own at openassignment.xyz.
Knowledge that resides in all of us, and that we have the capacity to write assignments of our own to imagine learning not as consumption, but as collaboration. Open Assignment is a continuation of that impulse, scaled into a public, collective space, to ask: What if we treated assignments not as obligations, but as invitations to shape the way we learn and live? Could an assignment be a gift, a provocation, a gesture of care?
Guided by the same spirit of invitation, the space is imagined as a working room, a site of shared authorship and living framework — open, adaptable, and responsive to the contributions of its participants. Visitors are invited not only to view but to contribute and inhabit the space with their ideas. This exhibition is made possible thanks to every contributor whose spirit of play and inquiry lives on in these pages. Try an assignment or create your own at openassignment.xyz.
So what forms can an assignment (and exhibition) take?
Usually tied to instruction, authority, and completion, I was interested in what might happen if an assignment could instead function as an invitation. Rather than asking for a correct answer, could it open up space for interpretation, exchange, and shared authorship?
From the outset, the project was conceived not as a fixed exhibition, but as a participatory system that could grow through public contribution. I wanted to shift the role of the audience from passive viewer to active contributor, allowing the work to be shaped by the people who encountered it. In this way, the exhibition became less a presentation of finished outcomes and more a structure for collective meaning making.
The process involved creating and gathering small assignments contributed by different people. Often simple, playful, reflective, or open-ended, these prompts became ways of noticing, imagining, and relating. What interested me was not only the individual assignments themselves, but the larger ecology they formed together, one shaped by circulation, response, and adaptation.
A key question throughout was how to hold openness with enough clarity and intention. The assignments needed to be accessible enough for people to enter, while still carrying conceptual depth. This meant thinking carefully about prompt-making as a form of hosting: how a simple invitation might create conditions for curiosity, agency, and exchange. In collaboration with Aaron Lim, presentation was also integral to the process. The project was not only about collecting assignments, but about considering how they could be encountered as a living and changing body of work. This meant thinking about display as something closer to hosting than arrangement. How might the space feel invitational rather than instructional? How might it encourage people to browse, pick up, contribute, revisit, or leave traces for others? These questions shaped the way the project was spatialised, allowing the exhibition to function less as a static display and more as a site of circulation, response, and return.
As the project evolved, it also became a way of rethinking authorship. Rather than positioning the artist as the sole producer of meaning, Open Assignment redistributed authorship across contributors, participants, and visitors. The work unfolded through the traces people left behind, the responses they offered, and the ways they interpreted or extended what was given.
At its core, Open Assignment explores how culture and knowledge might be shaped collectively through small, open invitations. It proposes the exhibition not as a static container of completed works, but as a living framework for participation, reflection, and shared imagination. An assignment does not need to be monumental to matter. It can be quiet, provisional, and incomplete, yet still open up another way of relating to the world and to one another. In this sense, Open Assignment is grounded in the belief that culture can be shaped not only through finished works, but through shared prompts, distributed authorship, and the willingness to let meaning emerge collectively.
From the outset, the project was conceived not as a fixed exhibition, but as a participatory system that could grow through public contribution. I wanted to shift the role of the audience from passive viewer to active contributor, allowing the work to be shaped by the people who encountered it. In this way, the exhibition became less a presentation of finished outcomes and more a structure for collective meaning making.
The process involved creating and gathering small assignments contributed by different people. Often simple, playful, reflective, or open-ended, these prompts became ways of noticing, imagining, and relating. What interested me was not only the individual assignments themselves, but the larger ecology they formed together, one shaped by circulation, response, and adaptation.
A key question throughout was how to hold openness with enough clarity and intention. The assignments needed to be accessible enough for people to enter, while still carrying conceptual depth. This meant thinking carefully about prompt-making as a form of hosting: how a simple invitation might create conditions for curiosity, agency, and exchange. In collaboration with Aaron Lim, presentation was also integral to the process. The project was not only about collecting assignments, but about considering how they could be encountered as a living and changing body of work. This meant thinking about display as something closer to hosting than arrangement. How might the space feel invitational rather than instructional? How might it encourage people to browse, pick up, contribute, revisit, or leave traces for others? These questions shaped the way the project was spatialised, allowing the exhibition to function less as a static display and more as a site of circulation, response, and return.
As the project evolved, it also became a way of rethinking authorship. Rather than positioning the artist as the sole producer of meaning, Open Assignment redistributed authorship across contributors, participants, and visitors. The work unfolded through the traces people left behind, the responses they offered, and the ways they interpreted or extended what was given.
At its core, Open Assignment explores how culture and knowledge might be shaped collectively through small, open invitations. It proposes the exhibition not as a static container of completed works, but as a living framework for participation, reflection, and shared imagination. An assignment does not need to be monumental to matter. It can be quiet, provisional, and incomplete, yet still open up another way of relating to the world and to one another. In this sense, Open Assignment is grounded in the belief that culture can be shaped not only through finished works, but through shared prompts, distributed authorship, and the willingness to let meaning emerge collectively.