Pharmacy of Play (2025)
Community Arts Public Installation for Ng Teng Fong General Hospital, Singapore
in collaboration with seniors from NTUC Health Active Ageing Centre (Taman Jurong) and youths from Tasek, supported by Jurong Health Fund
An intergenerational community art project developed with participants aged 7 to 86 to transform the hospital into a site of exchange, where younger and older participants co-create playful prescriptions for connection, resilience, and thriving.
Pharmacy of Play is an intergenerational participatory artwork developed within a hospital setting, where play is approached not as distraction, but as a form of care, exchange, and social healing. Bringing together participants across ages, the project explored how wisdom, memory, and imagination might be shared through collective acts of making.
The work responds to the hospital not only as a site of treatment, but as a public space shaped by vulnerability, waiting, care, and encounter. It asks how art might create room for tenderness and reciprocity within such an environment, and how intergenerational exchange might become a source of wellbeing in itself.
The project was developed through workshops, conversation, and collaborative making processes that invited participants to reflect on their own experiences of play, rest, connection, and joy. These contributions informed the language of the final work, allowing the installation to carry the textures of lived experience rather than simply represent them.
In this way, Pharmacy of Play functions as both artwork and social proposition. It reframes play as something restorative, relational, and collectively held, while expanding what a care space can hold.