​​Transforming public spaces into platforms for collective learning, play, and social connection.

Quek Jia Qi is a Singaporean artist and educator building participatory public art and learning systems that transform everyday spaces into platforms for collective authorship, care, and civic imagination.   

Through socially-engaged art projects across Singapore and beyond, she invites the public to shift from audience to contributors, expanding access to the arts and reshaping how knowledge and culture are made together. 
CURRENT
​BYOR: Bring Your Own Racket, Tanjong Pagar Discover Community Green
SAM Residencies (Community & Education), Singapore Art Museum 
Pharmacy of Play, Ng Teng Fong General Hospital
​A Living Museum for Bukit Gombak, Under Bukit Gombak MRT Viaduct

UPCOMING
Between Tides & Ties, National Museum of Singapore


​Selected Work

How might we bring moments of collective play and pause to our busy city?​


​BYOR: Bring Your Own Racket (2026)

​Tanjong Pagar Discover Community Green, Singapore Art Week 2026
in collaboration with Aaron Lim, supported by National Arts Council

A 46-metre public artwork and participatory activation that reimagined the visual language of city infrastructure as an invitation to play.

​Set in the Central Business District, the work introduced a gentle interruption into a landscape shaped by efficiency, encouraging strangers to slow down, invent new rules, and encounter one another differently.

How might we transform urban infrastructure into a vessel for storytelling in the neighbourhood, with the neighbourhood?


​A Living Museum for Bukit Gombak (2025)

Commissioned for NAC x LTA Art Under Viaduct Spaces, Singapore Art Week 2025
in collaboration with residents and community partners, supported by National Arts Council, Land Transport Authority, SMRT, in partnership with People's Association

A community-rooted public art project that reimagines the space beneath an MRT viaduct as a living archive of neighbourhood stories, material culture, and collective memory. Developed with residents and agencies, it transforms everyday infrastructure into a platform for public participation, shared authorship, and civic imagination.

How might we gather and circulate collective wisdom across the world?​


A Mobile Library for Collective Knowledge (2025)

​Commissioned for Brent Biennial 2025
University of Westminster,
​London, United Kingdom
in collaboration with Aaron Lim and assignment co-authors, supported by National Arts Council

A cross-cultural installation and activation programme between Singapore and the U.K. that reimagines knowledge exchange through communal experience, participation, and lived wisdom. The project challenges traditional models of cultural authority by treating collective experience as a form of public knowledge.

How might we reimagine play as a language of care across generations in a hospital? 


​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.

How might listening be an act of care?​


​Can You Hear Me? (2022)

Commissioned for As You Were, Bishan-AMK Park, Singapore
in collaboration with Aaron Lim,
​supported by Public Art Trust, National Arts Council

A large-scale interactive public artwork that reimagines the cup-and-string telephone as an invitation to listen, play, and connect with nature. Presented in neighbourhood parks across Singapore, the project expands access to contemporary art by turning the everyday landscape into a site of curiosity, encounter, and shared experience.

How might we reimagine the assignment as a collective pedagogical encounter? ​


​Open Assignment (2025)

Participatory Exhibition @ Art Outreach Singapore, Gillman Barracks, Singapore 
in collaboration with Aaron Lim and co-authors of assignments 
​
An evolving participatory framework that invites people to create small assignments for others to try, turning artistic authorship into a shared and distributed act. Across exhibitions, workshops, and public programmes, the project rethinks how knowledge can be generated, circulated, and extended through collective participation.

How might making together help us see the natural world anew?​


​​Field Notes for Encountering Nature (2025)

Participatory Exhibition @ Jurong Lake Gardens Entrance Pavilion
in collaboration with Aaron Lim and ​community workshop participants
​
A participatory public artwork in which collectively created field-note zines emerge through shared observation, reflection, and encounters with the natural world. By inviting participants to notice, document, and interpret nature together, the project reimagines ecological attention as a form of collective learning, authorship, and relation.

Further Works
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​How might we honour the past, present and future of play across generations in our former school grounds? 

First Flight (2024)

Commissioned for Singapore Night Festival 2024 
in collaboration with Aaron Lim, ​supported by National Heritage Board

A public interactive installation that transforms Armenian Street into a site for imagination, play, and collective encounter. Presented as part of Singapore Night Festival, the work draws resonance from the street’s histories of learning and becoming, reimagining flight as an invitation to wonder, participate, and move through public space differently.

How might we be the bridge between sighted and visually impairment individuals to foster greater inclusivity? 

Workbook of Everyday Instructions (2024)

Ways of Seeing Workshop + Workbook Publication, Singapore
in collaboration with Rendi Toh, developed as part of Co:creation Our Time to Shine, supported by the National Arts Council

A participatory workshop and workbook publication developed in collaboration with visually impaired artist Rendi Toh that explores how art-making can become a bridge between sighted and visually impaired participants. Presented as part of Our Time to Shine, the project invites participants to rethink accessibility, adaptability, and shared authorship through everyday creative instructions, opening up more inclusive ways of making, learning, and expressing together.

​How might we reconnect families distanced by technology through the arts and our everyday?

The Art of Family Time (2023)

Commissioned for NAC's The Arts Can Inspire Your Everyday series, supported by the National Arts Council
​
A participatory family art project commissioned for NAC’s The Arts Can Inspire Your Everyday series, exploring how collaborative art-making can strengthen intergenerational connection in daily life. By inviting families to create together instead of retreating into their devices, the project reframes art as a simple but powerful tool for presence, relationship-building, and shared experience.

How might we transform a ​game of the past to forge intergenerational bonds?

​Kuti Kuti? Playground (2023)

Singapore Art Week 2023 × PAssionArts × Arts in Your Neighbourhood, Radin Mas Community Club, Singapore
in collaboration with Aaron Lim

An intergenerational community arts project that transformed the traditional game of kuti kuti into a life-sized soft sculpture playground co-created with the public. Developed through participatory maker labs and presented as an interactive installation, the work brought together participants aged 1 to 82 to turn personal stories of play into a shared public artwork. By reimagining a nostalgic children’s game as a platform for collective authorship, Kuti Kuti? Playgroundexplored how play can connect people across generations in the digital age. 

Archive
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A wider selection of installations, participatory works, and collaborations ​across public art, education, and community contexts