National Arts Council, TBWA\Singapore present ‘AfterForms’, reframing the metaverse through art

Singapore – The National Arts Council (NAC) has partnered with TBWA\Singapore to launch AfterForms, a hybrid metaverse exhibition that brings climate grief, memory, and responsibility into dialogue through immersive digital and physical art. 

Supported under NAC’s Project Arts Metaverse initiative, part of Our SG Arts Plan (2023–2027), AfterForms is the third pilot project within the programme and reflects a shared commitment to advancing artistic practice in virtual spaces.

Developed with innovation counsel TBWA\Singapore and produced and curated by Spang & Lei, AfterForms positions the metaverse not as novelty or escape, but as a site of encounter and consequence. 

Conceived as a digital arts incubator, the project examines how digital worlds inherit what physical ones erase, allowing loss, ecological damage, and responsibility to continue accumulating virtually.

The exhibition unfolds across four newly commissioned virtual environments, complemented by physical installations at The Arts House. 

Visitors move between physical and digital realms as active participants, with presence, movement, and breath shaping what unfolds. 

Each interaction leaves a trace, inviting reflection on how digital environments can carry emotional residue, unresolved histories, and climate grief forward.

The commissioned works include Land Erosion by Cultural Medallion recipient Han Sai Por, which pairs sculptural installations with a virtual landscape shaped by erosion; Drift Alley by Debbie Ding, a fragmented digital environment inspired by the back lanes of Little India and the precarious economies embedded within them; The Wound is Bigger than Your Handyplast by Spang & Lei, a responsive virtual rainforest where interaction accumulates damage rather than repair; and Memory Factory by LiteWerkz, which presents memory as a navigable structure shaped by migration, misremembered homes, and speculative artifacts.

Beyond the artworks, AfterForms also features an artists’ talk, workshops, and a digital art toolkit designed to enable artists with no coding experience to build their own virtual worlds, reinforcing NAC’s aim to strengthen the arts sector’s digital capabilities through long-term, practice-led experimentation.

Victor Ang, director, Technology and Innovation at the National Arts Council, said, “Project Arts Metaverse reflects NAC’s commitment to support new modes of artistic creation in the virtual space while building the sector’s digital capabilities. We empower artists to experiment with technology and explore ideas through the virtual worlds they are developing. AfterForms demonstrates how digital environments can become sites of memory and cultural reflection that engage new audiences.”

Spang & Lei, producers and curators of AfterForms, said, “Technology promises reinvention, but it cannot erase consequence. The metaverse exposes what we have already neglected. AfterForms approaches it as a living archive of unresolved histories, emotional residue, and ecological memory. Every action becomes trace. Every choice persists. The future is not elsewhere. It is already sedimenting in the worlds we build.”

AfterForms runs from 22 to 31 January 2026 at the Blue Room, The Arts House, Singapore, from 12pm to 8pm daily. The artists’ talk, Worlds That Refuse to Disappear, takes place on 25 January 2026, from 3.00pm to 4.30pm, by registration only.