Image: Kent Chan, Weather Casting, 2026, still from film. Courtesy of Kent Chan
NTU Singapore Centre for Contemporary Art (NTU CCA Singapore) will be presenting Amsterdam-based artist Kent Chan's first solo exhibition in his home country since 2019, in a series of artworks that examine the impact of global warming on the planet.
Kent Chan. Three Acts of the Sun captures a significant chapter of Chan's artistic trajectory, focusing on the growing entanglement of the artist's tropical imaginaries with the escalation of the climate crisis in recent years. Featuring a newly commissioned film, performance, and print series alongside a selection of recent works, Three Acts of the Sun gathers speculative visions on the future of our planet.
Kent Chan. Three Acts of the Sun is curated by Dr Anna Lovecchio, Curator, NTU CCA Singapore and is part of Singapore Art Week 2026. It will run from 18 January to 1 February 2026 at The Hall, NTU CCA Singapore.
Global warming is a complex planetary process that has far-reaching and interconnected consequences across ecology and society, economy and culture, politics and emotions.
Dr Anna Lovecchio said: "The exhibition charts the tension between the reality of a planet increasingly dominated by heat and Kent Chan's desire to imagine the tropics in the future tense. It is from this vantage point of impending change that the artist looks forward and summons worlds to come. Set in unspecified futures, the artworks included in Three Acts of the Sun envision scenarios of advanced global warming where the climate demarcations of today have dissolved into a sweeping 'tropicalisation' of the Earth."
Framing this climatic shift through the prism of the embodied human experience, Chan's narratives speculate over environmental migrations, the burden of intergenerational injustice, and the hubris of technological mastery of the weather, all haunted by memories of lost climates.
Imagining the future of global warming
The exhibition serves as a portal into the speculative climate futures conjured by the artist, transporting the public into possible worlds ahead where the tales and the songs of our descendants reveal stories of human life as it unfolds on a heated planet.
The centrepiece of the exhibition is the new moving-image work, Weather Casting. Conflating prediction and actualisation, weather lore and techno-agency, divination and doom, the film builds upon the evolution of human relations to the weather from a history of reverence, adaptation, and survival towards one of technologically empowered intervention addressing our rising ambitions for an engineerable Earth. Weather Casting delves in radical shift from forecasting the weather to casting weather into reality through geoengineering, large-scale interventions in the Earth's climate system.
A series of fictional news presenters report on geoengineered weather along the route of the Asian-Pacific monsoon - one of the largest weather systems in the world - that connects Southeast and East Asia as the two lobes of the same planetary engine. In this speculative era of 'Tropics_Domain', the technological mastery of the weather is enacted by AI-driven systems, that are named after ancient local deities once believed to preside over the elements and natural harmony.
Programmed to clear the clouds, harness the winds, and rule over rainfall in service of human needs, these "deities" ultimately give voice to geopolitical antagonisms, environmental disruptions, and existential crises.
For this presentation, the exhibition space, situated on the verge of a secondary tropical rainforest, will relinquish its climate control, allowing Singapore's heat and humidity to become atmospheric contributors to the exhibition. Through the deliberate immersion of the artworks in the tropical temperature they are informed by, viewers are brought to experience the core concerns of this project not just visually, sonically, and intellectually, but in the flesh of their bodies.
Three Acts of the Sun contributes to NTU CCA Singapore's Climates.Habitats. Environments., a long-term line of inquiry aimed at the holistic understanding of this vital triangulation. Initiated in 2017, Climates.Habitats.Environments. focuses on environmentally engaged artistic practices and interdisciplinary collaborations to foster critical thinking and public awareness about the ecological complexities and the escalating climate crisis of our time.
