The UOB Southeast Asia Gallery is temporarily closed and will reopen in late 2027. In the meantime, works from the National Collection remain exhibited across the Gallery. 

Encounter 1960s Singapore and Malaya through Lai Foong Moi’s art, exploring questions of identity, social transformation, and belonging during an era of change.

  • When: 14 Aug 2026 – 3 Oct 2027
  • Suitable For: All
  • Where: City Hall Wing, Level 2, DBS Singapore Gallery
  • Ticket information: General Admission ticket required, free for locals.

About

Framed through the experience of “crossing(s)” as moments of transition, encounter and becoming, the exhibition on Nanyang Artist Lai Foong Moi (1931-1995) positions her practice as a site to consider how identity was pictured and lived in the 1960s in Singapore and Malaya – a productive period in her career which intersected with profound social transformation and national reimagination.

Although working within conventional genres of portraiture, still life, and landscape painting, Lai's attention to subjects of gender, labour, and urban development offer a distinct perspective about modern life in Singapore during the immediate pre-and-post independence period. 

Dalam Singapore is a series of exhibitions in the annexe of DBS Singapore Gallery 3 which is periodically refreshed with focused explorations of specific artists or themes that give deeper insights into lesser-known figures and stories from Singapore’s art history.

About the Artist

Born in Malaya, Lai Foong Moi (1931–1995) trained at the Nanyang Academy of Fine Arts in Singapore and the École des Beaux-Arts in France. She returned to Singapore in the late 1950s to a world negotiating ideas about nationhood, modernity, and belonging. Her paintings of women, labourers, and the city ask questions about individual experience during a period of profound change.

Image Credit:
Lai Foong Moi painting in Germany, 1955
Digitised by National Gallery Singapore Library & Archive with kind permission from the artist’s family.

Exhibition Materials

What defines an artist's life and legacy?

In this episode of Padang Spotlights, we dive into the life of Lai Foong Moi , the first Malayan-born woman with solo exhibitions in Singapore and Malaya. Once celebrated yet now little remembered, her story reveals the delicate interplay of forces shaping an artist's journey. Hear from Gallery curator Teo Hui Min as she traces Lai's path from her promising return from art training in France to her later years on the margins of public memory, alongside conversations with her former student Salleh bin Japar and contemporary Yeo Hoe Koon.

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