SINGAPORE — You know SG50 season is *really* upon us when you come across a visual art exhibition that has “SG50” in its title. And it’s organised by LASALLE’s Institute of Contemporary Arts!

That said, Artists Imagine A Nation: SG50 is not a cheesy rah-rah sort of exhibition at all. In fact, it’s a rather quiet, thoughtful show.

Comprising 85 works — mostly paintings — from the collections of architect Koh Seow Chuan “and friends”, the show could basically serve as a teaser for when the National Gallery opens later this year. You’ve got works dating back to the 1930s and the line-up of 36 artists includes some of the local art canon’s big guns (Cheong Soo Pieng, Chen Wen Hsi, Chua Mia Tee, Anthony Poon, Lim Tze Peng, Tang Da Wu) and more recent names (Boo Sze Yang, Wong Shih Yaw).

It’s pretty unusual to see this much modern art in a space that usually houses more contemporary shows, but it actually works. Curator Bala Starr, who wanted to highlight the paintings as objects in themselves, transforms the space into a mini-old school gallery show by roping in architect Helen Oja, who comes up with stainless steel screens that essentially divide the space into themed rows (portraits, street scenes, river scenes, mother and child, et cetera). I was initially reminded of the Heritage Conservation Centre’s sliding wall panels while a friend jokingly said it felt like a Modern Art Society exhibition.

While it’s technically a collectors show and it doesn’t claim to be a historical survey, the presence of quite a few big names ironically highlights the absence of others for me, such as Chua Ek Kay or Georgette Chen (who appears in a portrait by Tang Da Wu as Nezha). It’s quite a male Chinese selection as well, with only smattering of female and non-Chinese artists (although one of its pleasant surprises was the inclusion of the late, underrated Mohammad Din Mohammad, whose mixed media work — with lots of eerie heads and a title like Issues And Emotions — sticks out like a sore thumb quite pleasantly).

I’m pretty sure we’ll be seeing a lot of similar exhibitions further down the road so at the very least by virtue of being the first one off the blocks, Artists Imagine A Nation: SG50 gets a relatively free pass. The nation imagined here, which unfolds in the various themes mentioned earlier, ticks all the boxes but hardly steps out of these. But the exhibition’s mode of presentation offers a way out in that, unlike the definitive presence of paintings on definitive walls of a museum, these walls are porous and the paintings are, in a sense, floating, ready to be reshuffled and reconfigured at a moment’s notice.

And if you’re checking out this SG50 show, then might as well drop by the new exhibition from The Art Incubator. It’s the latest batch of what has been an impressive string of artists the residency series has supported. Check out Angie Seah’s various, surreal clay sculptures, which are occasionally sound works as well, done during her time at Melbourne’s Victorian College of the Arts. Sufian Samsiyar’s layered black and white photographs of Manila were done from his time with art space 98B. Godwin Koay, meanwhile, hung out at Taipei’s Bamboo Curtain Studio, and his contribution here includes a couple of his watercolours reworked unto fabric and a glass display case containing “speculative objects” in a “fictional framework” (as he points out in an author’s note), such as a poster advertising a meeting on building solidarity with immigrant workers dated 2017. Politics strongly inform Koay’s practice and this piece also comes with a note from the curator, Kimberly Shen, who points out that they have “modified” the presentation after concerns that audiences might misunderstand the “fictive nature of the posters” (Koay had initially wanted to present it in a package and the posters distributed freely). Well, given that whole (completely kneejerk) drama about Vertical Submarine’s cat posters at last year’s Night Festival…

Anyway, to wrap up the show, you’ve also got a small section of materials related to the various artist residencies in Singapore, The Art Incubator’s nice little shout-out to other similarly important initiatives, such as those by The Artists Village, Objectifs, Grey Projects, among a few others.

Update on Feb 17: The pieces that comprise the vitrine work Content Slated For Destruction have now been turned face down by the artist. Space has also been left between works where Koay has left a statement saying: "As this poster has been prevented from being displayed and free dissemination of these objects has been denied, the artist has decided to withdraw Content Slated For Destruction from the exhibition."

Artists Imagine A Nation: SG50 runs until April 19 while The Art Incubator 6: Residency As Method runs until March 29, both at LASALLE College of the Arts galleries. Free admission.