The CBD crowd has a new lunchtime companion: art

[SINGAPORE] According to credible studies, Singaporeans are among the fastest walkers in the world. And nowhere on the island is that national talent more evident than in the Central Business District (CBD), where every minute seems to come with a cost code.

In such a district, the Singapore Art Museum’s new public art trail feels like a pointed intervention. It does not ask CBD workers to make time for art. Instead, it puts art where their time already goes: along link bridges, MRT station exits, plazas and the routes between skyscrapers.

Take, for instance, Yang Jie’s sound sculpture Clock of the Everyday, placed at Raffles Place MRT station’s Exit E. Inspired by glockenspiels and mechanical clock towers, it takes on precisely the subject of time.

It functions like a clock – but it won’t tell you that you’re five minutes late for that meeting. Instead, it marks the looser rhythms of the work day with its chimes: the 7.45 am hush before the CBD fully wakes, the rapidly accelerating lunchtime surge at noon, the tea-break exhalation at 4 pm, and other offbeat moments. 

In a place governed by schedules, the clock’s chimes – a strange medley of teacup-trembling, broomstick-sweeping and disco ball-spinning, among other curious sounds – give the regimented hours of office work a whimsical rhythm.

Over at Asia Square Tower 1, Zul Mahmod’s Loop – The Resonance of Motion appears as a polished stainless-steel form, rounded like an industrial tube bent into an elegant loop.

Activated by vibration, it absorbs the CBD’s endless flow of movement and transforms it into something audible, almost musical. The district has always had a distinct pulse – Zul has given it a speaker.

Meanwhile, on the digital screen of the OUE Link facade, Teow Yue Han and Federico Ruberto offer the technologically sophisticated installation titled thusspoke.baby.

The “digital baby” is conceived as one that learns and grows over two years, absorbing information from global news, weather and social media, then releasing its own fragments of text and gestures throughout the day.

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In a district saturated with updates and dashboards, a baby fed by global information mirrors our own contemporary condition of being over-informed and constantly processing – though not necessarily wiser.

Over at One Raffles Quay North Tower, Catherine Hu’s quietly analogue sculptures A fountain when it rains stand apart from the trail’s more technological works.

The unassuming sculptures are made from salvaged ceramic tiles, concrete and fibreglass. They recall Housing & Development Board void-deck furniture and garden bird baths, yet sit among towers of glass and concrete. They become fountains only when rain falls.

In a district that likes useful things, Hu offers something with no obvious deliverable or key performance indicator: It’s just an object waiting for weather.

Finally, there is Finbarr Fallon’s Sweet Water at Shenton House, perhaps the most poignant of the current works. The brutalist building is soon to be demolished, and Fallon responds by translating its grid-like form and mosaic crown into sculptural pineapples placed in different spots.

The pineapple is a familiar symbol of prosperity. But here, it also carries history: An 1861 record notes that pineapple slices were once sold at Raffles Place for one cent.

Fallon collapses street trade, modernism, redevelopment and nostalgia into an object that is at once playful and mournful.

The public art trail, titled Momentary Pulses, will run till the end of 2027, with the support of Charles & Keith Group Foundation. It currently features five works, but two more will be added later.

For now, though, the CBD has already acquired a few precise interruptions: a loop that listens, a clock that misbehaves, a digital baby that thinks aloud, a fountain that waits for rain, and a pineapple that remembers.

These may not improve your quarterly numbers. But they might improve your lunch hour.

For more information, visit bit.ly/MomentaryPulses