PRESENTATION: Kent Chan-Three Acts of the Sun
Kent Chan is an artist, curator and filmmaker based in Netherlands and Singapore. His practice revolves around our encounters with art, fiction and cinema that form a triumvirate of practices—porous in form, content and context. He holds particular interest in tropical imagery, the past and the future relationships between heat and art, and contestations to the legacy of modernity as the epistemology par excellence.
By Efi Michalarou
Photo: NTU CCA Singapore Archive
“Three Acts of the Sun” is the first solo exhibition in Kent Chan’s home country since 2019. The project marks a pivotal moment in the artist’s ongoing exploration of climate change, tropical imaginaries, and futurity, presenting an ambitious body of work—spanning film, performance, print, and installation—that reimagines planetary futures shaped by heat and ecological transformation.
Kent Chan has built an international practice at the intersection of moving image, fiction, and curatorial experimentation. Throughout his career, he has interrogated how cultures, histories, and artistic forms are entangled with tropical climates and their socio-political legacies. His works treat the tropics not merely as a geography of heat but as a speculative site of futurity—where the promise and peril of warming converge.
“Three Acts of the Sun” extends this research into speculative climate futures. The exhibition assembles newly commissioned and recent works that articulate scenarios of advanced global warming, where the familiar climate boundaries of the present dissolve into a universal “tropicalisation” of Earth. In these futures, thermodynamic conditions once localized around the equator become planetary norms—transforming ecological, cultural, and political life alike.
The exhibition explicitly places the viewer within these imagined conditions. Situated adjacent to a secondary tropical rainforest, the exhibition space intentionally relinquishes conventional climate control. Singapore’s ambient heat and humidity act on both artworks and audiences, positioning human corporeality at the core of the climate speculation. This deliberate immersion underscores Chan’s interest in making climate change something palpably experienced, not just visually or conceptually apprehended.
At the heart of the exhibition is “Weather Casting”, a newly commissioned moving-image work that expands Chan’s inquiry into how humans relate to atmospheric phenomena. Far from conventional weather forecasting, Weather Casting speculates on a future in which geoengineering—large-scale manipulation of Earth’s climate systems—is wielded as a tool of planetary governance.
Through a sequence of speculative broadcast reports, the work traces an engineered interface with the Asian-Pacific monsoon, one of the most expansive weather systems on the planet. In this imagined era, weather systems are influenced by AI-driven architectures named after ancient elemental deities, repurposing cultural imaginaries into mechanisms of control. These AI agents are tasked with “clearing clouds,” “harnessing winds,” or “ordering rainfall”—but their interventions also expose deeper anxieties about technological mastery, geopolitical friction, and the fallout of climate stratagems. (
By conflating prediction with actualisation, and techno-scientific agency with mythic resonance, Weather Casting collapses the boundary between weather lore and engineered reality. This tension reflects a broader thematic strain in Chan’s work—how human ambitions to manage the Earth’s systems can produce both utopian dreams and dystopian consequences.
Beyond Weather Casting, “Three Acts of the Sun” incorporates print works and performances that expand its narrative scope. Chan’s speculative worlds are populated by motifs of environmental migration and intergenerational justice—foregrounding how future heat-shaped landscapes might intensify existing inequities and force new patterns of movement. These artistic scenarios grapple with the ethical and cultural imprints of climate change, extending climate discourse beyond science into the realm of lived human experience.
Memory and loss also loom large. The exhibition invokes climates that have vanished, juxtaposing them with futures accelerated by heat. This dual temporal perspective—looking backward to lost environments and forward to new tropic universes—creates a layered narrative that challenges linear conceptions of time, history, and climatic change.
Chan’s methodology blurs conventional artistic boundaries. Influenced by cinema, electronic music, and mythic cosmologies, his practice uses multiple media forms to create immersive speculative environments. His earlier projects—such as “Warm Fronts” (2021), a multi-channel video installation that fused sonic futurism with tropical imaginaries—demonstrate a consistent interest in how heat and culture co-produce imaginative possibilities.
In “Three Acts of the Sun” this ethos extends to the curatorial strategy itself. By allowing the gallery to become climatically active, Chan reframes the exhibition as a performance of conditions—a lived climatic presence rather than neutral backdrop. Audiences encounter works not only through vision and sound but through their own bodily response to heat and humidity.
“Three Acts of the Sun” is not merely an art exhibition in the conventional sense; it is a speculative climate architecture that invites audiences to confront the interwoven realities of heat, culture, and human agency. Kent Chan’s work maps a future in which the tropics might become a generative framework for understanding planetary transformation. By collapsing boundaries between myth and machine, past and future, embodied experience and geoengineering imagination, the exhibition positions art as a crucial medium for envisaging—and interrogating—the world to come.
Download exhibition booklet here
Photo: Kent Chan, Weather Casting (still), 2025. Courtesy of the artist
Info: Curator: Anna Lovecchio, NTU Centre for Contemporary Art Singapore, Gillman Barracks, 6 Lock Road, #01-09, Singapore, Duration: 18/1-2/2/2026, Days & Hours: Mon-Fri 10:00-17:00 https://ntu.ccasingapore.org/
