Current & Upcoming
Since the early 1990s, Malaysian-born Singaporean artist Kumari Nahappan's interdisciplinary practice has spanned painting, sculpture, and installation. Across more than three decades, her work has consistently engaged with natural forms and materials seeds, grains, spices, fruits as sites through which questions of potential, continuity, and cultural memory take root. Characterised by a sustained attentiveness to material transformation and symbolic charge, her practice situates individual works within broader systems of belief, exchange, and lived experience.
At the centre of Roots & Routes is the seed: a form modest in scale yet immense in implication. Seeds contain within them the capacity to grow into organisms many times their original size, embodying a temporal leap between present state and future possibility. In Nahappan's practice, this latent potential has long been a recurring concern. Her repeated use of seeds foregrounds not only growth and fertility, but patience, accumulation, and trust in processes that unfold gradually. The seed, here, is understood as something that must first take root-absorbing its surroundings before transformation becomes visible.
This exhibition situates these concerns within longer histories of movement that have shaped the region, particularly those associated with the spice trade. Long before the emergence of modern borders, seeds and spices travelled vast distances across oceans and ports, carried alongside people, beliefs, and knowledge systems. Upon arrival, they were planted physically and culturally— adapting to new soils and climates. These routes of circulation enabled ideas and practices to take root elsewhere, altering both origin and destination in the process.
Colour remains a defining force within Nahappan's practice and assumes renewed significance in this body of work. Her employment of colour often saturated and symbolically charged operates as a connective register through which forms are grounded and enlivened. In bringing together this new assortment of works, Roots & Routes offers fresh insight into a practice shaped by the continual act of rooting and re-rooting, revealing how Nahappan's works remain embedded within history while remaining responsive to the world they inhabit.
Routes & Roots
Yang Gallery (for ARTSG)
📍Singapore
21 Jan - 26 Feb 2026
Recent Exhibitions
Whitestone Gallery is pleased to present Happy Together: Visions of Gladness from Southeast Asia, an exhibition that brings the question of happiness to life through the eyes of five contemporary Southeast Asian artists, each offering a vibrant and imaginative take on joy. This captivating exhibition invites audiences to explore how happiness is expressed, shared, and celebrated across cultures. From immersive installation to bold visual expression, it captures the rich emotional landscape of Southeast Asia—where laughter, tradition, and togetherness converge.
Each artwork radiates a sense of joy, offering fresh glimpses into everyday joys and festive moments. Playful and poignant in equal measure, the exhibition is filled with humor, cultural reflection, and imaginative takes on what it means to be together. The featured artists reveal happiness not as a fleeting emotion, but as something intentionally nurtured - shaped by the strength found in unity, even and adversity.
Happy Together
Whitestone Gallery
📍Singapore
08 Jun 2025 - 27 Jul 2025
Chromatic Currents
Pristine Contemporary
📍New Delhi, India
11 Sep 2025
“Colour in its myriads of mutations is one single element that binds seemingly unrelated objects into one whole.”
For over three decades, Kumari Nahappan’s artistic practice has traversed the intersections of colour, materiality, and cosmology, mapping a terrain where form and energy coalesce. Chromatic Currents offers a synesthetic journey through her oeuvre, framing colour not as a static attribute but as a force that shapes and transforms meaning across time and space. Across the mediums and materials she works with, her artworks articulate an evolving language of material and myth.
Colour is not merely pigment in Nahappan’s universe; it is rhythm, vibration, and emotion. It is a bridge between the sacred and the everyday, a medium through which the artist channels the ineffable forces of the cosmos. While deeply rooted in Hindu cosmology-where celestial bodies dictate the hues of the Navagraha and chromatic frequencies chart the energies of the universe-Nahappan’s use of colour resists rigid codification. It oscillates between cultural specificity and universal resonance, inviting viewers into a meditation on perception, memory, and transcendence.
Nahappan activates the sensorial dimensions of art, where texture, weight, and scent become integral to the experience. At its core, Chromatic Currents challenges us to reconsider colour not as a surface quality but as a structuring principle of experience, one that transcends linguistic and cultural barriers. Whether as a ritual gesture, a cosmic signal, or a field of pure energy, Nahappan’s universe reminds us that colour is not simply seen-it is felt, remembered, and lived.
John Z.W. Tung, Exhibition Curator
Light to Night Festival 2024, Reimagine
2024’s Light to Night Singapore festival, Reimagine, spearheaded by National Gallery Singapore, invites visitors to engage with art and space in new and innovative ways, which spark creativity and encourage reflection.
Wings of Change by Kumari Nahappan features an enormous saga seed, an object that has endless possibilities. Nahappan’s luminescent saga seed symbolizes energy and hope.
In The Studio
Browse works presently available through the studio. For pricing and availability, please enquire directly.
A Journey of Artistic Expression Across Continents
Kumari Nahappan is a leading contemporary artist in Southeast Asia, known for her vibrant works that draw on nature, ritual, and her cultural heritage. A bold voice in Southeast Asia’s contemporary art scene, Kumari transforms everyday natural elements into monumental sculptures and immersive installations. Her works have taken root across Singapore—from the glowing Nutmeg & Mace at ION Orchard to the 45-meter bronze mural Pembungaan—and bloomed far beyond in cities like Venice, Tokyo, and Manila. With a practice grounded in heritage but always reaching forward, Kumari continues to inspire, teach, and create with a flair that's uniquely her own.
“Meet the Singaporean who’s spicing up the art scene with her giant chillies”
As featured on Channel News Asia