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If National Gallery Singapore’s Southeast Asia Gallery is part of your regular museum rotation, this is your heads-up: it’s going offline for a long while.
From April 1, 2026, the Southeast Asia Gallery at National Gallery Singapore will close for a large-scale revamp, with a reopening targeted for November 2027. The shutdown covers Levels 3, 4 and 5 of the Former Supreme Court Wing, which means the Rotunda Library and the UOB Theatrette will also be inaccessible during this period.
The Rotunda Library and Archive bowed out even earlier, with its closure on February 14. Access after that won’t be spontaneous – visits will be by appointment only, for those who plan ahead.
The rest of the building isn’t entirely off-limits, though. The Former Supreme Court Foyer on Level 1 and the Historical Lobby on Level 3 will stay open, so the Gallery doesn’t vanish completely from public view while the work is underway.
To avoid leaving visitors in a total drought, a scaled-down interim gallery is set to open in October 2026. It will feature selected highlights from the UOB Southeast Asia Gallery – not the full experience, but enough to keep the conversation going.
That conversation includes works by key figures from the region, such as Indonesian painter Raden Saleh and Thai artist Phra Soralaklikhit, whose practices date back to the 19th and early 20th centuries.
According to Chief Curator Patrick Flores, the revamp reflects years of curatorial research and a shift in how Southeast Asian art is understood today – less as a neat category, more as a region shaped by movement, exchange and overlapping histories.
Follow National Gallery Singapore on Instagram for more updates.
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