This season, New Art Museum Singapore is honored to present renowned Japanese architect Kengo Kuma’s first solo exhibition in Singapore, curated by leading Japanese curator Yuko Hasegawa. Opening on 23 January 2026, the exhibition will feature immersive models, photographs, installations, and design process that illustrate Kengo Kuma’s approach to sustainable architecture and the use of natural materials. It offers an interactive, immersive, and educational experience to the visitor and invites them to engage with Kengo Kuma's architectural concepts, including sustainable materials and design principles, that deepen understanding of the architect's global influence on modern architecture.

Kengo Kuma’s concept of “MAKERU” Architecture is not simply an architecture of humility or retreat. In this exhibition, yielding is not a gesture of weakness, but a rigorous ontological stance: a method that amplifies existing forces — humidity, climate, noise, cultural memory, material irregularity — rather than erasing or dominating them. Yielding becomes a world-making strategy.

This exhibition focuses on contexts long embedded within Asian landscapes: the bodily, rhythmic behavior of architecture, and the sustained co-evolution between environment and built form. Unlike Western architectural strength, which often seeks to dominate and control, Asian architecture has historically invented modes of building as ecological interventions — architectures that activate, intensify, and ultimately beautify their environments.

In Kuma’s work, matter is allowed to remain granular and plural — porous, rhythmic, layered, temporal — so that inside and outside are not separated by walls, but become an interactive field of resonance. Many of Kuma’s representative works are composed through subtle, embodied strategies such as particles, layering, porosity, weaving, and time. The materials themselves are often noisy, rough, and complex — far from uniform or homogeneous. Yet rather than eliminating this noise, Kuma embraces it, re-weaving its granular qualities into rhythm. Through this process, interactive spaces emerge in which interior and exterior are no longer severed by rigid boundaries.

Situated in Singapore as an Asian hub, this exhibition returns this methodology of reading complex Asian conditions back to the visitor through material and concreteness, not abstraction. The exhibition includes inhabitable tea rooms, full-scale mockups, and participatory interactions. It is designed to operate directly on the senses and emotions, enabling visitors to physically experience how architecture reorganizes the relationship between body and world through structural resonance.

“MAKERU” Architecture is no longer presented as architecture that submits passively to the world. Instead, it is an architecture that amplifies the world’s forces, fragments and granularizes itself, and strengthens the environment in order to reveal latent forms of beauty. “MAKERU” Architecture here does not defeat the world; it collaborates with the world, and makes the world more alive.

Kengo Kuma (1954, Japan)

Kengo Kuma established Kengo Kuma & Associates in 1990. He is currently a University Professor and Professor Emeritus at the University of Tokyo after teaching at Keio University and the University of Tokyo.

KKAA projects are currently underway in more than 30 countries. Kengo Kuma proposes architecture that opens up new relationships between nature, technology, and human beings. His major publications include Ten Sen Men (“point, line, plane”, Iwanami Shoten), Hito no Sumika (“shelters for people”, Shincho Shinsho), Makeru Kenchiku (Architecture of Defeat, Iwanami Shoten), Shizen na Kenchiku (Natural Architecture, Iwanami Shinsho), Chii-sana Kenchiku (Small Architecture, Iwanami Shinsho) and many others.

Yuko Hasegawa (1957, Japan)

Yuko Hasegawa is a leading curator, art critic, and museum director. She has served as Director of the 21st Century Museum of Contemporary Art, Kanazawa, and as Artistic Director of the Museum of Contemporary Art Tokyo (MOT).

Known for her interdisciplinary and forward-thinking curatorial practice, Hasegawa brings a deeply informed perspective through her longstanding engagement with Kengo Kuma’s work. She bridges architecture, contemporary art, design and ecology.