More than Human, ArtScience Museum Singapore: Beavers, Wetlands and 140 Works

The More than Human ArtScience Museum Singapore exhibition opens on 28 November 2026, and its star maker has four legs and a flat tail. Among more than 140 works by nearly 55 artists, designers, architects, researchers and communities, the piece the museum keeps leading with is wood — wood that beavers chewed into shape before an artist decided it was sculpture (Danamic). More than Human: Making With the Living World makes its Asia debut at Marina Bay Sands, running to 16 May 2027 (MARKETECH APAC).

The premise is simple to state and awkward to practise. Instead of treating plants, animals and ecosystems as material for human design, the show asks what happens when they’re treated as participants in it — “active participants in shaping more thoughtful and sustainable ways of living,” as the museum puts it (Danamic).

More than Human ArtScience Museum Singapore starts with a beaver’s chisel

Aki Inomata’s How to Carve a Sculpture transforms wood gnawed by beavers into works that, in the museum’s words, “question whether creativity belongs to humans alone” (MARKETECH APAC). The beaver did the chewing. The artist did the choosing. Whose work is on the plinth?

The other headline piece answers scale with scale. Jakob Kudsk Steensen’s Berl-Berl is a large-scale immersive audiovisual installation built around an ever-changing digital wetland, inspired by the landscape that became Berlin (MARKETECH APAC). Wetlands don’t usually get the gallery treatment that forests and reefs do, which is part of the point.

Between those poles sits Alexandra Daisy Ginsberg’s Pollinator Pathmaker, an eight-metre tapestry imagining a garden designed around the needs of pollinating species rather than what looks good to us (The New Age Parents). Add Marshmallow Laser Feast’s fly agaric work, Poetics of Soil, and Julia Lohmann’s Kelp Council, and the contributor list starts reading like a field guide (Danamic).

An Asia debut, not a touring photocopy

The More than Human exhibition Asia debut could easily have been a crate-for-crate restaging. It isn’t. The show was originally developed by the Design Museum in London with Future Observatory, its green-transition research programme supported by the UKRI Arts and Humanities Research Council, but the Singapore edition adds 25 works co-curated by ArtScience Museum with support from the DesignSingapore Council, foregrounding Asian perspectives and regional traditions (The New Age Parents).

“It was important to us that we bring our own perspective to this exhibition,” said Angelita Teo, Vice President of Attractions at Marina Bay Sands, describing voices and knowledge from Singapore and Southeast Asia connected to “the ways we understand and live alongside nature in this part of the world” (MARKETECH APAC). The new and adapted Southeast Asian line-up includes Bewilder, Lêna Bùi, Ines Katamso, Khvay Samnang, Zarina Muhammad, Isa Pengskul, Citra Sasmita, Studio SKLIM, Superlative Futures and thesupersystem & VAAS (Danamic).

Even the room design argues the thesis. Singapore practice Lekker Architects has built the three thematic sections from hedge mazes, archipelagos and woodlands (Time Out Singapore) — a maze for losing your bearings, an archipelago for separate things that belong together.

Local labs, fish houses and a bee trail

Here’s the detail that separates this edition from a design show with better PR. The collaborator list includes the National Parks Board, the National University of Singapore’s Experimental Marine Ecology Laboratory and the Asian Civilisations Museum — a parks agency, a working marine lab and a heritage museum, lending research and objects (The New Age Parents).

What they lend is concrete: NParks’ Bee Trail, the marine lab’s Fish Houses, and traditional Southeast Asian fish traps from the Asian Civilisations Museum’s collection (The New Age Parents). A fish trap built generations ago is, by this exhibition’s logic, already “making with the living world” — design that works with animal behaviour instead of against it.

The curators are careful not to oversell. Justin McGuirk, Director of Future Observatory, concedes that much of the work is “nascent or exploratory,” while calling it “a radical shift in worldview towards humans using design not just for their own needs but to support other species and their ecosystems” (MARKETECH APAC). Dawn Lim of the DesignSingapore Council frames the bet smaller: “The most meaningful breakthroughs often begin with a shift in perspective” (MARKETECH APAC).

Tickets went on sale on 28 October through Marina Bay Sands box offices and online (The New Age Parents).

Analysis: exhibitions about “our relationship with nature” are ten a penny, and most end at a wall text. This one’s wager is different — it hands authorship to a beaver, a wetland and a pollinator, then backs the gesture with a marine laboratory and a parks board rather than a gift shop. Whether visitors leave designing differently is unknowable in November. But as a piece of programming, the ArtScience Museum exhibition November 2026 slot has been filled with the rare eco-show that argues by objects, not slogans.

Photo: Dietmar Rabich, via Wikimedia Commons (CC BY-SA 4.0)

Sources

1. https://danamic.org/2026/11/10/more-than-human-at-artscience-museum-beaver-art-a-digital-wetland-and-140-works/
2. https://marketech-apac.com/artscience-museum-gives-asia-its-first-glimpse-of-more-than-human-exhibition-in-singapore/
3. https://thenewageparents.com/more-than-human-making-with-the-living-world/
4. https://www.timeout.sg/culture/culture-news/artscience-museums-next-blockbuster-exhibition-wants-us-to-rethink-our-place-on-earth