Singapore’s ArtScience Museum is launching an ambitious new exhibition that challenges Western cinema’s often dystopian view of the future. Instead, we’ll be getting optimistic visions of tomorrow through Asian perspectives. “Another World Is Possible,” opening as part of Singapore Design Week 2025, explores how architecture, design, and literature can reimagine humanity’s path forward.
Co-curated with globally renowned filmmaker and architect Liam Young, the exhibition serves as a sequel to “The Future & Other Fictions” and features four major immersive installations by Young, including “Planet City,” “The Endeavour,” and “After the End.” These cinematic landscapes unfold across vast speculative terrains, from hyper-dense cities to planetary megastructures and monumental acts of geoengineering.
Obilia; a render of Marina Bay, SIngapore in the future as imagined by RAD+ar from Link-Scape
The exhibition showcases Singapore’s distinct approach to the future—one rooted in collective nation-building, environmental pragmatism, and cautious optimism rather than dystopian fatalism. Local architects and designers feature prominently, including WOHA’s biodiverse vertical cities, Jason Pomeroy’s floating urban farms, and Finbarr Fallon’s vertical reimagining of the Singapore Flyer, demonstrating how technology and nature can be meaningfully integrated.
“From the heart of one of the world’s most future-orientated cities comes this daring new exhibition about imagining tomorrow with optimism and hope,” said Honor Harger, Vice President of ArtScience Museum. The exhibition embodies Singapore’s forward-looking spirit through artworks, design proposals, and immersive installations that welcome visitors into worlds where technology, ecology, architecture, and human imagination evolve together.
Across seven chapters, visitors journey through visually arresting landscapes where cinematic worlds, ecological architecture, and literary futures come alive. The show includes the neon-lit cyberpunk visions of Western cinema alongside the more hopeful voices of Afrofuturism and genres they’ve inspired across Asia and Southeast Asia, including Spicepunk and Silkpunk.
Beyond visual media, the exhibition presents speculative literature and video works from throughout Southeast Asia, including Ken Liu’s “Dandelion Dynasty” and contributions to LONTAR: The Journal of Southeast Asian Speculative Fiction. Together, these works build a distinctly Asian aesthetic of the future where human ingenuity, natural systems, and cultural memory are deeply entwined, revealing world-building as a vital creative act for rethinking how humanity might adapt and thrive.
For more information, check out the official website.