Tension
A Provocative Encounter with Human Connection and Identity
Karolina Prom & Lee Wei Lieh · 13–22 October 2023 · Singapore · By Appointment Only
This exhibition contained some nudity. Visitors were 18 and above, by appointment only.
Not a gallery.
A private apartment.
Tension was unlike anything Singapore had seen. Held inside a private apartment — not a gallery, not an institution — the exhibition dismantled the usual contract between art and audience. There was no safe distance. No polite viewing. No art hung on walls at eye level for inspection.
Visitors came by appointment only, in small groups, guided through a domestic space transformed into a series of live, interactive artworks that asked something personal of everyone who entered. Photography was limited. Discretion was required. What happened inside stayed close to the body — and the mind.
It was a collaboration between British performance artist Karolina Prom — whose practice centres on the human form, vulnerability, and the blurring of art and social experiment — and House of VSE’s Lee Wei Lieh, whose work lives at the intersection of intimacy, space, and presence. For both artists, Tension was a question as much as an exhibition: what happens when art refuses to let you stay comfortable?
What we were
asking, and why.
“Tension” was chosen deliberately. The word holds everything the exhibition explored: the space between vulnerability and strength, curiosity and reservation, attraction and repulsion. The inherent contradictions that shape how we connect — and how we know ourselves.
Human connection in Singapore — in much of modern life — happens at a remove. We negotiate intimacy through screens, through language, through the careful management of what we allow others to see. Tension stripped that away. The artworks demanded a physical encounter: opening a cabinet and finding the artist inside, reaching through a latex screen and feeling something disturbingly close to living flesh, confronting your own reflection in the same moment as another person’s body.
This was not art about vulnerability. It was art that produced it — in real time, in real people, in a space that had no gallery conventions to hide behind.
What visitors
walked into
Touch Starved — Photographic Prints
A series of photographs by Juan Cevallos that embrace the tactile as a more generous way of perceiving our existence. The body becomes an intermediary — skin to skin, almost without interference. Exhibited previously in Valencia, Spain; brought to Singapore for the first time.
“Every piece carried very profound
emotional weight.
Keyword: vulnerability.”
— Jeanne
What it did
to people.
Visitors left their responses on wax paper slips — the same translucent material used in the artworks. Unfiltered, uncurated, written immediately after the experience. These are some of what they wrote.
“Felt trapped & free at the same time.”
Visitor response, written on wax paper
“THIS IS TENSION.
It challenged.”
Visitor response
“Thank you for the thought-provoking show. Leads us to think beyond our comfort zone.”
Visitor response
“It’s my 1st time experiencing such an intimate piece. LOVED IT.”
Visitor response
“Thanks for baring your home & body for the exhibit — Wei & Karolina.”
Visitor response
“Make exhibitions like this. Please.”
— Nicole, Visitor
These responses were not solicited. They were written on the same wax paper that moved through the artworks — material that had held warmth, light, and touch. What people wrote on it afterwards says everything about what the work had done.
When art creates genuine vulnerability, something irreversible happens.
Tension proved that the most powerful thing art can do is refuse to let you remain an observer. When the work asks something real of you — your attention, your discomfort, your willingness to be seen — it leaves something behind that doesn’t wash off.
This is the foundation of what Destination Art Encounters is built on. Not spectacle. Not scale. The intimate conviction that art can change how a room feels, and in doing so, change how the people inside it feel — about themselves, about each other, about what they’re carrying.
Tension happened once. For ten days, in a small apartment in Singapore. Every person who came left a piece of themselves on wax paper. That is what an Encounter does.