21 Mar 2026
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2pm – 6.15pm |  |
ArtScience Cinema, Level 4 |
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Ticketed Admission S$10 per participant |
What does anatomy help us understand about the human body, and what might it leave unseen?
Organised as the opening symposium for Flesh and Bones: The Art of Anatomy, Expanded Anatomies takes the exhibition as a point of departure to explore how knowledge of the body has been formed, taught and experienced in Singapore and the wider Southeast Asian region.
While Western anatomical traditions have strongly influenced how bodies are studied today, the symposium examines how these ideas are passed on and reworked through local pedagogies, ethical frameworks and visual practices. Across a keynote lecture and two in-depth sessions, the programme moves from the institutional conditions through which anatomy is taught and authorised, to artistic reflections on memory, vulnerability, care and lived experience — dimensions of the body that resist being fully measured or mapped.
Expanded Anatomies invites audiences to see anatomy as a human practice shaped by historical circumstances, cultural contexts and ways of seeing, alongside its scientific foundations. Bringing together medical educators, practitioners, artists and curators, the symposium considers how bodies continue to hold meaning beyond diagrams and classifications, and the systems of knowledge they support.
Speakers include Dr. Monique Kornell (Visiting Associate Professor, Programme in the History of Medicine, Cedars-Sinai Medical Centre, L.A.), Professor Pang Weng Sun (Clinical Teacher, Lee Kong Chian School of Medicine, Nanyang Technological University), Eleanor Chua Chih Yin (Head, Centre of Continuing Education, Singapore College of Traditional Chinese Medicine), Chen Mingyue (Digital Education Technologist, Lee Kong Chian School of Medicine), as well as artists Chiharu Shiota, Dr. Yanyun Chen and Woong Soak Teng, among others.
| PROGRAMME OVERVIEW | |
| 2pm – 2.05pm | Welcome and Introduction by Zhang Bao Xin (Curator of Public Programmes at ArtScience Museum) |
| 2.05pm – 2.10pm | Opening Remarks by Honor Harger (Vice President of Attractions and ArtScience Museum at Marina Bay Sands) |
| 2.10pm – 2.35pm | Keynote: Curating Flesh and Bones Speaker: Dr. Monique Kornell (Visiting Associate Professor, Programme in the History of Medicine, Cedars-Sinai Medical Centre, L.A.) In this opening keynote, Dr. Monique Kornell introduces the curatorial foundations of Flesh and Bones: The Art of Anatomy. Drawing on her work at the Getty Research Institute, she traces how anatomy has been studied and represented over time, at the intersections of art, science and education. Rather than presenting anatomy as a settled body of knowledge, the lecture reveals how it has developed through specific institutions, visual traditions and ways of looking at the body. The keynote sets the conceptual ground for the symposium, opening up anatomy as a field that can be rethought and expanded across different cultural and institutional contexts. |
| 2.35pm – 3.35pm | Session 1: Inherited Bodies This session examines how anatomical knowledge is inherited, authorised and shaped within medical and cultural contexts in Singapore. Moving beyond anatomy as a neutral scientific discipline, it considers how bodies come to be known through histories of medical education and visual representation. Bringing together perspectives from biomedical ethics, medical illustration and Traditional Chinese Medicine, speakers reflect on how Western anatomical frameworks have been institutionalised while remaining entangled with other ways of apprehending the body through embodied practice and relational diagnosis. Their contributions invite reflection on anatomy as a human and ethical encounter, shaped by assumptions about learning and responsibility that continue to influence how bodies are taught, seen and valued. |
| 3.35pm – 4pm | Q&A: Practices in Conversation |
| 4pm – 4.15pm | Break |
4.15pm – 5.45pm |
*Session 2: After Anatomy This session brings together contemporary artistic practices that reflect on the body beyond systems of classification. It opens with a speculative reflection on how scientific knowledge has been shaped by Enlightenment frameworks, inviting audiences to consider alternative ways of imagining the body and other possible scientific modernities. The session then turns to works that approach the body as lived and felt. Across photography, installation and material-based practices, the body emerges as an archive of experience, holding traces and absences that cannot always be explained through anatomy alone. As the closing conversation of the symposium, it reflects on the limits of anatomical knowledge, and how bodies continue to generate meaning beyond the structures used to define them. |
| 5.45pm – 6.15pm | *Q&A: Closing Reflections |
*With Japanese – English interpretation by Mamiko Okada
Flesh & Bones traces anatomy as a shared language of art and science, where the body becomes medicine, cosmos, and a meditation on life, transformation, and afterlife.
Flesh and Bones traces anatomy as a shared language of art and science, where the body becomes medicine, cosmos, and a vessel for contemplating life, transformation, and afterlife.
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