In June 2024, architecture studio vn-a was commissioned by the artist collective Art Labor (Thảo Nguyên Phan, Trương Công Tùng, and Arlette Quỳnh-Anh Trần) to design the architecture, construction, and technical details of their artwork Angin Cloud in the Padang Atrium of the National Gallery Singapore. Angin Cloud is a large-scale, multi-level installation curated by Kathleen Ditzig, on view at the Padang Atrium of the National Gallery Singapore until 30 November 2025. Commissioned jointly by the Gallery’s OUTBOUND programme and Light to Night Singapore 2025, the project reimagines the rural industrialisation of Vietnam’s Central Highlands through a poetic and spatially immersive lens. (Angin Cloud by Art Labor | National Gallery Singapore)

“Angin Cloud manifests the air – the evaporation and its ambivalent relationships with matters. Angin Cloud takes inspiration from the Jrai people's cosmology of classifying physical states of matter, specifically between water and air. ‘Angin is air before it becomes wind; that is the battlefield of epic heroes; on this level, it involves swords and shields. […] It binds the moving air to the falling rain, […] ready to draw more fire in the appearance of lightning.’”
(Jacques Dournes, Pötao: une théorie du pouvoir chez les Indochinois joraï)
Angin Cloud is a struggle as in the epic meaning of angin. Metaphorically, its dynamism – like a new breeze of rural industrialization – opens lucrative relationships because of its ability to shower materialism/capital/progress. On the other hand, it is brutal and unpredictable when angin – the air – rises in a coil. It becomes a tornado, floods, and uproots everything it passes through.”
– Conceptual proposal by Art Labor collective.

To escort the idea of Art Labor, vn-a aims to shape Angin Cloud as a dart that pierces the Padang Atrium, then pauses and solidifies weightlessly within it. The challenge was how to suspend this two-ton mass in a state of apparent immateriality - delicately held beneath the roof structure designed by Studio Milou, and in harmony with the spatial relationship between the two heritage buildings of the National Gallery Singapore. Eighty-four slender pillars drop from a 32-by-6-meter steel frame, forming a subtle arc across the space, echoing the original condition of the field of pillars in the rural industrialisation of Vietnam’s Central Highlands.

Project info:

Project title: Angin Cloud - an art installation at the National Gallery Singapore
Architecture: vn-a (visual network art architecture)
Program: Installations & structures
Year: 2024
Location: Singapore National Gallery
Lead Architects: Giang Vu, Huong Vu
Design team: Duong Le, Vu Do
Images ©vn-a & ©artlabor