Puncturing Spaces is a speculative proposal for a Museum of Modern Art (MoMA) satellite in Singapore. Set within Esplanade Park, a historically charged civic space, the project reimagines how performance art, specifically the emotionally intense and ephemeral works of Amanda Heng and Tehching Hsieh, can be spatially embodied. Unlike conventional galleries that centre around paintings or sculpture, this museum begins with absence. There are no physical artefacts to display — only the echoes of time, vulnerability, and human endurance.

Through a process of addition and subtraction, the architecture carves itself into the landscape, narrow, compressed volumes punctuated by light-wells and open thresholds. These spatial gestures mirror the dualities found in the artists’ work: routine and rupture, public and private, presence and erasure. Visitors experience not a fixed route, but a non-linear journey that transitions from the ceremonial to the informal, a choreography of space designed to make one pause, reflect, and feel.

What began as a challenge in form-finding became a study in architectural empathy. How do we design for what cannot be seen? How do we make a space feel tender?

This project stands as a provocation: that museums can be more than just containers of art, they can be performative themselves. Through embracing abstraction and interdisciplinary influence, Puncturing Spaces invites viewers to think beyond the conventional boundaries of architectural typologies, and instead ask how design can host memory, ritual, and intimacy.