Yeo Workshop is pleased to present Fearsome Engines, a group exhibition exploring the aesthetics of game-related spaces and their enabling technologies. Bringing together four artists from Singapore, Vietnam and the UK - Charles Lim, Debbie Ding, Hà Ninh Pham and Martin Constable, who also curates the presentation, the exhibition examines the friction between gaming spaces and physical reality. Although none of them are gamers, each artist engages with the visual language and infrastructure of gaming in diverse ways, looking into themes of control, memory and corporate obsolescence.
Charles Lim’s relationship to game engines is a playful one that seeks to invert expectations of how an artwork functions. He presents Switch (2026), a digital installation that subverts the ‘white cube’ gallery. Repurposing his Central Saint Martin’s graduation project, Lim uses a game engine to create a virtual model of Yeo Workshop. Within this simulation, a set of lights flicker at random. In turn, the real-world gallery lights hard-wired to the simulation, flash out of sync. This interaction is facilitated by a crude hardware rig, exposing and stripping away the seamlessness usually associated with digital technology.
This interest in the physical manifestations of the virtual is echoed in the work of Martin Constable, who seeks to celebrate the dark romance of the gaming genre. In The Philosophers Paradise (2026), a series of lightboxes depicting gaming rigs - so-called battle stations - rendered with high visual appeal, Constable celebrates the aesthetics of male failure.
Shifting from the hardware of the present to the programmed histories of the past, Debbie Ding utilises game-engine logic to navigate the interstitial regions of consciousness and history. Her work New Village (2026) is derived from a walking simulator based on the historical internment camps established by the British during World War Two. Ding presents a digital print alongside a fabricated altar, which is a reference to game portals – a parody of their real-world function.
Finally, Hà Ninh Pham expands these themes into total world-building. His RPG, Institute of Distance, centers on the realm in the fetus where a soul-atom chooses its body parts and fate for its upcoming life. The exhibition features two works from this project. [mountain] is a collection of 3D-printed game assets. The print Loading Error celebrates the fact that this game is no longer available on Apple's App store and downloaded copies fail to function.
This exhibition is part of Yeo Workshop’s annual summer programming, which provides a platform for guest curators, foundations and artists to showcase alternative perspectives in contemporary art. The programme invites audiences to discover and engage with experimental voices outside the gallery’s roster, some of whom have never been exhibited in Singapore before.