For National Arts Council (NAC) to deepen the level of art appreciation, there is a need for the arts to be relevant and accessible for first-timers, or the uninitiated. This has been a problem most art institutions face in Singapore. More often than not, the focus is on the art and the thought process behind them, which can be too abstract or hard to understand. Moreover, people do not know where to turn to if they are interested in certain art forms. There are so many art-related events and festivals happening around Singapore, such as Singapore Design Week, Singapore International Festival of Arts, Art Stage – in the eyes of the mass public, they all sound the same with no real distinguishing value.

As the social agency on record for Singapore Art Week (SAW), our main challenge was to marry both content relevance and art appeal. If SAW is NAC’s bid to increase visibility and awareness of visual arts events in Singapore, especially to the uninitiated, then SAW should aspire to be a cultivation platform, to cultivate the interest in the arts amongst the masses. By being a cultivation platform - SAW is essentially the point of entry in an individual’s journey of garnering interest in the arts. We had to not only curate what we wanted to feature, but also translate art to easy, bite-sized content that people could understand and appreciate.

We thus came up with the idea of #ArtTakesOver. On one hand, we wanted to capture the imagination of Singaporeans, to help them see that art and creativity is everywhere around you, even in your day-to-day lives. On the other, this narrative ties in very nicely with Singapore Art Week’s offering of a week-long celebration of the arts where there are more than 100 art events happening all around the island.