Arts, Culture and Heritage
Numerous studies have identified the vital role of arts and cultural engagement in enhancing social cohesion, encouraging healthy behaviours and positive emotions, and strengthening wellbeing and resilience across the lifespan. At SMU, we support arts and cultural activities and actively seek to safeguard our cultural tradition and heritage, contributing to a more healthy, vibrant and liveable community and city.
Wee Kim Wee Centre
The Wee Kim Wee Centre is dedicated to promoting cross-cultural and inter-disciplinary dialogue within the SMU community and with the public about the major issues and challenges that attend to contemporary life. The Centre hosts and supports lectures, conferences, and publications that aim to advance learning and thinking about major cross-cultural issues for all who appreciate the need for a profound appreciation of the similarities and the differences that mark our common humanity.
Digital Cultural Heritage Asia
Digital Cultural Heritage Asia is an online platform for the dissemination of endangered cultural heritage resources from the Asian region, particularly those focused on urban contexts. It provides digital copies of "cultural heritage blind spots", locations that are typically at risk of disappearance, non-gazetted, non-protected, contested, less popular, or challenging to handle.
SMU Art Collections
The SMU Art Collection features a mix of over 270 Singapore, Southeast Asia, and international modern and contemporary artworks. Through exhibitions, workshops, and a newly launched Artist-in-Residence programme, delivered as part of the SMU Art Collection initiative, SMU aims to encourage the lively discourse on aesthetics, culture and history.
What you can do
- Take the Arts, Culture, and Global City course offered by the School of Social Sciences and gain a critical understanding of urban cultural planning and urban cultural economies.
- Take a self-guided tour of the SMU Art Collection on campus. A portion of the artworks are accessible by the public through our Public Art tour while the Art on Campus tour is only accessible by the SMU community.
- Are you a passionate and talented budding artist studying at SMU? Or do you know of someone who is? Apply for, or nominate someone for the SMU Emerging Artist Award.
- Dive into the fascinating evolution of Singapore's Hawker Culture, inscribed on the UNESCO Representative List of the Intangible Cultural Heritage of Humanity, with the second edition of the book Singapore Hawker Centres: People, Places, Food, by SMU President Lily Kong.