National Gallery Singapore, Youth People and Mental Health

What if an art museum’s role extended beyond curating masterpieces and educating school groups? What if its platforms — its walls, its festivals, its expertise — could be turned over to young people who are rarely seen, let alone heard? That’s the question at the heart of a collaboration between National Gallery Singapore and social service agency Fei Yue Community Services, presented at a recent MuseumNext conference by Mian Tze Kng and Zoe Tee.

From School Programmes to the Margins

National Gallery Singapore has, since 2021, been developing Strength Through Art (stART), a programme designed to improve the visual and emotional literacy of young people. In its original form, stART was delivered to youth in mainstream schools, following a three-phase framework: Name, Frame, and Reframe. Participants were guided to identify and articulate their emotions, connect those feelings to artworks in the Gallery’s collection, and ultimately learn to see their experiences from new perspectives.

The Macro Impact: Making the Invisible Visible

As Mian Tze, Assistant Director of Outreach and Engagement, described it: art becomes another language — one that allows participants to discover more about themselves and build a repertoire of emotional skills. The programme invites a different kind of conversation than a traditional museum education session, where the focus shifts from what is out there to what is within us.

A New Partnership, A New Population

In 2024, Mian Tze encountered Zoe Tee — Deputy Head of Youth Department at Fei Yue Community Services — at a conference. Zoe was presenting on NEET youth: young people Not in Education, Employment, or Training. The term “hidden youth” caught Mian Tze’s attention, and a partnership followed.

Fei Yue works with marginalised youth who have become detached from mainstream education and employment systems. As Zoe explained, this detachment is rarely a matter of apathy — it is typically the result of complex, difficult histories. Many of these young people have experienced bullying, family instability, or persistent struggles to find a sense of belonging, to the point where they have lost confidence in themselves and trust in society. Some are disconnected from their families entirely.
For these young people, simply showing up to a programme is already a significant act.

Designing for Trust, Not Output

The adapted collaboration, titled “Start Here From Every Vantage Point”, was structured very differently from the standard stART model. Fei Yue’s youth workers played a central co-delivery role, accompanying participants throughout every session to ensure they felt safe and supported. The focus was firmly on process, not output.

Polymer clay was chosen as the primary medium — malleable, tactile, and personal. As Mian Tze noted, however a participant shapes it, the clay always registers their imprint. Alongside the making, participants were brought into the Gallery itself to see how professional artists have also used their work to express struggle and difficulty.

Crucially, knowing the programme was an art programme rather than an academic one already lowered the barrier for many participants. As Zoe put it: art has no scoreboard. There are no right or wrong answers, no winners or losers. For young people who have frequently experienced failure and rejection within formal systems, this framing matters enormously.

The Exhibition as Advocacy

After ten sessions, the exhibition opened on 9th January 2026 as part of National Gallery Singapore’s signature festival, Light To Night. The works were not simply displayed — they were presented as a form of public advocacy. Through their drawings, clay pieces, and written stories, participants shared experiences that are rarely part of mainstream conversation, inviting the public to listen rather than advise.

The exhibition reframed NEET youth not as a problem to be solved, but as individuals with talent, insight, and agency.
Of the nine young people who participated stood out as a particularly striking example of the programme’s impact. At the start, they had been socially isolated for nearly three years. They struggled to make eye contact, and consistently criticised themself when praised for their work. They would arrive an hour to an hour and a half early to every session, carefully planning their journey on public transport — something that, for young people without structured routines, is far from simple.

Over the course of the programme, they developed a vision for how they wanted to tell their story. With support from art facilitators and social workers, they found the words. By the end, they were approaching media personnel to pitch the exhibition and advocate for youth like themselves. Their message: “I want people to know that youth like myself can be brave. Youths like myself can be powerful, and we’re just doing our best to live our lives.”

When the last group of media contacts chose not to attend a presentation, they turned to their colleagues and said: “It’s okay — we have done very well already.” For a young person who had spent years unable to accept affirmation from others, this was, in Zoe’s words, an extremely powerful shift.

Beyond the individual stories, there was a moment that stayed with Zoe as a social worker. During Light To Night, a large crowd gathered outside the Gallery, watching the youths’ artwork animated across the building’s facade. People stood, enthralled, eyes fixed on the work.

For Zoe, this was the point: these young people’s primary struggle is their disconnectedness from society. When the Gallery provided a platform that placed their work before a broad public — and that public stopped and looked — it sent a message that society still has space for them. That belonging is possible.

What This Means for Museum Professionals

This collaboration raises questions worth sitting with. The Gallery entered this partnership not as the sole expert, but as one half of a complementary relationship — bringing expertise in art and museum programmes, while Fei Yue brought deep knowledge of and trust with the youth themselves. Neither could have achieved this alone.

It also required the Gallery to let go of some of its usual structures: advance-designed programmes, output-first thinking, and the assumption that the museum is the primary relationship in the room. In this model, the social workers were.
The result was a programme in which the museum’s platform — its space, its festival, its audience — became a tool for social change, and young people who are typically invisible in public life became, for a moment, impossible to ignore.

This case study was presented by Mian Tze Kng (National Gallery Singapore) and Zoe Tee (Fei Yue Community Services) at a Museum Wellness Summit 2026.