Singapore’s Last Sawmill Lets the Public in on 7 November, Before Its Lease Ends

For S$68 on Saturday, 7 November 2026, you can spend two hours inside Sin Siong Lim Sawmill in Sungei Kadut. Independent arts group OH! Open House (OH!) describes the century-old timber business as Singapore’s last operating sawmill, and the site is approaching the end of its lease.

The visit is the second edition of Departures, a new OH! programme that brings artists into places facing closure, redevelopment or transition. Its guiding question sounds simple and gets harder the longer you sit with it: what do we keep when a place disappears?

Departures at a glance

A 1912 Story in Sungei Kadut

The business traces its roots to Siong Lim Sawmill, established in 1912, when it was part of Singapore’s early regional timber trade and processed wood for local use and for export. That makes it older than most of the buildings you walk past on your way to work, which is a slightly dizzying thought for a place most Singaporeans have never heard of.

Its survival comes down to a clever pivot. As regional controls on logging and the movement of raw timber tightened, the sawmill moved away from processing imported logs and began working increasingly with locally generated wood. That includes trees removed as Singapore manages its streets and green spaces, so the old rain tree that came down along your bus route could plausibly have ended up in a yard like this one.

OH! frames this as the sawmill’s continuing role in Singapore’s circular economy, and it’s a fair point. A place that gives a felled tree a second life is doing something the city still needs, which makes the prospect of losing it feel a lot less like nostalgia and a lot more like a practical loss.

What Do We Keep?

Departures doesn’t pretend it can save the buildings. “Departures is not about asking Singapore to stop changing,” said Alan Oei, Executive Director of OH! Open House. “It is about asking what deserves to continue even when the building, business or landscape does not.”

He sees artists as the right people for the job “because they can spend time with what is easily overlooked and make those stories visible to the rest of us.” At the sawmill, the overlooked part is the know-how: assessing timber, processing it, and deciding what it’s good for, all knowledge that OH! says has been built up over generations. Each edition feeds into a digital archive of the histories and lived experiences tied to every site, so the stories outlast the programme too.

Two Artists, One Timber Yard

The sawmill edition brings in artists including Robert Zhao Renhui and Lewis Choo, who will respond to the site, its materials and the people behind it. Zhao, born in Singapore in 1983, founded the long-running artistic platform the Institute of Critical Zoologists in 2008 and represented Singapore at the 60th Venice Biennale in 2024. His work keeps returning to how human activity tangles with the natural world, which makes a yard full of city trees an almost suspiciously perfect fit.

Choo, a sculptor and ceramicist born in 1990, works mostly in clay and mixed media, exploring memory, transformation and the traces everyday life leaves behind. Commuters may already know his hand: he created murals for the Land Transport Authority (LTA) and National Arts Council (NAC) Art in Transit commission across seven North East Line MRT (Mass Rapid Transit) stations.

Alongside the artworks, visitors will encounter the working sawmill’s timber, machinery and daily processes, plus stories from the Lim family. Getting a family’s version of more than a century in the trade, told in the place where it happened, is the part of the ticket that no archive can fully reproduce.

First, a Kelong Weekend

Before the sawmill, Departures opens with Kelong E63, and the logistics differ from the sawmill edition, starting with the fact that it doesn’t take place out at sea:

🗓️ Dates: Friday, 23 October; Saturday, 24 October; Sunday, 25 October 2026
⏰ Time: 7pm to 9pm on Friday and Saturday; 12pm to 2pm on Sunday
📍 Location: Golden Mile Tower, 6001 Beach Road, #22-06
🎟️ Tickets: S$108 per entry, with a dining and storytelling experience included

E63 was formerly one of Singapore’s last active working kelongs (offshore fishing structures built on wooden pilings). According to OH!, more than 250 licensed kelongs operated here in the 1940s. E63 was acquired in 2004 by the late Timothy Ng, known as Uncle Timothy, and his wife Maureen Ng, who ran it with an adjoining floating fish farm for more than two decades until it ceased operations in 2025.

The National Heritage Board (NHB) has digitally documented the kelong’s structure and working practices, so this edition turns to the memories that are harder to record. Artist-curator Daniel Chong works with fishing nets and wooden floorboards that Uncle Timothy gave him, exploring how ordinary objects pick up meaning through years of use.

The higher price makes sense once you see that a meal is part of it. Kenny Lek, co-founder of Pasarfish, presents a dining and storytelling experience on how Singapore’s fishing has shifted from kelong-based wild catch to fish farming, drawing on Pasarfish’s research into local seafood. If you’re mapping out the rest of your month, our guide to things to do in Singapore this October 2026 pairs well with it.

Which One to Book

If you can only do one, make it the sawmill:

• Price: S$68 for the sawmill versus S$108 for the kelong edition.
• Setting: The sawmill visit happens on a site that’s still working; the kelong edition is held at Golden Mile Tower.
• Timing: The sawmill’s future is the one OH! flags as uncertain, so the chance to stand among the machinery comes with a time limit the kelong edition no longer has.
• Availability: Departures has planned only three sessions at the sawmill, all on a single Saturday.
• For food lovers: Grab a kelong seat if you want the whole sensory package, since it’s the only edition with a meal built in.

Departures continues in 2027 with a third edition centred on a vinyl shop at Golden Mile, with artists yet to be announced. The sawmill edition is privately supported by collectors Sun Xiaolu and Ang Chia Liang, and as OH! board member and early backer Liang Shi’ai put it, “Places do not need to be monumental to matter.” If you’d like to keep projects like this going, OH! accepts donations on its website.

🗓️ Date: Saturday, 7 November 2026
⏰ Time: 9am to 11am, 1pm to 3pm, or 4pm to 6pm (two-hour sessions)
📍 Location: Sin Siong Lim Sawmill, 2 Sungei Kadut Street 5, Singapore 728949
🎟️ Tickets: S$68 per entry
🔗 Details: OH! Open House programme tickets

Photos and Visuals courtesy of OH! Open House and Robert Zhao Renhui.

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