Confluence 2026, a group exhibition of 23 artworks by 11 award-winning artists from Indonesia, Malaysia, Singapore, Thailand and Vietnam, runs from 6 November to 6 December 2026 at All About Art Gallery in Tanjong Pagar Distripark. Every work on the walls is for sale through the gallery, so you can see, and maybe take home, what the region’s UOB Painting of the Year winners are making right now.
UOB presents the exhibition with the gallery as the second edition of Confluence, following a first show launched in October 2025 under the UOB Artist Alumni Network. If you’ve ever wondered whether winning an art competition leads anywhere, this month-long show is the bank’s answer, hung on a wall.
Life After the Trophy
Some background helps here. The UOB Painting of the Year (POY) competition began in Singapore in 1982 and later expanded to Indonesia, Malaysia, Thailand and, from 2023, Vietnam. UOB calls it the longest-running art competition in Singapore, and its alumni list includes Cultural Medallion recipients Goh Beng Kwan, the late Anthony Poon and the late Chua Ek Kay.
The bank says it gives POY artists a platform to sell their works “through a standard art gallery business model”, which is the part of a creative career that award ceremonies rarely cover.
The Freshest Winner in the Room
The biggest name in the line-up is Tang Kok Soo. Tang Kok Soo won the 2026 UOB Painting of the Year (Singapore), Established Artist Category. We covered that win in our story on the meditative grid of hearts, and his work is also part of Confluence.
His backstory is the kind that makes career-switchers feel seen. According to UOB, Tang trained as a semiconductor engineer and spent years in the corporate world before going full-time. His breakthrough came in 2016 with a Gold Award for Elephants Crossing the Water, which then appeared in UOB’s 2016 Annual Report. Since then, he’s held his first solo exhibition, Tang and Tranquility, at the UOB Art Gallery and has shown at Art Central Hong Kong.
From Art Jamming to Gold
If one story in the line-up deserves your attention, it’s Lorain Kok‘s. UOB’s profile says she trained in architecture, worked in Singapore and London, taught, and then stepped back to raise her two children. During the Covid-19 pandemic she started art jamming with them (casual, no-pressure painting sessions), which reignited a passion she’d held since childhood.
From there, she went back to painting late at night and entered the UOB Painting of the Year competition every year from 2021. She is a 2025 UOB Painting of the Year (Singapore) winner, Gold Award, Emerging Artist category. Her paintings draw on the streets of Jalan Besar and the way the neighbourhood keeps changing, a subject that will hit home for anyone who has watched their own HDB estate get a makeover!
Her route matters because it’s so ordinary at the start: no art school pipeline, just years of submissions before a win. For any young creator sitting on a folder of unsent work, that’s the encouraging part.
Two Paths Through One Prize
Valerie Ng shows what a long game looks like. She won First Prize in the Abstract category of the 2004 UOB POY (Singapore), then a Bronze Award in the Established Artist category in 2018. UOB notes that she completed the Alternative Foundation in Fine Art programme at The Slade Summer School in London.
Valerie paints mostly in oil on canvas and acrylic on paper, with work inspired by the natural world and built around colour, mood and movement. Her CV runs from the Singapore Art Museum and the National Art Gallery Malaysia to solo shows at the UOB Art Gallery, The Substation, Maya Gallery and Mulan Gallery.
Jamie Teo took a quicker route through the same system. After graduating with a Bachelor’s in Fine Arts from LASALLE College of the Arts in 2017, she won a Silver Award in the 2018 Emerging Artist category. According to UOB, she is a recipient of the UOB – NAFA Artist In Residence Programme at Cité Internationale Des Arts, Paris.
Her work moves between abstraction and representation, studying how changing light and surroundings alter the way we see colour. Her first solo exhibition, Shifting Stillness, was held at the UOB Art Gallery, a neat example of the prize-to-gallery pipeline Confluence is built around.
The Regional Artists
The regional half of the line-up is where the variety kicks in. Tran Viet Long, who took Gold in the 2025 Emerging Artist category in Vietnam, studied Lacquer Painting at the Ho Chi Minh City University of Fine Arts. He works with traditional Vietnamese lacquer and experiments with colour blending to stretch what the material can do, which makes his pieces worth seeking out for anyone who has only seen paint on canvas.
Tanyapat Manasarakul, named Most Promising Artist of the Year in Thailand’s 2025 Emerging Artist category, is currently studying at Chulalongkorn University in Thailand. Indonesia’s Mutiara Riswari, meanwhile, works with earth, rubber, acrylic and pastel, drawing on the Javanese idea of Jagat alit (the body as a microcosm).
Rounding out the 11 are Muhammad Shodik, a member of a community-based art collective in Madura, East Java; Tudpong Outayamagul, whose 2025 milestone was the IFA International Art Exchange Exhibition in Osaka; Muhammad Arash Bin Ab Jabbar, who draws nostalgic still lifes in water-based coloured pencils; and Cao Van Thuc, whose paintings centre on labourers and everyday life in Vietnam.
Planning Your Visit
A weekend afternoon is the easiest window to visit, and the show fits neatly into a month of plans alongside the rest of our November things-to-do list.
🗓️ Date: 6 November to 6 December 2026
⏰ Time: Thursday to Sunday, 12pm to 6pm; Tuesday and Wednesday by appointment only
📍 Location: All About Art Gallery, 39 Keppel Road, Unit 02-01E, Tanjong Pagar Distripark, Singapore 089065
🔗 Details: All artworks available for purchase through All About Art Gallery; more on the UOB and Art page of UOB’s website
Confluence 2026 is a chance to meet a whole generation of Southeast Asian painters in one room, from a 2026 Singapore Painting of the Year winner to a Chulalongkorn student and a Jalan Besar mum who painted late at night. Head down to Tanjong Pagar Distripark before 6 December, and check the UOB and Art page on UOB’s website for more on the artists and the bank’s wider art programme. Your next favourite artist might be hanging there right now!
Photos and Visuals courtesy of UOB.
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