From Sunday, 1 November 2026, Singapore illustrator Shirley Lim is hanging doodled versions of the Mona Lisa, Girl with a Pearl Earring and The Scream inside Coze+, an independent arts café at 803 King George’s Avenue. The show is called The Doodle Museum, and it runs until mid-December. Anyone who finds galleries a little too hushed for a weekend can look at famous paintings with a coffee and something to eat on the table.
Ten Years, One Solo Show
The name behind the show is Pillybaxtoodles, the illustration project Shirley started in 2016. In her note to us, she says she has spent the decade since then drawing alongside building her career, and The Doodle Museum is her first solo art exhibition.
That timeline is the part worth sitting with. Plenty of people fill a sketchbook in their twenties and shelve it once deadlines pile up. Shirley kept the doodles going for ten years before giving them a wall of their own, which is a far more relatable route to a first show than the overnight-discovery story we usually hear about artists.
She tells the longer version on the Pillybaxtoodles site, in her post about the exhibition. Read it before you go, so you walk in knowing the person behind the pen as well as the paintings she borrowed from.
Famous Faces, Fewer Rules
The concept is simple: Shirley takes paintings almost everyone recognises and redraws them as whimsical doodles. In her words, the aim is to “bring a little art appreciation into everyday life.”
Of the three works Shirley names, The Scream is the one we’d make a beeline for. The original is a painting about dread, so seeing what a playful doodle does to that open-mouthed face promises the best kind of “wait, that’s allowed?” moment. The Mona Lisa is the obvious crowd-pleaser and will probably end up on your Instagram story. Girl with a Pearl Earring is the sleeper pick, because her doodle keeps the details people remember: the blue headscarf, the pearl and a gold-and-white collar.
There’s a clear upside to this approach. You don’t need an art history module to “get” a doodle of the Mona Lisa when you already know the original. Spotting what changed becomes your way in, and that’s a gentler start than a wall label full of dates and movements.
Art With a Side of Coffee
The venue does a lot of the work here. Shirley describes Coze+ as an independent arts café where visitors can enjoy coffee and food alongside the exhibition. That makes it a different outing from a big museum trip, where the visit swallows a whole afternoon.
Because the café opens at 9am, the show slots into plans you might already have, like a breakfast catch-up, a solo brunch or a slow Sunday morning before errands. It suits anyone who likes the idea of art but has never felt at ease in a white-walled gallery. Bring the friend who swears they “don’t get art” and see how long that lasts!
If one show won’t fill your weekend, pair it with a pick from our roundup of Singapore art exhibitions from October 2026 to January 2027.
Plan Around the Mondays
According to Shirley’s listing, the exhibition is open from 9am to 6pm and closed on Mondays, so the first full day you can’t visit is Monday, 2 November. The show runs until mid-December 2026, but no exact closing date has been named. We’d go in November rather than gamble on the busy stretch before Christmas.
🗓️ Date: Sunday, 1 November 2026 to mid-December 2026
⏰ Time: 9am to 6pm, closed Mondays
📍 Location: Coze+, 803 King George’s Avenue, #01-242, Singapore
🔗 Details: The Doodle Museum on Pillybaxtoodles
Ten years is a long time to keep drawing without a spotlight, and The Doodle Museum is the payoff, hung somewhere you can order a flat white and stay a while. Read Shirley’s own account in The Doodle Museum: my first solo art exhibition after 10 years of Pillybaxtoodles. Then follow @pillybaxtoodles on Instagram for updates, and make a weekend morning at Coze+ part of your November before the doodles come down!
Photos and Visuals courtesy of Shirley Lim of Pillybaxtoodles.
Read us first on Google: add DANAMIC as a preferred source and our stories show up more in your Top Stories and AI results.
