NEO-EDEN SG60
NEO EDEN SG60 – Past, Present and Future of High-Density Cities.Art Exhibition & Lecture by Guillermo Aranda-Mena at Highlight Art Gallery, Singapore | July 9th of July, 2025.
Singapore: Where East Meets West, and North Meets South
Singapore stands at a unique crossroads—a convergence of East and West, North and South. It is a city where cultures, climates, and ideas meet, intersect, and transform. This dynamic synthesis makes it an ideal backdrop for imagining a Neo Eden—a new vision for liveable, high-density cities grounded in harmony between nature and urban life.
HIGHLIGHT Art Gallery is set in the heart of Chinatown, in a beautifully heritage building. This occasion also marks 20 years of my creative, academic, and teaching journey in Singapore as a Visiting Artist and Scholar. I am grateful to Highlight Art Gallery for their generous collaboration and support with this event. I look forward to reconnecting with old friends and meeting new ones on July 9th.
Short biography
Dr Guillermo Aranda-Mena is a Mexican-Australian artis, academic and architect. He runs an independent art studio
The Artist
I love cities. After all, I was born in the largest metropolis on Earth—Mexico City. Since then, I’ve lived in many beautiful cities across Mexico and around the globe. This year, I celebrate two decades of being a visiting Scholar in Singapore, I have done creative work, research, and taught many university students over the years. Although I have never formally lived in Singapore, nor taken residency there, I have got to know the place quite well. I have also long lasting friends, colleagues and acquaintances. I have stated several times that I consider myself a nomad at hart — well, Singapore has been a constant in this lifetime sojourn of mine.
I am an artist, and architecture is my muse. It has always been, for as long as I can remember. As a child, I would build paper maquettes of castles while visiting my grandmother in San Luis Potosí. She would supply me with paper, glue, colour pencils, sticky tape, and scissors. I must have been five or six years old. My parents were then busy building their dream home (in which we only lived 3 years and is a theme for my forthcoming exhibition as Gasworks, Albert Park, Melbourne June 2026). Since those early days, I have lived in over a dozen towns and cities.
My worldview is shaped by my journeys. La Città Ideale—The Ideal City— was my 2025 Melbourne exhibition (May, 2025) which emerged from a reflection of both my memory and my lived experiences. I have been a global citizen: spending summers in the U.S. and Canada during my teenage years, in my early adult life I completed my architecture studies in Seville, Spain, and then moved to Madrid and Barcelona as a young ambitious architect. As a graduate, I worked and studied in Portugal, Denmark, and the United Kingdom.
Voyage 50505, my August-September 2023 exhibition in St Kilda, Australia, emerged from the idea of depicting one painting for each year of my life, and thus I ended with 50 paintings to celebrate my 50th birthday. I thought of the exhibition as a Grand Tour or Voyage, and the number 50505 alludes to fifty years of life, fifty cities and five continents. My paintings ranged from places I grew up such as the Spanish colonial cities of San Luis Potosí and Guadalajara in Mexico. Later, I lived and studied in Seville, Barcelona and Madrid in Spain; Esbjerg, a small fishing town in Denmark (on the south west side of Jutland peninsula); Porto in Portugal, and then various towns and cities the UK, where I pursued my Ph.D. at the University of Reading. I often escaped into London via the 27-minute train to Paddington—Wales, Devon, Cornwell, were frequent haunts with the Reading photography club. Paris and Brussels became weekend cities via the Eurotunnel and affordable student fares.
Tratti Sfumatti ('diffused layers', alluding to blended and integrated cities) was the name of my Italian exhibition (held at the UNESCO HQs for Architecture in Mantua, Italy October 2024), for me, this exhibition provided an opportunity to reflect on the past, present and future of our cities, urbanism and heritage (mainly western, but not only buildings and traditions). There is built heritage such as buildings, and civil infrastructure, natural heritage and there is intangible heritage which revolves around values. When these values are shared socially and not just personally, we begin to form our Città Ideale—our collective Ideal City.
Neo-Eden the city in perfect harmony. The Garden of Eden as the first home of humanity, a place of innocence and joy. This exhibition builds on an ongoing personal preoccupation and professional enquiry into visions of utopia, the perfect city. Although an ambition aligned with Sisyphus nature thank human realities, we can certainly track and scientifically document 'what is what makes cities thrive'. Humankind has attempted the perfect city, the Utopia, with various attempts since the Italia renaissance.
Neo-Eden and the ultimate garden. This exhibition at Highlight Art Gallery with two accompanying lectures (12:00pm and 6:00pm, 09.07.25) revolves around the idea of the garden city an high density living i.e. not as merely shelter and occupation as liveability, the thriving and healthy attributes of our cities. In today's urbanised world, Singapore is a beacon of sustainable city planning and green architecture. In less than 60 years, Singapore achieved a remarkable achievement. Contrary to Babel's unfinished tower in which the myth stipulates the communication challenges in a multilingual site, Singapore has achieved fast development progress in a systematic and measured way, and continues to do so, the challenge of course is to maintain a balance with protecting heritage, nature and the fragility of social structures. For instance, the arts community needs a long nurturing time to fully flourish, it is say the you can measure the maturity of a nation or community based on its creative and artistic production. Singapore has been certainly keen to promote the arts, and not only arts programs and education but the same buildings that host the art work such are the examples of the National Gallery.
The lesson is simple: we must return to our primitive being, to what it is to be human, and to re-engage with the a deeper understanding of human settlement and urbanism, not urbanisation. Inner-city development, not unmeasured expansion; repurpose existing structures, not demolition. For this we must care and love those same places in which we live, work, and play.
Neo-Eden and the Ultimate Garden
Exhibition at Highlight Art Gallery
This exhibition—and the two accompanying lectures—explores the idea of the garden city and contemporary liveability. It locates Singapore as a beacon of sustainable urban planning, design, and architecture.
In less than 60 years, Singapore has accomplished a remarkable transformation. Once a struggling post-colonial state, it is now an emblem of eco-urbanism—a modern Neo-Eden where liveability, infrastructure, and biophilic design converge. But this success story is more than just a product of planning; it reflects a conscious effort to nurture—not just grow—its urban fabric.
The Tower of Babel, that ancient metaphor for collapse, did not fail due to ambition. It failed due to a lack of empathy and effective communication. Many fast-growing metropolises today still risk that same fate: prioritising unchecked expansion over livability, speed over soul.
Singapore offers a counterpoint. It shows us that the future of cities lies not in sprawl, but in the cultivation of place—through empathy, through design, through care.
The lesson is simple and urgent: we must return to our primitive essence, to what it means to be human. We must re-engage deeply with the values of true urbanism—not urbanisation. We must shift from a mindset of expansion to one of intensification and renewal. Inner-city development, not endless outward growth. Adaptive reuse, not demolition. Harmony, not haste.
Above all, we must learn to care for and love the places in which we live, work, and play.
Welcome to "NEO-EDEN SG60: DESIGNING GARDEN CITIES"
Comments