In the American National Football League, the Combine is where futures are decided — prospects reduced to measurable data before they've played a single professional game. The logic is simple, if clumsy. Decide what they're worth.

Curated by Trong Gia Nguyen, COMBINE borrows both name and structure, and asks what happens when you apply it, more thoughtfully, to artists. Part project, part curation, the exhibition is a whimsical inquiry born from a specific parallel event: Nguyen's role as Chief Judge for the 2026 UOB Painting of the Year Prize in Vietnam, one of the region's most prestigious art awards.

Through an open call, the show pairs Vietnamese and international artists who register through the COMBINE online scouting portal. Artists wishing to be considered must complete a battery of six tests: vertical jump, Vulcan Span, reaction time, an endurance blink test, a timed artist statement, and Wonderlic. The tests measure, however obliquely, what matters in an artistic practice: ambition, dexterity, responsiveness, focus, voice, and adaptability. The data from these tests partially determines the pairings. A Vietnamese sculptor might be matched with a German performance artist, or a painter from Hanoi with a Brazilian photographer.

Each pair agrees to produce a collaborative work that will be exhibited at Chillala House of Art. Those works — and the process behind them, the correspondence, friction, and negotiation — form the core of the exhibition.

COMBINE is also a literal sharing of earnings. Artists agree to equally divide any revenue from sold works among the entire group of participating artists. The market enters the room, as it always does, but on different terms. COMBINE puts those assumptions to the test. In soccer terms, competition here is a friendly. The stakes are not necessarily high, but no low point is sought either.

The Native/Foreigner, East/West dialectic that structures so much of the global art world, what gets centred and what gets pushed to the periphery, is subjected here to debate.