'My grandfather's face was just erased': Residents speak out as duplicate image replacements strip family histories from HDB estate murals

The mural had been on the void deck wall at Block 412 along Ang Mo Kio Avenue 10 for nearly two decades. It showed an elderly man playing chess under a rain tree — a face several residents say was modelled on a real grandfather from the block, painted by a community artist commissioned during a 2007 neighbourhood renewal project. Last March, workers arrived with rollers and primed over it. A new image — a generic skyline silhouette — went up within days. The reason given to the residents' committee: the original design had been flagged as a duplicate of artwork appearing at another estate in Tampines.

The replacement was one of dozens that have quietly occurred across Singapore's public housing estates since the Housing and Development Board launched its Estate Refreshment Programme in its current form in early 2024. Under the programme, estate artworks are subject to digital audits that use image-matching software to identify visually similar or duplicated panels across the national housing stock. The intent is coherent: with over one million HDB flats spread across towns from Woodlands to Bedok, ensuring each estate has a distinct visual identity is a legitimate planning goal. But residents in at least three towns say the process has been stripping out murals that carry specific local meaning — replacing them with images that could belong anywhere.

What the algorithm misses

In Toa Payoh, a town that was among the first built under the HDB programme in the late 1960s, a long-time resident of Lorong 7 described watching workers remove a mosaic that had been part of a 2009 community bonding initiative run through the People's Association. She said the panel had been designed collaboratively by residents of her block and incorporated motifs chosen by the community — a specific orchid variety, the pattern of a neighbour's batik sarong. The replacement, she said, was installed without any community consultation. She did not want to be named for fear of affecting her household's standing with the town council.

A retired schoolteacher in Buona Vista said something similar happened to a painted panel near the Ghim Moh wet market in late 2025. The panel had depicted the old hawker centre that stood before the current one was built — a piece of visual heritage that older residents treated as a reference point. He said several stallholders from the market had contributed personal photographs that the original artist used as reference. Now, he said, the wall shows a lotus pond. Nobody he has spoken to knows where the lotus pond is supposed to be.

Community arts practitioners have raised concerns through the National Arts Council's feedback channels about how the image-matching audits are weighted. The core complaint is that software designed to detect pixel-level duplication cannot distinguish between a commercially sourced graphic printed at two different estates and a community-made work that happens to share visual elements with another mural — a red door, a bicycle, a bowl of rice — because those elements are simply common to Singapore life.

Data gaps and what comes next

The HDB's annual report for the financial year ending March 2025 noted that the Estate Refreshment Programme had refreshed artwork at more than 80 precincts since its expanded rollout. The report does not break down how many of those refreshes involved removing existing murals versus painting previously bare surfaces. Residents and arts advocates say that distinction matters, and they have been unable to obtain a disaggregated figure through standard public channels.

The National Heritage Board maintains a Register of Intangible Cultural Heritage but community-commissioned void deck and corridor murals do not currently qualify for listing, which would provide some procedural protection before removal. A petition submitted to the OneService app by residents from Ang Mo Kio and Toa Payoh in April 2026 requested that town councils be required to conduct a minimum 30-day public notice period before removing any estate artwork more than ten years old. That petition had gathered 2,400 signatures as of June 30.

Residents who want to protect existing artwork are advised by community lawyers to contact their town council in writing — not only through the OneService app — before any scheduled estate works begin, and to request written clarification on whether any artworks in the work scope are slated for removal. Documenting murals photographically and submitting records to the Singapore Memory Project, a National Library Board initiative, is also a step advocates recommend, since it creates a public archive even when the physical work cannot be saved.