Crosscurrents: Masterpieces of Mughal, Safavid, and Ottoman Art from the Musée du Louvre

Paris is renovating. Singapore is minding the jade cup.

Free for citizens and PRs, open late on Fridays and gone after 24 January 2027: if you have an evening near Empress Place, this is the best use of it. With the Louvre's Islamic art gallery closed for renovation, part of its collection is travelling, and the Asian Civilisations Museum has 100 objects from Paris dating from the 16th to 18th centuries, most of them shown in Singapore for the first time. The one compromise is that it is split across two floors, so plan your route before you start.

It isn't a straight import, and that is the point. About 30 pieces from ACM's own collection have been woven in. ACM's director Clement Onn told Options, "We didn't simply want to take it as it is", and principal curator Noorashikin Zulkifli frames the show around contact and exchange between the three great empires and Southeast Asia. Her summary is nicely blunt: "globalisation is not new."

The objects make the case on their own. A dark-green jade cup set with gold wire and rubies, once owned by Louis XIV. A Safavid tile panel of two young men locked in a poetry contest. Iznik ceramics arranged so you can watch the palette change over time. And from West Sumatra, a Minangkabau brass ewer shaped like a chicken, which is where we would head first (it is a brass chicken; it needs no further pitch).

The show sits across the Islamic Art Gallery on Level 2 and the Design Gallery on Level 3, where there is a purple Ottoman room. Start on Level 2 and finish in the purple room.

Go on a Friday, when the museum stays open late, and make a Silk Road evening of it with the Dunhuang caves in the same building. Just don't leave it until late January, when the cup goes back to Paris.

Good to know Until 24 January 2027 at the Asian Civilisations Museum, 1 Empress Place (nearest MRT: Raffles Place), Levels 2 and 3. Free for citizens and PRs; other visitors check ACM's site for ticket prices.

Crosscurrents: Masterpieces of Mughal, Safavid, and Ottoman Art from the Musée du Louvre | Asian Civilisations Museum, 1 Empress Place, Singapore 179555 | Nearest MRT: Raffles Place