Time is of the essence at Changi Airport – From passengers checking in and ground handlers preparing the planes, to bags being processed and planes taking off.

Time can also be celebrated along with the millions of memories created at the airport. Millions of reunions and see-you-laters translate to millions of beautiful moments and delightful possibilities.

With this concept of time in mind, Changi Airport Group approached Humans since 1982, a Stockholm-based artist collective who are experienced in producing works that are situated between visual art and product design.

A Million Times at Changi greeted the world on 1 January 2018. Functioning both as a kinetic sculpture and a clock, the artwork elegantly mastered the dimension of time, a quality at the core of Changi Airport’s operations.

With a ‘clock face’ made up of 504 smaller clocks, the kinetic sculpture is the biggest clock installation in the world. At a width of 7.5m, the entire ‘clock face’ is wider than that of London’s Big Ben. Each of the hands in the smaller clocks are fitted with individual motors, giving the kinetic sculpture the ability to project various motifs, as well as greetings in various languages across different times of the day. Displaying greetings in Chinese was one of the challenges that Humans since 1982 had to overcome for this project, as the language was foreign to them and the Chinese characters took on a different meaning when the clock hands were slightly out of position. A series of improvements later, passengers are now greeted with a perfect ‘Zao An’ (good morning), ‘Wu An’ (good afternoon) and ‘Wan An’ (good night).

With A Million Times at Changi, Kinetic Rain in Terminal 1, and Petalclouds in Terminal 4, the airport now has 3 kinetic sculptures – This is all part of the continuous drive to enhance the experience for our passengers and offer them a personalised, stress-free and positively surprising experience whenever they are at Changi Airport.