At a recent Singapore Art Museum exhibition, visitors were invited to pick up little glass jars filled with dubious-looking liquids and give them a quick sniff - just as you would do with perfume bottles at a cosmetics counter. But in this case, the experience was not always pleasant.
'Cheeseburger,' said a docent, gleefully, as the pong of someone's salty feet assailed a tester's nostrils.
The olfactory mystery was all part of Japanese artist Maki Ueda's work, Aromascape of Singapore, in which 13 distinctive smells of Singapore were chosen with the help of some local students, extracted and exhibited in little vials.
Besides fermented cheeseburger, the evocative scents included bak kut teh, or peppery pork rib soup, kopi-O, the black coffee beloved by the heartland populace, Indian incense, ixora flowers and cement.
'Nowadays, you can smell Chanel No 5 on the streets in Japan, Singapore or Holland,' says Ueda, 36, who is based in Rotterdam with her Dutch artist husband and their young son. 'We are in a time of globalisation, and it transposes to our sense of smell.'
With celebrity 'noses' and the opening of olfactory art museums abroad (such as the recently announced Centre of Olfactory Art at the New York Museum of Arts and Design), scents are fast becoming recognised - and recognisable - as art.