Arts In Singapore Research Articles

RMIT exporting education:

In 1996 Interior Design at RMIT1 entered into a partnership agreement with LaSalle/SIA College-of the Arts in Singapore, which offered the School of Architecture and Design at AMIT the opportunity to geographically locate itself within South East Asia in collaboration with an established and respected Arts school.

Towards a Critical Pedagogy for Inclusion: Disability-led Arts and its Radical Promise in Singapore

ABSTRACT The inclusion of disabled people in Singapore (and globally) is gaining traction given the dominance of transnational instruments like the United Nations Convention on the Rights for Persons with Disabilities. Yet, in the absence of disability rights legislation, inclusion in Singapore has taken on markedly different forms, based on ablenationalist notions of productivity and meritocracy. Situated amidst these global and national frameworks of social inclusion, we consider the recent emergence of disability-led arts in Singapore. These disabled-led initiatives have proliferated in the past five years and have afforded new opportunities to challenge existing meanings of inclusion and to impart new forms of knowledge about the disabled body. In this article, we analyse recent disabled-led art productions put up by Access Path Productions, a disability-led arts creative organisation. In pivoting to the disabled body/mind as a generative form of knowledge and embodiment, these disabled-led performances offer new artistic practices spanning both digital and physical forms. Importantly, these initiatives have engaged with existing art and cultural spaces and institutions in Singapore, transforming existing ways of doing, thinking, and knowing about disability and offering a critical praxis aimed at (re)educating the public on the meanings of disability.

КРЕАТИВНАЯ ЭКОНОМИКА ВО ИМЯ УСТОЙЧИВОГО РАЗВИТИЯ: ТРЕШ-АРТ В СИНГАПУРЕ

2021 was declared by the UN as the year of the creative economy for sustainable development. The goal of this campaign was to attract participants in the creative industries to the problems of sustainable development of the world. One of the manifestations of the creative economy is trash art, the authors of whose works try to attract public attention to environmental problems and climate change with their works. Singapore is no exception. The article discusses examples of trash art in Singapore. It is concluded that the main goal of the artists is to draw attention to the problem of recycling waste and reducing carbon emissions.

Black Cube: The Stage for Performance in Singapore, 1995–96

Abstract: This article proposes the term 'black cube' to describe some forms of performance art in Singapore in the mid-1990s. While Claire Bishop had persuasively theorised the "gray zone" for theatrically-influenced performance art being presented in American art institutions, her gray zone does not describe the situation in Singapore. The gray zone presupposed a history of suspicion between the fields of visual art and theatre, a history that existed in New York through the writings of Michael Fried. This lineage does not properly exist in Singapore, as there has been a close relationship between visual art and theatre. This relationship deepened especially after 1994, when an incident with the Singapore state threw practitioners of both art and theatre toward a united front. This article will discuss events such as THE CUTTING EDGE [no, not the arts festival …] (29 February–30 March 1996), an experimental theatre festival by TheatreWorks (renamed T:>Works in 2020), which presented work that hovered on the precipice of art while determinedly declaring themselves as theatre. Jailani "Zai" Kuning's Growing Madness: The Day After (7–9 March 1996), Lee Wen's Hand-Made Tales (14–16 March 1996) were two works from this festival that demonstrate the character of the black cube. By discussing these case studies, the article expands upon Bishop's theorisation of performance space from a Singaporean lens. Unlike gray zone works, which were habituated to the white cube, black cube works continued to antagonise the categories of visual art and theatre through denying objective distance in the work.

Van Gogh in the Neighborhood: Creative Placemaking and Community Art in Singapore

Creative placemaking is a process involving different sectors of society as they collaborate in cultural activities, deepening their relations with each other and the place in which they live and work. As a supposed panacea to the woes of poorly planned spaces and apathetic communities, it hopes to address social exclusion and generate feelings of belonging as the environment is culturally and collectively enhanced. Applying the dual concepts of creative placemaking and community art, this article explores the phenomenon of Void Deck Galleries in Singapore. As more spaces in public residential environments are filled with community-created art works, the relationships between the state, artists, and local communities demand critical examination. Empirical data derived from fieldwork in three void decks in Singapore reveal a proactive state, the coordinating role of an arts organization, and the involvement of an enthusiastic although largely passive local population. The full potential for creative placemaking in Singapore remains frustrated, however, and the discussion identifies reasons for this while also contemplating avenues toward its future accomplishment.

What the Centre Cannot Hold: Pandemic Vicissitudes and Contemporary Art in Singapore

If anything, 2020 was a year to compel magical thinking; to paraphrase Joan Didion: for mourning the loss and getting to work in finding other ways out and doing the right thing. Coronavirus stoppe...

Affective paragrounds: alternative envisionings through multidisciplinary contemporary arts in Singapore

ABSTRACT The socio-political transformations of East and Southeast Asia, their direct impact on the changing norms of censorship, cultural and urban policies, and on growing surveillance have led people involved with the socially engaged artistic and creative practices to develop varied tactics and strategies to renegotiate the (im)material boundaries set for them. These mainly discursive, spatial, temporal and aesthetic forms of affective civic engagement aim to disseminate alternative envisionings without necessarily having a directly antagonistic agenda towards the establishment. Inspired by the recent discourses of affect and its potentiality not only in arts but more broadly in temporary, human/nonhuman encounters, and also in the urban environment, I propose that this kind of liminal and fluid self-positioning between ‘underground(s)’ and mainstream could be better understood as ‘affective paragrounds’. As an organic and continuously reconfiguring rhizomatic translocal network of protagonists – and their (in)tangible spaces – affective paragrounds are premised on mixed-method temporary approaches and alliances of communal collaborations with continuously changing positions, roles and strategies. By paragrounding themselves in ‘in-between-ness’ of private and public, they function on the borderline of (in)visibility to re-envision gradual transformations of socio-political and cultural conditions, at the same time raising awareness of freedom of expression, participatory citizenship and civil society formation.

Towards planetary performance pedagogy: digital companions in multipolar classrooms

This article proposes ‘planetary performance pedagogy’ as a theoretical and practical framework for spatially and temporally distributed teaching and training in higher education, combining remote and experiential modes of interaction to facilitate an awareness of multiple planetary perspectives. Our argument deploys the creative potential of several concepts that we develop within this framework: the idea of the planetary classroom, the digital companion, and the multipolar performance prompt. We develop these concepts in relation to a series of experiments conducted by the authors using mobile technologies and video-conferencing platforms in performance pedagogy and training settings, connecting across different continents (North America, Australia, and Asia) with a focus of activity around a Practice Research class at LASALLE College of the Arts in Singapore. In using asynchronous communication over Telegram text and video messages, collaborative Google Docs, and multimodal performative lectures over Zoom, our research questions have taken on an even more urgent dimension as the COVID-19 pandemic has radically transformed the delivery of higher education, as well as our wider awareness of the economic and material flows of globalisation. But we argue that the experiential and somatic values of performance might find new manifestations in a technologically distributed teaching practice, complicating the binary model of face-to-face versus anonymous multi-user, and instead creating hybrid and multi-bodied ways of moving through and engaging with the world and its pedagogical and technological inequalities.

Laden with great expectations: (re)mapping the arts housing policy as urban cultural policy in Singapore

The arts and artists need space to thrive. However, as much of the land in Singapore is state-owned, the finiteness of space – literally and figuratively – remains a key challenge. Yet there is a rich variety of arts infrastructure in Singapore today, from exhibition spaces to performing arts venues and state-subsidised artist studios. This infrastructure comes at a cost - these arts spaces are positioned as policy interventions capable of achieving a broad confluence of cultural, urban, economic and social outcomes for Singapore. This article aims to provide an understanding of how arts spaces in Singapore has been framed and legitimised as a strategic means to pursue multiple policy goals. In particular, this article will focus on the Arts Housing Policy, which was formally introduced in 1985 as an artist assistance scheme that provides subsidised work spaces to artists and arts groups. Over the years, the policy has evolved into an urban cultural policy expected to achieve urban rejuvenation goals. Through tracing the governmental structures and organisational processes behind the evolution of the Arts Housing Policy from an artist assistance scheme into an urban cultural policy, this article will demonstrate how and why arts housing spaces have become encumbered by the institutional layering of potentially incommensurate policy agendas, assumptions and aspirations. This article contends that a micro-level analysis of the bureaucratic structures and processes behind policy development will enable a more nuanced understanding of the tensions and incongruities between local artist needs and urban cultural policy goals in Singapore. • Arts governance in Singapore has been instrumentalised to deliver urban rejuvenation rather than arts-related benefits. • Singapore's Arts Housing is an urban cultural policy shaped by both global policy trends and local non-cultural state agendas. • The actual capacity of cultural infrastructure to deliver urban rejuvenation outcomes is questioned. • Analysing the processes and agendas behind cultural policy will enhance understanding of the expectations placed upon the arts. The

Wall dressed up: Graffiti and street art in Singapore

To be a ‘Renaissance City for the Arts’, Singapore has long relied on worlding devices such as iconic infrastructure and international cultural events. Since the early 2010s, a shift towards the public interests has emerged alongside the recognition of non-mainstream groups in the cultural life of the city. This paper considers graffiti and street art in Singapore, and their recent acknowledgement as an emergent subculture in the country. The scope is two-fold, firstly focusing on state policies on public art and the embrace of graffiti and street art in recent years, and secondly the artists' responses to government embracement. While some artists resist incorporation, others have strategized opportunities to showcase their work under official license. The conclusion highlights three particular issues attending subcultural embracement in Singapore, pointing the way ahead for further research on subcultural change in globalizing cities.

Terence Chong, The State and the Arts in Singapore: Policies and Institutions

Terence Chong, The State and the Arts in Singapore: Policies and Institutions

From design thinking to design knowing: An educational perspective

The process of design explicates the procedural knowledge of design activities, shifting theoretical conceptions across practical dimensions. Design thinking, as a creative and innovative methodology, has been established as a designerly process for non-designers to address complex problems. This article reviews the implications of introducing the design thinking methodology as a pedagogical approach in design education at LASALLE College of the Arts in Singapore, generating new knowledge to inform the research spaces of design practice and theory. Using the design thinking methodology as a sound framework to facilitate risk-taking decisions in design research and practice, students from the design specialisms of Design Communication, Product Design and Interior Design were inducted into an interdisciplinary project. The perspectives and insights arising from the collaborative, design thinking methodology are extracted, analysed and adapted to form a framework to illustrate the non-linear, circular structures of knowledge generation from theory (designerly knowing) to practice (design thinking) and research (design knowing).

Autogenous culture as political form: explorations through participatory art in Singapore

ABSTRACTThis paper presents the concept of autogenous cultural practices as a political form that is neither a subject of state practices, nor a means of resistive anti-state force. Through a study of three participatory art projects carried out by the author, this paper examines how and if autogenous culture can be presented and more importantly effect societal change. These projects were carried out in a governmental disciplinary facility, a local non-governmental organization supporting sex workers and an independent art project with three young women who were graduates of the Normal Technical stream in Singapore respectively.

HISTORICITY AND THE CONTEMPORARY THEATRE OF KUO PAO KUN AND KRISHEN JIT

What is the place of contemporary art forms from the 1980s within the present global dispensation in which the attempt to obliterate temporality transpired, as witnessed in the Hegelian revivalism of Francis Fukuyama’s The End of History and the Last Man (1992)? This essay suggests that the contemporary of contemporary art in Singapore and Malaysia is less a period style and more a differing artistic response to the end of temporality as a situation. The idea of contemporary art entails the existence of an idea of the contemporary. Temporality, in turn, is to be comprehended as the way time is conceptualised and lived out in society. The contemporary is both an idea of the time in which we are in and a goal of reacting more effectively to the demands of the immediate present. And a part of the 1980s was a sense that earlier regional formations of modern art that had eradicated traditional cultural forms as backward needed to be rethought. The artistic practices of Singapore playwright and director Kuo Pao Kun (1939-2002) and Malaysian director Krishen Jit (1939-2005) are major examples of such artistic responses. Their work incarnates a contemporary in which historicity, cultural memory, and interpretations of traditional art forms had roles. Their overlapping theatre commitments require us to see their engagement with the issue of plural identities within and without the modernising nation-state (for Kuo) and within the boundaries of the modernising nation-state (for Jit) in the decades of the 1980s and 1990s, when that great modern ideology of nationalism was being revamped by globalising imperatives. They represent a shared engagement with a common colonial-era Malayan legacy of multiracialism and state formation from the Cold War. Historicity for Kuo and Jit is not the modernist desire to reconstruct the fragments of the past into a whole, and is not centrally about the representation of the past (though that occurs), but is in the first instance the need to capture the past’s fragments in order to conceive a fuller sense of the present’s multicultural opportunities.

Role of research in community arts: Developing an evaluation framework in Singapore

Community arts in Singapore have gradually evolved since the country became a self-governing state in 1959, from a mostly top–down approach of government-initiated programs to include more ground-up initiatives. This shift advocated embracing community members not only as audience but also as originators, through community-focused policies and programs aimed at making arts and culture more accessible. In this changing context, this article seeks to understand the relationship between cultural research and practice, and examines a collaborative project between the National Arts Council of Singapore and the National University of Singapore that aims to create a community-based evaluation framework to assess and evaluate arts and culture-focused community spaces in Singapore. Results from the study show that research can inform change that not only facilitates collaboration among different stakeholders in the process of creating the outcome, but also promotes further ground-up engagement in community arts by empowering practitioners with an evaluation framework.

Must Art Have a ‘Place’? Questioning the Power of the Digital Art-Scape

Must Art Have a ‘Place’? Questioning the Power of the Digital Art-Scape

Machiavelli Meets Michelangelo

This article examines newspaper coverage of the arts in Singapore to consider the role of the island state’s newspapers in the development and documentation of Singapore’s growing arts scene. Sampling two constructed weeks for each of 10 years, 1999 to 2008, content analysis is used to examine arts coverage in the Straits Times and Lianhe Zaobao. The study benefits from groundwork laid by Janssen’s 1999 study of arts coverage in Dutch newspapers, in which not only quantity of content was reported but also hierarchical attention was paid to art forms over decades. Singapore is of interest as it represents a country where neither the arts nor newspapers are declining, and both enjoy significant overseeing by the government.

Material availability and painting practice: a case study of Singapore artist Georgette Chen

Pioneer artist Georgette Chen (1906–1993) is recognised as an influential figure in the early development of modern art in Singapore, however few studies have been undertaken on her painting materials, their availability and techniques. Building on earlier research, this paper presents a greater understanding of Chen's paintings through an in situ technical examination, materials analysis of four oil paintings in the collection of Balai Seni Visual Negara in Kuala Lumpur, Malaysia and documentary source research. The four paintings, Still Life (Ikan Kering) (1940), Rambutan and Magosteens (1950), Mother and Child (Ibu dan Anak) (1960) and Mother (Ibu) (1960), were painted in three locations between 1940 and 1960, and are representative of three decades of Chen's oeuvre. Evidence suggests that Chen employed a fairly limited range of artist quality materials. Although Chen's practice coincided with limitations in trade and distribution of artists' colourmen materials, she showed a preference for the higher quality artists' paints and supports at a time when new proprietary products were being marketed and made available. Research therefore on the widespread availability of proprietary household paints in Malaysia may not be relevant to Chen, but is of larger relevance for artists painting in this period and the wider technological changes.

A historic neighbourhood as arts space: the little india experience

Many cities around the world are redeveloping their neighbourhoods as arts and cultural precincts. Urban industrial zones and lower‐income residential areas have taken on new life as arts neighbourhoods in a bid to attract high‐yield visitors, propel their creative industry and brand themselves as attractive to investors and residents. This article has two aims. Conceptually it explores the notion of arts urbanization – the creation of arts spaces in cities and the socio‐spatial dynamics which they embody. Empirically, the concept is tested using the case of Singapore's Arts Housing Scheme. Under this scheme, historic ethnic precincts take on new roles as arts and creative belts. While the scheme has yielded some success by way of fostering spaces of identity and inspiration for artists, it has also generated social concerns and spatial challenges. Singapore's Little India offers an empirical setting to explore this concept. The paper argues that geography matters to the arts and that arts‐led urbanization creates distinct spatial configurations in cities. For this reason, a greater understanding of and research into arts neighbourhoods and their socio‐spatial dynamics are essential if we are to aspire to sustainable and sensitive development of cities and their creative communities.

‘New uses need old buildings’: Gentrification aesthetics and the arts in Singapore

The phrases ‘new uses need old buildings’ and ‘old buildings require new uses’ emphasise the mutually reinforcing relationships between historic buildings and new activities in cities. What the phrases do not say are the challenges and incompatibilities that are part of the urban redevelopment process. Singapore’s inner city has been transformed since the 1990s with the introduction of new economies. This paper focuses on one precinct that has undergone land use change – Little India. The concept of ‘gentrification aesthetics’ provides a suggestive frame to explore the form and outcome of urban change, as well as its contestations when new arts and cultural activities occupy historic buildings. Gentrification aesthetics as conceptualised in the West takes on different perspectives in Singapore, prompting questions on whether a ‘Singapore style gentrification’ is evolving – one that melds urban redevelopment with state ideology in arts enhancement and aesthetic regulation.