City Report: Singapore

Dominic Eichler:

It is only about a 38-minute drive from one end of Singapore to the other, something that documentary filmmaker and artist Tan Pin Pin’s calculatedly comment-less video 80 kmh (2004) demonstrates. Whether you watch her work or do the trip along motorways, many of them flanked by beds planted with as much attention as a botanical garden, what you’ll see includes endless Postmodern condominiums, glimpses of the harbour jammed with container ships, downtown’s brash tropical skyscrapers housing both bankers and lobby orchids, and virgin landfills made from sand imported from neighbouring Indonesia, awaiting even more property development or yet another golf course.

Singapore is home to about 4.2 million people, most of whom are either at work or safely streaming in hand-holding pairs through a labyrinth of malls such as Suntec City, where advertising exhorts them to be creative with some digital device and reminds them that their built-yesterday city–state on the tip of the Malay peninsular is just ‘a dot on the globe’. Singaporeans take pride in the fact that foreign visitors can gorge themselves on well-prepared dishes of Asian cuisine and spend the rest of their time working up an appetite frenetically shopping. Singapore is notoriously conservative, clean and watched over by its own authorities – so much so that it would be the perfect setting for another boring addition to the sequence of Matrix films or an Asian remake of The Stepford Wives. It’s as if the ultimate goal is for the whole place to resemble an airport duty-free lounge where no one actually takes off.

Speaking to local artists and filmmakers, I was told that ‘Singapore has no memory and the people forget fast’. State control is so pervasive that ‘anonymity is impossible’, ‘there is no active way of protesting’ and the Singaporean middle class has been ‘wholly co-opted in the preservation of the status quo’. This is the downside of an entrenched system of ‘comfort and control’, a social-political pact whose terms are the trading of political and cultural freedom in return for a prosperity overseen by a one party government that has been in power since independence in 1965 and to which there is no effective political opposition. The result is a system where ‘repression is not visible, not physical, but […] is manifest in the death of ideals and whole cultures, for example, the disappearance of a whole class of leftist intellectuals who were absorbed into the business world’. It’s perhaps not surprising, then, that Singapore is not known for its contemporary visual art or that, judging from scant audience numbers and public interest and from the fact that artists are traditionally considered layabouts in this status-obsessed society, it is barely missed. There are a handful of independent spaces, and some commercial galleries, which tend only to show worse than average paintings, forcing interesting artists into a claustrophobic state-dependent corner.

Increasingly in recent years, however, the authorities have realized that the lack of a vibrant arts scene is potentially counter-productive and image-damaging. Officially they want Singapore to be a cultural ‘Renaissance City’, and a number of big-budget ticket initiatives in the last ten years reflects this intention. These include: the establishment of the Singapore Art Museum and the National Arts Council, the building of the Esplanade (a durian fruit-shaped culture complex that also has a number of squeezed-in spaces for visual arts and an integrated shopping mall to attract an audience), participation in the Venice Biennale, and, most recently, plans for the first Singapore Biennale, scheduled for September 2006. With a budget of 6.4 million Singaporean dollars, the biennial will be directed by Japanese curator Fumio Nanjo and, not by chance, is timed to coincide with meetings of the IMF and the World Bank.

But grassroots problems aren’t solved through prestige projects, particularly when one word seems so cemented in people’s heads – censorship. This can be routine, direct and stifling, as in film, or only slightly more insidious, as in visual art, through the requirement that all public events be licensed (just months ago art exhibitions were finally exempted) and through funding criteria that control content or enforce lip-service compliance. This in the long run is depressing and results in plenty of self-censorship or even, at the extreme, the threat of financially crippling defamation suits or criminal prosecution. One example that the arts community is now putting behind it is a high-profile case in the early 1990s in which a gay activist was prosecuted for cutting his pubic hair and a de facto ban put on Performance art, which was only lifted two years ago. Sexuality, though, is only one of a range of potentially taboo themes – top of the list being any open criticism of the government.

Thankfully there are always those who find ways to take exception to the rule. The most interesting artists and other culture producers are often those who have studied or have opportunities aboard, or who have found a way of being openly, if obtusely, rebellious and free-spirited locally despite the odds and difficulties. Distribution of information through blogs and community-building in the Internet has greatly assisted a new sense of freedom, albeit virtual and fragile, and made censorship of work and ideas increasingly untenable. A survey of South-East Asian contemporary art titled ‘Spaces and Shadows’ opening in September at Berlin’s Haus der Kulturen der Welt will include a number of Singaporean artists and filmmakers and reflect the curators’ premise that there can be a ‘politics of fun’. Cheeky youth culture and artists’ collectives will be represented there by groups such as KYTV (Kill Your Television). Their collective approach is indirectly indebted to the pioneering work of Tang Da Wu, the artist initiator of The Artists’ Village, whose radical ephemeral Conceptual and project street art earned him a reputation as Singapore’s Joseph Beuys. Artist Charles Lim thoughtful work Sea State 1: Inside Outside (2005) will also be shown – a series of Becheresque pairs of photographs showing sea buoys marking Singaporean territory – one shot looking back and the other out to the world beyond.

Dominic Eichler is a writer, artist and musician living in Berlin.

Ong Keng Sen:

In the video game Second Life residents are friendly and the environment is stunning. Your avatar is completely customizable, with myriad variations of skin tone, eye colour, hair type, clothing, shoes and so on. You can purchase some land and build a house, all based on a series of menu-based scripts – a rich, creative economy embedded in a game. Second Life also has its own currency, Linden dollars (Linden Lab is the creator of the game). Residents receive a small amount of money when they open their account, and a weekly stipend, the size of which depends on the type of account they have opened. To earn additional money residents can also sell objects or services for Linden dollars through in-world shops. It is possible to convert Linden dollars to US dollars and vice versa through real-world brokers. The Second Life economy generates about $US 500,000 worth of economic activity per week, mostly as a result of the way the developers encourage players to use real money to pave their way inside the virtual world.

With nothing to limit them except the elusive parameters of the game engine, players have built entire towns on their land, filling them with houses, sports arenas, churches, night-clubs and more. Powerful scripting features enable them to trigger audio or even video alerts when another resident wanders by; all of this serves to grease the wheels of social interaction within the game, encouraging players to work together as they build the digital world to even greater heights.

Second Life is the ultimate fantasy, a phenomenon in the gaming world with communities of players all over the world. The life the game describes could be that of Singapore, the ultimate project, designed by Minister Mentor Lee Kuan Yew, who led the country fearlessly out of the British Empire and into economic prosperity. The People’s Action Party (PAP), led by Lee, has created a powerful master engine based on home ownership, with English as its first language. Singapore is an economic hub envied by countries around the world. It is a country that has been driven by an intense search for excellence – evident in its journey from third world to first world in only 40 years.

In such an environment, artists from Singapore who thrive by becoming travelling salespersons, taking their art overseas in search of a dialogue as opposed to producing work for a consumer market, constitute a class of foreign workers who trade their know-how in parallel with those in the international sex industry, domestic staff and construction workers. Censorship – no more or less than in Republican America – still hangs like the Sword of Damocles above the heads of artists who hit a glass ceiling. Artists make art, they do not have a stake in expressing what this culture could be – they leave that up to the game designers. Conceptual art ought to thrive, as Singapore is the most complex concept of all.

In the last year Singapore has been caught up in a moral furore: to have a casino or not to have a casino? Many aspects of this attempt to upgrade its tourist industry remain uncertain. (Apparently residents are more concerned about gay parties – which have been closed down since international papers reported the strength of the pink dollar in Singapore.) Some decisions have been made, though. For example, the proposed massive casino will form part of an integrated resort, which architects from around the world (such as Daniel Liebeskind) are bidding to design. In an attempt to dissuade locals from gambling their lives away, however, Singaporeans will have to pay a large admission fee to enter the casino. Residents seem happy. Singapore is the game of the future, where the virtual world becomes real again, a Third Life perhaps, where you can create your fantasy in the real world. As in Second Life, Singapore taps into the deepest desire of human beings, to live out an imagined empowerment. I am sure that more than 4.2 million people will want to be a part of this game.

Ong Keng Sen is the curator of ‘Politics of Fun – Art from South East Asia’, at the Haus der Kulturen der Welt in Berlin from 30 September – 20 November 2005. He curated the In-Transit Festival in Berlin from 2001– 2003 and the London Insomnia Festival at the Institute of Contemporary Art in 2005. He will be one of the exhibiting artists at the upcoming Yokohama Triennale with 'The Flying Circus Project Special Edition 2005'.