Free of Charge Art

Free of Charge Artshow (FOCA) contributes to S'pore's cultural narrative by addressing shifting concerns by way of documentation & discourse. CLOSURE was our first exhibition housing a collection of multi-views that negotiated the situation of Singapore’s cityscape as one in a perpetual state of re-construction. 8 different creatives responded to the notion of progress/loss through change in their own ways in an old flat at its final stage of en-bloc at Teban Gardens. 

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Dialogue Session with Ben Slater

Closure Art Exhibition @ Teban Gardens by the Free of Charge Artshow

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Transcript (Gist)

Ben Slater <Moderator>

It’s a real pleasure, it’s fascinating to come here, to come to this estate, to experience something you don’t often get to experience, which is being in place and to be inside of it just on the brink of its destruction.

Although it’s possible it could be next month, or six months later – it is always something very strange and poignant, and almost emotional about being in this block and walking through these rooms which some of you might have gone and explored a little, went further upstairs, seeing the kind of doorways, doorframes and traces of peoples’ lives that they’ve left behind. 

That’s something all of the artists are trying to engage with. We can get to that, and I’m also wondering when was the last time forty people were in this room. I think… probably like a funeral or something, and then it stops being funny.

It is weird to think about the occasions that could have been held in this room, and these kinds of spaces are like time machines. Coming into this flat and looking at all the artwork, there is something exciting and there is a certain level of voyeurism even though its inhabitants have long left… and finding one room we suddenly can’t go into is really frustrating. [on Boedi Widjaja, Path 3. The Lode in my heart]

Now I have a thought that I want to throw out, it’s more of a comment really, rather than make you guys answer questions… It seems that a lot of contemporary visual and moving image works in Singapore have been dealing with this idea of documentation and capturing things before they go… Quite interestingly enough it is always younger artists who are very concerned with this. There is a sense of nostalgia, inevitably, which is a weird kind of nostalgia over things that have existed – that you don’t necessarily have a memory of.

Photograph taken by a visitor. 

One thing that worries me about it is the fetishization of things that are about to be destroyed; a sadness, a constant looking back, a constant worrying about the demolition of history that might all be a dead end. Yes things are destroyed. That is sad. But that’s life. Things die; we move on, and naturally new things take their place.

Then is there a danger with work that is continually about documentation, continually on the downer tip, about Oh God, how terrible is this thing! Where do you go with that? It is something we can express quite simply, even by walking through this flat without the artworks; we are going to feel some of that.

Haven’t we got enough documentation when we take photographs with our phones, since we take photographs of everything? Do we really need to worry about that now? 

Izyanti Asa’ari <artist>

I don’t know what we are doing with it, but it's an expression of our anxiety and I think the reason why it's a lot of the younger generation artists who are concerned with the nostalgic, is because things move faster in our shorter span of life. Things were already moving faster than they did for our parents' generation so it became very apparent that there is a lack of roots.

It feels very obvious that's not much going on with ours so there is this tension. I guess it's just a sense of bad omens. An analogy would be, do you know that recently there have been all these trees collapsing when there are heavy storms and strong winds? 

My mum used to work in the botanical side of things with the N parks for a while, She says the reason why they fall really easily even though they are such huge trees is that we planted those trees almost when they were fully grown. They never really had time to dip those roots in. So now, that progress of wanting to build up the garden city very fast is killing people. 

Shah Rizzal sharing about his work.

Ben Slater <Moderator>

When the trees fall on their head?

Izyanti Asa’ari <artist>

Ya! You know that seems to be happening... 

Ben Slater <Moderator>

So you are the tree in this metaphor. 

Izyanti Asa’ari <artist>

It’s just that I don’t know how long this state will continue… this speed? 

Ben Slater <Moderator>

So it's almost like this abstract anxiety about what the future is and what is holding us down, and where we come from. Urich Lau <Artist>

I'm not young, but i find this obsession with documenting and creating works with nostalgia more of a reactionary response rather than our own doing. Because the government is always talking about cultivating our arts and culture and what it means to be Singaporean. 

New buldings and new structures are coming up all the time and old roads and old buildings are gone. So the idea of having to form your own culture and your heritage in a new environment will cause this reaction for any artist. I find that maybe for younger artists they will use documentation as their medium because they have more access to their gadgets: their phone. 

They are more used to capturing images. But older people like us will just use our memories… or write them down, or even sketch them. I don’t use the camera. I think it's a response rather than a choice."

Izyanti Asa’ari <artist>

Is it a problem that we are responding? The trend seems to be that we are just very reactionary to things happening around us.

Ben Slater <Moderator>

The problem I’m trying to identify with is making a work that says ‘You know, this is really sad, these things that are happening.’ But when you go with that, as the audience or as a viewer of an artwork, what do you take away from that? 

Just visiting this building in itself can provide us with that sense. So how can the artworks add to that or get us thinking? Where do they take us?

Future is happening and if artworks are always just focusing on these little pockets of things that are being knocked down or destroyed, and people are feeling slightly sad, nostalgic and poignant. That is a very powerful emotionally charged kind of work for sure. But artists also need to be engaging what's happening next and where things are going after that… Don't they?

Audience Respondent 1

Can i 'ask' a point? Frankly I’m very sick of all of you artists. The point is, im very tired when somebody goes, “Oh the chair is old! It's from the 90s, my childhood, it's about to be thrown away! It's precious, like the estate. And oh my god! Look at that, the chair, the furniture, the old people!”

I’m so sick of it, my god. If you were there 10 years ago and you didn’t appreaciate it, why are you appreciating it now? Because suddenly it's going away, it becomes a novelty. It's like a muse and it's being worshipped like something that's cool, interesting and new. 

Come on, you are all looking back at the past and you are all not progressing and building onto the future.

ii.

Ben Slater <Moderator>

I’m curious because you go to other cities in Asia and in Southeast Asia where there are the same kinds of things going on, and in some places like Hong Kong, it’s even worse, where you see the government not even caring about old buildings particularly, whereas in Singapore there are huge committees, bodies and organisations that are pondering what to say or what not to say. Though we may not always agree with their decision, but they are trying to say something.

Why are Singaporean artists so obsessed with this, you think? It seems to be something very specific to here. The phenomena of loss and destruction of the past is not unique to Singapore.

Audience gathered to listen to the artists

Melvin Tan <FOCA>

As young people we are fascinated with these things because we see old people using them and they are attached to it, they know it. But we don’t. I think change has become a constant and place is rather, temporal, now. Boedi Widjaja <artist>

I think it is not fair to say that Singaporean artists can be categorised into a group of people who simply think about the past. From when I look around, especially in this exhibition, I don’t see it at all.

 If anything, what I see is one scenario where Singaporean artists are grappling with the reality of the past that has been lost and how we can then move forward. So I disagree with the classification that Singaporean artists are just a bunch of nostalgic people who simply keep looking at the past, and who complain about what we have lost.

Izyanti Asa’ari <artist>

I suppose since we are veering towards the political right now, the trajectory of all these nostalgic-themed work is just offering an alternate narrative to what we hear around us all the time, because what might be more unique about Singapore is our media which has a very clear plan and storyline, that gives us what we are supposed to hear. I guess the reason why we are so obsessed with capturing everything that is old and that is from the past is that it is not aligned to the national agenda. It may simply be an obsession with things that are not said by the powers that be.

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Vandalising the Interior

Teow Yue Han discusses the social function of vandalism, drawing links to a personal artwork conceived during the FOCA Incubator Project at Peninsula Plaza spanning the 22nd and 25th of July, 2013. 

Shah Rizzal's Website

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Shah Rizzal, Applying a layer of white and letting it drip.

The Closure team almost immediately thought of including graffiti artists for our show. After all, graffiti artists are sensitive to the decays of society, dwelling in derelict spaces, marking their territories. We thought it might have been a feat otherwise impossible – to legally vandalise a building. After news that the facade was not to be tempered with, Shah Rizzal headed straight for the kitchen. In his interview during the dialogue session, Shah mentioned his incessant visits at 3am to the kitchen at his former home, in which he was chased out from due to en-bloc. Staying on his own, the kitchen had no food. Yet it was inspiration that was cooking. In response, he decided to create the work in black and white, because “colours came later”. Shah works spontaneously. On the 2nd day of installation, I arrived to witness the (finished) work: fresh, oozing from the pipes, dripping into the sink. No sign of the artist. It was an outpouring of raw yet specific emotions, order & chaos: an explosion of thoughts. The identifiable body parts not only acted as a signature of the personal dialogue between the artist and the kitchen but also magically transformed it into a living organism.

It is beneficial at this juncture for me to introduce my current enquiry on scribbles (from strips of pen-testing paper) collected from bookshops. For months, I have obsessively acquired or stole wads, slips and snippets of friendly banter from their “guardians” – the stall keepers. I mention this as a tête-à-tête with Shah’s piece. Both graffiti and scribbles raise the debate on artistic expression and functionality. Oscar Wilde famously stated, “All art is quite useless.” Graffiti is not accepted as art by the general public and frowned upon as lowering the quality of life. This perception and assertion of cultural and physical control onto our cityscape by the local government has accumulated a loaded history and incited critical discourse on the very notion of “public art”, which needs no further elaboration. 

Shah Rizzal, Untitled

At some point graffiti began to gain acceptance and curatorial attention as high art (or perhaps, institutionalized art) ridding it of its very significance, championing almost, a reduction to embracing mere decorative function. Singapore, understanding the need to control such rebellion and to imbue social function, has apportioned lengths of walls for creative expression that operate like murals. Street artists begin to negotiate the slippery relation between high and low art, public and private spheres, and public and social control. This might explain Shah’s current introspection in his artist profile, “evolved from the angst ridden spontaneous visual execution to a more poetic approach in terms of comprehension and its outcome.” 

What then is the function of graffiti? Pent up frustration engraved on school tables, below playground slides and occasionally, at the far end of buses – leaks in society? Perhaps it is then plausible to see them as cultural artefacts of a very valid social anxiety. These pen-testing paper strips seem to empower aspiring ‘graffiti’ artists – given a chance to hide behind anonymity, to express themselves crudely in a mini no censorship zone, and release bouts of creative catharsis. What drew me to these scribbles was the collaborative effort (by the community) in making rather abstract-looking yet generic masterpieces, borne from the very functional act of pen testing. 

In a way, it brings us back to the very primordial essence of human civilisation – mark making. The word graffiti is derived from the Italian word graffito, which means, “to scratch”. Staring at these strips of paper and envisioning how I could use them as material for an artwork, I delved into cave painting as primal instances of mark making. As such, I began using candles and a small camera to film the material, to channel an “act of discovery”. This view into the past, or celebration of a timeless desire to inscribe observations as something more then historical, is the crux of the exploration. The aesthetic of the candle and the first-person camera movement situate the scribbles within an allegorical cave. This internalisation provides a dialogue with the public and externalized forms of mark making, to bring forth an atavistic vision, in a similar vein to Shah’s piece. 

In Kitchen, the artist looks at home as a sheltered space that is both metaphysical and ephemeral, as imprints on the mind that refuses to be subjected to demolition and whitewashing from society. My scribble work revisits the cave of collective consciousness: a tool for social reformation and collaboration that has been extinguished due to the advent of social media. This subversion calls for a relooking of the functional instead, calling for a celebration of autonomy and mental flight.

The closing “performance” of Shah’s piece took place in his absence, and was that of erasure. Part of the terms and conditions of using the unit was to return it to its original state after use. The FOCA team whitewashed Shah’s work, recalling 80s NYC, Ed Koch’s subscription to the broken glass theory that led to an anti-graffiti campaign and graffiti clean-ups all over the world. Graffiti constantly demands tabula rasa, whitewash, a clean sheet of paper, discarding the past… which is very much the central theme of Closure: Investigating our nation’s entanglement with nostalgia. Perhaps these memories live on in the dialogue, documentation and discourse of our everyday living.

Yuehan's exploration of scribbles found in bookstores.

These scribbles is a pen testing procedure of customers wanting to buy pens.

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POT(LUCK)

Lishan Chan examines a book curation piece by Riya de los Reyes at the CLOSURE exhibition.

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Pot(luck) assemblage of books, curated by Riya de los Reyes

The flats in Teban Gardens are only 35 years old. Yet, as early as 1997, they were considered old and shabby enough to be torn down. The flats now lie in their final stage of en-bloc, waiting to be demolished.

Perhaps it was the cheap materials that had been chosen when the buildings were constructed. It seems that no long-term plan existed for the maintenance of these buildings to last a lifetime. Such low-cost assembly is indicative of utilitarian, effective function at the cost of durability.

The rapid replacement of buildings in Singapore means, for members of the community and society, loss of identity, memory and cultural values. Architecture is associated with history- the familiar places we inhabit give us a sense of who we are. Tear them down, and we are displaced.

When an en-bloc deal is closed, flat occupants receive an attractive sum of money in return for their removal (bodily and architecturally) and replacement. Occupants proceed to shift their memories and belongings into storage, preparing to shift habits of a lifetime to new locations.

It was in this context that Free of Charge Artshow (FOCA) transformed a flat in Teban Gardens into a gallery site/ exhibition space where people collectively discussed the notions of change, progress and loss, and the rapid replacement of buildings. In a sense, this was a political response to the en-bloc situation. With no ultimate say over the transformations in our landscape, it might nevertheless be possible to reclaim the space, albeit for a brief period, and to occupy present space and time, in order to stake a place in our heritage.

As part of the exhibition, Riya de los Reyes had transformed the kitchen counter and cabinet into a repository of books. I was especially excited to have the opportunity to review this conceptual art piece of a kitchen library, given my love of books and my interest in socio-cultural development.

Beginning with the question, 'which cuisine(s) do you want represented at the dinner table?', Pot(luck) sought to explore rapid social change as a parallel to rapid transformations of the building landscape. In particular, Pot(luck) focused on the influx of foreign talent and migrant workers permeating Singaporean society

Underpinning the continuous upgrades and replacement of old buildings is the belief that the better off one is, the more opulent is the home one inhabits. Something old is overtaken by something new. Upgrade from a three-room to a five-room flat. Vacate the HDB flat, move into the greener pastures that the condominium offers, complete with gym, swimming pool and function rooms.

The rapid replacement of buildings is a quick fix for a country whose constant emphasis is survival in a globalised world. To get ahead, we welcome renewal without any skepticism regarding its possible disadvantages. The deliberate methods through which Singapore is urgently and continuously modernised suggests that diversity (old and new) in the urban landscape has been sidelined.

Close-ups of some titles.

In a similar vein, at the root of increased labour mobility is the belief that attracting talent from abroad or filling the need for workers to perform menial work is required for remaining competitive. But this has resulted in an intertwining of the Singaporean identity with flows of foreign nationalities. It reminded me of Singapore's position as hinterland, in particular, Singapore's economic relations with Malaysia and Indonesia that reconfigure social and political ties.

Semantically, the term 'potluck' suggests individual contributions to a meal. Within this arrangement, however, exists contingency and uncertainty. Which food items will appear? Likewise, Pot(luck) narrates ambivalent consequences. The outcomes of movement and migration that result from Singapore’s liberal foreign policy are undefined.

The kitchen-library saw several books deliberately arranged on the counter top. My attention was drawn almost immediately to a pile of cookbooks effectively lit by a desk lamp illuminating their presence. They featured cuisine from a plethora of countries: French, Italian and British sat proudly at the top, Japanese and Korean occupied the middle, while Bangladesh was situated right at the bottom. Plagued by the stark absence of a local cookbook, I contemplated my own status. Where should the Singaporean stand in the midst of foreigners in his own country?

A separate set of books about Singapore lay on the table. The separateness of the foreign from the local books was strangely unsettling, seemingly suggestive of a gap between the social and economic status of foreigners and Singaporeans. Or perhaps it was a recognition of the failure of foreigners to smoothly integrate into Singapore society. Singapore as a Port City. Capitalist Development and Culture in Singapore. Territorial Transformations... Singapore’s Hinterland. The titles themselves were enough to unnerve, unleashing concern after concern at the viewer.

But as a piece meant to connect with the en-bloc situation and to explore notions of past, change, progress and loss, I was unable to see a strong or direct message. The books presented were current writings on Singapore, with no space on the counter for possible or future books, representing future concerns.

There was no clear indication that the art piece had engaged with the notions of change and nostalgia for the past, whether in reference to the building landscape or to society. But perhaps this should have been addressed, particularly in the environmental setting of an en-bloc situation. The questions of whether or not and how much we should latch on to the past, and how much we should let go in order to advance, could have been aptly highlighted, perhaps by inclusion of relevant books such as David Lowenthal's The Past is a Foreign Country.

As a standalone piece, however, the kitchen library by Riya de los Reyes is not without its merits. If understood as a catalyst to stimulate and provoke thought on migration and mobility, population demographics and national identity, it has sufficed.

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Baywatch Singapura

BAYWATCH SINGAPURA – INCUBATING ELYSIUM

Simon Chiang’s dissertation purports that the architecture of Singapore’s first reclaimed coast initiated subsequent massive urban change. The East Coast is not just a sleepy coastal residential estate but the urban incubator of modern Singapore. Chiang’s investigations of the coast as a singular mega structure have delineated post-independency Singaporean spheres of influence into frameworks such as: remaking living environments, urban infrastructure, lifestyle creation and spatial products of social surveillance. The reclaimed coast has thus provided the urban theory upon which modern Singapore is designed today. Chiang addresses the intertwining concepts of design, state, social security and territory.

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“Landscape architecture is not a passive product of culture. It is an active and strategic agent of culture.” – James Corner, architect, founder of Field Operations

“To achieve First World standards in a Third World region, we set out to transform Singapore into a tropical garden city.” – Lee Kuan Yew, former prime minister of Singapore, Memoirs

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How did the ‘City in a Garden’ come to exist? 

Cities are fluid amalgamations of populations, lifestyles, policies, laws, infrastructure, education, economy and continuous trial and error.

 The national ‘Tree Planting Campaign’ of 1963 was the first wave of modernization – Horticulture as urban design tool. Tree planting, however, does not fashion a city. Instead, a series of controlled experiments testing the products, its infrastructures and mass-producing First World lifestyles are conducted before island wide implementation.

 There is also a belief in Singapore that applying first world urban doctrines to the original city would result in a First World Garden City.  

East Coast Park is a manifestation of coastal reclamation, tabula rasa, horticultural testing, Japanese and American landscape theory, lifestyle reeducation, creating spectacles and social control integrated through design. It fosters the type of public recreation, which modernists fantasize about. The first world doctrine in question is La Charte d’Athenes, published in 1942, promoting the functional city as a desirable product of top down zoning into dwelling, work, recreation and transportation. Ergo, this dissertation explains why East Coast Park and its periphery have a pivotal role in Singapore’s transformation towards a modernist utopia – the religiously functional island, Elysium.

Tracing this green genealogy, East Coast Park is identified as the original laboratory, where the strategies, zoning and mechanisms that later shape the City in a Garden are first incubated before mass reproduction. In light of climate change and the increasingly complex global cultural/political milieu, an examination of the history of East Coast Park reveals that the architecture of landscapes is all at once an urban pioneer, incubator and instigator. However, uncompromising attachment to such methodologies may herald the possible downfall of the little red Elysium. 

The chaos to set in order

The new coast replaces a coastal settlement that developed under the British without an official urban plan. The following description of the coast prior to reclamation has been derived from first hand investigations, historical records and archival photography; “an image of chaos”.

From the time publication of the Raffles Plan of the city centre in 1823 until the Singapore Improvement Trust (SIT) 1955 Master Plan, Singapore had developed into a city organically with no official planning principle. (Waller, 2001)  Away from the bustling urban centre of Singapore, notable architecture along the coast comprise of many ritzy hotels and villas, where Europeans and illustrious locals held extravagant parties.

 The East Coast is an agricultural hinterland, with large private estates as well as swathes of coconut plantations, family farms and fishing villages (kelongs). (Tan, 1976) Several recreational facilities including the Singapore Swimming Club and Chinese Swimming Club offer public bathing in the sea for its members. Malay Muslim fishermen live and work on the coast, harvesting and selling coastal produce, in villages such as Kampung Siglap while up to 20 Malay kelong communities off the coast of Bedok and Tanah Merah thrive. (Fig) Mangrove and coconut groves are the typical flora found along these clear waters, abundant with coral reefs. (Waller, 2001) The shoreline of muddy overgrown mangrove estuaries are interspersed with white sandy private beaches. Coincidentally, the Straits of Singapore is also one of the world’s busiest shipping lanes. The eastern coast is a co-existence of raw tropicality, indigenous culture, agriculture, industry and western sophistication. Though idyllic, it has had a violent history. During the Japanese Occupation, strategic buildings along East Coast are bombed by American fighters and even today, unexploded shells and bombs are unearthed periodically.

Given its proximity to the Indonesian islands, East Coast also becomes a target for Indonesian saboteurs during the ‘Konfrontasi’ period from 1963-66.

Upon reclamation, these various communities, memories, livelihoods and ecosystems are evicted. All the villagers are relocated into the HDB flats in the Bedok.  

According to the HDB, the new reclaimed coast is to become the Marine Parade and Bedok estates of high rise towers for 100000.

 A continuous verge as a recreational green ‘lung’ full of apparatus to pioneer the Garden City will be built along the coast. The creation of such a spectacle becomes an industry, creating hundreds of jobs and attracting foreign expertise to Singapore. This approach to landscape is a victory for modernism in brining order to ‘chaos’.

Amnesia as urban design tool

The new East Coast evokes Robert Moses’s frenzied construction of New York’s infrastructure and parks during the 1930s in both context and scale. It is truly new urbanity on trial at East Coast, a world apart from the slums, crowds and poor sanitation that plagued the decaying colonial city centre. Collective amnesia as an urban redevelopment tool is pioneered at East Coast.  In front of the old villas and villages, parklands, expressways and corbusian concrete towers on piloti emerge. By making a region lose its immediate context and function, new programs, purposes and lifestyles become more convincing and easier to implement. Immediately after reclamation, apartments, which accommodate dense populations, replace old estates and villas. On the other end of the spectrum, fishermen relocated to HDB flats lose their way of life, places like Kampung ayer Germurh (Thundering Water Village) and Sungei Mata Ikan (Fish Eye River) reflecting the rich aquatic vernacular of the coast forever erased from sight and mind. Phase 1 of the reclamation evicts 20 Kelong communities; the fishermen are denied permission to rebuild their kelongs to fish at East Coast Park or sail their fishing boats into the canalized estuaries. (Tan, 1976) Small insignificant fragments of the old coast do exist however. At the junction of Nallur Road and Marine parade Road, an old seawall and the beach gate of Tan Lark Sye’s magnificent beachfront villa still remain.

The villa has long been demolished, the land now carved into numerous lots for several rows of freehold terrace homes.

The spirit in which architecture of the verdant new coast is constructed is hardly neutral or unbiased. It is become an agent of amnesia where controversial modernist urban doctrines such as the cursory non-contextual retention of historical architecture

 and the expulsion of ‘peasant populations’ (Harvey, 2008) are exercised.

 As explained in later chapters, the entire East Coast is created in a purely top down process with prior consultation with the populations affected. Despite this, the official reason given for such grand scale tabula rasa is one of economy – the cost of land acquisition payments for an entire coast was calculated by the Ministry of National Development (MND) to be greater than the cost of reclamation. (Tan, 1976) 

Fabricating Elysian Living Environments by the sea Theme Park Urbanism

“Garden City (1963)”, “Tropical city of excellence (1991)” or “City in a garden (2012)” are but variations on a theme park. The theme park city is a) ageographical globally recognized urban bits b) obsessed about enclaves, security and surveillance over citizenry c) architecture which exert their authority by a semiotic of pure imageability, oblivious to the real needs and traditions. (Sorkin, 1992). This critique will provide the framework for the recurring themes featured in rest of this dissertation. The attractiveness of a top down ‘theme parked’

 city to the fledgling government is unmistakable. Instead of “chaos entering the city”

, the aesthetic of a garden city satisfying dwelling, work, recreation and transportation needs would prove to the impoverished Third World man in the slums and foreign investors alike that through strong political leadership, a First World living environment is attainable. 

Lee Kuan Yew travels extensively around the island, inexhaustibly taking note of the growth individual trees and writing memos for his Parks and Trees Unit (predecessor to the Parks and Recreational Department

 (PRD) (1973) which is then renamed National Parks Board (Nparks) (1996)). The imagery of his ‘Garden City’ takes its cues from the unmistakable semiotics of high modernism in urban design. Unfortunately, Le Corbusier’s sketches of La Ville Radieuse never included impenetrable tropical canopies, ferns and a tangle of undergrowth, but soft willowy trees that softened and reduced the vertical scale of his Breton brut towers.

Year after year, Lee tasks his subordinates with memos about the type of plants suited for the Garden City, and the atmosphere that a garden or park should have, personally planting countless of trees during his term as Prime Minister of Singapore. Today, Prime Minister Lee Hsein Loong continues his father’s legacy.

According to the NParks, East Coast Park is a ‘themed’ playground, with ‘recreation for all’. However, from 1976 to 1972, the reclaimed coast lies bare, functionless, settling, during which no public consultations are conducted with regards its future use. HDB hands over the land earmarked for ‘park space’ over to the Parks and Recreation Department (PRD) indefinitely. Out of the total 454 hectares, 185 hectares are devoted to the park.

 In July 1972, Otto Fung Wai Chan is appointed to the PRD as the first chief landscape architect in Singapore to master plan this land-in-waiting while the brief for turning the East Coast into the “Gold Coast” of Singapore comes from the MND. (fig) The man made beaches, parks, modern residential towers, commercial centres, golf courses and highway connecting the CBD to the airport would translate into an exclusive enclave, the hallmark of a First World country that would impress overseas investors in a ‘certain subtle way’. (Lee K.Y, 2000) This is the beginning of hyperreal Simulacra Singapura.

 The following observations of East Coast Park over the past 35 years illustrate how this ‘themed’ playground has influenced Singaporeans lifestyles and converted the city into a theme park of function. 

Tabula Rasa – Coconut tree to Concrete pilotis 

The incubator role of the coast can be gleaned from a study of the original 1974 masterplan of the reclaimed coast. Grids of wide roads carve the new land into neat packages, seamlessly connecting to the highway for transport towards the CBD while plots for educational institutions, commercial centres, and modern dwelling towers (raised on pilotis) are zoned systematically. This master plan of East Coast Park hints at the sweeping changes to come. Compared to the abstract representations in the 1971 concept plan, the masterplan of East Coast explicitly foretell the future – Singapore is to be neatly organized into green recreational space, efficient transport routes, modern high-rise dwelling zones and distinct commercial and industrial zones. 

New homes and New lifestyles

HDB is well known for successfully relocating the majority of the population from Third World dwellings (in villages and crowded urban slums) into modern towers of high-rise apartments. Nevertheless, the methods in convincing people to give up their old ways of living and working has always been more controversial. According to modern urban doctrine, work comprises of industry, workshops, offices, government and commerce.

 The Fishing kelongs of east coast somehow do not have a place in Lee’s image of the new functional Garden City. Most of the fishermen and villagers of the coast are relocated into HDB flats at Marine Parade and Bedok. It is surprising then that amnesia has surprisingly not completely erased all vestiges of the old coast. 

9 rows of 6 green storage boxes are lined up on the sand of Area B at East Coast Park. 1.5m by 2m, these boxes contain fishing and boating equipment. Rows of boat carrier trailers and small sampans painted with eyes

 line the bay just behind these boxes, each box inscribed with a license number that corresponds to the boat parked adjacent to it. Arranged like mini HDB blocks, these are in fact the last vestiges of fishing community left behind on the East Coast of Singapore. Before 7am daily, people are seen buying fish from fisher men who still fish these waters.

The existence of the neatly ordered, blocks of boxes and carefully parked boats confirm that some form of concession between top and bottom has taken place. It is the architectural manifestation of the subordination of private interests to the greater interest of the community.

 Somehow, the kelongs of yesteryear have been abstracted into a function of ‘work’ that is compliant to the new public park and allowed persist. One wonders if more such concessions could have been made during the transition of old to new coast.  

The green glue  

The process of fitting dwelling and industry within an idealized landscape is tested at East Coast Park. While East Coast may be designed as an idyllic suburb with sandy beaches and lush public parks, in reality, the beach flanks one of the busiest shipping routes in the world (fig), with the $51.2bil water transport services industry forming the backdrop to the beach. Conventionally, industrial shipping and beachfront lifestyles seldom co-exist. The trick then is to mitigate the negative visual and environmental impact of industrialization by re-introducing nature as a buffer. In the case of the East Coast reclamation scheme, approximately 40% of land immediately along the water is earmarked for park use. For every 9km2 of built up area, 1km2 is to become green spaces. (URA, 1980) According to the government, even man-made “nature has economic value” (Singapore Biodiversity, 2011). Billions of dollars worth of property and infrastructure have been developed parallel to the coast; property prices escalated by views of the park, evidence that even artificial nature can induce desirability. Today, every new private apartment with a partial sea view along the coast will command higher than average prices. (Koh, 1996)  Spreading this green glue across the country, Singapore is overhauled into the Garden City by inserting shady lawns and parks as interstitial zones. 

Despite the importance of nature, the original indigenous pockets of nature and geography of the old coast are erased. While the original estuaries still divide the coast into 8 zones (Area A – H), these estuaries are concretized to facilitate speedy drainage during downpours. No longer sustaining any form of community or economy, these canals become lifeless urban edges. (Some have since been converted into park connectors) The replacement of previously self-sufficient neighborhoods (messy fishing villages) with top down nature and parks (new lifestyles) will reflect the future formula in urban planning in Singapore. Every chaotic inch is to be accounted for and reorganized according to the virtues of the Garden City.

Wild nature allowed back into the park . . . as long as it serves a purpose 

In the 1990s, there is a slight about turn in this attitude. Heeding PM Goh Chok Tong’s call to ‘live the next lap of the tropical city of excellence’, the URA and MND decide ‘to help landscape a Singapore so entwined with tropical greenery that it gives the illusion of being a city that has sprung out of a garden’. (URA, 1991) Having achieved success as the functional city, native tropical nature is allowed to reoccur in controlled settings. NParks decides that East Coast Park is suited to accommodate such patches of tall grasses and jungle vegetation and thus 4 – 5 such “Bird sanctuaries” are established. The dense tropical rainforest plants remain a buffer between the expressway and the park (see Raintree tunnel) while a fork in the main jogging/cycling tracks leads park goers through this vegetated zone, engaging them in ‘real nature’. It is hoped that even such small isolated zones of ‘natural habitat’ would attract and complement the avifauna of Singapore, even accommodating coastal egrets, wading birds and migratory species. (Chin, 1991)This wild growing natural habitat now features heavily in between Area H and the Changi Coastal Park Connector, where the cycling track meanders through a dense forest, giving the impression of total immersion into wilderness. Despite its contrived roots, the bird sanctuaries and wilderness zones have matured into genuine natural habitats for wildlife. 

III.

new Lifestyles, Globalisation, Foreign Talent 

The Singapore Story (Lee, 1996) credits the country’s modernization to its unrelenting enforcing of state control to completely rearrange the zoning, architecture and aesthetic of the country in a swift top down move. (fig lee kuan yew pointing)  Nevertheless, for Singapore to truly be embedded within the capital flows and consumerism of the world economy, the population must adopt a lifestyle that complements such an end. Physical urban change can only be successful if the peoples’ hearts and minds are won. The role of laboratory East Coast Park does not stop at urban zoning or the trial of large infrastructure. Additionally, a national campaign of persuasion to adopt complementary lifestyles and attitudes of the new Garden City is set in motion. Naturally, foreign experts from the first world are hired to help design East Coast and in essence the way we live, consume and play. 

“Existing space and social formations are purged … cleansed … re-engineered. In their place, world class infrastructure … systems are developed, maintained and constantly refashioned.”(Yeoh, 2004) Understandably, this new world-class identity consists of globally recognized urban bits (Sorkin, 1992). After beautifying existing infrastructure, how else could the demand for manufactured landscapes be promoted? For example, East Coast Park is one of the venues where thousands, joined by Prime minister Goh Chok Tong, participate in the Great Singapore Workout. It is a fun, semi-patriotic nation (body) building exercise, aimed to encourage healthy lifestyles in an urbanized city. The message – you can show your love for Singapore by enjoying outdoor recreation and staying active. Promoting public affection for the outdoors translates into tax dollars spent on an entire industry of creating recreational facilities and parks. The following examples are spatial products and philosophies that explain how this new Singaporean milieu is pursued.  

Winning hearts and minds 

“The original concept (from the Ministry of National Development) was simple, to create the largest recreational ground in Singapore catering to the family and people of all ages, taking advantage of its location as a coastal park” – Otto Fung, Parks & Recreational Department, Chief architect of East Coast Park 

In August 1972, Otto Fung, freshly graduated from Utah State University, is given his first official job, to design East Coast Park. His philosophy – landscape is to be shared, molded and influenced by the current culture (social, economic, political), climate and topography of the site. He imagines a public beach, full of simple facilities, lush greenery and relaxing spaces that would be used by Singaporeans for years. 

Modern urban theory preaches that the demolition of chaotic slums in favour of well-defined open recreational grounds serve to ameliorate the surrounding areas.

 Likewise, East Coast Park convinces Singaporeans that they no longer live in the third world by exposing them to first world lifestyles of recreation, work and dwelling. When Frederick Law Olmsted designed Central Park in 1857, it was an interesting juxtaposition to the rest of Manhattan. There were streams, woods, knolls in his organically crafted landscapes. Central Park provides an escapist zone from the hustle and bustle of city life and informs urban planning itself.

 Having no key topographical features is a limitation for any park. The narrowness of the reclaimed land compounded this problem. He also faces the challenge of working with the hot tropical climate, coastal environment and clayey soil. Fung thus tries to emphasize a planted shady corridor instead. Many of the plants and trees that he was familiar with are not suited to survive the local conditions. While Singapore is not Manhattan, he knew that in order for his park to stay relevant to the modernizing lifestyles of Singaporeans, it had to provide a place to escape the concrete jungle even before the country was fully urbanized. 

Fung’s foresight is unmistakable. Over the past 40 years, the shipping activity in the Straits of Singapore has increased exponentially while the built environment opposite the park and the ECP has become increasingly dense. However, age has only increased the national appreciation of the park as an urban oasis of quiet recreation and leisure. 

Accepting Foreign Talent 

The development of East Coast Park has always been cast in a nationalistic light, but a little known aspect of it reveals a fundamental concept seldom mentioned in the Singapore Story – that we did not do this alone. In a controversial move, 25 years after the Japanese occupation, Singapore accepts assistance from Japan to create this national playground. As member countries of the Colombo Plan organization since 1954 (Japan) and 1966 (Singapore), the MND of Singapore is offered assistance in areas of economic and social development.

 The Japanese International Cooperation Agency (JICA) dispatches Japanese landscape architects Yokoyama and Fujiyama to assist Fung with the design of the park. 

At Area D one notices architectural features that are dissimilar to the rest of the park, sampled elements of Japanese garden design. There are undulating knolls of about 5m in elevation and an adoption of ‘shakkei’ or ‘borrowed scenery’ techniques found in many Japanese Gardens (the dense bird sanctuary surrounding the pond also forms its backdrop). The only 2 reflection carp ponds of East Coast park are in Area D. These ponds have their own individual landscaping such as a forested area surrounding it and mini pedestrian paths, diverted away from the main pedestrian paths, with benches placed at certain points, facing the pond or some mini rock gardens; rest areas for contemplation. A very Japanese miniaturization of the elements of nature, made to specifically craft viewpoints, makes the park appear bigger than it is. Area D is all at once a quiet contemplative garden with pond and rock formations, forested paths through a bird sanctuary but also a busy recreational beach filled with showers, changing rooms, rest huts and benches and a myriad of circulation. 

By 1973, Yokoyama completes Area D of the park, the first landscaping to take place on the reclaimed coast, urgently designed as a standalone interim park catering to the residents who were already moving in to their sea-view homes at Marine Vista. The rest of the park is later designed and completed by Fung. In the coming decades, local and many foreign architects will compete to fill the Singaporean skyline with their modern designs. 

Made uniquely in Singapore

In 40 years, Singapore has become a living billboard advertising the Singaporean brand of architecture, urban design and landscaping.

 Local landscape architects are now much sought after for their knowledge of the tropical climate.

 The greening of East Coast Park has contributed much knowledge in this field. Because the fill material excavated from Bedok and Siglap is infertile tanah merah (laterite) (Tan, 1976), the topsoil of East Coast Park is not ideal for plant growth and the clay content causes drainage difficulty, resulting in the soil of the entire park being waterlogged. Hailing from Hong Kong and trained in USA, (now a Singaporean) Fung was not familiar working with the tropical conditions and plants. East Coast Park thus, fulfils its role literally as an incubator. Unknown to most people, the aesthetic of the park today is the result of the efforts of Fung and his team of horticulturalists who devise planting tests, inventing new methods to cultivate plants species that could withstand the high salt environment, strong winds, water logged soil and limited space. For example, a method of planting trees by creating mounds of topsoil for each individual plant was pioneered. (fig)East Coast Park today is a neat arrangement of towering green trees, an exuberant hall of fame of the hardiest tropical shrubs and flowers. This attitude of landscape design at East Coast Park, and eventually in Singapore, reveals that every tree has to be planted in specific positions, maximizing its utilitarian functions such as shade factor or visual buffer. 

The East Coast has ‘excited the interest of coastal engineers and researchers from around the world’.

 Many foreign visitors are so impressed with the bays and the landscaping at East Coast Park that they seek to create their own versions at home. Presented at the 1972 and 1974 international conferences on Coastal Engineering, East Coast Beach is case studied for the use of beaches formed between artificial headlands as a defensive strategy for newly reclaimed land. Hosting International conferences like the IPR Regional Congress on parks & recreation has also established Singapore as an authority in land/park/beach making. Saudi Arabia, Sri Lanka and China have all come to observe the experiment and made their own beaches.

 On some level, East Coast Park has given rise to the Singaporean industry of environmental design, a burgeoning brand of star architecture. Many urbanizing countries dream of creating their own Garden Cities and hold Singapore’s Design & Environment in high regard. Recently in the press, urban planners from Singapore have been in the limelight for having the ability to create livable cities, our country itself being a ‘living laboratory’.

 The Singapore model, (Koolhaas, 1995) while panned by Koolhaas, is undeniably efficient, manageable and profitable. There is a growing trend that the Singapore brand of architecture and praxis of urban planning will become bona fide urban theory that is emulated by developing countries. 

2 See www.nparks.gov.sg/ciag/  - imagine Singaporeans having a home within a garden, instead of just having a garden outside a home. 

3 Cities are an immense laboratory of trial and error, failure and success, in city building and city design. This is the laboratory in which city planning should have been learning and forming and testing its theories. – Jane Jacobs, 1961

4 The URA 1971 concept plan, is drawn to guide the development of Singapore, among other things, into the Garden City. In it, the island of Singapore features a verdant southeastern edge as a large public coastal park. 

5 An isle of edenic beauty, located in the western Oceanus at the end of the earth, its residents of select mortals and Gods mingled among shady parks where they engaged in atheletic and musical recreation. Sacks, David (1997). A Dictionary of the Ancient Greek World. 

6 Excerpt from a speech by Lee Hsien Loong, Prime Minister, at the official opening of Gardens By the Bay, 28 June 2012, 7pm at Gardens by the Bay

7 pt 71, La Charte D’Athenes

8 Illustrious socialite Mrs Lee Choong Guan (Diamond Queen), held lavish parties for the elite of Singapore at Mandalay Villa, a grand house built in 1902 by architects Lermit and Westerhout, along Amber Road. Well loved by the British and locals, she allowed villages of nearby Kampongs to live rent-free on her land. 

9 An unexploded WW2 bomb was found at a condo worksite at amber road and safely removed. 24 July 2012 (The Straits Times)

10 Rubber tycoon Tan Lark Sye’s beachfront villa along Nallur Road is bombed.

11 “Where 100,000 will live and play on reclaimed East Coast” 8 August 1971 (The Sunday Times)

12 . Its wrought iron gate still features the imagery of the old, virgin coast – the iron is twisted into the design of a coconut tree and wavy water. 

13 Otto Fung lives in the terraced house built behind this gate along Nallur Road. 

14 Pt 65 – 67, La Charte D’Athenes : Fine architecture … should be protected from demolition… (so that) they express an earlier culture … (for the sake) of public interest. But their preservation … (should not cause) people to live in insalubrious conditions. 

15 See “The right to the city” in“Social Justice and the City” by David Harvey, 2008

16 According to the Merriam-Webster Dictionary, ‘theme park’ was first coined in the 1960s and is described to be an amusement park in which the structures and settings are based on a central theme. A true 'theme' park consists of different themed regions through the use of landscaping, architecture, music, food, employees, and attractions, great efforts are made to create the illusion of another world or culture. Walt Disney employed film directors instead of architects he was able to create a true escape from reality, as if the theme park were a movie on a screen. Disney also created the concept of themed resorts as the ideal location for vacations in which visitors never have to leave to fulfill their needs.

17 pt 8, La Charte D’Athenes, 1942

18 The name Parks and Recreation department reflects quite clearly the positioning of nature as an adjunct to recreation and beautification rather being allowed to thrive on its own merit. 

19 "Can we not get tall equatorial forest trees, like the Jelutong or the Teak, that grow to 30m to 40m to grow alongside the 30- to 50-storey buildings sprouting all over the city? - Mr Lee Kuan Yew, in a speech at the Horticulture and Aquarium Fish Show, Sept 17, 1980

20 “From the beginning, even before Singapore became independent, we sought to build a world-class living environment here through greenery.” – Lee Hsein Loong, opening address of Gardens By the Bay, 28 Jun 2012

21 Joo Chiat Commercial Centre (parkway parade), Marine Parade HDB estate, several schools, and several condominiums and HUDC civil servant apartments will occupy the remaining 269 hectares. 

22 East Coast Park as Simulacra – the making of a park as an expression of societal ambition and political will integrated through architectural design. The image of the new coast is actually itself a reproduction of the desired image of the beach. Thus we perceive a simulation of a coast. Baudrillard defines simulacra as not mere imitation, but a conscious substituting the signs of the real for the real. Thus, East coast park as artificial product, able to do more than a original coast, has supplanted the need for a real beach. This is the seduction of the City in a Garden. A hyperreal model that excludes the unwanted elements of the natural. It is the simulation of nature that becomes the thing itself we want to protect. 

23 pt 41, La Charte D’Athenes

24 local fishermen traditionally paint eyes on their fishing boats for good luck, a practice that can be traced back hundreds of years

25 Pt 94, La Charte D’Athenes, 1942

26 The secretariat of the United Nations’ Convention on Biological Diversity has hailed the republic as a living testimony that sound urbanization and ecologically managed cities can exist. 

27 pt 36 -37, La Charte D’Athenes, 1942

28 Under the influence of Olmsted, the urban recreation and park movement, extended the park to become a complete system of open spaces in which parks not only constituted an enhancement of the urban environment but also a structural component in shaping of urban form. (Yuen, 1996)

29 Japan International Cooperation Agency (JICA) is an affiliated agency of the Colombo Plan, and under its schemes, sends technical ‘experts’ to developing countries such as Singapore. According to their mission statement, they want to improve the standard of living in developing countries by technical assistance, loans and grants.   

30 Straits Times, Urban Planners building reputations abroad, Natasha Ann Zachariah, 21/4/12

31 Because of the flatness and openness of the bare earth, during the monsoon season, where the prevailing winds from the north and south became extremely strong, only plants which have a natural resistance to salt blasts and the high electrolyte content in the soil could thrive. 

32 “Making our beaches to order …” The Straits Times, 24 September 1974

33 China’s largest man-made beach, the Bihai Jinsha (blue sea gold sand) beach and residential district was completed in Fengxian Shanghai. It has white sand shipped from Hainan Island and a filtration system in the water to turn it blue and clear. The Man-made beach can accommodate 5000 swimmers at a time. Covering 79 hectares, the beach stretches 1.3km. A new residential quarter adjacent to the beach will house 100 000 new residents. 6 July 2009 China Daily

34 “The Singapore Brand: Efficiency, Integrity, Rule of Law” 1 March 2008, The Straits Times

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When Hidden Folk met CLOSURE

Sihan Tan, scriptwriter of Hidden Folk, provides an exciting account of the film’s conceptual development.

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Hidden Folk (2013) Trailer from Thong Kay Wee on Vimeo.

The first draft of Hidden Folk was conceptualised about six months before production. Initially, the climatic conversation set within a pop-up art gallery steered towards a visual, aesthetic motivation. Having wandered into professional and private galleries in Euroasia, the eclectic mix of audience mingling before art appeared rather haphazard. The facilitator’s skill in distinguishing the hordes of patrons seems to bud off from prior curation of the art pieces as well. Does the showy banker belong as much as the miserly hipster? A (profitable) curator’s job is not noble and he/she does not pretend it to be. 

Our female lead within the screenplay contends not with issues of the heartlands but the cultured; grapples with prestige and visage, not societal, heart-on-your-sleeves concerns; yet is entirely human. Being a human of some stature, Lilian Mah would naturally be hypocritical, objectionable, disappointing and identifiable. Now what if this insecure, successful creature happened to be the hidden party of a sex scandal? With much media attention devoted to all sorts of local sex related scandals, we were interested in a possible, unfiltered backstory of the feminine figures involved. The backstory would rewind back to before the fall, before the charge, before any high profile media coverage to trace its beginnings. To up the stakes, she would be visible, highly regarded and accessible to all, the 1% and the rest.  Thus, an acclaimed curator slash art educator. 

Screen captures of the film Hidden Folk

Six months ago, draft 1, Lilian Mah would have curated a bitterly indulgent festival critiquing gentrification, Singaprogressivism and mass-produced alternative culture for the vimeo/tumblr/instagram fraternities. Her showcase was titled “(insert) des Bellas Artes”. (Before we had settled upon Teban Gardens, several alternative spaces were tossed about such as under flyovers, void decks, canals and those temporary dormitories for foreign workers.) Patrons would even wear masks to avoid distractions arising from face identification when purveying righteous art and the respective pieces would have been sold exorbitantly to the good-humoured wealthy.  

As our collaboration with the FOCA team came into fruition, the celluloid gallery evolved, organically. Fistful of revisions later, the shallow, conceptual wisps of HDB des Bellas Artes found a sound harbour in CLOSURE. A tweak of angles followed – the art gallery would be reflective and symbolic of Lilian’s will to self-closure, an end to her insufferable condition. This self-possessed, celebrated specimen will no longer be puppeteer cum laude making digs at felt hipsters, wooden politicians and our wired society.  Lilian’s gallery will no longer be a pompous, indulgent display of her nihilistic disregard for the people who champion her and the strangers that don’t . 

Nevertheless, Lilian’s persona takes center stage within her 5-room flat integrated art realm. In one of Hidden Folk’s later scenes, she is seen briefing various parties, but rather than detailing the works she is more concerned with getting her curatorial vision through. The commissioned artists go deliberately unmentioned. Her mini-lecture gaining momentum from every agreeable nod in return. In fact, the culmination of the sequence ends in the living room where framed portrait of the very artists are hung. While in CLOSURE, the pictures celebrate the unseen creators; in Lilian’s world, they are akin to the mounted trophies from the big hunt. Artists slaved for her, patrons beguiled by her. She single-handedly made everything happen. 

Most of Hidden Folk happens before her appearance at the gallery. With 6 separate pieces, CLOSURE explores and questions the tension between past and future, progress and memory, opening and closure.  Similarly, Hidden Folk is a series of closures strewn across a spatial and temporal spectrum. Through encounters with the ex-lover, an absent mother, the flighty best friend, she seeks avenues to reconcile, attain both private and shared instances of closure while also exploring what comes after closure. And it is within the borrowed space of the gallery where she is confronted by an inevitable, life-taking resolution.  The inquest for closure might satisfy any state of suspended uncertainty but it could possibly open fatal, new wounds. 

Screen captures of the film Hidden Folk

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On Closure

Lan Cheow Lee, one of the most spirited respondents at the CLOSURE Artists’ Dialogue Session, reviews the show in writing.

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An audience member speaks about her views about the issues raised in the dialogue session.

At the exhibition Closure, one of the recurring concerns was of nostalgia, sentimentality towards that which once was but is no longer. Of particular interest was the set of found objects – everyday, household objects taken from the abandoned block and put on display beside the TV set at the show. I thought that was rather representative of a past-blasting trend around me recently: heritage trails around Tiong Bahru, pretty photographs of discarded objects showing up on Instagram feeds and Facebook albums, and a hardware store that doesn’t sell any hardware. 

Nostalgia is nothing new. To paraphrase Chumbawamba, we sing the songs that remind us of the good times, and the songs that remind us of the better times. As I look at the works, I also return to the question that the curators have brought to us: how do we deal with constant change? And so I look back at the works with more questions. What was the intention? How do they fit into the overall dialogue?

PeiLing responds

It is dangerous if the artist’s work lingers in the past, unable to see the future; that the onl y way we try to move forward is by attempting to reconstruct a history that does not belong to us. I suppose part of the nature of art is to establish meaningful dialogue, and there is a real danger that we automatically regurgitate emotions and responses. It is a danger of indulgence, that we become self-absorbed in the comfort zone of longing.

Sometime after the exhibition, I was reminded of the works of Chris Ware, cartoonist, illustrator, designer and ephemeralist. Much of his work deals with the past, of loss and longing, while his visual and literary styles both reference and pay homage to early 1900s American design. Here, I thought, was nostalgia well put to use, in word and image, as a stepping-stone to discuss timeless themes relevant to the everyman.

Art is part observation, part analysis and part discussion (and part craft, but we shall save that for another discussion), and most importantly, it deals, and it helps us deal, with the human condition. It may be tyrannically utilitarian of me, but I believe that to linger on the past is stagnation, but building upon these feelings will allow us to create and explore new and unseen avenues.

Ben Slater, moderating the event.

I just watched a video clip from our favourite art historian, T. K. Sabapathy about the impediments to local art, and he tells us: “Ultimately, when it comes to creative processes, whether you like it or not …… it is up to the individual.” Art is difficult. It is very heartening that despite insurmountable challenges (and I use the phrase for what it means in its entirety), the Free of Charge Artshow (FOCA) and the participating artists have taken things into their own hands and put up an exhibition worth your while. So to take a lesson from nostalgia, I see FOCA, and these artists, represent exciting times for Singaporean art and culture. With each step into the future they, and we, will grow as artists, curators and creators, and I am terribly proud that myself, and all of us, have the opportunity to be a part of this new unknown.

Boedi weighs in his views.

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Last Look Around

Yun Teng reflects on Marcel Gaspar’s Last Look Around and the Teban Gardens landscape where CLOSURE the exhibition was situated in.

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Single Channel Video, Last Look Around by Marcel Gaspar

Documents from dawn to dusk.

C L O S U R E, organized by Free of Charge Art (FOCA), was an ambitious undertaking with a seemingly simple premise: How do we deal with constant change? When I first stepped into the space I didn’t know what to expect – this concept of change is a common one, explored and discussed at length by artists, especially young ones, in Singapore’s constantly evolving (I hesitate to use the word progressing) society. It is also one that I am personally concerned with – from the eyes of an art student, interpreting and processing all the information I receive through the lens of art, it is evident that the only thing that does remain constant through the ages is change. It becomes apparent however, that there is a lot more to this issue than it initially seems; beyond the process, what is more important, I feel, is the impact that it has on us, the receivers and participants of change.

  It was refreshing to discover that this exhibition was centered around a concrete context in the midst of this conceptual change – reflective of the larger society, yet possessing a very tangible, immediate impact. The said flat in Teban Gardens (of which has been probably demolished at the point of this publication) yielded, if I might venture to call, a nostalgic aura, where much of the initial flat was retained. The intervention by invited artists worked well with the space – for example, Shah Rizzal’s graffiti-style installation in the kitchen and Hans Tan’s work that drew inspiration from the immediate space around it. This direct contemplation of the context of Teban Gardens was perhaps most evident in Marcel Gasper’s ‘Last Look Around’, a video documentation of the immediate environment surrounding the flat over a period of time. The frames overlap repeatedly until small segments of each time frame can be seen, a linear progression across the screen and at the same time changing as time passes. This dissected series of images which evolve as day becomes night is Marcel’s attempt at capturing change – in the short pocket of time within which this flat is still standing, to accurately and wholly retain the essence of a day spent here, a day closer to its eventual, inevitable demolishment. It is mundane, simple yet poignant – enhanced by its presentation on an old, large-backed television, the graininess and static ever so slightly present. It grapples with the reality of the destruction by trying to further delay it, to delay the eventual loss of the memory of Teban Gardens as it used to be.

As a young Singaporean myself, I can wholeheartedly understand this sentiment – it is perhaps because we’ve seen so much change that we struggle to find something solid to hold on to. There is constant construction and deconstruction going on in the city – so much so that if one leaves the country for a couple of years and returns, he wouldn’t be able to recognize it. An occupation with the past was hence something that was raised in the dialogue session conducted during opening night – is this an obsession that young Singaporeans cannot let go of? Is this a valid concern worth pursuing – looking back as opposed to looking forward? While many felt that it was far more worth it to embrace progression and focus on the ‘creation of new things’, I still hold onto the view that the past is worth exploring. In many ways, the government has a standard way of dealing with old buildings that have lost their initial purpose – to redeem them as outlets for tourism or entertainment. It seems that the only merit they have is to bring in profit, and the historical value of buildings are oftentimes secondary. Otherwise, they aren’t even retained at all, and a new condominium or shopping mall pops up in its place. It is necessary to examine this change from a different perspective, an ‘alternative narrative’ if you will, and through very emotional and personal exploration of memories and history we are able to arrive at a better understanding of the path ahead. It certainly can, in my opinion, be a worthwhile pursuit for young artists today. And I felt that C L O S U R E was a comprehensive examination of this issue, enhanced by the great discussion that followed the opening. It certainly left me with a set of personal questions and a sharper perspective on change.

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Elsewhere

Mike Chang examines Calvin Chua’s New Workers vis-à-vis Guthrie Lonergan image archivals

Guthrie Longergan’s archive Pic-see

At the beginning of 2000s, artist Guthrie Lonergan began collecting images of domains1.  This archive of images consists of people’s computer desks, entertainment centers, shelves of gaming consoles and movie collections. These images are mostly collected from online message boards, where virtual friends share their setups of the places they sit plugged in for hours on end to interact with each other.

Lonergan considers himself an avid Internet user2.  He often makes work about the Internet and its communities. While today everyone is a net user, when we traverse history, it was a different scene ten years ago. This was the time when Napster was shut down and Web 2.0 was realized: user as contributor and participation drew large influx of Internet users to share their knowledge and experiences over social platforms (Facebook just took off in 2004). It was then that Lonergan began looking closely at his Internet peers. To Lonergan, these physical spaces are “domains of control” where Internet users have complete authority over the virtual realm through mouse and keyboard.  These images spell out vocabularies of domains where the Personal Computer is the obvious focus, and the trophy accessory that accommodates the (mostly) young male’s aesthetic taste.  What is shared between the users (and the public) is the similarity and familiarity of spaces where they are physically located, as well as the shared experiences these users possess.  Even though the found images are mundane, it paints a portrait of the American online landscape, offline. 

Guthrie Lonergan’s archive Pic-see

In Calvin’s New Workers, a series of portraits is featured of the artists involved in the exhibition Closure at Teban Gardens, including himself.  The photograph of each artist is taken on Skype with the webcam while the artist is in a familiar domain: home or studio.  Hanging these portraits in the living room of the now abandoned housing estate signals the changes in local societal structure. Teban Gardens was initially conceived in city plans to accommodate the labor force that worked in the Jurong Industrial Estate.  But Singapore has very rapidly, in the last twenty years, shifted away from said labor-centricity.  Now, at 47%3, Singapore has the worlds’ highest percentage of the creative class within its working population. Richard Florida’s term ‘Creative Class’ refers to those who contribute to the economy through creativity, innovation and knowledge-based transfers. Teban Gardens represents the waves of HDB flats that have been made to go en-bloc to make space for new high-density, high value housing projects, aimed to satiate the rising members of the creative class.

While CLOSURE uses the abandoned housing unit to examine en-bloc culture, Calvin Chua’s project literally pins artists onto the wall. A metaphor for the rise in status of the creative class following the increase in their ‘overall economic contribution’, these Skype portraits raise various questions on current conditions. How will the new creative/cultural-fueled economy change the way we consider architecture? The transformation of space organization and human ergonomics, in addition to the shift away from traditional notions on working hours only serves to push the contemporary citizen towards embracing mobility.

Additionally, the entire process of making New Workers possesses a temperament of obedience.  Sign in to Skype > Screen capture > Photo crop > Email to printer > Standard Daiso frames > Wall portraits.  It points to the process of art making in a time of immense capitalism, at the same time expressing a coldness in its logic.

Guthrie Lonergan’s archive and Calvin Chua’s photographic portraits are both unconventional documentations of their prospective times. Lonergan identifies himself among Internet users by locating the physical space that is parallel to the virtual world.  He is interested in the typology of the domains the Internet users have set up, particularly of the American male circa 2000-2005.  On the other hand, Calvin identifies himself (along with other artists in the exhibition) as the rising creative class at the forefront of an economic shift.

While the work is meant to be read as a predictive insert into a space that has been rendered out-of-date, none of these portraits were shot in that particular housing unit, revealing that its locality lies elsewhere. Perhaps the actual occasion Chua’s portraits depict is the mobility of the Internet User, also members of the creative class, in a moment of transition, both economical and architectural. Ironically, in the act of locating the compliant body in the present moment of vacancy, the physical space is never really at the center of it.  Skype says it best.

1. Guthrie Lonergan’s archive of domain Pic-see. Web. <http://nastynets.com/picsee/>

2. Guthrie Lonergan and loose internet collective, Nasty Nets founded by artist Maria Olsen. Interview with Thomas Beard. Web. <http://rhizome.org/editorial/2008/mar/26/interview-with-guthrie-lonergan/>

3. Florida, Richard. "The World's Leading Creative Class Countries." The Atlantic Cities. The Atlantic, 4 Oct. 2011. 

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Martin Siu explores Hospitality within a philosophical framework that is increasingly relevant to Singapore, with our high foreign import flow. 

Sovereign national governments today have acquired the right and power to regulate and police the movement of peoples across different territories. As such, the notion of 'hospitality' – how we are to treat the stranger and the foreigner at our doors and in our territories – has become pertinent to the politics and ethics of international migration. The most recent contributor of import to the concept is Jacques Derrida, and attempts to comment on the topic cannot avoid engaging his notion of absolute hospitality.

Derrida explores the assumptions underlying the cosmopolitan view of hospitality, chiefly being the existence of a host who is sovereign over the territory into which the visitor is welcomed. For Derrida, this implies a conditional hospitality that imposes limits upon the visitor who may do him violence. Therefore, he proposes an understanding of hospitality that is unconditional in its reception of others. This 'absolute hospitality' is never fully contained within law or concept, and those who practice hospitality should give to the visitor without reserve or condition. Moreover, the host gives unconditionally to guests, relinquishing sovereignty to the extent that the guest seems to be the master. For Derrida, the Law of Unconditional Hospitality and the laws of Conditional Hospitality must be held in tension – the Law of Unconditional Hospitality must always critique specific practices of hospitality, while the laws of Conditional Hospitality must always exist in order for any practice of hospitality to occur.

Yet this Derridian hospitality is not without its problems; for instance, while the Law of Unconditionality provides a basis for critique against violence, its author does not provide any basis for how it might be possible for humanity to meet such unending demands. Moreover, Derrida's work is founded on the modern and reductive assumption that all kinds of exchange between us and the other are inherently economic in nature, thereby leading him to take a suspicious stance toward any particular act of hospitality. If hospitality is to be truly rescued, we must acknowledge Derrida's critique of the conventional assumptions of hospitality we hold, yet turn to another source for an alternative account of hospitality.  

The works of St. Augustine (the French-Algerian philosopher himself has written on his work) are apt for this purpose as it converges with elements of Derrida's thinking. Firstly, both thinkers regard the achievement of perfect justice as impossible here on earth – Augustine because of human depravity, and Derrida because of the deconstruct-ability of law and duty. Secondly, both diminish the right and duty of the citizen to the sovereign in comparison to the ethical obligations of persons– Derrida challenges the citizen's privileges over the stranger, while Augustine argues that people have duties to God and one another that go beyond the demands of earthly citizenship. Both thinkers therefore employ the transcendent to critique the immanent, and at the same time question the primacy of national boundaries in politics and ethics.

Yet Augustine diverges from Derrida in significant ways which offers possible solutions to Derrida's aporia. Augustine does not directly comment on the subject of hospitality; but his insight that it is human desire, or Love, that moves human action overcomes the problem of motivation which we encounter in Derrida. For Augustine, what drives ethical action and political judgment is Love, rather than Law, and an Augustinian conception of hospitality would include notions of a rightly ordered Love that properly regards and cares for the stranger. Secondly, despite his powerful expositions on human fallibility, Augustine's writings are underpinned by what John Milbank calls an 'ontology of peace'. As such, interactions between us and another need not be be motivated by selfish economic exchange or violence, but can also be the expression of an innate desire for charitable communion with one another. Drawing on Augustine's theology, we are able to articulate an account of hospitality that is not just critical, but founded on hope; and more importantly, it is to be made manifest to the world by the community which he terms as the Civitas Dei.

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Dan Koh provides an intimate account of CLOSURE the exhibition, with references to Hans Tan’s Mirror Mirror.

“Why did you bring me to this dump?” an overseas friend of mine asked. I must have mumbled something about Teban Gardens’ history—that these were flats built in the 1970s by the Jurong Town Corporation, that they were significant for having been spared redevelopment time and time again, that this poor cousin of Pandan Gardens was special, at least, for turning into a sort of ghetto: after being built for factory workers, they became in their afterlife low-cost housing, where midnight walks in the estate threw up sights of old men sitting in the shadows of the night, street cats prowling amidst flickering street lights, and sepak takraw games at 1am. On those nights when I crossed their path, I felt I had come across an independent existence, an elusive character to this dark neighbourhood.

The truth is that Teban Gardens was so very common. SERS (Selective En bloc Redevelopment Scheme) was spreading, and across the island, especially over the last few years, ghost towns of HDBs emerged: on Commonwealth Avenue, as the train sped by Queenstown MRT, around Holland Drive, as you took a dip in Buona Vista Swimming Complex, and at Kampong Bahru, around the corner from the Tanjong Pagar Railway Station. In my mind at least, a new nostalgia was being created as blue construction mesh was hoisted up, an immediate desire separate from the race to store away the past of the KTM railway line or mosaic playgrounds. Returning to Teban Gardens, I started to calculate the true lifespan of 99-year leases. How much longer would it be before I was moved to another 40- or 50-storey tower, connected by ticketed sky gardens, wobbling in the wind? How did we get brought to this dump? 

Walking around the largely abandoned building, it was instructive to find things that were left behind. A plethora of literature abounded: relocation companies offering “non-obligatory quotations” and “protection for piano”, housing agents, sometimes on the reverse side of the flyers or on helpful 2013 calendars, promising to “buy/sell/rent” or sort out “divorce, contra sell buy, bankruptcy, bank refinance and all kinds of problems”. In the lifts, which were still armed with quaint urine detection devices, stickers were pasted then scraped off, a hint of a job opportunity still visible as the fire for the first, fourth, seventh, tenth and thirteenth floors went on and off. Clothes hangers, especially, were popular items to leave high and dry, as were walking sticks, umbrellas, fish tanks and religious artefacts—together, they formed some kind of post-apocalyptic preparedness pack, I thought. On the last floor, the power services that be had been by. They had dismantled the four electrical boxes at the lift landing, their casings dangling off like yellowed incisors that had come loose, while on the fifth floor, a rhyming couplet outside a locked gate still bore the wish for an active home, active people and active career. Above it, a pair of eyes, cloaked in blue, green and red kept watch.

Behind these faces, in the interior of the ground floor flat, was a small habitat that despite its fierce ordinariness had been given an extended stay on life. And at the back, by a big brown door, was the restroom, or rather, restrooms—two sanctuaries of cubicles, an upgraded one for the water closet, and another for showering, separated by a pink sink on the outside. Perhaps this arrangement was meant to accommodate the multiple residents of the flat, easing their morning rush hour, or maybe it cushioned the transition from outdoor jambans, where showering and relieving oneself were activities that had separate spaces carved out for them. 

To create a mirror of this change, printing its very image onto a portable scenography as Hans Tan has done, is to reflect a seemingly trivial configuration that “was very iconic for HDB flats of that era”, Tan says, capturing a “typology…that I believe is no longer relevant in Singapore”. It is his hope for “Mirror Mirror being used in the everyday context of such an interior, where it creates a tension between a contemporary space with the old, bygone space suggested by the printed image.”

Probably ridiculously, I imagine a family moving their restrooms with them, “grafting” its image to wherever they are off to next. More pertinently though, Mirror Mirror dutifully replicates the little pink flowers that the former residents had painted on their bathroom walls. In undulating patterns, on the corners of walls and below cupboards, these moulded flowers bloom haphazardly and high up, a dream of a garden on the outskirts of a city. Between the actual and printed surfaces, these signs of life connect for an instant, and I wonder whether after all this change, we will find ourselves in the mirror, or just a reflected image of all our past lives. 

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Cinema within a Constructed Culture of Constant Change

Shian Wen explores the meta-film Hidden Folk, created in collaboration with the FLIM Collective. 

Making film in a carefully constructed society like Singapore that has experienced drastic change in the past five decades, and that continues to change, is a daunting endeavour. The official narrative paints the Singapore story as the collective effort of a simplified multicultural society that works together on a quest for prosperity, one that invariably involves great pragmatic change – obstinately so, for the sake of progress. This is a quest that requires letting go of many things tied to the past.

Within this ideological framework that has been ingrained as a national ethos, the past (and things connected to it) are considered to be relics, obsolete and disposable, particularly so if they interfere with the relentless march of Progress. This instrumental pragmatism is observed in the way the Singaporean government constantly develops land: removing villages, reclaiming land, tearing down old apartment blocks and building roads through ancestral gravesites before their historical and cultural significance can be fully absorbed or realized. This relentless march towards progress has not come without cost. As such the younger generations of Singaporeans who are born into a system of change in the name of progress, are cultural refugees with considerable difficulty anchoring themselves. Each successive generation finds it harder to locate anything of ancestral memory beyond block after block of erected architecture. It will soon, in a few decades, be their turn to be sacrificed on the pedestal of progress. Art-making in a society where the values of progress and change are emphasized often at the expense of properly contextualizing the past is disheartening, as artists often find themselves faced with a lack of historical ground. This same challenge is experienced by local filmmakers, in the struggle for cinema to tap into sources of cultural narrative from which stories can be constructed. When asked to describe what truly resonates within the Singaporean ethos, filmmakers find themselves at a loss. The tension between past and future, progress and memory, birth and closure are explored in the art show ‘CLOSURE’, housed appropriately in an apartment building set to be demolished for redevelopment. Hailing from multiple disciplines and styles, the artists explore the implications of change and progress. It is against the backdrop of a real art-show in which filmmaker Thong Kay Wee lends his cinematic flair with Hidden Folk, a film that follows the final night of the protagonist, Lillian Mah, as she wraps up the final art show of her burgeoning career. As the hours pass, leading up to the finale, demons from her past haunt her. She encounters an ex-lover, best friends and distant parents. Things come to a breaking point as a devastating scandal with dire implications on her future threatens to erupt. Lillian personifies a social condition. We observe the difficulties society faces in dealing with latent memories of hastily-removed relics, some partially forgotten and others half-remembered, and the contradictions encountered while attempting to reconcile present with future.

Hidden Folk is an exploration of the human psyche, ever challenged by change with all its idiosyncrasies and vulnerabilities. This is steeped within the backdrop of ‘CLOSURE’, the art show, with authentic art-works that explore the very same issues. In the creation of the film, Kay Wee has chosen to merge the background of his narrative with reality, drawing from curatorial information provided by the FOCA team. Eventually, the fictional character Lillian personally engages the work on screen. This deliberate blurring of the forth-wall creates a larger meta-narrative beyond the confines of the script, and in many ways Hidden Folk is more than just a film. One cannot fully comprehend the message it conveys without considering the locality it is steeped in and the art that it is surrounded by. Like the actual ‘CLOSURE’, Hidden Folk explores the themes of permanence and disappearance, fears and anxieties that are particularly important as we begin to question what it truly means to be Singaporean.

Hidden Folk challenges the notion that the dominant cultural narrative of Singapore is as straightforward as it has been made out to be, especially if past memories have not been properly dealt with. Lillian acts as both audience surrogate and pilgrim – She attempts to navigate the precipice of the present between a past that has never found true closure and an imperiled future. Less an explicit, didactic narrative, Hidden Folk is a meta-exploration of real world settings. It sets in motion many questions. Can one reach the future without truly dealing with the past? Can progress only be achieved by destroying what we now possess? What secrets that we keep will be forever forgotten?

Cinema in a city whose cultural narratives are marred by sanitization will see its filmmakers struggle to find a relevant point of resonance for storytelling, crippled by a fear of irrelevance. Then, we find ourselves wondering, while watching Lillian, if in our rush for currency, we have erased the very ground that we stand on.

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Ling Tiong tracks memory and responds to the sense of a void with Boedi Widjaja’s ‘Lode in My heart’. 

In Memory

Looking into someone else’s home from the outside: this is the position that Boedi Widjaja places the viewer of The Lode in my Heart, an installation created for Closure.

To view part of the artwork, one stands on a small wooden chair placed outside the window of a ground floor flat. Peering in, the viewer is first confronted with the window grilles that form a barrier between oneself and the room. Nonetheless, one can see beyond the grilles into the room itself. Mounted on the wall directly facing the window is a photograph of a man with a large, white rectangular object behind him. The door to the room has been removed, and its doorway has been sealed with a piece of plywood, barring entry from within the flat. The door itself is nowhere to be seen.

In accessing our own memories, we sometimes experience them in the third person, as if looking in from the outside. This seems to suggest an interior or “inside” to memory that can be inhabited. Yet, no matter how clearly memory is perceived, it can never be entered; we are perpetual outsiders looking into a sealed room. 

The Load in My Heart

Unbeknownst to the viewer, the photograph documents another event in the artist’s life that underlines the lapse between perception and memory. Following its removal, the door was tied to the artist’s body and dragged around the Teban Gardens estate. Widjaja sustained physical exertion and injury in this grueling act – at one point, the door came undone and slammed into his body. He recounts that the friction of the door dragging on the hard ground created an unpleasant grating noise. The viewer does not witness this physical event. By the time one sees the artwork, what remains is a placid photograph void of the physical experience. The artist’s presence and experience has been diminished.

For the entire duration of the exhibition, the room is sealed off and cannot be entered. The live physical act of Widjaja dragging the door behind him is not witnessed in real-time. The viewer is held at multiple distances – both spatial and temporal – from getting close to the artwork and to the artist himself. In The Lode in My Heart, perception is only possible as an outsider.

Landfill/Lode

Teban Gardens was built as a public housing project serving Jurong Industrial Estate, part of a parcel of land reclaimed from a mangrove swamp in the 1970s. The estate has since been designated for redevelopment and “rejuvenation”, and several blocks of the estate will be demolished. 

Memory is different from physical space. As art and cultural theorist Hubert Damisch notes, “the construction of new buildings presupposes the demolition of those previously occupying the same site, whereas the unconscious can easily accommodate the survival of archaic formations beside others that have supplanted them, even on the same site.” Unlike the physical world, memories don’t have to be erased or forgotten for new memories to form. Memories will survive the future.

Homonyms lode and load share etymological origins in Old English. Widjaja chooses lode, emphasising that he does not select memory as his burden. The lode is a geological deposit of metallic minerals, such as gold, that fills a crack in an array of rock, deposited between rock layers. The lode separates and splits the rock from its original self. It fills the crevice with precious ore. Although it is impossible to inhabit memory, the gap between memory and the present is a space of possibility. Therein lies the possibility for imagination and freedom in Widjaja’s formulation.

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Traversing History: Trajectory and Singapore’s Urban Insomnia

Kenneth Tay, on our understanding of historicity and urbanity.

The perennial issue that critics have with Singapore is its historical consciousness, or rather, the painful lack of it. As Lee Weng Choy notes, “Singapore is a very ahistorical society; it seems only to live in the present tense, and claims no need for the past, let alone a sophisticated consciousness of history”[1]. Elsewhere, Heman Chong cheekily suggests a sense of “time-traveling” to describe the experience of living in Singapore, and of having to come to terms with its constantly changing environment[2]. In other words, Singapore seems to move perpetually in this state of urban insomnia. Like New York, this city doesn’t sleep. But this is only because it disfavors the prospect of dreams and nightmares. Are dreams and nightmares not the projections of our accumulated past(s)? A nation that purges the annals of history cannot afford a moment of sleep; for fear that it sees no reflection in the mirrors of its dreams[3].

The first thing one experiences when approaching Izyanti Asa’ari’s Trajectory is its swings’ wobbly seat. Before you go about the business of propelling into the imaginary future and of rolling back years past, it strikes you, the viewer, that this seat – this present – through which you are to catch glimpses of pasts, futures and future pasts, is already an unstable one. As if by some strange magic, the seat moves; and invariably it invites you to join in its movement. In the swinging back and forth, the restlessness of the present is buffeted by a sense of impotence that arises from the denial of maximum displacement. But to understand this castration-anxiety, we need a past, a ‘primal scene’ that will act as a screen…

Yet, the “past” is a brick-wall denying entry. Knowing this, would we be brave enough to dig deeper and swing harder, but with every possibility that we should find nothing save for mirages, and nothing within that to hold us down? In Ho Tzu Nyen’s Utama[4], the historical figure of Sang Nila Utama is problematized alongside the claim made by Singapore’s national mythmakers that Sir Stamford Raffles was the origin-ary figure. But Ho refuses to grant Utama any solid historical weight either – at least not without questioning the faint shadows through which Utama is made known to us. Not that this is necessarily a crisis, of course. When Sigmund Freud proposed the concept of the “primal scene” to explain the origins of our psychosexual development, he nonetheless conceded that this aspect of our infantile past remains fundamentally a mystery[5]. This isn’t so much a failure on the part of Freudian psychoanalysis, but rather it represents even Freud’s own acknowledgement that the past is always only re-covered; it is a projected screen that consequently screens away something else. But more importantly, it is this indeterminate ‘something else’ of our past that actually ensures the relative openness of our futures.

At the same time, whether or not we chose Raffles or Utama, and correspondingly, the birth of Singapore’s history in the 14th or 19th Century, in both cases the past comes back in the uncanny form of Singapore as a prosperous port. Between the choices of a 19th Century colonial port and a 14th Century center with trading ties extending to China, the ‘Singapore story’ falls back to Singapore as a conduit of trade – an image not dissimilar to Singapore today. The past merely dances as a re-animated corpse of the present… the horrors of a perpetual present.

In the distance, we are told, is the future. There are constructions and reconstructions, en-blocs and lift upgrades. We would have walked past countless buildings shrouded in green scaffolding nets in our lifetimes. Giant cocoons with their promises of a better future. But these are mostly futures bound within more green scaffolding nets; Cocoon after cocoon, one awaking to another. If so, the present goes on forever. And we begin to realize we’re in one big green cocoon ourselves: A Singapore always in progress[6].  

Walter Benjamin argued for an excavation of history in order to re-encounter the incompleteness of the past in Theses on the Philosophy of History. For Benjamin, it is this incompleteness of the past that would “[strip] the future of its magic”[7] and “unsettle and threaten [the present’s] conceptual framework”[8]. Nowhere is this incompleteness of the past more obvious in the makeshift brick-wall of Trajectory. And nowhere is this openness of the future clearer than the window. Sure, there are limits placed on either facades; but breaking them, we would not find for ourselves some readymade past and future combined. Rather, these limits remind us that there is a ‘something else’ that exists beyond them, that the incompleteness of the past is invariably the mirror of the future’s openness. In fact, the unsteady seat of the present in Trajectory highlights precisely Benjamin’s notion of Messianic time – that every moment in time presents the possibility of a potential revolution[9].   

 By the time we get off from our perch, we find that we are no longer same as before – Similar perhaps, but never identical. Back and forth through the present, past, future and future conceptions of past, we have left with nothing save for the radical uncertainty of both before and after. Singapore’s urban insomnia is the result of a lack of courage to sleep alongside the past and to rouse to the future; an unwillingness to embrace the radical uncertainty of both states, preferring instead to live in the present it knows only too well. Having experienced Trajectory, we are now more than equipped to deal with this, yes? The proof is in the vertigo that lingers long into the night.

[1] Lee Weng Choy, “Citing and Re-siting”, Art Journal 60, no. 2 (2001): 24.

[2] Heman Chong, “Heman Chong on ‘Phantoms of Asia’ and Science Fiction” AsianArtMuseum. 14 May 2012. Web. <https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=aC_HEyVQ-_I>

[3] If the concept of the “talking cure” in psychoanalysis is to mean anything, it would be that need to firstly historicize experience, to funnel dreams into language and into the flow of time.

[4] Utama is Ho Tzu Nyen’s 2003 experimental film. For more, see page on Objectifs. Web. <http://www.objectifsfilms.com/product.php?id_product=37>

[5] Sigmund Freud, The Freud Reader, ed. Peter Gay (New York: Norton, 1995), 421-426.

[6] Cherian George, Singapore: The Air-Conditioned Nation (Singapore: Landmark, 2000), 189.

[7] Walter Benjamin, Illuminations (New York: Harcourt, 1968), 266.

[8] Howard Caygill, “Walter Benjamin’s concept of cultural history” in The Cambridge Companion to Walter Benjamin, ed. David Ferris (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2004), 24.

[9] Benjamin, 266. 

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Jennifer Koh dissects the aural sense, inspired by Tan Peiling’s sound installation.

Could it not be that we are here to say: house, bridge, cistern, gate, pitcher, flowering tree, window - or at most: monolith... skyscraper? But to say them in a way they, themselves, never knew themselves to be? [...] The things we can live with are falling away morethan ever, replaced by an act without symbol.

- Rainer Maria Rilke, Duino Elegies : The Ninth Elegy

I was invited by Jane Koh to attend an art installation by a group of artists at the soon-to-be demolished Teban Gardens. A look inside an over-crowded four room flat, here I was amidst a gathering of youthful people, most of whom seemed to be in their 20s and 30s. The irony of place and persons wasn’t lost on the audience, at least not for one of its members, who vehemently spoke about his tiredness at the young artist’s hypocritical preoccupation with nostalgia for moments not lived. It did feel like a funereal send-off for things that one never owned or inhabited, but it made me wonder if that isn’t what art is concerned with – a way of grieving and making sense of what may not have been ours in the first place? Perhaps the fetish and fascination that the young have for the old and residual stems not from mourning their own memories, but those they never had time to encounter, from finding the new in the old or a presence in the past.

While dialogue continued in the living room, I found myself in one of the posterior rooms, a reconstruction of an all-but bare space. Entering the space, the first thing one sees is text, five lines in block letters: an annunciation of closure. Two hollow cement walls are positioned off-centre in the room, forming a tunnel from which two speakers emanate a loop recording of (de)construction sounds. A green scaffolding net is suspended over the window on its exterior.

In Tan Peiling’s work, Untitled, a sound installation, what is mourned is not so much the subject of loss but the failure of visual archival, a mourning of Loss itself. The artist herself says, the eagerness to photograph kills the event. Sound is the only testimony of an event veiled to our eyes, in this case the demolition of Teban Gardens. 

The site of the work is interesting – once it was a high-rise flat built for industry workers; in its transformation, it is now a different kind of worker, the cultural one, who steps in to rework, reconstruct and interpret the space. The paradoxical title teases as a double entendre, at once indicative of both the stripping of linguistic excess and a stripping of place.

Is it true that one sees before hearing? How is hearing, no, listening, essential to one’s experience of an event? How does it transform our view of place or non-place? How does one in an obsessively visual culture re-present experiences which are un-photographable? These are some questions I think the artist asks in her work. But Tan's installation somehow also made me think of death, or sleep; that moment of slippage from the conscious to unconscious that one finds almost impossible to record. Yes that too, for we one day will vanish.

Standing between the hollow cement walls and speakers (first mistaken as two projector beams of light) – an experience akin to being entombed within a vertical coffin – what one hears is a recording of industrial sounds, a soundtrack stitched together from several places. These are common sounds; unmappable because everywhere. For one bearing witness in this sound enclosure, time slips and intermingles – what we hear is the has-been, the present and the to-be. For isn’t this the din of the daily, the pounding of an upstairs neighbours’ renovation works, the building of a new condominium across the road, a soundtrack for walking through the park? In our nation state, construction and de-construction are cross-referential polarities, twin signifiers of progress. (It is this twinning that the artist herself probes in sound curation – one speaker plays the sound of Housing Development Board (HDB) construction, while demolition sounds issue from the other speaker.)

Tan’s interest and sensitivity towards sound and its meanings has roots in her personal experience of working as a volunteer amongst deaf people. This made me ask, what might the experience be like for someone who cannot hear? He or she would see, and perhaps feel or imagine vibrations. A blind person entering the space might “see”, if not by words, then by sound. For either, it may be that the suggestion of sound or sight alone would suffice. Ultimately for us, the performance of demolition plays like an industrial magic show –  tamed with a green shroud, the block of flats register the invisibility of change, and come undone with a mechanical hum. (Un)veiled, the green nets advertise the force of human agency and progress, an act beyond the haphazard functions of nature: this is renewal, not disaster.

As I listen to the closure of sounds from a four minute soundtrack, an applause erupts from the living room signalling the end of the evening’s presentation. People smile, then disperse. It is as if mourning itself could be celebrated.

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Mint

Amanda Lee pens a free response to Urich Lau’s Electro-somnia.

The boy had grown up thinking the world smelled like chocolate, for he lived adjacent to a chocolate factory.

It was only during the last round of Chinese new year visitations to the North and the East that he’d realised that the rest of the island did not share that same heady scent of confectionery. This far out in the West, there was always the smell of chocolate in the air. As a boy it was something he was grateful for, an invisible daily treat he did not tire of. It reminded him of something his mother said about how ghosts fed on the scents of food offerings. He’d knelt by the altar in the kitchen once, wanting to try the domed orange sponge cake, with the red dot in the middle so much like the bindi of an Indian girl in his class. Both times, he was told not to touch.

When he became a man, he hated chocolate. The smell of it made him sick.

It reminded him of the tiny three-room flat in the West, his mother squinting at receipts for household expenses and penciling them into an old notebook, the squatting common toilet, sharing a bunk bed with his younger sister until he was thirty, the lack of air-conditioning units in their house. Sometimes when he was bored or if it was too humid to fall asleep, he would watch his sister sleeping; often her ratty class t-shirt would ride up to expose her ample, bare chest. All he wanted was to rent an apartment in the Central district, to inhale asphalt and exhaust and the smell of money.

Presently, though, the boy was young, and he was pegging laundry onto the bamboo pole with his mother. The mother was praising him for his dexterity with the clothes pegs. The sister was not in the picture yet. The father stood by the kitchen window, smoking without a shirt on. The angry lovemaking that would ensue later that night, sans condom, would impregnate the mother with said sister. 

‘Tien’, the father said in Mandarin, without turning to regard him, ‘Do you know where money comes from?’

The boy was but eight. He’d never thought about this. He did know though that he never had enough coins to buy a drink and a meal during recess every day of the week. An exercise in choice. He loved the fizzy kick of Sarsi and would sometimes give up the meal so he could get the drink instead. Sometimes he would allow himself two cans, and for the rest of the day, if he burped on an empty stomach, the air that resurfaced would carry with it the flavours of sarsaparilla and licorice.

He shook his head, and the father beckoned him over. He scooted over and the father put a thick, warm palm on his shoulder.

‘There,’ he said.

‘Where?’

The father clenched the cig between the corner of his lips and lifted the boy under his armpits. It tickled and he squirmed. The father pointed towards some flatted factories, separated from their block by a wide road, large trees and a canal.

There—that’s where they print money, would you believe it? The national mint. All the banknotes and coins in there in heaps. Mountains, really. Right there.

‘Can we go?’

‘Tien, there’s no such thing as a free lunch. You learn it good.’

‘Why?’

The father was putting the boy down. Already, he was regretting opening up the conversation. He hadn’t actually meant to ask the boy the question; but when you have children you don’t quite recall how to do monologues anymore. 

The boy understood this was a form of rejection. He went back to squatting on the terazzo floor to sort the laundry out. He fished out a pair of white school socks of his that were nestled in the crook of his mother’s beige cotton underwear.

The mother finished up and hoisted the bamboo pole up and out the window, securing the pole into the standard-issue cylindrical holder on the exterior of their sixth floor flat. The boy could never understand how it was that the pole never fell to the ground. It was heavy when laden with clothes and bedsheets, and there wasn’t anything to hold up the other end of the pole.

The father was tapping his ash into the kitchen sink. ‘Will you stop that,’ the mother said, running the tap, ‘And didn’t you say you ran out before lunch?’ She moved to the laminated-wood dining table and passed him the heavy glass ashtray. He placed it on the edge of the sink.

‘I went down to the mama-shop to get a new pack.’

‘When?’ ‘When you were in the bathroom.’

‘How much does a pack cost?’

‘Don’t get started on me again.’

‘No, really, how much does a pack cost?’

He waved her away and cracked the bones in his neck from left to right.

‘If you smoked less, we could get Tien a tuition teacher.’

‘That’s underhand.’

‘What is?’

‘Bringing the kid into the picture.’

‘I’ll tell you what’s underhand – bringing a kid into the world when you can’t give him enough.’

The father had moved his hand, a broad sweeping gesture. It was hard to tell, even for himself, if he’d meant to dash the ashtray to the floor in anger, but he did. Narrow as the kitchen was, it hit the boy – still squatting and pegging up the smaller items onto the pale green laundry carousel – on the back of his head before landing on the floor with a dull sound, without shattering. 

Even as the boy’s hand reached as a reflex to the back of his head, he stilled it. The fights occurred often enough for him to be able to understand the weighted scales of the brink of one. It wasn’t that they wouldn’t have seen the ashtray hit him—that was out of the question—but that his exhibition of any signs of pain, of having been struck, could be the gesture to tip the balance. Sometimes, if you are lucky, when you stay perfectly still, the world remains suspended with you for just long enough.

The boy saw the father’s feet cross from the area in front of the sink back to the window. He knew he could move now. He stood up.

‘Tien, do you know what that factory is?’

This time the boy came with a plastic stool. It had cartoon characters on it as a vinyl sticker. The sticker was peeling. The boy had taken his nails to it one afternoon, having wondered if it was possible to remove it, or if it were printed on the seat itself. He stepped onto the stool. The father was pointing at a smiling man on a billboard-like signage across the expressway, further north from the mint: ‘That’s an air-con factory – ‘The Carrier man can’, remember hearing that on TV?’

‘That,’ the father continued, ‘is a luxury camera factory.’ The boy tried to make out the word on the building his father was pointing at: Leica. ‘And that’, the father continued, ‘is a sports car showroom.’ The father didn’t bother pointing out the chocolate factory.

When he was much older, the boy would walk past the sports car showroom to take bus number 30 from the expressway stop. It was a straight bus to the university. There was a girl in school he had an eye on, and there was a boy whose car she stepped out of every morning. It was some months later before he realised that the boy’s car was the same make as the one he walked past in the factory showroom everyday, only in a flashier colour, a lime green that was larger than life.

He went up to the back of the car and read the brand name in the classic Italian logotype, as if committing to memory the name of a foe: Lamborghini. One day, he fingered his house key and ran its jagged edge across the body of the car, in the faculty carpark. Campus security replayed the footage and the owner of the car was called in to identify the perpetrator. He didn’t recognise him, but the girl, who’d accompanied him, did. He’s in my HS101. I thought he was a nice guy. The boy had to pay for the damage. But this was all still years away, too.

‘Isn’t it funny?’ The father was saying. He was lighting a new cigarette.

‘What is funny, Pa?’

‘That they’re all around us.’

The boy was silent. He didn’t think it was funny but he knew it wasn’t the right time to ask why. The sky had been clear before, but a light, steady rain was starting up. Chaocheebye, the father said, and he leaned out to bring the bamboo pole back in. The boy stood on the stool and they lodged the bamboo pole onto curved metal grooves attached to the kitchen ceiling. When the clothes were hung indoors, there was a musty smell about them when they dried that the boy greatly disliked.

The father was shutting the windows. The windows were tinted lightly, and in them he saw the reflection of his mother, on the floor, cleaning the ash from the fallen ashtray. By the time they turned, the ashtray was back on the dining table, and she had taken out a small cut of pork to thaw for dinner. 

[freeofchargeart]

Urban Renewal and Sustainability in Architecture: Singapore 
– A 22nd Century City-State in Flux

ATELIER | SMALL shares their views on CLOSURE and the Singaporean architectural condition. 

FOCA’s (Free of Charge Artshow) engagement of alternative spaces through critical dialogue and cross-collaborations speaks volumes about the present condition of the urban cityscape. CLOSURE (Jan 2013), an art exhibition held at Teban Gardens –  announced as one of the completed SERS (Selective En bloc Redevelopment Scheme) sites in 2007 – makes use of interim spaces as alternative venues for community art shows. 

CLOSURE provided a communal channel where shared sentiments are manifested in the form of physical interventions within a spatial void (a vacated single household unit). Here, art works respond to concepts of progress and loss. Concurrently, CLOSURE quietly embodies a valuable idea catalyst – prompting the rethinking of temporary spaces in our environment and new ways of dealing with Singapore’s rapidly changing landscape; a reflection of current urban conditions. This brings forth a point of departure in the following discourse on Singapore’s chronic urban transformations and its relationship to sustainability in architecture.

Urban Renewal

“...very few city governments are able to stop population growth by sheer decree. This is especially so if the city needs to stay relevant in the global arena...”[2]

Continued urban development and infrastructure renewal are undoubtedly, essential components in sustaining a nation’s growth. This progress brings about economic, social and environmental issues that will largely affect city planning. With rapid shifts in demography and population, Singapore is constantly challenged to meet evolving national expectations.

Sustained economic growth inevitably demands an increase in population – clearly expressed in the recent White Paper debated in parliament. To house our population within 700 square meters of land, it is paramount to maximize our land resource efficiency. As infrastructural improvement requires time to materialize, responsive urban control and land policies are essential. Given such land scarcity, urban development very often means the renewal or redevelopment of existing infrastructure. 

With little room for error, it is thus crucial to execute urban redevelopment in a systematic manner. This must occur in tandem with having the right policies in place to establish certainty that land will be available in future for systematic renewal. 

SERS is one such policy that identifies old housing blocks with the potential for redevelopment. Occupants of these demarcated areas are relocated to make way for new developments. Residents affected by this scheme are often offered new homes and given priority when relocating to neighboring sites, in a bid to preserve relationships forged over the years.

Land Use and Possibilities

SERS as a procedure however, leaves much to be desired. After units are vacated, buildings are left dormant for an undefined period of time lasting up to several years before they are finally demolished. These unintended, interstitial times result in underutilized space. HDB initiatives – such as the Parenthood Provisional Housing Scheme that provides temporary housing for first-timer married couples awaiting completion of their Build-To-Order Flats – are initial measures that seek to make use of such spaces.

Initiatives like FOCA forge frontiers in exploring the potential of temporary spaces for transient activities such as travelling art exhibitions. Yet there are countless possibilities for such spaces, including the implementation of permanent programmes or conjoined usage of the environment to host expositions, entrepreneurial start-ups and incubatory projects. This overlapping of activities will ensure that buildings are used to their maximum potential.

Our urban environment can be likened to an evolving organism encountering a process of adaptation towards newly-formed economic and social formats. This is far removed from the Tabula Rasa city-state purported by Rem Koolhaas in Delirious New York. The rapid pace of construction and potential interim uses could possibly engender an entirely different housing typology – one designed to accommodate varied and multiple uses throughout its lifetime. 

Future transformation may observe residential units moving away from the ubiquitous HDB housing block to living spaces that support multi-use activities, with overlapping life spans. Such accommodating living spaces will inject healthy vibrancy into the heartlands, maintaining the innate characters of existing neighborhoods while ensuring that it never becomes stale.

Sustainability, Resources and Technology

Apart from streamlining strategic planning and policy-making to facilitate the renewal process, a strong foundational understanding of environmental limits versus expected growth is paramount. Changing attitudes towards resource use will require us to creatively rethink the environmental value of existing buildings and their constituent components.

Due to an increasing awareness towards sustainable material usage, reuse has emerged as a trend in contemporary architectural design strategies. Over the past decade, Singapore has seen a significant rise in built projects that reflect heightened awareness for environmental responsibility in the form of material conservation through the reuse of materials. This approach reduces dependence on procuring new materials that sufficiently respond to the constraints of limited natural resources. Manpower and cost involved in sourcing, production and transportation processes have thus been reduced, consequently, minimizing the need for waste landfills. 

The local phenomenon of constant change provides potential opportunities – acting as an impetus for wider applications and practical implementations of sustainable design concepts and resource efficiency in architecture.  Instances are namely: Adaptive Reuse , Closed-Loop Construction Material Flows and Material Conservation through DFD/ S – (Design for Disassembly/ Salvageability)[3].

Technological advances such as subtractive and 3D prototyping provide new platforms for the industry to craft parallel applications for sustainable architecture. 

Such versatile methods of construction greatly increase the ability to reuse and replace architectural components; eradicating the restrictions resulting from current construction methods.[4] Hence, DFD/S effectively mitigates uncertainties in future construction demand against existing resources at the strategic (master-planning) as well as the tactical (project) level. Furthermore, the introduction of Radio Frequency Identification (RFID) chips which can be embedded in structural components allow for information to be stored in and accessed readily through the information management framework as a systematization of forecasting and facilitating future demand. [5]

The challenge of living in a city that is constantly in flux should not be viewed as an obstacle. Rather, we should reap the opportunities that follow, looking towards transforming the morphology of the city beyond a static master plan, towards one that embraces constant change. Efficient utilization of space and material will point towards a transformative, sustainable city that is responsive to the needs of our people.

[freeofchargeart]

by Jane Koh

One could plausibly say that no one would have given Blocks 2 to 11 of Teban Gardens Road a second look before its closure. The blocks of public housing for workers was tucked away within a fairly inconspicuous region in Jurong, soon to be demolished. Yet, as dooms day impended for the modernist-architectural housing, it is uncanny that its death birthed an independent Art collective – Free of Charge Art Show (FOCA).

 Over the past years, we witnessed Singapore’s plight and fight for impermanence. Works like Tan Pin Pin’s Invincible City to Min Tio’s Astormetric Archive showcased a fascination and documentation of the Megapolis Transient. Needless to say, it seems ever more stark that the present is giving weight to a damaged romanticism of the past. This social phenomena, and inherent search within its wonderment, will be further touched upon by the artists and writers featured in this publication. For its preface, I would like to provide a linear narrative of FOCA’s beginnings.

Last August, I met Jonathan Tan and Melvin Tan at a gallery exhibition. The exhibition left us questioning; as young artists critically self-aware of our being, we attempted to break away from established labels and conventional ways of perceiving.  Pregnant with the ideals of engaging the everyday’s micro-macro literature of culture and surpassing presupposed thematic imposition, it was of mutual consensus that we would like to together, create something that would entail a fair amount of creative liberty.

 It was not till October that we saw things properly kick-started. Melvin had gathered mutual friends; Teow Yue Han and Cheryl Lim Xin to join in the critical discussion. It was apparent then that we would face monetary constraints for a show, yet, the group came to an unorthodox agreement that the first show would be curated at no cost. Yes, literally out of the generosity of cultural contributors and free of charge for our guests. Perhaps such decisions were then propelled by a counter-intuitive reaction towards Singapore’s somewhat economically induced art scene. Of course, possibly fueled by personal ideals to see art production encompassing intrinsic values as opposed to commoditization. It became more evident along the road that we sought to gather a community of art lovers and like-minded individuals. We were geared towards Art being a powerful channel for expression.

 Serendipitously, good faith brought us to Thong Kay Wee, a director who was in need of art direction for an exhibition scene in his film. Ironically, the double play of having the film set as an exhibition space critically layered the notion of a space not of neutral construct, in addition, provoking one to question their own media construct as language. With Teban Gardens as the given venue, we delved into research on En-Bloc spaces. We then contacted artist who we were familiar with and would engage with such discourse. Our approach was personal, leading artists on site-tours and getting them to talk about their preliminary ideas and installations. “CLOSURE” would hereafter become a term that beckoned reflections and incited disembodied views of what spaces could cathartically offer.

 For the “CLOSURE” opening on 12th Jan 2013, family, friends and art enthusiasts gathered as Benjamin Alexander Slater (writer, lecturer and curator) moderated the Artists’ talk. The open dialogue session was an intimate one, as several artists recounted the inspirations for their works in a packed living room. The central theme that circulated amongst the floor primarily asked this one question –How do we deal with our evolving culture? In the week that followed, we witnessed art appreciators, researchers, students and friends experiencing Teban Gardens. The organizers took turns to watch over the space, interact and provide complimentary curatorial tours for our guests, many of whom shared their personal responses. In order to prolong the discussion that each work of art delves into, we have decided to pair a writer to work alongside each artist for this post-publication.

 To organize this show with a talented team of artists has been extremely enriching, it went beyond a fad for kitschy terms of cultural-preservation or heroic, marvel avant-garde ventures. Through the process of creative negotiations and service for artists, new beginnings of friendships have been forged and the passion for creating rekindled. 

 On behalf of the FOCA Team – Melvin Tan, Cheryl Lim Xin, Jonathan Tan, Teow Yue Han and myself, I end by sincerely thanking those who have shown their generous support and believed in our vision. This could never have been possible without your ignition.

 "I simply want to say that representation itself is suffering a deep crisis. This means – and this is probably the biggest quality of the contemporary era – that because of this crisis, human dimensions become very important. The quality of the result is very relative. It is important now that an object – and not just an object, it could be a gesture, a performance, etc. – is based on the human gesture behind it. We are facing the moment when notions such as style, fashion, language... have completely lost their significance. It becomes ridiculous to discuss such issues, as for example the European intellectuals in the fifties who spent a lot of time discussing figurative and abstract painting, what is their relationship, etc. From my point of view I live in the era of total absence, irrelevance of these kinds of criteria. What is relevant now is human presence, with its statement, its body, with its ethical being."

– Viktor Misiano