creating high culture in the globalized cultural desert of singapore - c.j.w. - l. wee

8/3/2019 Creating High Culture in the Globalized Cultural Desert of Singapore - c.j.w. - l. Wee

1/15

Creating High Culture in the Globalized "Cultural Desert" of SingaporeAuthor(s): C. J. W. -L. WeeSource: TDR (1988-), Vol. 47, No. 4 (Winter, 2003), pp. 84-97Published by: The MIT PressStable URL: http://www.jstor.org/stable/4488510Accessed: 14/10/2009 12:41

Your use of the JSTOR archive indicates your acceptance of JSTOR's Terms and Conditions of Use, available at

http://www.jstor.org/page/info/about/policies/terms.jsp. JSTOR's Terms and Conditions of Use provides, in part, that unless

you have obtained prior permission, you may not download an entire issue of a journal or multiple copies of articles, and you

may use content in the JSTOR archive only for your personal, non-commercial use.

Please contact the publisher regarding any further use of this work. Publisher contact information may be obtained at

http://www.jstor.org/action/showPublisher?publisherCode=mitpress.

Each copy of any part of a JSTOR transmission must contain the same copyright notice that appears on the screen or printed

page of such transmission.

JSTOR is a not-for-profit service that helps scholars, researchers, and students discover, use, and build upon a wide range of

content in a trusted digital archive. We use information technology and tools to increase productivity and facilitate new forms

of scholarship. For more information about JSTOR, please contact [email protected].

The MIT Press is collaborating with JSTOR to digitize, preserve and extend access to TDR (1988-).

http://www.jstor.org
http://www.jstor.org/stable/4488510?origin=JSTOR-pdfhttp://www.jstor.org/page/info/about/policies/terms.jsphttp://www.jstor.org/action/showPublisher?publisherCode=mitpresshttp://www.jstor.org/action/showPublisher?publisherCode=mitpresshttp://www.jstor.org/page/info/about/policies/terms.jsphttp://www.jstor.org/stable/4488510?origin=JSTOR-pdf


2/15

84 critical ctscritical ctscritical ctscritical ctscritical ctscritical ctscritical ctscritical ctscritical ctscritical ctscritical ctscritihmirez.Reply Affirmation n FurtherSupportof Motion to Dismissfor Facial n-sufficiency.

Ramirez,Garrett2002 "LegalStatement."Email to lawyer, orwardedo author,31July.Reclaimthe Streets2001 "MAYDAYWRESTLING MADNESS!!SUPERBARRIO MAN!!" Emailtoauthor,I9 April.R2Kphilly.org2000 "Remaining RNC Puppet Warehouse Defendants Cleared of All Charges."

(23 June 2003).Scott,JamesC.1985 TheMoralEconomy f the Peasant:Rebellion ndSubsistencen Southeast sia.NewHaven:YaleUniversityPress.Shepard,Benjamin2003 Email to author. 13 April.Vitale, Alex2003 "OpenLetter o MayorBloomberg."Emailto author,13April.Wilson, David L.2001 "Superbarrio ludes NYC Policeon MayDay." Indypendent, ay: 5.

L.M. Bogad is a Lecturern Drama and TheatreArts at the Universityof Birming-ham in the UK. His book, Electoral Guerrilla Theatre: Speaking Mirth toPower, an international tudy of satirical electioncampaigns,will bepublished byRoutledgePress in 2004. His writingshave also appeared n Radical Society andTDR (45:2, T17o). Bogadis a veteranof the LincolnCenterTheatreDirector'sLaband a member f LaLuttaNew Media Collective.

CreatingHigh Culturein the Globalized"Cultural Desert" of SingaporeC.J.W.-L.Wee

This essayis dedicatedo thememoryof Kuo Pao Kun (1939-2002)

Singapore, with a population of 3.2 million (4 million, including foreigners)is distinct from other postcolonial societies in its desire to emulate the ad-vancements of the West while forsaking not only many of the political dimen-sions of democratic life but also its cultural dimensions. The result is anindustrial and commercial understanding of culture; manufacturing and pro-ductive institutions have become the collective basis of social life. And yet, de-TheDramaReview 7, 4 (T18o),Winter 003.Copyright 2oo3New YorkUniversityndtheMassachusettsnstitute f Technology


3/15

critical ctscritical cts critical ctscritical cts critical ctscritical ctscritical ctscritical ctscritical ctscritical ctscritical cts 85spite this rather dour and puritanical modernity, experimental theatre andvisual art has begun to flourish since the 198os.What further has transpiredis an understanding by the state that in order tobe a "creative economy" and a "happening" Global City that can retain the"best" foreign and local business and industrial talent, Singapore cannot dis-play only a philistine modernity. Consequently, public policies have been setin place since the 199os to foster artistic creativity and even create an arts mar-ket, in the hope that such creativity will in turn encourage technological andentrepreneurial innovation. Ironically, this poses challenges for those verysame innovative artists that the state professes to want to foster. This essay ex-plores some of the tensions, if not actual contradictions, of the recent changes.

IThe city-state Singapore, under the leadership of the People's Action Party

(PAP) since 1959, represents a capitalist modernity that deliberately forsookautochthony in cultural development for economic success (see Wee forth-coming). The PAP's reputation for forging an uncreative society composedmainly of shopping centers by and large stemmed from a pragmatic, petit-bourgeois vision of a hard-working modern society. Nonetheless, since thelate I980s it has been open to creating a cultural superstructure that wouldmatch its status as a major regional financial and industrial hub. In the 20-oddyears prior, "culture" had referred more to multiethnic cultures and values,though by the early I98os to the mid-g99os, "culture" also signified the myth-icized "Asian/Confucian" values that were the alleged foundation of Singa-pore's "East-Asian Miracle" status. Cultural policy-policy that fostered theartsand high culture-was not a real concern.By 1989, the government began to articulate a recognizable cultural policywith the government-authorized Report of theAdvisoryCouncil on Culture andthe Arts (Ong et al. 1989). By this time, there was alreadya burgeoning theatrescene principally led by The Theatre Practice (TTP), The Necessary Stage(TNS), and TheatreWorks (Singapore), among the first contemporary profes-sional theatre companies. There was also a nascent experimental visual arts de-velopment, led by Tang Da Wu.TTP's Kuo Pao Kun (1939-2002) was the major enabling personality in thenew theatre scene. He had been detained without trial by the PAP govern-ment between 1976 and I980 for alleged communist activities. Kuo bouncedback into prominence in the 1980s with plays that examined the possibility oftrans-ethnic understanding and the destruction of culture and cultural mem-ory in the wake of a statist modernity with totalizing impulses. He also brokethe mold of single-language theatre and created plays, such as Mama Lookingfor Her Cat (1988), which utilized a range of the languages spoken in Singa-pore.I Significantly, Kuo was a naturalinstitution builder able to recognize andgenerously support younger talent; he was able to harness the energy of visualartists involved with newer genres such as performance art--introduced toSingapore by visual artist and Fukuoka Cultural Prize winner Tang Da Wu-thereby helping to pioneer an emerging multidisciplinary contemporary artscene.

The three theatre companies created adventurous productions, often for-mally bold (many of the plays were "devised," with the scripts created in aworkshop setting) and dealing with issues of memory, ethnicity, and otheridentity issues. These were artistic reactions against the singular and sometimes

criticalacts criticalacts criticalacts criticalactscriticalacts criticalacts criticalacts criticalactscriticalactscriticalactscriticalacts


4/15

86 critical ctscritical ctscritical ctscritical ctscritical ctscritical ctscritical ctscritical ctscritical ctscritical ctscritical ctscritstrident top-down disciplinary modernization of Singapore since the mid-1960s, which had allowed little space for reflection on cultural or historical is-sues. What was notable about the theatre of the I980s to mid-I99os was that"difficult" theatre-even if text based-formed the mainstream of the moreimportant theatre groups; devised theatre even coexisted within companieswith fledgling, indigenized Broadway-style musicals. Gender issues were no-ticeable by the early 199os. All in all, these were invigorating years. Theatre isnow the most prominent and, not surprisingly, visible art form in the city-state. The formulation of cultural policy and the increased financial resourcesthat were poured into the arts, along with the creation of other theatre com-panies-2002 well represents these changes-has dramatically altered theoverall cultural and certainly theatrical landscape since the mid-199os.The visual arts scene has also changed. Tang Da Wu returned from Londonin 1988 (after the best part of 20 years in England, with occasional returntrips), and founded a group called the Artists' Village in 1989. The group wasestablished in an abandoned village in a then-rural area called Sembawang as acritical response to the petit-bourgeois urban society that Singapore was be-coming.2The art that arrived helter-skelter with Tang was contemporary, anticom-mercial, and eclectic. Suddenly, there were dynamic experiments in concep-tual art, performance, installation sculpture that used Duchampian "found"objects, figurative painting that had German expressionist antecedents (butwas executed with personal rather than historical references), pop art, andHappenings. There had been earlier intimations of such artistic possibilities,but they were just that--intimations. Not surprisingly, the experiments thatsprang up around Tang did not definitively reference their origins. If, by themid-197os, conceptual art in the West was either popular or beginning togrow stale, to be followed by a very plural visual culture that had an unpre-dictable and innovative diversity, the corporate "arrival" of contemporary artin its various forms in Singapore in the '9os was confusing but energizing. Thepredominantly young artists Tang mentored, who were of various ethnicities,experimented with themes that implicitly or explicitly critiqued the state'swished-for bland identity and urban modernity. The environment, sex, vio-lence, identity, and rebellion became valid areas for enquiry. The world of ab-stract modern art that dominated the local arts in the 1970osexploded. Whatwas also notable was that many artists were from the less-privileged and oftennon-English speaking social strata, which distinguished them from the morebourgeois backgrounds of English-language theatre practitioners, providing adistinctive edge to the visual arts.

Ironically, the arts flourished during the i98os up to the early 199os pre-cisely because of the pragmatic, philistine modernity promoted by the govern-ment. Singapore society--in its mercantile/industrial-oriented indifferenceto the artsy-craftsy--allowed space for artistic growth,3 as such growth gen-erally was not considered important enough to warrant attention.For theatre, however, the late '8os was a very difficult time, 1987 in partic-ular. A group called the Third Stage, which had produced plays critical ofpolitics and social issues in the city-state, was affected by a general governmentcrackdown on a so-called "Marxist conspiracy." The home affairs ministry al-leged that the conspiracy planned to "subvert the existing social and politicalsystem [...] through communist united front tactics to establish a communiststate" (Straits Times 1987). The Third Stage was a "front organization" of theconspirators, and various Roman Catholic societies and one ecumenical stu-

critical cts critical ctscritical cts critical cts critical cts critical ctscritical cts critical cts critical cts critical ctscritical cts crit


5/15

critical acts criticalacts criticalacts critical acts criticalacts critical acts critical acts criticalacts critical acts critical acts critical acts 87dent fellowship formed another front. Five of the 16 people detained on 21May 1987 were members of the Third Stage. Though four were released, an-other six people were detained on 20 June; one of this latter group was thepresident of the Third Stage.4The situation calmed down thereafter, until another government crack-down in late 1993-this time specifically on the arts. A 21-year-old perfor-mance and visual artist, Josef Ng, who did a performance protesting the policeentrapment of working-class homosexual men, and TNS, which practicedAugusto Boal-style Forum Theatre, were accused, respectively, of obscenityand having a "Marxist" orientation. The latter charge, with the collapse of theBerlin Wall, could only sound absurd. Performance art remains officially in aposition of limbo, and cannot receive National Arts Council funding (NAC).Despite these obstacles, the state's desire for a commodified theatre and visualarts scene has persisted.What is curious in the city-state is a sort of "backward" arts development.First, there was an experimental, cutting-edge arts scene, which was followedby attempts to create the necessary infrastructure: proper arts education in theschools, major art spaces or museums (the Singapore Art Museum [SAM], forexample, built to showcase modern and contemporary Southeast Art, wasopened only in 1996), and major theatre venues. "Black box" venues beganopening in the early 199os; the other options previously had been the inappro-priately large Kallang Theatre and the colonial-era Victoria Theatre).In 1992, the government began to promote a policy to make the city-statenot just a Global City, but, indeed, a Global City for the Arts. Unfortunately,if predictably, an overall instrumentalist attitude predominated. Some leadingpoliticos had discovered that to become a "serious" Global City capable of at-tracting and retaining the "foreign talent" of senior business executives whocould further "globalize" the city-state, we needed Western metropolitan-style cultural infra- and superstructures that would enable Singapore to be-come a sort of "London of the East."

As is often the case in Singapore, an it-needs-to-happen-tomorrow social-engineering imperative and paradigm were adopted for the new cultural pol-icy. The entrenched position of this paradigm gave rise to the central tensionbetween the professed wish for a dynamic creativity and the existing instru-mentalizing and rationalist mental set. Arts funding increased and theatre, asthe most visible art form of the I980s, was a major beneficiary. The preten-tiously entitled Renaissance City Report: Culture and the Arts in Renaissance Sin-gapore (200o) advocated for even more funding to be made available (someS$50omillion-nearly U.S.$30 million-over five years), and these funds havestarted to have an impact on the cultural scene. The crowning infrastructuralachievement was the October 2002 opening of the S$6oo million (U.S.$345million) "Esplanade- Theatres on the Bay" arts complex, built specificallyfor "world-class" foreign acts-a statist attempt to create a commercial Cultof the Beautiful. It remains to be seen how this will affect theatre develop-ment, given that the Esplanade has no medium-size theatre space: its majortheatre auditorium seats some 1,8oo00 ersons--a number that both the olderand newer theatre companies would find daunting to fill.II

Before proceeding to reflect further on the Esplanade's potential impact onSingapore's cultural life it is important to assess the arts from 1980 to the mid-

critical acts critical acts critical acts critical acts critical acts critical acts critical acts critical acts critical acts critical acts critical acts


6/15

88 critical ctscritical ctscritical ctscritical ctscritical ctscritical ctscritical ctscritical ctscritical ctscritical ctscritical ctscriti1990os, and then to consider how diversity in the arts may be compromised bysailing too closely to the reified production of what may be called a "global-ized high culture."The visual arts scene since perhaps the mid- or late 1990s has seen a nor-malization of arts practices that had countercultural edges. This normalizationin itself is not surprising; it is the pattern in the metropolitan West. What issurprising is the speed of the process, having taken place less than a decade aftersuch newer practices arrived in the city-state. Relatively speaking, there are apronounced number of newer, energetic zo-something artists-many of whomare articulate in "pomo" talk-with privileged overseas fine arts educationsfrom metropolitan institutions such as Goldsmiths College or the Slade School,London. (Their counterparts from the I980s also received fine arts educationsbut, in many cases, they studied locally at institutions that were only then start-ing up, such as what today is the LaSalle-SIA College of the Arts.) These artistsbegan participating in the global art world ofbiennales (Documenta at Kassel,Germany; Venice Biennale) earlier in their careers than their immediate pre-decessors had managed.In some ways, it is this increased firsthand exposure to the metropolitanWest combined with the state's desire to occupy the cultural space it had pre-viously evacuated that has led to both the increased visual arts activity and thedecline of artistic criticality, diversity, and radicalism. In this respect, on a re-lated note, the establishment of SAM in 1996 served both to promote the ideaof "contemporary Southeast Asian art"6--the city-state is the only local placewithin Southeast Asia with the finances and "Western" expertise to createsuch a museum-and to contain the counter- or subcultural aesthetic im-pulses, with public awareness in mind. With SAM, the state was moving rap-idly and self-consciously into the emerging new art world.As for the theatre, and indeed the contemporary arts scene in general, a ma-jor impetus for change was Kuo Pao Kun, who died of cancer in September2002-a loss that we have yet to come to terms with. Kuo forged significanttheatre links with Hong Kong, China, and Taiwan, and was a mentor to manydirectors, including TheatreWorks' Ong Keng Sen, TNS's Alvin Tan, and Ac-tion Theatre's Ekachai Uekrongtham. He was also the founding artistic direc-tor of The Substation, Singapore's only independent arts center, and he raiseda strong public voice that questioned matters not only of the arts but other keysocial concerns such as education and ethnic-management policies. Kuohailed from a period in Singapore's cultural-political life when it was possibleto hear more than just the state's voice-before the state had learned how todominate the space of public speech. His 1976 to 1980 detention without atrial under the Internal Security Act gave Kuo a moral stature that enhancedhis natural charisma.

With Kuo's illness during recent years, TTP's programming (perhaps inevi-tably) has seemed thinner when compared to their past output. In 2002, TTPstaged a Mandarin-Chinese version of David Mamet's Oleanna and Athol Fu-gard's The Island. The latter was highly anticipated as it had been staged first in1985 by Kuo himself (neither of the 200oo productions was directed by Kuo)and was seen by some as Kuo's own oblique comment on Singapore'sdetention-without-trial laws. However, neither of the productions reflectedthe same progressive aesthetic that TTP had under Kuo's influence.

Singapore's other notable international theatre figure is TheatreWorks' ar-tistic director Ong Keng Sen. With Ong spending much of his time on artisticwork overseas,' the company appointed a part-time artistic director for Sin-

critical cts critical ctscritical ctscritical cts critical ctscritical ctscritical cts critical cts critical cts critical cts critical cts criti


7/15

critical ctscritical cts critical cts critical cts critical ctscritical ctscritical ctscritical ctscritical ctscritical ctscritical cts 89gapore productions, journalist-playwright Tan Tarn How (whose plays Onghad directed in the 1990s), along with two full-time associates. Two new playswere staged in 2002: Tan's own Machineand Russell Heng's ComradeMayor.Despite TheatreWorks' attempt to maintain their local presence, Ong's ex-tended stay in Europe during 2002 has led, along with Kuo's demise, to a no-ticeable disruption in Singapore theatre. Malaysian director Krishen Jit-himself a key theatre figure in Southeast Asia-as early as 1993 had alreadycommented in a conference addresson "the absence of a strong critical tradi-tion in Singapore theatre." According to Jit, this lack is also the reason why"according to the local media, apparently Singapore theatre achieves an ar-tistic breakthrough or a reinvention of its history almost every six months"(1995:22). While Ong does bring his overseas productions back to the island,the absence of Ong and the death of Kuo have weakened local theatre's senseof itself.Of the three major companies, TNS has been the most consistent. Artisticdirector Alvin Tan and resident playwright Haresh Sharma continued, in2002, the production of experimental and sometimes completely devised playsthat address community and social issues. The Beginningof the End (BOTE),conceived and directed by TNS associateJeff Chen, evoked the absurdand thehysterical in the analysis of everyday life. Sharma's new play, goteatgod,stagedinJuly,was a responseto the September II terrorist attack.It was an uneven mixof song, drama,and comedy that dealt with the ramificationsof 9/I I. Close-InMy Facewas a company-devised play that humorously examined the claustro-phobia of living in Singapore's ubiquitous high-rise public housing estates, averitable symbol of its modernity.TNS's ongoing commitment to the island-state's cultural life is significant,but the theatre company also seems fatigued and overextended. In 2001, thegroup retrenched, cutting many forms of cultural outreach. Most unfortunately,2ooi saw the end of [Names Changedto Protect he Innocent],a regular platformthe company had provided for exploratory work, well managed byJeff Chen.This program fostered installation and performance art, variously combinedwith dance and visual art, as well asmore "standard"theatre pieces-that is tosay,it ran the gamut of the contemporary artsin the city-state. Workshops andforums were held in conjunction with productions. The end of this programhas meant the end of gem-like, small-scale experimentation.As in the visual arts, the theatre scene has transcended the I980s to mid-199gosphase, with a wide and diverse range of both companies and produc-tions. Adventurous programming is attempted but with both uneven aestheticresultsand ill-defined cultural politics.

The bilingual (Mandarin-Chinese and English-language) Toy Factory The-atre Ensemble, for example, has made a reputation for staging provocativeplays-and also for their sexually provocative advertising. InJanuaryand Feb-ruary2002, they featured English and Mandarin versions ofJonathan Harvey'sLondon fairytale of gay youth coming of age, Beautiful Thing. In September2002, they put up Marius von Mayenburg's Fireface,which deals with identityas an accident of birth and as constructed by the opinions of others, as well aswith controversial elements of sexual deviance and pyromania. Artistic direc-tor Goh Boon Teck's most ambitious production for 2002 was his SingaporeArts Festival contribution, an adaptation of Chekhov's The CherryOrchard n-titled TheMorningPeople.Goh seems to be ambitiously reproducingthe Englishtradition of staging classics n "updated"or "localized" contexts. The settingwastransposed to 1934 Shaanxi, China, to evoke China's crumbling order. It was

criticalacts criticalacts criticalacts criticalactscriticalactscriticalactscriticalactscriticalacts criticalactscriticalactscriticalacts


8/15

go critical ctscritical ctscritical ctscrit alactscritical ctscritical ctscritical ctscritical ctscritical ctscritical ctscritical ctscritical

ei a : ..

1. Publicity hoto or ToyFactoryTheatreEnsemble'sFireface (20o02), directedbyBeatrice cia,stagedat theToyFactoryTheatrette,Singapore.Photo? ToyFactoryTheatreEnsemble)

beautifully staged, but some felt it failed to convey the urgency of Chekhov'splay for a contemporary audience and "filled" the meaningful silences of theChekhovian text (see Seet 2002).The Harvey and von Mayenburg plays are part of what Ong Keng Sen callsthe "global playwright" phenomenon; the plays of such authors get staged inWestern European cultural centers such as Berlin and London-and now inSingapore. Despite the provocative content of the two plays, the managementof Toy Factory presents their productions as "events" that arepartof the glitzy,globalized theatre world. However, at this stage, Toy Factory's aesthetic am-bitions exceed their capacity to deliver.In February 2003, Toy Factory produced a version of Hong Kong play-wright Raymond To Kwok-Wai's Mad Phoenix at the Esplanade'sstudio the-atre. The play,which was made into a film in 1997, tells the story of Cantoneseopera playwright Kong Yu-Kau (19o9-1984). Goh's staging attempted to use

critical ctscritical ctscritical cts critical cts critical cts critical cts critical cts critical cts critical cts critical cts critical cts critical


9/15

critical cts critical ctscritical cts critical ctscritical cts critical ctscritical ctscritical ctscritical ctscritical ctscritical cts 9 IChinese opera-style singing and movement-both of which his (generallycapable) youthful actors were not up to, as these are techniques that hardly canbe mastered during a limited rehearsal period. Ambition- commensuratewith the city-state's leaders' own global ambitions-was allowed to overrideaesthetic good sense. It is also significant that despite Toy Factory's "alterna-tive" status, Mad Phoenix was staged at the Esplanade, the new center for thearts, as part of its Chinese Festival of Arts (6-16 February 2003).8

IIIOne might think that the PAP government has realized the "postmodern"as that stage in capitalism when, as Fredric Jameson has famously pronounced,culture has to a greater or lesser degree become coextensive with the econ-

omy. The actuality, though, is a more superficial grasp of the situation, as thestate still remains true to its older modernist and, indeed, vulgar Marxist com-prehension of the economy as the base of all reality. However, some politicosand senior civil servants have either read or heard enough of cultural policypapers with titles such as "From the Information Economy to the CreativeEconomy: Moving Culture to the Center of International Public Policy" (Ven-turelli n.d.) to know that the government must now create a cultural sphere tomatch the city-state's existing "hub" status within the global economy.There is a certain refreshing directness in statements by government officialsabout their investments in the culture industry: economic forces reign su-preme. In a 2002 statement made in Manchester, England, justifying the build-ing of the costly complex built during a time of recession in the city, thepermanent secretary of the Ministry of Information, Communications, andthe Arts, Tan Chin Nam, points out the financial benefits of the complex:

$6o00million is a worthy investment for Singapore to attract world-classmusicians and performers. When they come, not only the local, but for-eign businessmen also, are elated by the buzzing arts scene. Add to thatthe whole hotel industry, F&B [Food and Beverage industry], airline,transport and local designers gain from the dollars these foreign per-formers as well as [their audiences from the region] spend in Singapore.(in The Graduate 2003:4)9

Not surprisingly, Tan makes no mention of local artistic development-which, after all, might in time become suitable cultural "content" for "ex-port."The dynamism of "alternative theatre"-in actuality, as already noted, themainstream, until more conventional theatre such as Action Theatre becamevisibleo--has waned in recent years, possibly fatigued by the pursuit of "re-sults" demanded by state funding. This situation may be exacerbated by theEsplanade's opening. The Substation, for instance, has had 12 years of a multi-disciplinary contemporary arts festival called Septfest, during which some goodyounger talent has been supported. Septfest's direction might need to be re-considered, given the new circumstances, in which the state's interest in thevisual and performing arts is stronger. The 200oo2 festival still manifested astrong commitment to theatre programming, featuring two small, innovative,young experimental groups: the idiosyncratic Spell#7, and a newer group,KYTV ("Kill Your TV"), which mixes music, the visual arts, kitsch costumes,and movement.

s critical cts criticalactscriticalacts criticalactscriticalacts criticalacts criticalactscriticalactscriticalactscriticalactscriticalacts


10/15

92 critical ctscritical ctscritical ctscritical ctscritical ctscritical ctscritical ctscritical ctscritical ctscritical ctscritical ctscritiThe Esplanade's opening festival in October 2002 featured Batsheva DanceCompany's Anaphaza and, as its mainstage theatre offering, a new musical onthe life of the Chinese Dowager Empress by popular Singaporean songwriter-singer Dick Lee, entitled ForbiddenCity: Portraitof an Empress"--a suitablymonumental offering for the opening of the state's cultural monument.The question that arises out of Singapore's new circumstances is this: Whatsort of art will we now have,versus the sort of art we may now need?Politicaland cultural commentator JanadasDevan noted a decade ago, when it was ap-parent that the government would build a monumental arts center, "[Y]oucannot do without an Arts centre-or something that answers to that name: acentre. [...] The centre exists whether you like it or not." The more importantthing is:

to keep in tension the relationship between one kind of art and an-other- [...] a tension which, if it doesn't already exist, one must createand sustain. Only that art which keeps in tension the relationship be-tween singularity and plurality will save us. [...O]nly that artwhich re-fuses to simplify what it promises, [...o]nly such art is absolutelynecessary. (1995:55)

The "tension" that Devan speaks of is very different from the tension that ex-ists between the professed statist desire for a creative society and the actual im-plementation of instrumentalized cultural policy.The Esplanade's opening festival did have its moment of "plurality."Part ofthe festival was an Asian Contemporary Theatre (ACT) festival, coordinatedby the late Kuo Pao Kun and his codirector of the Practice Performing ArtsSchool, T. Sasitharan.The festival featured India's KalakshetraManipur (Nupi[Woman]), Japan's Gekidan Kaitaisha (Bye-Bye: The New Primitive),Indone-sia's Sardono Dance Theatre (Nobody's Body), and Taiwan's Shakespeare'sWild Sisters (Six Memos for the Next Millennium). An accompanying confer-ence examined the "meaning" of "contemporary Asian art," and had speakerssuch as the intercultural theatre practitioner and theorist Rustom Bharuchaand Tokyo University's Uchino Tadashi. Unfortunately (and possibly tell-ingly), the Esplanade's publicity for both the ACT and conference was rela-tively poor, and the admission charge for the conference was prohibitive,excluding most ordinary people.Two points emerge from the 2002 theatre season: first, the amount ofmoney invested in the theatre scene may raise official expectations that far ex-ceed the realistic possibilities for aesthetic development in the short term; andsecond, while the presence of the Esplanade "center" will not thwart ambi-tious local theatre-indeed it may expose us to aesthetic possibilities--thereis still a need to be aware of the challenge of having this center. Beauty wasonce a subversive protest against the markets' instrumentalism; at present, theattempted commodification of the arts-both in the theatre and the visualarts-means that beauty can be made to be the gloss of the established order,even in a pragmatist society where the arts have not had a significant historicalplace. We must be careful of the suppression of everything outside of com-mercial culture, especially given the aspiration to have the arts be the decora-tive capstone of an aspiring Global City.The start of 200oo3brought new problems for the arts: the Iraq war and theappearance of Severe Acute Respiratory Syndrome (SARS) in the region ledto the further weakening of the Singapore economy, following in the wake ofthe 1997 Asian economic crisis and the 2001 crash of high-tech equity. Whilegovernment arts and cultural funding will increase in 200oo3 by 24 percent to

critical cts critical ctscritical ctscritical cts critical ctscritical ctscritical ctscritical cts critical ctscritical ctscritical cts critic


11/15

actscritical ctscritical ctscritical ctscritical ctscritical ctscritical ctscritical ctscritical ctscritical ctscritical ctscritical cts 93

dg)

j

??::i

2. From he TheatrePrac-tice'sMandarin-languageproduction fDescendantsof the Eunuch Admiral(1995) at the Victoria Thea-tre,Singapore, irectedyKuo PaoKun. (PhotoCThe TheatrePractice)

S$529 million (U.S.$302 million), much of this amount goes to "hardware"orinfrastructural rojectssuch as a new National Librarybuilding and the redevel-opment of the Singapore History Museum. Actual artsfunding-as channeledthrough the NAC-has shrunk by Io percent to S$35.5 million (U.S.$20 mil-lion). There is also talk of cuts in the funding for the Singapore Arts Festival(see Tan 2003). The issue here is not that there should be no cuts to arts fund-ing during hard times, but more the depth of the government's commitmentto the artsin the firstplace. Given that, it is hard not to think that, in 2003, thePAP government pulled the rug from underneath the arts. The funding situa-tion highlights the contradiction between the older economic instrumental-ism and the hope for a "creative economy" in which the arts have a pivotalrole.It is appropriate to conclude this essay with Kuo Pao Kun. An astute ob-server of the city-state's cultural life, his allegorical Descendantsof the EunuchAdmiral (1995) offers an incisive analysis of Singapore's liminal arts space-and it potentially becomes an analysis that offers a more universal picture ofculture and the arts.Descendants ffers a post-romantic vision of mankind that retains a commit-ment to human aspiration and imagination. It drawsexplicit parallelsbetweenthe history of the famous Muslim-Chinese admiral and explorer Zheng He(akaCheng Ho [1371- 1435]), who during the expansive Ming Dynasty sailedwith his Chinese armadato the shores of East Africa, and contemporary man,and between the cost to be paid for service to the state-in this case, an anach-ronistic and allegorized Chinese nation-state before that modern idea reallyexisted-and to capitalism-allegorized in the play as "markets."If, becauseof poverty, some men voluntarily submitted to the literal and symbolic castra-tion necessary for state service, Zheng He, Descendants sserts,was violently setupon by the state and cut off from a Muslim identity and future for the state'sglorification. The Zheng He character must therefore seek help from any pos-sible source:

Allah knows my bitternessBuddha has mercy on my soulSea Goddess protects my fleetVoyages to the West fulfill my life. (Kuo 2003, scene Io)

actscriticalacts criticalacts critical ctscriticalacts criticalacts criticalacts critical cts critical cts critical cts critical cts critical cts


12/15

94 critical ctscritical ctscritical ctscritical ctscritical ctscritical ctscritical ctscritical ctscritical ctscritical ctscritical ctscritihIronically, the moments of transcendence beyond Zheng He's present con-dition come about only during the voyage to realms and markets away from the

ambiguous and discomfiting home that is China, while representing the gloryof the Ming emperor:

At the end of this great market-festival, Zheng He and the king ex-changed gifts of gold and silver, silk and ivory, jewels and porcelain. Asthe setting sun displayed the most brilliant of its colours, they parted inpassionate sorrow. The king and his attendants hold on to their treasuredsilk, porcelain, and jewels while Grand Eunuch leads away the rare ani-mals and birds given to his mission as reciprocal gifts. Even when theywere sailing down the river back to the [Zheng He-led Chinese] ar-mada, the music from the instruments made of shells and reeds couldstill be heard from land. [...]Grand Eunuch Zheng He, faithful servant of the Ming Emperor, wassent to the Western Ocean as an imperial emissary to blaze a trail ofglory for the Middle Kingdom. Never did he expect to leave a path ofamazing splendour that would seep into the lives of so many people inso many places, through so many ways over so long a time [...]. (2003,scene 13)

The markets-representing a sort of prelapsarian capitalism-thus can be-come the cosmopolitan contact zones for an expansive Asian globalism, zonesoffering the genuinely marvellous, that which exceeds the confines of alien-ated life in the modern nation, with the potential for intercultural exchangestill alive.

The circumscribed reality of castration, deracination, and entrapmentthrough service to the state remains; but we must search for meaning and forthe possibility of an identity that-if need be-may be different from one'sorigin, precisely because of the reality of a seemingly universal capitalism thatcontinues to fragment local spheres. Zheng He's fractured Muslim-Chineseorigins and life itself-as shattered as Singapore's cultural life, but also repre-senting more than the Singapore condition-suitably only comes through asdisjointed narrative fragments in the play; when we try to add them up, we seehow the one missing male "fragment" has animated this life.In the end, Descendants says, cultural identity and history are hard to protectfrom the politico-economic realm. The challenge is to transcend the literaland symbolic violence done to the realm of culture, and even to transcend thenation-state that practices such violence. Any person who serves the state andthe global markets must face this challenge -multiple cultural attachmentsand identities are offered as a goal to aspire to rather than a problem resolvedin Descendants:

But the eunuch admiral seemed never to have given up the hope offinding an alternate life. On board his drifting vessels, in the lonelinessof the vast ocean, in the limbo between departing and arriving, betweenbeing a man and a non-man, he kept on dreaming, hoping, searching,struggling. (Kuo 2003, scene 16)

Singapore artists-as the paradoxical "descendants" of the eunuch admi-ral-must maintain the suitable tension between plurality and the singularitythat may now threaten cultural production in the city-state.

critical ctscritical ctscritical ctscritical ctscritical cts critical cts critical ctscritical cts critical cts critical cts critical ctscritic


13/15

s critical ctscritical ctscritical cts critical ctscritical cts critical ctscritical ctscritical ctscritical ctscritical ctscritical cts 95Notes

I. Nearly all of Kuo's plays in English-he wrote most of his plays in both Mandarin-Chinese and English-have been published (see Kuo 1990, 2000, 2003). The planninghas commenced for putting together Kuo's collected works.2. In 1989, Tang is quoted as saying: "The main reason for being here [in Sembawang] isthe isolation." The magazine writer's response to this was: "The psychological contextof the village is earthy, rudimentary, and free of the numerous and trivial distractionsnormally found in the city" (Chia Ming Chien 1989:33).

3. This point is illustrated by one journalist's writing on the Artists' Village:Describing their [visual] work may be simple enough. The greater difficulty liesin actually rating the artists. [As art critic and historian] Mr. [T. K.] Sabapathysays: "There's no critical history here [in Singapore] where you can slot an artistsomewhere on a scale of I to Io." (Lee 1989)

4. In the city-state, the term "Marxist" is taken by the state to be coterminous with "com-munist." The 1987 crackdown was codenamed "Operation Spectrum." Straits Timescorrespondent Chua Lee Hoong-a former Internal Security Department officer-re-cently offered the most extraordinary comparison between the 1987 security sweep andthe 1989 Tiananmen Square incident as a justification for Operation Spectrum: "Everycountry has its own iconic movement in dealing with potentially destabilising dissent.Tiananmen was one of China's, and I dare say it brought relative political stability for atleast 20 years" (2003:I8). According to Chua, Operation Spectrum was one of Singa-pore's such "iconic movements," along with the infamous February 1963 OperationCold Store, when the security forces detained over Ioo leading opposition political fig-ures. Singapore was then trying to join the Federation of Malaysia, and internal securityon the island was shared between Malaya (now West Malaysia), Britain, and Singapore.It is too easy to say that Chua represents the state's position on such matters; it is mostunlikely the PAP government would wish any of its activities--historically or other-wise-to be compared with the very violent Chinese clampdown.

5. For more information regarding this crackdown on the arts, see the essays by SanjayKrishnan, Sharaad Kuttan, Lee Weng Choy, Leon Perera, and Jimmy Yap in Looking atCulture (Krishnan et al. 1996). This anthology was initially intended to be an issue of theNational University of Singapore Society's journal, Commentary. The Society panickedin the wake of the 1993 arts controversy, and stopped the publication process; the editorsresigned and subsequently had the issue privately published.6. The opening show and the published catalogue were entitled "Modernity and Beyond"(see Sabapathy 1996). The exhibition showcased SAM's potential for defining the ter-rain of modern "Southeast Asian art."

7. In 2002, Ong was in Berlin for the In Transit intercultural festival at the Haus der Kul-turen der Welt; in Kornborg Castle, Copenhagen, for his Search:Hamlet, which ends theintercultural Shakespeare trilogy that began in 1996 with his Lear; and at Lincoln Cen-ter, New York, for Silver River, with music by Bright Sheng and libretto by David HenryHwang.8. The main jewel of the Festival was the Asian debut of the Kun opera, The Peony Pavilion,directed by Chen Shi-Zheng, which had premiered at the Lincoln Center Festival of1999. Unfortunately, attendance of the event was poor: the country's limited arts edu-cation has not developed a significant audience for an opera that stretches out over fiveevenings.

9. The editorial goes on to note a truth the entire population should be familiar with: "Bynow, the people should see that whatever the government invests in, be it education, thearts, conservation projects or biotechnology, the bottom line is how one derives an eco-nomic benefit from each venture."

io. Action Theatre is one of the more artistically ambitious companies of the commercialtheatre. In 2002 it adapted for the stage Singaporean Hwee Hwee Tan's novel MammonInc. (200I), which deals with a 2o-something Singapore woman's capitulation to globalconsumerism in the guise ofa transnational firm that "manages" cross-cultural identitiesfor the "betterment" of global business. Action has also involved prominent Malaysian

ts criticalacts criticalactscriticalactscriticalacts criticalacts criticalacts criticalacts criticalacts criticalacts criticalactscriticalacts


14/15

96 critical ctscritical ctscritical ctscritical ctscritical ctscritical ctscritical ctscritical ctscritical ctscritical ctscritical ctscriti,director KrishenJit with their work. He was involved with another 2002 projectcalledSqueezeandSqueezability, smorgasbordof six shortplays.The qualityof the scriptswasuneven, though the direction and actingwere of high standards.

I I. Formore on Lee'swork, see Wee (1996).

ReferencesChia Ming Chien1989 "The Artists'Village."Man,April-May:33.Chua Lee Hoong2003 "Me? I'd Rather Save Money on the Candles..." Straits Times (Singapore),

Op. Ed. section, 2 April:18.Devan,Janadas1995 "Is Art Necessary?" In Art vs. Art: Conflict and Convergence (The SubstationConference 1993), edited by Lee Weng Choy, 51-56. Singapore: The Sub-station.The Graduate2003 "The Esplanade an Impetus? Only Time will Tell." Editoral. The Graduate

(Singapore), February-March:4.Jit, Krishen1995 "The Larger Context of Arts Development in Singapore." In Art vs. Art: Con-

flict and Convergence (The Substation Conference 1993), edited by Lee WengChoy, 21-25. Singapore: The Substation.

Krishnan,Sanjay,et al., eds.1996 Looking at Culture. Singapore: Artres Design & Communications.Kuo Pao Kun19902000

The Coffin Is TooBig for the Hole-And Other Plays. Singapore: Times Books.Images at the Margins: A Collection of Kuo Pao Kun's Plays. Singapore: TimesBooks.

2003 Two Plays by Kuo Pao Kun: Descendants of the Eunuch Admiral and The Spir-its Play, edited by C.J.W.-L. Wee and Lee Chee Keng. Singapore: SNP Inter-national.Lee Siew Hwa1989 "VillageArtists."SundayTimes Singapore),"SundayPlus"section, 28 May.Ministry of Information and the Arts2000 RenaissanceCity Report:Cultureand the Arts in Renaissance ingapore. inga-pore: Ministry of Informationand the Arts.Ong Teng Cheong, et al.1989 Reportof theAdvisoryCouncilon Cultureand the Arts. Singapore: Singapore

National Printers.Seet, K.K.2002 "Review of The Morning People." Arts Magazine (Singapore), September-October: 128-29.Straits Times1987 "Two Main Fronts in Conspiracy: Full Text of Ministry of Home AffairsStatement on the Marxist Conspiracy." Straits Times (Singapore), 27 May.Tan Shzr Ee2003 "The Art of Spending." Straits Times (Singapore), 16 April, Life section:L4.Venturelli, Shalinin.d. From the Information conomy o the CreativeEconomy:MovingCulture o theCenterof International ublicPolicy.Cultural Comment Series. Washington,DC: Center for Arts and Culture. .

critical cts critical ctscritical cts critical ctscritical ctscritical ctscritical cts critical cts critical cts critical ctscritical ctscritic


15/15

critical ctscritical ctscritical cts critical ctscritical ctscritical cts critical ctscritical cts critical ctscritical ctscritical cts 97Wee, C.J.W.-L.1996 "Staging the New Asia: Singapore'sDick Lee, Pop Music and a Counter-modernity."PublicCulture8, 3 (Spring):489-5 10.forthcoming "Singapore."In A Dictionaryor the Twenty-First entury:The Ambivalent u-tureof KnowledgendCulture, dited by AshisNandy andVinay Lal.

C.J. W-L. Wee teaches iterature nd cultural heoryat the Nanyang TechnologicalUniversity,Singapore.He was ormerlya Fellowat the Instituteof SoutheastAsianStudies,Singapore,andis theauthorofCulture, Empire, and the Question ofBe-ing Modern (LexingtonBooks, 2oo3), and the editorof Local Cultures and the"New Asia": The State, Culture, and Capitalism in Southeast Asia (InstituteofSoutheast Asian Studies, 2002).

s criticalacts criticalacts criticalactscriticalacts criticalacts criticalacts criticalacts criticalactscriticalacts criticalacts criticalacts

creating high culture in the globalized cultural desert of singapore - c.j.w. - l. wee

Documents