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

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Notes

1 The initiative’s website is https://www.novelwaysofbeing.sg/, which also contains the digital archiving of the various exhibitions through the 3D virtual tour platform Matterport. In addition to the National Gallery Singapore and the Singapore Art Museum, the other participating organisations and independent spaces or groups include the Singapore Tyler Print Institute; LASALLE’s Institute of Contemporary Arts; Nanyang Technological University — Centre for Contemporary Art; ADM Gallery at Nanyang Technological University, School of Art, Design and Media; The Substation; Coda Culture; Grey Projects; INTER-MISSION; and soft/WALL/studs.

2 See https://softwallstuds.space/beyondrepair

3 See https://www.neverbefore.sg. This virtual exhibition is populated by work from ‘creatives’ rather than artists and is curated by fashion designer Yang Derong.

4 A classic study would be the sociologist Chua Beng-Huat’s paper, ‘Race Relations and Public Housing Policy in Singapore’. As the population of migrant workers has increased, questions related to their housing has become a hot topic, focusing too on a riot in Little India in 2013. Housing, home, and homesickness are interrelated aspects discussed in Wajihah Hamid’s ‘Feelings of Home Amongst Tamil Migrant Workers in Singapore’s Little India’, Pacific Affairs 88.1 (2015): 5–25.

5 This ended with the fifteen-month suspension of Lee Suet Fern. Another associated case is the defamation suit that PM Lee is bringing against the editor of The Online Citizen, Terry Xu, for reposting the accusations brought forth by PM Lee’s siblings.

6 A useful timeline of events can be found at https://artsequator.com/the-substation-timeline-armenian-street/. See also Hoe Su Fern, ‘The Substation: How Many More Canaries in the Coal Mine?’

7 On 14 June 2020, a national broadsheet, The Sunday Times, ran a survey of the public’s perceptions of essential jobs within the context of a pandemic and branded the artist as a top-most profession that was deemed ‘non-essential’. See Ashley Tan.

8 ‘nor’ (lowercase intended) is the artist Norah Lea’s artistic moniker, adopted in 2021. Some related collateral and materials may still refer to nor by her former name.

9 Elections were called by the ruling People’s Action Party in July 2020 despite the country having recently emerged from a lockdown before enforcing strict social distancing that proscribed gatherings larger than five persons (although South Korea, Taiwan, India, and the United States too held polls during the pandemic). While the elections gave the ruling party a signal mandate to steer the country in decisive ways to deal with the crises in the wake of Covid-19, the signals were far more ambiguous. Although returned to power, the party had a reduced margin and lost one more constituency to the opposition, The Workers’ Party, in an unusual election year where every constituency was contested.

10 One flashpoint reached during the election involved police reports made against twenty-six-year-old MP-elect and social activist Raeesah Khan, whose historic Facebook posts about police discriminating against ethnic minorities were alleged as evidence of her own racism. Khan’s public apology for her posts became the occasion for her to restate her passionate interest in raising awareness about minority concerns. The contrition she showed seemed to pay off; unlike previous rundowns by the government on any opposition politician who deigns to bring racial matters to the surface, Khan survived her baptism of fire. The Workers’ Party swung resolutely behind her along with a youth-driven #IStandWithRaeesah social media campaign. Khan eventually won her parliamentary seat in Sengkang GRC and got off with a stern police warning. See Rei Kurohi.

11 In order to solve problems brought about by the pandemic, countries will also require a new wave of local innovation to reduce the dependency on externals. All direct-to-local efforts will at least provide a bare minimum of relief and enable some limited form of self-sufficiency.

12 See the exhibition’s website, http://afrosoutheastasia.com/. The exhibition, curated by Kathleen Ditzig and Carlos Quijon Jr., is also slated to travel to Manila, Philippines in October 2021 and thereafter to the Republic of Korea.

13 Bani Haykal’s installation ‘We’re Not Satisfied with Just Making a Noise’ (original emphasis, 2021) speaks to this history of American ‘jazz diplomacy’ at the core of a visit to Singapore by the clarinettist and band leader Benny Goodman, who was one of the first people to run racially integrated music groups. Goodman gifted a replica of his own clarinet to Runme Shaw as a token of appreciation and friendship to the members of the Musicians Union of Singapore.

14 See National Gallery Singapore, ‘Artist Talk’.