Contemporary Arts as Political Practice in Singapore

169 Pages·2016·2.886 MB·English

by  Wernmei Yong Ade, Lim Lee Ching (eds.)

Contemporary
Arts as Political
Practice in
Singapore
Edited by Wernmei Yong Ade and Lim Lee Ching
Contemporary Arts as Political
Practice in Singapore
Wernmei Yong Ade • L im Lee C hing
Editors
Contemporary Arts as
Political Practice in
Singapore
Editors
Wernmei Yong Ade Lim Lee Ching
Nanyang Technological University Sim University S ingapore
School of EEE, NTU Singapore Singapore
Singapore
ISBN 978-1-137-57628-6 ISBN 978-1-137-57344-5 (eBook)
DOI 10.1057/978-1-137-57344-5
Library of Congress Control Number: 2016959635
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C
ONTENTS
1 Introduction 1
Wernmei Yong Ade and Lim Ching L ee
2 Waxing on Wagers 13
Jeremy Fernando
3 Loo Zihan and the Body Confessional 2 9
Louis Ho
4 Kiasipolitics : Sagas, Scandals and Suicides
in Johann S. Lee’s P eculiar Chris 4 5
Jun Zubillaga-Pow
5 The Mosaic Body: Interpreting Disability in Performance 6 3
Stephen Fernandez
6 Embodying Multiplicity on the Singapore Stage:
Plays of Difference 8 1
Charlene Rajendran
v
vi CONTENTS
7 Becoming Ellen Toh: The Politics of Visibility
in  Invitation to Treat: The Eleanor Wong Trilogy 1 01
Wernmei Yong Ade
8 “Neighbors”: A Tiong Bahru Series 119
Jessie Morgan-Owens and James Owens
9 The Substation at 25: On Institutional
Memory and Forgetting 137
Debbie Ding
Index 151
L F
IST OF IGURES
Fig. 8.1 Charles Wee Hian Guan 122
Fig. 8.2 Simon and Bernadette Parvi, with Mark and Luke 123
Fig. 8.3 Song Monk Geok 124
Fig. 8.4 Pierre Vuillet and Clement Coralie 126
Fig. 8.5 Soon family 127
Fig. 8.6 Emma Yong and Jerry Lim 128
Fig. 8.7 Gabriel Victor Cabarello and Jose de la Cruz 129
Fig. 8.8 Chin Yen and Esther Chow 131
vii
CHAPTER 1
Introduction
Wernmei   Y ong Ade and  Lim Lee   C hing
Abstract This introductory chapter will introduce the rationale for this
project, through an examination of the relationship between aesthetics
and politics as conceived by philosopher Jacques Ranciere. For Ranciere,
politics takes place along an axis of a distribution of the sensible: what can
or cannot be seen, what can or cannot be heard, what can or cannot be
said. When the terms of the system become fi xed, a police order is estab-
lished, whereupon politics is then said to effect a r e distribution of the sen-
sible. Dealing with the sensible (that which involves the fi ve senses), all art
forms are, to a large extent, political. Rancière’s defi nition of politics as a
re distribution of the sensible thus provides the basis for the way the essays
in this collection investigate the relationship between art and politics. To
this end, the introduction will include a brief evaluation of how each of
these essays participates in the political.
W.Y. Ade
Nanyang Technological University, Singapore
e-mail: w [email protected]
L.L. C hing
SIM University , Singapore
e-mail: l [email protected]
© The Editor(s) (if applicable) and The Author(s) 2016 1
W.Y. Ade, L.L. Ching (eds.), Contemporary Arts as Political
Practice in Singapore, DOI 10.1057/978-1-137-57344-5_1
2 W.Y. ADE AND L.L. CHING
This collection of essays examines the contemporary arts as political prac-
tice in Singapore. Singapore marked 50 years of independence in 2015,
and to commemorate the nation’s golden jubilee, the Institute of Policy
Studies (IPS) launched T he Singapore Chronicles , a set of simple primers
for the general public, to record, explain and offer insights into the coun-
try’s make-up. While in no way related to the work of the IPS, this collec-
tion hopes to provide critical insight into some of the more controversial
talking points that have shaped Singapore’s identity as a nation. One of
these is the role played by the contemporary arts in shaping Singapore’s
political landscape. Politics is often perceived as that which limits the fl our-
ishing of the arts here. The objective of this volume is to critically examine
the tenuous relationship between the arts and politics in Singapore, to sug-
gest a mutually informative relationship between the two. Scholars agree
that a democratic space is needed for the arts to fl ourish, and Singapore, as
one such scholar noted, is not known for its democracy1 . Between the arts
manifesto formed by the artistic community in 2013 calling for a more
democratic handling of the arts, the removal in 2014 of three children’s
books by the National Library Board due to their promotion of what is
perceived to be non-traditional family values and most recently the ban on
the public screening of Tan Pin Pin’s fi lm To Singapore with Love because
the fi lm, as announced by the Media Development Authority, “under-
mines national security,”2 the nation seems primed for an evaluation, and
perhaps a re-vision, of the relationship between the arts and politics. Our
intention is to demonstrate that aesthetic practice can be, indeed is, politi-
cal, without having to be subjected to self-censorship. While censorship
continues to be a point of contention in Singapore, what we aim to do is
to expand the pejorative understanding of what it means to be politically
engaged, beyond matters of party politics.
Our essays begin with the assumption that all art is indeed political and
that all art form is a form of political practice. From this starting point,
the essays examine both critically and creatively, specifi c ways in which the
practice of art in Singapore redraws the boundaries that conventionally
separate the arts from politics. In doing so, they open a dialogue between
1 C an-Seng Ooi, “Political pragmatism and the creative economy: Singapore as a city for the
Arts,” International Journal of Cultural Policy, Vol. 16, No. 4, November 2010, 403–417.
2 “ MDA has classifi ed the fi lm ‘To Singapore, with Love’ as Not Allowed for All Ratings
(NAR),” Media Development Authority, 10 September 2014, www.mda.gov.sg/AboutMDA/
NewsReleasesSpeechesAndAnnouncements/Pages/NewsDetail.aspx?news=639
INTRODUCTION 3
artistic practice and political practice that reinforces the mutuality of both,
rather than their exclusivity. To this end, this volume aims to redefi ne our
understanding of the political, to demonstrate that political involvement is
not a simple matter of partisan politics, but constitutes what philosopher
Jacques Rancière refers to as a redistribution of the sensible: what can or
cannot be seen, what can or cannot be heard, what can or cannot be said.
According to Rancière’s understanding, politics has an inherently aesthetic
dimension, and aesthetics an inherently political one. More importantly,
these conditions delimit the terms of inclusion and exclusion when we see,
hear, speak, think, do and create. This distribution defi nes the fi elds of
aesthetics and politics. For Rancière, aesthetics, especially contemporary
art, and politics involve a r e distribution of the sensible, or a d issensus . Steve
Corcoran explains Rancière’s conceptualisation of political practice:
Politics, then, instead of consisting in an activity whose principle separates
its domain out from the social, is an activity that consists only in blurring
the boundaries between what is considered political and what is considered
proper to the domain of social or private life.3
Politics, argues Rancière, “invents new forms of collective enunciation. It
reframes the given by inventing new ways of making sense of the sensible,
new confi gurations between the visible and the invisible, and between the
audible and the inaudible, new distributions of space and time—in short,
new bodily capacities. […] Politics creates a new form, as it were, of dis-
sensual ‘common sense’.”4 Dissensus is fi gured not as a “designation of
confl ict as such, but is a specifi c type thereof, a confl ict between s ense and
sense . Dissensus is a confl ict between a sensory presentation and a way of
making sense of it, or between several sensory regimes and/or bodies.”5
This volume is as much an examination into the ways Singapore is (re)
imagined through the contemporary arts, as it is an investigation that
chimes with Rancière’s understanding of the aesthetics of, and inherent
to, politics, where politics constitutes precisely a redistribution of what
can or cannot be seen and heard. Each essay here deals with the arts, soci-
ety and politics in a manner that not only interrogates the boundaries we
3 Steven Corcoran, “Editor’s Introduction” in Jacques Rancière (2010) Dissensus on
Politics and Aesthetics, edited and translated by Steven Corcoran (Continuum International
Publishing), pp. 1–26, 3.
4 Jacques Rancière (2010), 139.
5 Rancière 139.