Performing Singapore

Pavel Braila, The Golden Snow of Sochi, 2014. Photo: Courtesy Zagidullin Rustam.

© Manifesta 10, St. Petersburg, Russia.

Singapore is a city/state in flux, an island nation in Southeast Asia that has transformed itself from a former British trading post for the East India Company upon its independence in 1963 into one of the world’s major commercial hubs. A city/nation of skyscrapers and shopping malls that is perpetually under construction, Singapore has sought to transform itself into a tourist destination by supporting contemporary art and artists. This support comes with a price, however, as the National Arts Council encourages organizers, curators, and artists to produce exhibitions and events that have a broad appeal to the general public. My focus here is the role of the community of artists and audience members vis-à-vis the annual performance festival Future of the Imagination (FOI). Under the artistic direction of Lee Wen, Kai Lam, and Jason Lim, FOI, which premiered in 2003, has remained an alternative event for a small international community of artists and audience members committed to avant-garde performance art. To participate in FOI as an artist, audience member, or writer (the roles are often interchangeable) is to resist the homogenized construction of what Lee Wen has termed “the man in the street.” Although FOI benefits from state and corporate funding, under Lee, Kai, and Lim it has remained an event that resists commodification to the extent that not even food or alcohol is sold during the festival. As Lee Wen wrote in the catalogue introduction for FOI 6 (April 2010), “Performance art practice grapples with balancing a desire to be financially viable and maintaining artistic authenticity. Especially when looking into the historical context of performance art, being anti-establishment, provocative, interventionist, and an opposition to the commodification of art . . . .”

FOI takes place against a history of state censorship that has only recently been lifted. In the past, Singapore’s semi-authoritarian government has had a reputation for suppressing civil liberties and political rights in all sectors of society, including that of the arts. In the mid- to late-eighties, performance art in Singapore was decidedly anti-authoritarian and politically subversive, taking place in alternative sites under the auspices of non-state sanctioned spaces such as The Artist’s Village (TAV), founded by Tang Da Wu. In 1994, as part of the Artist’s General Assembly (organized by TAV), Joseph Ng Sing Chor and Shannon Tham Kuok Leong performed during the New Year’s Eve program at the 5th Passage Gallery, which was situated in a shopping mall. By the time that Ng and Tham performed, the festival, which included a film screening, had already had two films censored for homosexual subject matter and inflammatory political content. Tham’s performance engaged with the sensationalistic coverage of the festival by The New Paper (TNP). Ng’s performance was even more controversial. Entitled Brother Cane, the performance alluded to a caning sentence that had recently been meted out to a number of men who had been charged as the result of an anti-gay entrapment operation. The performance itself was quiescent and meditative, with Ng creating a circle of objects that included twelve newspaper clippings relating the incident. After stating that clipping hair could be a form of silent protest, Ng, his back to the audience, cut some of his pubic hair, which he placed in the center of the circle. Upon the conclusion of the piece, police raided the gallery. Ng and his collaborators were arrested while the audience members scattered. Following this incident, the Singapore NAC decided to cease funding performance.

Singapore is not the only country to withhold funds for artists based on a nebulous standard for public decency. In 1990, just a few years prior to the Brother Cane controversy, the National Endowment for the Arts (NEA) in the U.S. denied funding to four performance artists (Tim Miller, Holly Hughes, Karen Finley, and John Fleck) for alleged obscenity in the work, even though all four...