Creating High Culture in the Globalized "Cultural Desert" of Singapore

This essay is dedicated to the memory of 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 advancements of the West while forsaking not only many of the political dimensions of democratic life but also its cultural dimensions. The result is an industrial and commercial understanding of culture; manufacturing and productive institutions have become the collective basis of social life. And yet, despite this rather dour and puritanical modernity, experimental theatre and visual art has begun to flourish since the 1980s.

What further has transpired is an understanding by the state that in order to be a "creative economy" and a "happening" Global City that can retain the "best" foreign and local business and industrial talent, Singapore cannot display only a philistine modernity. Consequently, public policies have been set in place since the 1990s to foster artistic creativity and even create an arts market, in the hope that such creativity will in turn encourage technological and entrepreneurial innovation. Ironically, this poses challenges for those very same innovative artists that the state professes to want to foster. This essay explores some of the tensions, if not actual contradictions, of the recent changes.

I

The city-state Singapore, under the leadership of the People's Action Party (PAP) since 1959, represents a capitalist modernity that deliberately forsook autochthony in cultural development for economic success (see Wee forthcoming). The PAP's reputation for forging an uncreative society composed mainly of shopping centers by and large stemmed from a pragmatic, petit-bourgeois vision of a hard-working modern society. Nonetheless, since the late 1980s it has been open to creating a cultural superstructure that would match its status as a major regional financial and industrial hub. In the 20-odd years prior, "culture" had referred more to multiethnic cultures and values, though by the early 1980s to the mid-1990s, "culture" also signified the mythicized "Asian/Confucian" values that were the alleged foundation of Singapore's "East-Asian Miracle" status. Cultural policy—policy that fostered the arts and high culture—was not a real concern.

By 1989, the government began to articulate a recognizable cultural policy with the government-authorized Report of the Advisory Council on Culture and the Arts (Ong et al. 1989). By this time, there was already a burgeoning theatre scene principally led by The Theatre Practice (TTP), The Necessary Stage (TNS), and TheatreWorks (Singapore), among the first contemporary professional theatre companies. There was also a nascent experimental visual arts development, led by Tang Da Wu.

TTP's Kuo Pao Kun (1939-2002) was the major enabling personality in the new theatre scene. He had been detained without trial by the PAP government between 1976 and 1980 for alleged communist activities. Kuo bounced back into prominence in the 1980s with plays that examined the possibility of trans-ethnic understanding and the destruction of culture and cultural memory in the wake of a statist modernity with totalizing impulses. He also broke the mold of single-language theatre and created plays, such as Mama Looking for Her Cat (1988), which utilized a range of the languages spoken in Singapore.¹ Significantly, Kuo was a natural institution builder able to recognize and generously support younger talent; he was able to harness the energy of visual artists involved with newer genres such as performance art—introduced to Singapore by visual artist and Fukuoka Cultural Prize winner Tang Da Wu—thereby helping to pioneer an emerging multidisciplinary contemporary art scene.

The three theatre companies created adventurous productions, often formally bold (many of the plays were "devised," with the scripts created in a workshop setting) and dealing with issues of memory, ethnicity, and other identity issues. These were artistic reactions against the singular and sometimes strident top-down disciplinary modernization of Singapore since the mid 1960s, which had allowed little space for reflection on cultural or historical issues. What was notable about the theatre of the 1980s to mid-1990s was that "difficult" theatre—even...