On 20 August 2006, three weeks before the opening of Belief, the first Singapore Biennale, Prime Minister Lee Hsien-Loong delivered a National Day rally speech on television, outlining Singapore’s cultural and economic priorities. Prime Minister Lee praised Singapore’s ‘high international standing’, the imminent IMF/World Bank annual meetings with their expected 16,000 international delegates and visitors, the nation’s reputation and the need to work together–for example, through the ‘4 Million Smiles’ campaign–and to offer ‘service from the heart’, reflecting Singapore’s gracious society, because ‘if we impress them, they’ll be our best ambassadors for Singapore... Worth far more than any EDB or Tourism Board advertising campaign’(Lee, HL, 2006).

Singapore’s biennalization has been late in coming. The National Arts Council (NAC) and government toyed with the idea for years. 1 What set the wheels turning was 2006’s most highly anticipated financial event: the IMF/WB meeting, conveniently held one week after the Biennale opened to the public on 4 September, a meeting primed to generate at least SGD 95 million for the local economy and 16,000 visitors (Chow, 2006). The tacit utility of biennales for the accretion of cultural capital and national imagebuilding is regularly criticized, as politicians hover over proceedings and multinational corporations swap sponsorship for logo space on international stages of symbolic production. The tropical Asian Tiger is perhaps the most explicit example of these conditions: along with a solid GDP and nanny state, Singapore is home to a culture industry dependent on and frequently troubled by the country’s politico-economic pursuit of an elusive ‘world class’. 2 Belief’s importance lies in its testimony to the conditions underwriting contemporary art’s production, within globalized cultural and economic industries.