Tash Aw on Singapore’s Contemporary Art Scene

As a child growing up in Malaysia, I didn't know anyone who didn't have family in Singapore. Distant aunts and cousins would visit us regularly. Some of them had only recently moved across the causeway in search of new jobs and had inevitably settled there. They'd bring gifts of beautifully packaged biscuits or electronics that we couldn't get at home. They'd also bring stories of their lives, which could be summed up simply as: everything is better over there.

It’s impossible not to be dazzled by Singapore – not just by the glassy skyscrapers arranged neatly around Marina Bay but by the statistics that measure the performance-obsessed island nation: the highest GDP per capita in the world when adjusted for purchasing power parity, a 98 percent literacy rate, the world’s sixth safest country. Can numbers really tell us the story of a small, young country and its people?

The arc of Singapore’s story is dramatic, almost cinematic.

Singapore celebrated its 60th year of independence this year, and with this landmark came a new set of statistics, more revealing and, to me, more moving. A child born in Singapore in 1965 had a life expectancy of 65; a child today can expect to live beyond 86. In reading tests conducted by the Organisation for Economic Co-operation and Development (OECD), Singaporeans over the age of 35 came close to the bottom of rankings, whereas 15-year-olds emerged at the very top. All this speaks not just of rapid progress in a short space of time, but of total change in which the act of transformation itself has become a way of life, even a kind of national aesthetic. Time takes on a different meaning; it is accelerated and collapsed. The body is caught up in this whirlwind of change, at once a participant and yet, somehow, held at a distance from it.

Singapore’s journey through independence entailed a particularly messy double separation, involving liberation, first, from its status as a British colony in 1959, and then, from its closest neighbour, Malaya, with which it had formed the new country of Malaysia in 1963. The union lasted only two years before Singapore was ejected by its sibling in a break famously described by its founding prime minister, Lee Kuan Yew, at a 1965 press conference as a ‘moment of anguish’. Two territories with a common history – shared cultures, languages, religions – detached into separate entities.

It was inevitable that this tumult would mark the country’s development, and indeed its transformations have been so urgent that they have at times assumed a magnificent fury – of the kind that Lee, an electrifying public orator, displayed in his early post-independence speeches. ‘We made this country from nothing,’ Lee said in 1965, ‘from mud-flats.’ A tiny nation, cast adrift, defies the odds to overshadow its far larger, more populous neighbour in just a few decades: the arc of the story is dramatic and tightly played out, almost cinematic.

Ming Wong, currently the London National Gallery’s artist-in-residence, was born in Singapore only six years after its definitive independence – which is to say, not long after its rise out of the mud-flats – but by the time he attended art school at Singapore’s Nanyang Academy of Fine Arts in the 1990s, the country had already become solidly middle class. His work is concerned with the fluidity and questioning of language and race, with how we inhabit the histories and cultures assigned to us – and how we free ourselves from them. Although his practice has expanded greatly to encompass different forms – a recent major work, Rhapsody in Yellow (2022), is a lavish, auditorium-filling ‘Lecture Performance with Two Pianos’ on the so-called ‘ping-pong diplomacy’ of the 1970s between the US and China – his principal medium is film, imbued heavily with the kind of theatricality more readily associated with the stage, and none of the realism or naturalism that cinema usually calls for.

The most fascinating work from the early period of his practice, Four Malay Stories (2005), is a four-channel video installation played on a variable loop (though, truthfully, I could spend several hours attempting to unravel the scenes). In the work, Wong plays 16 characters from four films starring the legendary actor, singer and director P. Ramlee, the principal figure in the golden age of Malay-language cinema, which spanned roughly a decade from the mid-1950s – precisely the time of Singapore’s journey through independence. Whether comic or romantic, these films were characterized by their lyricism and expressive acting, always on the verge of melodrama. Their settings were laced with a sense of nostalgia, as if anticipating their own imminent demise: watching these films as a child, only 15 or 20 years after they’d been made, they seemed to me to have emerged from another era altogether, one in which people lived in a society of unimaginable gentleness, despite the strength of their passions. Perhaps it was precisely the unabashed nature of their emotional expression that lent these movies their quality of innocence.

On each of the four channels, Wong acts out scenes from a different P. Ramlee film. His costumes and make-up replicate the originals with the exacting detail that has come to characterize his later work. On one screen he plays a woman arguing with her lover; on another he is a Malay mother and her son-in-law; on a third, he plays a pair of warriors; on the last, all the characters in a love triangle. The hammy performances are curiously faithful to the tone of the originals; they are exaggerated, but not all that much.

Ming Wong’s work is concerned with how we inhabit histories and cultures – and how we free ourselves from them.

All four films play at once, overlaid with an amalgam of soundtracks from P. Ramlee films. The music is dramatic and faintly menacing, and because at least four characters are speaking at the same time, the viewer only catches snippets of each conversation before being distracted by its neighbour. I’ve tried several approaches to following the films – concentrating on one individual channel for the duration of its loop, or flitting from one to the other in the hope that it will come together like a mosaic – but still I can’t grasp the whole. It’s as though I’m constantly being asked to listen to the language and how the words are delivered. Is that a Singaporean Chinese accent breaking through the otherwise flawless Malay? Everything is in flux; everything is in question. It’s telling that these films come from a time when territories, racial identity and language in the region were far less fixed than they are today. P. Ramlee was born in modern Malaysia and identified as Malaysian, yet his best work was made in Singapore, produced by multi-ethnic teams from both countries.

Wong’s solo exhibition for the Singapore Pavilion at the 2009 Venice Biennale offered examples of his widening interrogation of representation and identity. In Life of Imitation (2009), Wong’s double-channel riff on the 1959 Hollywood melodrama Imitation of Life by Douglas Sirk, a Black mother visits for the final time her mixed-race daughter, who has been trying to flee her true identity by ‘passing’ as a white woman. The scene takes place in a hotel room, the set of which Wong has recreated faithfully, and the two female roles are played by male actors drawn from Singapore’s three main ethnic groups: Chinese, Indian and Malay. Gender is performed here, rather than inherited, and so too is race. Like Sarah Jane, the main character, the actors slip in and out of their skins, inhabiting other realities. In Love for the Mood (2009), a three-channel installation inspired by Wong Kar-wai’s In the Mood for Love (2000), has a white actress playing both male and female leads, stumbling over her Cantonese lines, which the artist prompts off-camera. The effect in both films, where each channel is played at a slight disconnect from the other, is at once unsettling and riveting. The languages and accents get mixed up, and we don’t know where the voices are coming from, or even, sometimes, who is inhabiting which body.

Walking through Heman Chong’s sprawling retrospective, ‘This is a dynamic list and may never be able to satisfy particular standards for completeness’, at the Singapore Art Museum (SAM) this summer, I got a sense of how swiftly buildings are repurposed in Singapore. The show was held in SAM’s Tanjong Pagar Distripark gallery, housed in former port warehouses built in the early 1970s, when the area was home to southeast Asia’s first modern container terminal. Much of Chong’s most intriguing work deals with the passing of time, which he documented in minute detail in his project Calendars (2020–2096) (2004–10). The series of 1,001 images, presented as pages from calendars, was arranged in a tight grid across two immense walls in the largest room of the exhibition. Each photograph depicts a public space in Singapore – the foyers of apartment blocks, stairwells, walkways in shopping centres – yet each is mysteriously devoid of human presence, which exists only as vestiges.

In some photographs, it feels as though the space has only recently been emptied; others seem to have been vacated some time ago, even though their floors, walls, ceilings and other structural qualities are in mostly fine condition. They are all ghostly and still. Seeing so many images in succession is a hypnotic experience, and I wasn’t sure if I was looking at pandemic-period interiors or an imagined dystopian future, or even a nostalgic record of the past. The work is a sustained meditation on time in a densely populated country where change happens so quickly that moments of stillness go unnoticed. Calendars is, in that sense, a continuous snapshot of our present, and Chong pins us to it, making us witness it while the rest of the world spins madly around us.

Detail and its repetition lies at the heart of Chong’s practice, as does his obsession with the printed word, specifically in book form. These interests converge in one of my personal favourites in the exhibition: his playful, itinerant, ongoing project The Library of Unread Books, started in 2016 in collaboration with librarian and producer Renée Staal, which involves piles of books donated by thousands of people who responded to Chong’s call for literature that their owners had never read. Visitors to this ‘living’ reference library are free to browse through over 500 titles, and a few sat down to read peacefully during my visit. First presented in 2016–17 at the NTU Centre for Contemporary Art Singapore as part of the artist’s residency at the institution, it has travelled to locations such as London, Manila, Milan and Utrecht. At SAM, the catalogue notes that the artist wanted to address the surplus and sharing of knowledge, building on Umberto Eco’s idea of an ‘antilibrary’ in which unread books are more valuable than read ones. I sensed a further provocation within the work, specific to its current setting: a country where knowledge is prized, but not necessarily the act of reading.

Elsewhere in the exhibition, printed paper is shredded and heaped in piles that we are invited to pick through, the fragments offering sentences whole or partial, compelling us to read. Pages of novels are redacted, making us more alert to the remaining sentences than we might otherwise have been. Another project, Oleanders (2023), consists of photographed details of books found in every painting in New York’s Met Gallery. Together, these works ask us to consider what has been censored, destroyed, shared, enshrined. Chong’s restless relationship with words and books had me thinking about my own relationship to literature as I walked through the gallery – what I seek from it, and what I ultimately gain from it. 

Heman Chong’s restless relationship with books made me think about my own relationship to literature.

The act of sharing is extended to the vast collection of postcards that form Perimeter Walk (2013–24), Chong’s visual record of images taken as he walked the entire perimeter of Singapore. Sand banks, tents housing migrant workers, border controls, dead animals, fragments of posters on billboards – each image is printed on postcards (550 in total) that visitors buy for a nominal fee of US$1, a memento of the artist’s exploration of the boundaries of life in a small island nation. The work recalls the reflective projects of other solitary walkers – the writers Jean-Jacques Rousseau and W.G. Sebald, for example – but rather than probing the relationship between the artist and the world around them, Chong is here describing, in a physical, literal way, the country he lives in. In a region of relatively young nations still trying to articulate their identities, the work is a subtle quest for what it feels like to belong to – or be contained by – a particular national territory.

I followed the recommended sequence of rooms and ended my visit with what might arguably be the show’s centrepiece: a room whose floor is almost entirely covered in a sloping pile of – what? At first they looked like raven-black tiles, lustrous and hard, faintly menacing, but then I realized these objects were pliable, despite their stiffness. Yes, I touched them, I even walked and slid on them, as others did. At its deepest the pile was calf-high. Monument to the people we’ve conveniently forgotten (I hate you) (2008) consists of one million blacked- out business cards – ubiquitous items across Asia – that together evoke anonymity, finality and the failure of personal connection when reduced to the transactional. Though the work can be read as a commentary on the insignificance of the individual in contemporary capitalist society, I experienced it more as an erasure of time that strips back everything to a homogeneity, a nothingness – one that is uncertain, terrifying, but also, curiously, seductive. I was struck by the absence of nostalgia in the show, just as I was when I revisited Wong’s work. Both artists confront a multicultural society undergoing rapid transformation, but instead of suggesting simpler, older iterations of culture, they pull me into Singapore’s pluralistic future: complex and, sometimes, overwhelming. I often feel I can’t keep up – but that’s the whole point.

This article first appeared in frieze issue 255 with the headline ‘ACROSS THE CAUSEWAY’

^{Main image: Ming Wong, In Love for the Mood (detail), 2009, cinema billboard. Courtesy: the artist}