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Drew St. Lawrence
← Field Notes

Singapore, 2020 · Part 5 of 13 ·

Singapore Art Week

A city bet on human capital, and over 100 art events in a single week.

It seems that I got here at the right time. All month, the city has been buzzing with artistic and cultural events, like the Singapore Biennale and Singapore Art Week. All around the city there are signs (pop-up markets, Chinese zodiac displays, red lanterns hanging from storefronts) of the build-up to the biggest celebration of the year: Chinese New Year. This post will focus on my experiences at SAW; I'll write about my Chinese New Year adventures sometime in the near future.

Chinese New Year display with golden ingots and a cartoon rat among red and orange flowers.
The Year of the Rat approaches…

Singapore Art Week has been one of the country's premier visual arts festivals since 2013. This year, from January 11 to 19, the work of local artists, collectives, and organizations was showcased in museums, cultural institutions, private galleries, and public spaces across the island.

Singapore, to make up for its lack of material resources, has made conscious efforts to leverage the power of its human capital. This is most evident in business, education, design, and the arts. In the span of a few decades, Singapore has made (remade?) itself into an innovative "Asian Tiger". This emphasis on ingenuity and creative thinking is what brought me here. With over 100 SAW events to choose from, I decided to dedicate my free time to witnessing as many as I could, because, culture.

Here are a few highlights from the week:

A video installation by Susie Wong called Dancing Alone (Don't Leave Me). Referencing a line from The King and I ("no woman would dance alone while a man is looking at her"), the work explores the representations of women consumed through media and re-enacted in everyday life. Through dance, Wong's performers are both empowered and subjugated.

The Light to Night Festival in the Civic District. This year's theme was "Invisible Cities", and its surrealist installations encouraged visitors to reimagine and reexamine familiar landmarks around the city.

A colonial-era building lit in blue at night, with crowds outside.A wall sculpture made of hundreds of green blocks.A grey spiked sculpture with hollow pockets.An abstract painting in orange, yellow and blue.A floor installation of rust-coloured granules.Performers lying on the floor in yellow costumes.
Arts After Dark at Gilman Barracks, a colonial British military installation turned international contemporary arts complex.
Exhibition space with archival photographs at the National Archives.A wall covered in old newspaper clippings.Drew peeking over a book titled Road to Nowhere: An Autobiography.A hand-drawn mind map centred on the word Anarchism.A chalkboard wall covered in handwritten notes beside a bookshelf.Drew with two people in front of a chalkboard titled Harbinger.
A visit to the National Archives of Singapore with Jenn and Johan from MOE. We saw a presentation from Koh Nguang How on the history of performance art in Singapore, a series of short films by Rajendra Gour, and Harbinger, a historical narrative created from the personal archive of Toh Hun Ping. We found him there working, and he was kind enough to speak to us and pose for a photo.
A robotic beetle with a green dome shell on a gallery floor.
A robotic beetle from Prototyping Tokyo: Illustrating Design Led Innovation, at the National Design Centre.

Next up, a recap of week one at my first school attachment!

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