Notes for next Academic Year 2024/2025

Some things to do and remember when I am preparing for the next academic year. 

> Develop Social Studio Component and it's weekly schedule

> Check in with Benson on new semester studios 

> Check in with Ruobing about the new semester studios. 

> Revise Theory Lectures 
> Prepare new theory lectures for Curatorial Studies 

The nomadic life.

Post-Museum ended our activities in our Rowell Rd space with Singapore Really Really Free Market 18 on 7 Aug. With the help of friends who have volunteered their time and effort, we finally moved out a week later and is now taking a break. Thanks everyone for your support! Post-Museum is now officially a nomad! We plan to hold the first of our Out-Post events in Nov. Out-Post is a new series of events Post-Museum will be holding in various spaces in Singapore. We are looking for interesting and cool spaces and people, so if you wanna offer us your space or work with us, we'd love to hear from you! In the meantime, take care and keep in touch with us on our virtual spaces: FB, Twitter, our website, and of course, on our new WP Space!

Bamboo Spirit and the Bamboo in you.

Excited to see what experiments emerge from these fantastic people in the ad-hoc Textile Paper Lab. (Adel, Veron, CY, Agatha) 

I have been busy getting the Bamboo Broadcast Studio for Alternative Ecology. As such, I couldn't hang out to see their pre-sessions. 

I missed the opportunity to meet with Eko this time. Ruobing invited us (Post-Museum) to activate the space that Eko built as part of Alternative Ecology. She shared that Eko wanted people to 'use' it. In that sense, he didn't see the structures he built as beautiful spaces but places for community, action and hope.   

While I may not know him, listening to the stories about him during the memorial (11th Jan), I felt I recognised him. I saw a human being who has lots to give to the world and a kindred spirit. I will be cheeky on this occasion and call this the "bamboo spirit". I recognised Eko because I have met others who had this "bamboo spirit" too. People with "bamboo" in them have always inspired me. They recharge my "hope-a-meter" because they had the "bamboo" in them to fight a good fight. 

I wonder who, with that "bamboo spirit", inspired and influenced Eko on his path. Do share your "bamboo spirit" story.

 

Cheng Yan's notes on SRRFM

A post from Chengyan. A SRRFM participant. Super stoked to come across participant's thoughts on their participation or relationship with the event. 

Last Sunday, Nov 26th was my best ever when it comes to my accumulation of art tools. After posting a photo showing my Chinese seal and Chinese red ink, the Universe rewarded me with two more dishes of unused Chinese red inks courtesy of the Singapore Really Really Free Market (SRRFM). These are certainly coveted, valued and cherished by me. I was there to bless away my collection of used & obsolete phone cards. I was amazed that they were taken up immediately. I was also blessed with 2-CD’s sets which will be played in my portable CD/DVD player when I am painting. I thought that I am the only odd person listening to CD’s. I was mistaken because I met a young man by the name of Raymond. He borrowed a ballpoint from me to write his contact details on his sticker to advertise that he is selling CD’s on Instagram. Oh, that’s wonderful stunning news. We had a good chat. He told me that his CD’s sell for between $3 to $15/-. I asked him, CD players are difficult to buy in SG, so how to have business? He showed me his Toshiba CD player which he bought in Japan for $80/- when he was there. Apparently, the Japanese are still listening to CD’s. He also told me that Shopee is also selling players online for about $50/-. I told him that I have no need to buy CD’s when I can get them for free. Haha. In a way, he is like me scouring SG for free CD’s. The only difference is that he gets them to sell whilst I get them to listen. If I have extras, I bless them away. If you listen to the correct channels and are patient, you can get them because they are tons of unwanted CD’s waiting to be unloaded.

My thanks goes to Woon Tien Wei & Jennifer Teo, the dedicated husband & wife team for faithfully organising this 76th edition.

Edmund Wee of Epigram Books (chance upon this article)

Picture by 

zakariazainal

 

I found this article in one of my bookmarks. Sudhir did a feature on Edmund Wee. Click on the link to read the full article.

https://sudhirtv.com/2021/10/31/edmund-wee-of-epigram-books/

Edmund was on the board of the Substation and Independent Art Archive. Not mentioned in this article, but Edmund supported the arts. Like some of Lee Wen's friends, he supported Lee Wen's archival fever (Lee Wen founded and depended on his supporters to fund the Independent Art Archive). I always felt that Edmund took risks both in his publishing business and in supporting artistic endeavours. This is the attitude that I admired about Edmund. 

I have 'highlighted' some info from the article which I found relevant, interesting and informative for my research.

"Epigram Books owes its existence partly to Lee Kuan Yew’s secret police."

As a young journalist, Edmund covered 1981 by-election.

[...] plain-clothes officers from the Internal Security Department watched in horror as a young reporter from the Straits Times jumped up and down at the counting centre.

[...] career suicide for journalists from the government-controlled media outfits to show appreciation for the opposition.

Wee journalism career was affected as he would not be promoted over the years.

[...] Wee used the time to learn about graphic design and marketing. In 1991 he left the paper to start up a design agency.

Epigram was founded because a friend (who climed Everest) couldn't find a publisher. Wee saw an opportunity to shake up the publishing industry (one which faced bad design and over saturation of poetry anthologies). [...] ‘You have [Singaporeans] who have gone to study how to write, they want to write, and they’re not being served by publishers.’

[...] Epigram Books was launched in 2011 and quickly became known for its edgy marketing and arresting sleeve design.

[...] The NAC withdrew its funding of the book and drastically cut its annual grants to Epigram Books. (A separate satire of the Lee family may also have irritated the NAC’s career-minded bureaucrats).

[...] Huggs-Epigram Coffee Bookshop [...] is Singapore’s only bookshop dedicated to local works.

In 1822, three years after Stamford Raffles ushered in British colonialism, Singapore’s first printing press arrived from Malacca with Claudius Henry Thomsen of the London Missionary Society (LMS). Thomsen and two workmen did type cutting, bookbinding and other publishing work in English and Malay. Capabilities for Arabic, Chinese and Siamese soon followed.

[...] In 1823 LMS missionaries established Singapore’s first ever publisher, the Mission Press, which over the next two decades served God, the government and the people, publishing among other things the Singapore Chronicle, the island’s first newspaper, and more than 2 million pages of tracts and scriptures in Chinese, Malay and Buginese.

The 1830s-1870s were arguably the golden era of Malay publishing, thanks partly to two men: Munshi Abdullah, a Melaka-born scribe, teacher and translator of mixed Tamil-Yemeni descent, who is best known as Raffles’s muse and author of Hikayat Abdullah (Abdullah’s Story); and Benjamin Keasberry, an India-born British missionary who made it his life’s work to teach—not just proselytise—the Malays, partly by publishing numerous academic and popular books in Malay. (‘Missionary to the Malays’ says his epitaph.)

[...] Following independence in 1965, Lee Kuan Yew accelerated Singapore along the global-city trajectory the British had put it on. [...]

‘Poetry is a luxury we cannot afford,’ Lee famously quipped, confirming that in his Singapore, language is primarily a market tool. In the 1990s Lee’s successor dissuaded the use of Singlish, our delightful Creole, petrified that it might displace the Queen’s English and turn off the globe-trotting elite. [...]

[...] One could easily get lost in the children’s section, where the eight-part Diary of Amos Lee, one of Epigram Books’s crown jewels with more than 200,000 copies sold, resides. ‘If I wanted to be very, very profitable, I would just close everything else and publish “middle-grade”,’ Wee says. [...]

[...] “Nathan saw the Harry series [about Lee]. Then he called me up and asked if his life story could also be written for kids.” [...]

Wee has been on a crusade to get Singaporeans to read local stories about local people. “Why aren’t schoolchildren reading ‘Sugarbread’ instead of ‘To Kill a Mockingbird’?” he says, referencing the first book by Balli Kaur Jaswal, one of Singapore’s best-known novelists. “It’s a wonderful story about racism in Singapore.”

[...] “I decided forget about the bloody old boys club in London. Why should I have the Booker? Why can’t I sell books in ASEAN countries? ASEAN is six hundred and fifty million people, you know?”

[...] Like other discontents who dance on the edges of mainstream society, Wee trades in the vocabulary of the oppressed. He is a self-professed “outsider” and “maverick”, somebody who finds affinity with “people on the fringes”.

[...] These include the drug addicts and Hell’s Angels he hung out with in the 1970s at a commune in Hamilton, New Zealand, while completing a bachelor’s and master’s in psychology at the University of Waikato; as well as the Singaporean delinquents he wrote about in the 1980s for the Straits Times: the “McDonald’s kids” and “Far East [shopping centre] kids”, seemingly aimless uniformed teenagers spending their afternoons not rote learning but—horrors!—conversing with others.

[...] Almost three decades after his shenanigans at the Workers’ Party victory in 1981, Wee’s editor at the paper questioned him about it in preparation for his own memoirs. It turned out that 163 cm tall Wee was jumping, not in celebration, but because he wanted to see over the head of the 183 cm correspondent from Monitor, a competing paper. The ISD’s officers had misinterpreted the jump.

Tenth-anniversary celebration: NTU Centre for Contemporary Art Singapore

Collating materials from the Queer-Tai "Incident". Sure that it has been mentioned, Queer-Tai is not the only event during the 10th Anniversary celebration. There were others of course as seen here. 

TODAY highlights only this event to talk about because of the LGBTQ and Queer theme. That in itself is quite suspicious, why not talk of it as a whole and not in parts. 

TODAY editorial / journalist gravitates towards this theme but yet unable to see the queerness / LGBTQ-ness of the other 'performances' and events. Or have they actually attended the other events? 

Even by most definitions of queerness, Getai in it's essence of non-conventional and non-conforming is queer as it challenges and question normative and binary systems. Getai in itself replaces the 'traditional programming' of festivals. Queerness should never be imagined without this potency because the space for the misfits, out of place/sync is a powerful force to reimagine the world. It is never just sex or sexuality. 

Tenth-anniversary celebration: NTU Centre for Contemporary Art Singapore 

September 16–30, 2023

NTU Centre for Contemporary Art Singapore Gillman Barracks Block 6 Lock Rd Singapore 109443 Hours: Monday–Friday 9am–6pm NTU Centre for Contemporary Art Singapore celebrates a decade of innovation and creativity at a thought-leading institution committed to nurturing and fostering cross-cultural dialogues. Nanyang Technological University, Singapore (NTU Singapore) is delighted to celebrate the tenth anniversary of the NTU Centre for Contemporary Art Singapore (NTU CCA Singapore), a national research centre with a threefold mandate: exhibitions, residencies, research and academic education. The Centre would like to thank all its contributors and supporters, from artists to staff, advisory boards to audiences, who have shaped it into an institution that stands for creativity and critical thinking in the contemporary art landscape of Singapore and beyond. To commemorate these ten years of nurturing artistic innovation, interdisciplinary experimentation, and meaningful connections, NTU CCA Singapore is proud to showcase a series of newly commissioned collaborative performances by Artist-in-Residence alumni and previous contributors working in the realms of sound, performance, and new technologies, curated by Dr. Anna Lovecchio (Italy/Singapore), Assistant Director (Programmes) and Magdalena Magiera (Germany/Singapore), Curator (Residencies and Public Programmes). On Friday, September 29, the celebrations will be inaugurated by Guest-of-Honour Low Eng Teong, Chief Executive Officer of the National Arts Council Singapore, and welcome remarks by the Centre’s Founding Director Ute Meta Bauer (Germany/Singapore), Professor, NTU School of Art, Design, and Media (NTU ADM). Saturday, September 16, 2023, 3:30pm Time is still and we are in revolution, Yan Jun (China) and Yuen Chee Wai (Singapore) NTU CCA Singapore Seminar Room Friday, September 29, 2023, 6–10pm Ace of Cups, Zachary Chan and Zarina Muhammad (both Singapore) QUEER-TAI, Intervention (Singapore) NTU CCA Singapore Residencies Studios Saturday, September 30, 2023, 3:30–5:30pm dakodako, Tini Aliman and Fyerool Darma (both Singapore) NTU CCA Singapore Screening Room Between a Rock and a Cloud, ila and anGie Seah (both Singapore) NTU CCA Singapore Seminar Room The selected artists and collectives consistently push boundaries, challenge norms, and create thought-provoking experiences in their respective practices, in synergy with NTU CCA Singapore’s decade-long commitment to supporting experimental forms of artistic expression. Established in 2013 by NTU Singapore, over the past decade NTU CCA Singapore has shaped itself as a hub for curatorial experimentation and artistic research. The centre’s inaugural exhibition Paradise Lost (2014) featured Zarina Bhimji (India/UK), Trinh T. Minh-ha (Vietnam/US) and Fiona Tan (Indonesia/Netherlands). Its various programmes were guided and unified by the overarching research clusters PLACE.LABOUR.CAPITAL. (2013–2016) and CLIMATES.HABITATS.ENVIRONMENTS. (2017–ongoing). Under this unique institutional framework, NTU CCA Singapore has presented over 50 exhibitions and research presentations in its public exhibition spaces (2014–2021) designed by artist Fareed Armaly (US/Germany). These range from Theatrical Fields (2014), Incomplete Urbanism (2016/2017) inspired by architect William S.W. Lim (Singapore), Ghosts and Spectres—Shadows of History (2017), The Oceanic (2017/2018), Trees of Life—Knowledge in Material (2018), Arus Balik: From below the wind to above the wind and back again (2019), The Posthuman City (2019/2020), and Non-Aligned (2020), to first institutional solo exhibitions in the region of ground-breaking artists such as Yang Fudong (China) in 2014/2015, Allan Sekula (US), Simryn Gill (Australia/Malaysia), and Tomás Saraceno (Argentina/Germany) in 2015, Joan Jonas (US), Charles Lim (Singapore), and Amar Kanwar (India) in 2016, Ulrike Ottinger (Germany) in 2017, Tarek Atoui (Lebanon/France) in 2018, Jef Geys (US) in 2018/2019, Siah Armajani (Iran/US) in 2019, and Trinh T. Minh-ha in 2020/2021. The Centre released 17 publications, amongst them Theatrical Fields: Critical Strategies in Performance, Film and Video (2016), Becoming Palm by Simryn Gill and anthropologist Michael Taussig (Australia/US), and Saraceno’s award-winning Arachnid Orchestra. Jam Sessions in 2017, Place.Labour.Capital. and Voyages de Rhodes by Thảo Nguyên Phan (Vietnam) in 2018, The Impossibility of Mapping (Urban Asia) (2020), and Climates.Habitats.Environments. (2022). Most recently, it published with National Gallery Singapore The Modern in Southeast Asian Art: A Reader (2023), edited by eminent art historians T.K. Sabapathy (Singapore) and Patrick D. Flores (Philippines/Singapore). The Centre’s residency programme has worked with and nurtured more than 210 Artists-, Curators-, and Researchers-in-Residence, among them 60 Singaporean artists and counting. Many of the projects developed by the artists during their residencies went on to be presented at international exhibitions, biennials, and festivals. Its public resource platform, programmes and conferences continue to engage with artists, curators, and critical thinkers across disciplines. The Centre was joined by 56 Young Professional Trainees over periods of six to eight months, contributing to capacity building in the arts sector. In 2018, NTU CCA Singapore and NTU ADM jointly inaugurated the Master of Arts programme in Museum Studies and Curatorial Practices, the first of its kind in the region. About the NTU Centre for Contemporary Art Singapore Situated within Singapore’s premier art precinct Gillman Barracks, NTU CCA Singapore is a pioneering institution that has been instrumental in shaping the contemporary art landscape in Singapore and beyond. With a focus on fostering creativity, innovation, and critical thinking, the Centre’s programmes have consistently challenged the status quo, encouraging artists to explore new realms of artistic expression. For more information, visit ntu.ccasingapore.org. About Nanyang Technological University, Singapore A research-intensive public university, Nanyang Technological University, Singapore (NTU Singapore) has 33,000 undergraduate and postgraduate students in the Engineering, Business, Science, Medicine, Humanities, Arts, & Social Sciences, and Graduate colleges. NTU is also home to world-renowned autonomous institutes—the National Institute of Education, S Rajaratnam School of International Studies, Earth Observatory of Singapore, and Singapore Centre for Environmental Life Sciences Engineering—and various leading research centres such as the Nanyang Environment & Water Research Institute (NEWRI) and Energy Research Institute @ NTU (ERI@N). Under the NTU Smart Campus vision, the University harnesses the power of digital technology and tech-enabled solutions to support better learning and living experiences, the discovery of new knowledge, and the sustainability of resources. Ranked amongst the world’s top universities, the University’s main campus is also frequently listed among the world’s most beautiful. Known for its sustainability, over 95% of its building projects are certified Green Mark Platinum. Apart from its main campus, NTU also has a medical campus in Novena, Singapore’s healthcare district. For more information, visit ntu.edu.sg.

The first 'title'

This has changed because of NAC claims that TODAY has misquoted and misrepresented the NAC Chief. The original title offers a more progressive NAC. More than it's later position after it has been clarified. Putting it here before this things becomes untraceable. 

LGBTQ-themed arts performances in public spaces in line with the times: National Arts Council chief 

• Sep 30, 2023

• #1

SINGAPORE — While heartland "getai" shows typically showcase live performances of Mandarin and Hokkien music, a crowd at Gillman Barracks on Friday night (Sept 29) was treated to a different version of it.

With a set list of Malay, English and even Japanese songs, perhaps the highlight of the half-hour show was a drag queen playing trombone to the tune of evergreen National Day theme song Home, which moved its spectators to sing along.

Entitled Queer-tai, the show was among a series of arts performances commissioned to celebrate the 10th anniversary of the Nanyang Technological University Centre for Contemporary Art (NTU CCA) Singapore.

In line with the times, the public can expect arts performances in the public and education space that touch on themes relating to the lesbian, gay, bisexual, transgender and queer (LGBTQ) community.

This is because artists naturally explore a wide range of topics and will always produce work that “speaks to our times”, said National Arts Council (NAC) chief executive officer Low Eng Teong, who was attending the anniversary event as a guest of honour.

As part of NTU CCA's anniversary celebrations, a series of collaborative performances by the centre’s past contributing artists and artist-in-residence alumni members were commissioned.
Two of such shows were staged on Friday, including Queer-tai — a half-hour karaoke segment led by a few people, including some dressed in drag, followed by a DJ setlist.

Asked about the significance of having arts performances with LGBTQ themes in public spaces and educational institutions, Mr Low said: “Artists explore all types of topics and themes and issues in their work, so I think that is something that is to be expected, in (that) artists will always want to make work that speaks to our times.

“It is for artists to be interested in issues like climate change, environmental, social issues, the different kinds of events, world events happening around the world and how it affects our lives, so I think this is part and parcel of the natural process of art.”

Intervention, the group that staged Queer-tai, describes itself as “a queer party collective”.

It has organised three parties since it was formed in November and was commissioned to perform at an exhibition opening at the Singapore Art Museum.

https://www.todayonline.com/singapo...ine-times-national-arts-council-chief-2270861