I’m just back from London, where I was trying to sell my book GASPP! And the crazy thing is, over there I kept bumping into Singapore artists.
 

 

 

In the Victoria & Albert, they were playing videos by Erika Tan. Forbidden Planet was selling Sonny Liew’s Liquid City, and Gay’s the Word had stocked Royston Tan’s 15. The Tate Modern even had Simryn Gill’s photos on display (and while she’s patently Malaysian, the signage said Born Singapore, works in Australia).

 

I ran into Tan Kai Syng at the Tate Britain. She’s doing this Tehching Hsieh-inspired artwork, which involves her running (online and in real life) for 1000 days, searching for the meaning of life, while also avoiding haircuts. Her hair’s 430 days old now: quite a contrast from her close-cropped swimmer do of her first exhibition.
 

 

 

Meanwhile, I specifically arranged myself a couple meetings with my old director and collaborator, Choy Ka Fai. I used to work with him on projects at TheatreWorks, including V.I.S.T.A Lab and Reservoir, and arguably one of the crazier videos of POP Station.
 

 

 

He’s getting himself a Master’s over at the Royal Academy of the Arts. He’s embarking on a new multimedia-performance project called Prospectus for a Future Body which he’s already shown off in Budapest. It involves him hooking performers up to electrodes and shocking their muscles into mimicking iconic works in the history of modern dance, from Martha Graham to Pichet Klunchun.
 

 

 

 

 

He warned me it’d hurt, but given that I’m actually a mild masochist, it was really quite fun. Unfortunately my muscles stopped reacting when I tried to make a video shot. That or the machine got grossed out by my perviness and went on strike.

 

Then there were the Singaporeans I hung out with from other branches of the creative industry/community: Mandarin playwright Ng How Wee, slam poet Stephanie Chan, novelist Johann S. Lee, pop historian Yumei Balasingham-Chow, heritage conservationist Kelvin Ang, architect Vince Ong and designer Clara Yee.  There's even an unofficial governing body to this Left Bank ghetto.
 

 

 

Why are all these Singaporeans in London? There’re some obvious reasons, of course. London is cheaper and nearer than New York, more central and more exciting than Melbourne, more multicultural and global than Tokyo. Makes a lot of sense for an NAC scholar to apply to train there.

 

But there’s more to it than that. There’s the fact that London’s such a treasurehouse of the past: its museums and libraries (free admission, mind you) are these huge, voluminous spaces, larger even than our future NAG at City Hall, to the extent that researchers on Singapore history will dig into our colonial past there – did I mention I saw paintings by Charles Dyce in Tate Britain and the famous Raffles portrait in the National Portrait Gallery?
 

 

 

(See the Buddha statue on the left of him? I'd never noticed that before.)

 

At the same time, London’s a city of the future: extremely open to contemporary art interventions into its heritage, adamant about showcasing its diversity, and sprawling enough to tolerate an unassimilated mass of global cultures and communities who can retain their immigrant identities. (Contrast this to New York, where Singaporeans are just assumed to be Asian-Americans in waiting.) Plus, the city’s connected up with city after city in Europe, so you can exhibit your work to large sophisticated audiences everywhere from Galway to Istanbul.
 

 

 

I’m not writing this blog post as part of a call to bring these artists back to Singapore. They’ll visit and exhibit here if they want to; in the meantime they’ve got to go wherever’s best for their creative development, and London looks like it’s a very good place to be.

 

I’m just thinking about how Singapore could become a little more like London: a space where international and homegrown artists come to create work for the region, nourished by the global past and present.

 

 

The founding of the National Art Gallery’s got to be a step towards that. Excelsior, my friends.