Papers by C. J. W.-L. Wee
Southeast of Now: Directions in Contemporary and Modern Art in Asia 8, no. 1, pp. 127-139, 2024
Tropical: Stories from Southeast Asia and Latin America opened on 18 November 2023 and ran at the... more Tropical: Stories from Southeast Asia and Latin America opened on 18 November 2023 and ran at the National Gallery Singapore (NGS) until 24 March 2024. NGS's website states that the exhibition is "the first large-scale museum exhibition to take a comparative approach across two regions united by their shared struggles against colonialism", comprising over 200 paintings, sculptures, prints and installations. The exhibition proceeds not always via direct formal or informal engagements between artists but by "an alchemy of shared narratives" (Teo Hui Min). Tropical endeavours to complicate the essential link between modernism and modernity by reflecting on how the "accursed European and American influence" is "absorbed" (Hélio Oiticica) into the local and indigenous, resulting in what might be called miscegenated art. National Gallery Singapore's Tropical: Stories from Southeast Asia and Latin America attempts an ambitious and, indeed, unusual comparative exhibition of (primarily) select Latin American and Southeast Asian, mainly modernist, avant-gardist and vanguardist art; these are two regions and their visual cultures are rarely (if ever) put together. The central focus is on artistic work from approximately the 1930s to the 1980s. The exhibition is curated by Shabbir...
positions: east asia cultures critique, 1993
Interventions: International Journal of Postcolonial Studies, 2023
The 1990s saw art exhibitions and biennials staged in East and Southeast
Asia and Australia repre... more The 1990s saw art exhibitions and biennials staged in East and Southeast
Asia and Australia representing a contemporary rather than traditional
Asia. These events were supported by region-wide fora on Asian
contemporary art that promoted the discursive and imaginative capacity to
curate such an Asia. The Japan Foundation Asia Center contributed to this
capacity building via what could be called cultural infrastructural networks
– their symposia on Asian contemporary art from 1994 to 2008. The
concern was to increase a regional representational capacity based on
sound art-critical and historical approaches and to ascertain the
contemporaneity of present artistic practice. An emphasis on present-day
art established a relational approach to temporality in which the
recognition that contemporary artistic formations occupied a coeval time
zone with contemporary western art in turn implied increased equality
with the western metropole. However, the capacity to exhibit the regional
contemporary of an Asia that has economically arrived did not overcome
the apprehension of older modernizing ideologies linked with fraught ideas
of Asia that had led to the Pacific War. Nevertheless, a multicultural Asia –
the aspirational conjuncture of diverse regional locales with still disparate
development levels and temporalities to produce a fictional totalized
present – was projected in exhibitions that strove to rise above inter-Asian
national clashes. These may have been performative projections of the
contemporary, but such possibilities were not available during Asia’s
colonial period.
Inter-Asia Cultural Studies, 2020
TDR/The Drama Review 47, no. 4 (T180), 2003
Inter-Asia Cultural Studies 21, no. 2: 251-265, 2020
This article argues that the artistic-cultural work of the late Kuo Pao Kun (1939–2002) from the ... more This article argues that the artistic-cultural work of the late Kuo Pao Kun (1939–2002) from the mid-1990s commenced on what tentatively can be called an "extraterritorial theatre practice" that engaged with the modern state’s capacity to make national identity singular in the interests of political, military and economic goals, and in which cultural formation and identity must exceed the nation-state’s purview. The present, “globalised” moment requires freedom from local jurisdictions: this is the line of thought regarding a truly contemporary theatre’s direction cut short by his demise in 2002. Two plays represent Kuo’s new direction: "Descendants of the Eunuch Admiral" (1995) and the "The Spirits Play" (1998 and 2000). His deliberations on contemporary art and culture draw from older ideals of modern cultural formation and is conjoined, it may be contradictorily, with postmodernism’s rhetoric of the decentred and the multiple; but if so, this contradiction becomes an adumbration of the fraught attributes of the contemporary.
Inter-Asia Cultural Studies 21. no. 2: 183-188, 2020
Special issue on 'Kuo Pao Kun: Art, Culture, Capitalism'. Overview of issues in relation to Kuo's... more Special issue on 'Kuo Pao Kun: Art, Culture, Capitalism'. Overview of issues in relation to Kuo's theatre development. There is no preview: the document will need to be downloaded.
The bilingual playwright, theatre director and public intellectual Kuo Pao Kun, who was born in 1939 in Xiaoguo village, Hebei, China, passed away on 10 September 2002, having been ill since the previous year. In one of a number of tribute articles that appeared in the major English-language paper, the Straits Times, one socio-cultural commentator acutely contends that Kuo is “the most important cultural figure in Singapore’s history” (Janadas 2002, 55).1 When detained in 1976 under security laws spawned by the Cold War, he “work[ed] on himself, and emerged from it refined and spare, stripped of superfluities, but he did not, in the process, abandon his ideals. He did not, to use a word from those times, break” (Janadas 2002, 56). Proceeding from and continuous with Chinese letters from the early twentieth century, Kuo’s work is prompted by the question, “What is Chinese modernity?” — and that enquiry latterly extended into an examination of “the Asian present” (Janadas 2002, 58).
The assessment captures Kuo Pao Kun’s distinctive place in Singapore’s cultural history. Culture (in both senses of “ways of life” and “artistic achievement”), politics and economic development are not easily separated in his art, and this remains so before and after his detention: the cultural self and the political self remain tightly intertwined. The morphing of modernisation theory from the Cold War (with its commitment to industrialisation and social progress) into discourses on globalisation (with its emphases on finance, information technology and the service sector) can be traced in his art, for these changes carry implications for culture and the formation of a contemporary art. Indeed, he placed his artistic-intellectual capacities in the service of a long-term engagement with the historical and contemporary upheavals, both positive and negative, that the attempt to become modern entailed, broadly taken, in Singapore and the larger region. From Singapore’s postcolonial nation-building process during and after the years of the Cold War, to the fate of cultural and linguistic diversity as a result of the city-state’s socio-engineering of its citizens in accordance with the standards linked with the “decade of development” in the 1960s thought necessary to “support the growth of infrastructure and industrialization” (UNICEF 1996), to the dangers of Asian nationalism in the age of transnational capital, Kuo’s art concerns itself with peoples and cultures unhoused or displaced. There is a persistent interest in the multiplicity of things, and with the scarcity of shared ideals on culture and society. And yet, despite the difficulty of thinking new versions of wholeness — itself potentially oppressing, Kuo was aware — his art and thought implies that being unhoused and displaced can force us to look for new places to stand and to live. [...]
focas: Forum on Contemporary Art & Society, no. 3 (Jan.), 2002
New Formations: A Journal of Culture/Theory/Politics, no. 24 (Winter), 1994
SARE: Southeast Asian Review of English, 2018
What is the place of contemporary art forms from the 1980s within the present global dispensation... more What is the place of contemporary art forms from the 1980s within the present global dispensation in which the attempt to obliterate temporality transpired, as witnessed in the Hegelian revivalism of Francis Fukuyama’s The End of History and the Last Man (1992)? This essay suggests that the contemporary of contemporary art in Singapore and Malaysia is less a period style and more a differing artistic response to the end of temporality as a situation. The idea of contemporary art entails the existence of an idea of the contemporary. Temporality, in turn, is to be comprehended as the way time is conceptualised and lived out in society. The contemporary is both an idea of the time in which we
are in and a goal of reacting more effectively to the demands of the immediate present. And a part of the 1980s was a sense that earlier regional formations of modern art that had eradicated traditional cultural forms as backward needed to be rethought. The artistic practices of Singapore playwright and director Kuo Pao Kun (1939-2002) and Malaysian director Krishen Jit (1939-2005) are major examples of such artistic responses. Their work incarnates a contemporary in which historicity, cultural memory, and interpretations of traditional art forms had roles. Their overlapping theatre commitments require us to see their engagement with the issue of plural identities within and without the modernising nation-state (for Kuo) and within the boundaries of the modernising nation-state (for Jit) in the decades of the 1980s and 1990s, when that great modern ideology of nationalism was being revamped by globalising imperatives. They represent a shared engagement with a common colonial-era Malayan legacy of multiracialism and state formation from the Cold War. Historicity for Kuo and Jit is not the modernist desire to reconstruct the fragments of the past into a whole, and is not centrally about the representation of the past (though that occurs), but is in the first instance the need to capture the past’s fragments in order to conceive a fuller sense of the present’s multicultural opportunities.
Theatre Research International 42, no. 3, 2018
What might the contemporary performing body look like when it seeks to communicate and to cultiva... more What might the contemporary performing body look like when it seeks to communicate and to cultivate the need to live well within the natural environment, whether the context of that living well is framed and set upon either by long-standing cultural traditions or by diverse modernizing forces over time? The Singapore performance and visual artist Tang Da Wu has engaged with a present and a region fractured by the predations of unacceptable cultural norms – the consequences of colonial modernity or the modern nation state taking on imperial pretensions – and the subsumption of Singapore society under capitalist modernization. Tang's performing body both refuses the diminution of time to the present, as is the wont of the forces he engages with, and undertakes interventions by sometimes elusive and ironic means – unlike some overdetermined contemporary performance art – that reject the image of the modernist 'artist as hero'. Part of the cause for this distinctive art committed to historicity and a deliberate ordinariness is that artistic communication to him means provoking self-reflexive thought rather than immediate action. Over the years this has resulted in collaborative artistic workshops, in which he has imaginatively transferred art making from his body to the realm of ordinary people. These workshops become his particular extension of the neo-avant-garde's breaching of art's infrastructures.
Performance Paradigm vol 8, 2012
Theatre practitioner Noor Effendy Ibrahim, interviewed by C. J. W.-L. Wee.
Performance Paradigm, vol 8, 2012
The late Singaporean performance and visual artist, Lee Wen, interviewed by C. J. W.-L. Wee.
Inter-Asia Cultural Studies, 2016
This article focusses on Chua Beng Huat’s work on the East Asian pop culture that became more pro... more This article focusses on Chua Beng Huat’s work on the East Asian pop culture that became more prominent in East and Southeast Asia from the 1990s, when the circulation of multilingual and multi-format pop culture started to exceed linguistic, ethnic and national boundaries. It argues that Chua’s work indicates that the pop-cultural production and innovation that support the globalisation and regionalisation processes in East Asia need not be national in origin but can hail from different national origins – and this despite the existing political realities of the region and its history of political fractures. He cautions, though, that the national-popular can also be marshalled to defeat the border-crossing potential of an inter-Asian pop culture. What is the ‘Asia’ imagined or being represented in such cultural production? Chua’s work is also distinctive in that it deals with the political and economic conditions that underpin mainstream pop consumption as a socio-cultural phenomenon, instead of examining consumption as identity politics. The article concludes by noting the significance that Chua as in institutional builder has played in enabling the study of East Asian pop culture in the region.
Asia Art Archive website: <http://www.aaa.org.hk/Collection/Shortlists>, 2015
Bibliographic essay on readings in modern and contemporary Singapore art done for Asia Art Archiv... more Bibliographic essay on readings in modern and contemporary Singapore art done for Asia Art Archive, Hong Kong. Published 2015.
Performance Paradigm, vol 10 <https://www.performanceparadigm.net/index.php/journal/article/view/141>, 2014
Reflections on contemporary art in the wake of Jodi Dean's criticism of art in her THE COMMUNIST ... more Reflections on contemporary art in the wake of Jodi Dean's criticism of art in her THE COMMUNIST HORIZON (2012).
Public Culture, vol. 8, no. 3, 1996
Substance (The Substation newsletter), Nov 1998
Substance (Newsletter of the Substation arts centre), July, Jul 2000
positions: asia critique Volume 20, Number 4, pp.983-1007 , 2012
""The Singapore People's Action Party (PAP) state's adapted Euro-US modernist impulses were refle... more ""The Singapore People's Action Party (PAP) state's adapted Euro-US modernist impulses were reflected not in high cultural achievements but in building construction. Since independence, the PAP has revamped Singapore's colonial downtown into a conceptually empty postnational space filled with decontextualized buildings designed by famous foreign architects. While this uniformly high-rise environment and urban development is common among the high-economic-growth East and Southeast Asia countries since the 1980s, one difference in Singapore's urbanism is a utopian belief that once existed in the advanced West — that rational design will make rational societies without superfluousness. The commercial downtown and successful public housing jointly become the embodiment of a uniform urban space of physical perfectibility.
An important part of the emergence of Singapore contemporary art practices has been the exploration in 1990s independent film of the suppressed nonelite subjectivities in public housing. Some filmmakers took public housing to be a space separate from the commercial downtown, and they suggested that this space represents an ambivalent site of modernity in its relationship to increasingly elitist capitalist development—they constitute a geography that indicates sociocultural difference. The filmmakers, in attempting to map an urban space capable of yielding knowledge of nonelite people, also attempt to delineate the interiority of a major part of Singapore's city space, given that 80 percent of the population lives in public housing. The films inscribe city space by depicting the ordinary and the potentially tragic cultural meanings that are emitted from this place. They represent an interest in depictions of class, though not in class-based politics. Such films also mark the imaginative disappearance of a colonial “tropical” city for an urban world now thoroughly modernized.
The representative films undertaking explorations of class and the urban environment that form the focus of this article are Eric Khoo's Mee Pok Man (1995), Kelvin Tong and Jasmine Ng's Eating Air: A Motorcycle Kungfu Love Story (1999), and Royston Tan's 15 (2002). The filmmakers accept the “arrival” of the extended public-housing cityscape as a fait accompli and an iconic marker of Singaporean identity. However, they also look at public housing as locales where utopian impulses foster dystopic places that possess diverse cultures under erasure or suppression, and in which there is no past, only endlessly present space. Critical independent film, like much of the contemporary film since the 1980s, displays dissatisfaction with the stifling enclosure of a quasi-authoritarian late modernity, and from which a thematized break is longed for. This essay examines the similar and contrasting means by which three filmmakers present the city-state as a palimpsest of suppressed urban cultures. [From the Duke UP journals website]""
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Papers by C. J. W.-L. Wee
Asia and Australia representing a contemporary rather than traditional
Asia. These events were supported by region-wide fora on Asian
contemporary art that promoted the discursive and imaginative capacity to
curate such an Asia. The Japan Foundation Asia Center contributed to this
capacity building via what could be called cultural infrastructural networks
– their symposia on Asian contemporary art from 1994 to 2008. The
concern was to increase a regional representational capacity based on
sound art-critical and historical approaches and to ascertain the
contemporaneity of present artistic practice. An emphasis on present-day
art established a relational approach to temporality in which the
recognition that contemporary artistic formations occupied a coeval time
zone with contemporary western art in turn implied increased equality
with the western metropole. However, the capacity to exhibit the regional
contemporary of an Asia that has economically arrived did not overcome
the apprehension of older modernizing ideologies linked with fraught ideas
of Asia that had led to the Pacific War. Nevertheless, a multicultural Asia –
the aspirational conjuncture of diverse regional locales with still disparate
development levels and temporalities to produce a fictional totalized
present – was projected in exhibitions that strove to rise above inter-Asian
national clashes. These may have been performative projections of the
contemporary, but such possibilities were not available during Asia’s
colonial period.
The bilingual playwright, theatre director and public intellectual Kuo Pao Kun, who was born in 1939 in Xiaoguo village, Hebei, China, passed away on 10 September 2002, having been ill since the previous year. In one of a number of tribute articles that appeared in the major English-language paper, the Straits Times, one socio-cultural commentator acutely contends that Kuo is “the most important cultural figure in Singapore’s history” (Janadas 2002, 55).1 When detained in 1976 under security laws spawned by the Cold War, he “work[ed] on himself, and emerged from it refined and spare, stripped of superfluities, but he did not, in the process, abandon his ideals. He did not, to use a word from those times, break” (Janadas 2002, 56). Proceeding from and continuous with Chinese letters from the early twentieth century, Kuo’s work is prompted by the question, “What is Chinese modernity?” — and that enquiry latterly extended into an examination of “the Asian present” (Janadas 2002, 58).
The assessment captures Kuo Pao Kun’s distinctive place in Singapore’s cultural history. Culture (in both senses of “ways of life” and “artistic achievement”), politics and economic development are not easily separated in his art, and this remains so before and after his detention: the cultural self and the political self remain tightly intertwined. The morphing of modernisation theory from the Cold War (with its commitment to industrialisation and social progress) into discourses on globalisation (with its emphases on finance, information technology and the service sector) can be traced in his art, for these changes carry implications for culture and the formation of a contemporary art. Indeed, he placed his artistic-intellectual capacities in the service of a long-term engagement with the historical and contemporary upheavals, both positive and negative, that the attempt to become modern entailed, broadly taken, in Singapore and the larger region. From Singapore’s postcolonial nation-building process during and after the years of the Cold War, to the fate of cultural and linguistic diversity as a result of the city-state’s socio-engineering of its citizens in accordance with the standards linked with the “decade of development” in the 1960s thought necessary to “support the growth of infrastructure and industrialization” (UNICEF 1996), to the dangers of Asian nationalism in the age of transnational capital, Kuo’s art concerns itself with peoples and cultures unhoused or displaced. There is a persistent interest in the multiplicity of things, and with the scarcity of shared ideals on culture and society. And yet, despite the difficulty of thinking new versions of wholeness — itself potentially oppressing, Kuo was aware — his art and thought implies that being unhoused and displaced can force us to look for new places to stand and to live. [...]
are in and a goal of reacting more effectively to the demands of the immediate present. And a part of the 1980s was a sense that earlier regional formations of modern art that had eradicated traditional cultural forms as backward needed to be rethought. The artistic practices of Singapore playwright and director Kuo Pao Kun (1939-2002) and Malaysian director Krishen Jit (1939-2005) are major examples of such artistic responses. Their work incarnates a contemporary in which historicity, cultural memory, and interpretations of traditional art forms had roles. Their overlapping theatre commitments require us to see their engagement with the issue of plural identities within and without the modernising nation-state (for Kuo) and within the boundaries of the modernising nation-state (for Jit) in the decades of the 1980s and 1990s, when that great modern ideology of nationalism was being revamped by globalising imperatives. They represent a shared engagement with a common colonial-era Malayan legacy of multiracialism and state formation from the Cold War. Historicity for Kuo and Jit is not the modernist desire to reconstruct the fragments of the past into a whole, and is not centrally about the representation of the past (though that occurs), but is in the first instance the need to capture the past’s fragments in order to conceive a fuller sense of the present’s multicultural opportunities.
An important part of the emergence of Singapore contemporary art practices has been the exploration in 1990s independent film of the suppressed nonelite subjectivities in public housing. Some filmmakers took public housing to be a space separate from the commercial downtown, and they suggested that this space represents an ambivalent site of modernity in its relationship to increasingly elitist capitalist development—they constitute a geography that indicates sociocultural difference. The filmmakers, in attempting to map an urban space capable of yielding knowledge of nonelite people, also attempt to delineate the interiority of a major part of Singapore's city space, given that 80 percent of the population lives in public housing. The films inscribe city space by depicting the ordinary and the potentially tragic cultural meanings that are emitted from this place. They represent an interest in depictions of class, though not in class-based politics. Such films also mark the imaginative disappearance of a colonial “tropical” city for an urban world now thoroughly modernized.
The representative films undertaking explorations of class and the urban environment that form the focus of this article are Eric Khoo's Mee Pok Man (1995), Kelvin Tong and Jasmine Ng's Eating Air: A Motorcycle Kungfu Love Story (1999), and Royston Tan's 15 (2002). The filmmakers accept the “arrival” of the extended public-housing cityscape as a fait accompli and an iconic marker of Singaporean identity. However, they also look at public housing as locales where utopian impulses foster dystopic places that possess diverse cultures under erasure or suppression, and in which there is no past, only endlessly present space. Critical independent film, like much of the contemporary film since the 1980s, displays dissatisfaction with the stifling enclosure of a quasi-authoritarian late modernity, and from which a thematized break is longed for. This essay examines the similar and contrasting means by which three filmmakers present the city-state as a palimpsest of suppressed urban cultures. [From the Duke UP journals website]""
Asia and Australia representing a contemporary rather than traditional
Asia. These events were supported by region-wide fora on Asian
contemporary art that promoted the discursive and imaginative capacity to
curate such an Asia. The Japan Foundation Asia Center contributed to this
capacity building via what could be called cultural infrastructural networks
– their symposia on Asian contemporary art from 1994 to 2008. The
concern was to increase a regional representational capacity based on
sound art-critical and historical approaches and to ascertain the
contemporaneity of present artistic practice. An emphasis on present-day
art established a relational approach to temporality in which the
recognition that contemporary artistic formations occupied a coeval time
zone with contemporary western art in turn implied increased equality
with the western metropole. However, the capacity to exhibit the regional
contemporary of an Asia that has economically arrived did not overcome
the apprehension of older modernizing ideologies linked with fraught ideas
of Asia that had led to the Pacific War. Nevertheless, a multicultural Asia –
the aspirational conjuncture of diverse regional locales with still disparate
development levels and temporalities to produce a fictional totalized
present – was projected in exhibitions that strove to rise above inter-Asian
national clashes. These may have been performative projections of the
contemporary, but such possibilities were not available during Asia’s
colonial period.
The bilingual playwright, theatre director and public intellectual Kuo Pao Kun, who was born in 1939 in Xiaoguo village, Hebei, China, passed away on 10 September 2002, having been ill since the previous year. In one of a number of tribute articles that appeared in the major English-language paper, the Straits Times, one socio-cultural commentator acutely contends that Kuo is “the most important cultural figure in Singapore’s history” (Janadas 2002, 55).1 When detained in 1976 under security laws spawned by the Cold War, he “work[ed] on himself, and emerged from it refined and spare, stripped of superfluities, but he did not, in the process, abandon his ideals. He did not, to use a word from those times, break” (Janadas 2002, 56). Proceeding from and continuous with Chinese letters from the early twentieth century, Kuo’s work is prompted by the question, “What is Chinese modernity?” — and that enquiry latterly extended into an examination of “the Asian present” (Janadas 2002, 58).
The assessment captures Kuo Pao Kun’s distinctive place in Singapore’s cultural history. Culture (in both senses of “ways of life” and “artistic achievement”), politics and economic development are not easily separated in his art, and this remains so before and after his detention: the cultural self and the political self remain tightly intertwined. The morphing of modernisation theory from the Cold War (with its commitment to industrialisation and social progress) into discourses on globalisation (with its emphases on finance, information technology and the service sector) can be traced in his art, for these changes carry implications for culture and the formation of a contemporary art. Indeed, he placed his artistic-intellectual capacities in the service of a long-term engagement with the historical and contemporary upheavals, both positive and negative, that the attempt to become modern entailed, broadly taken, in Singapore and the larger region. From Singapore’s postcolonial nation-building process during and after the years of the Cold War, to the fate of cultural and linguistic diversity as a result of the city-state’s socio-engineering of its citizens in accordance with the standards linked with the “decade of development” in the 1960s thought necessary to “support the growth of infrastructure and industrialization” (UNICEF 1996), to the dangers of Asian nationalism in the age of transnational capital, Kuo’s art concerns itself with peoples and cultures unhoused or displaced. There is a persistent interest in the multiplicity of things, and with the scarcity of shared ideals on culture and society. And yet, despite the difficulty of thinking new versions of wholeness — itself potentially oppressing, Kuo was aware — his art and thought implies that being unhoused and displaced can force us to look for new places to stand and to live. [...]
are in and a goal of reacting more effectively to the demands of the immediate present. And a part of the 1980s was a sense that earlier regional formations of modern art that had eradicated traditional cultural forms as backward needed to be rethought. The artistic practices of Singapore playwright and director Kuo Pao Kun (1939-2002) and Malaysian director Krishen Jit (1939-2005) are major examples of such artistic responses. Their work incarnates a contemporary in which historicity, cultural memory, and interpretations of traditional art forms had roles. Their overlapping theatre commitments require us to see their engagement with the issue of plural identities within and without the modernising nation-state (for Kuo) and within the boundaries of the modernising nation-state (for Jit) in the decades of the 1980s and 1990s, when that great modern ideology of nationalism was being revamped by globalising imperatives. They represent a shared engagement with a common colonial-era Malayan legacy of multiracialism and state formation from the Cold War. Historicity for Kuo and Jit is not the modernist desire to reconstruct the fragments of the past into a whole, and is not centrally about the representation of the past (though that occurs), but is in the first instance the need to capture the past’s fragments in order to conceive a fuller sense of the present’s multicultural opportunities.
An important part of the emergence of Singapore contemporary art practices has been the exploration in 1990s independent film of the suppressed nonelite subjectivities in public housing. Some filmmakers took public housing to be a space separate from the commercial downtown, and they suggested that this space represents an ambivalent site of modernity in its relationship to increasingly elitist capitalist development—they constitute a geography that indicates sociocultural difference. The filmmakers, in attempting to map an urban space capable of yielding knowledge of nonelite people, also attempt to delineate the interiority of a major part of Singapore's city space, given that 80 percent of the population lives in public housing. The films inscribe city space by depicting the ordinary and the potentially tragic cultural meanings that are emitted from this place. They represent an interest in depictions of class, though not in class-based politics. Such films also mark the imaginative disappearance of a colonial “tropical” city for an urban world now thoroughly modernized.
The representative films undertaking explorations of class and the urban environment that form the focus of this article are Eric Khoo's Mee Pok Man (1995), Kelvin Tong and Jasmine Ng's Eating Air: A Motorcycle Kungfu Love Story (1999), and Royston Tan's 15 (2002). The filmmakers accept the “arrival” of the extended public-housing cityscape as a fait accompli and an iconic marker of Singaporean identity. However, they also look at public housing as locales where utopian impulses foster dystopic places that possess diverse cultures under erasure or suppression, and in which there is no past, only endlessly present space. Critical independent film, like much of the contemporary film since the 1980s, displays dissatisfaction with the stifling enclosure of a quasi-authoritarian late modernity, and from which a thematized break is longed for. This essay examines the similar and contrasting means by which three filmmakers present the city-state as a palimpsest of suppressed urban cultures. [From the Duke UP journals website]""
NOTE: The uploaded pages were the page proofs and the pagination may not be the same as the finalised, printed version.
http://books.google.com.sg/books?id=EMabSFBOgyAC&pg=PA2&lpg=PA2&dq=culture+empire+and+the+question+of+being+modern&source=bl&ots=9eW0j6igpa&sig=Z6gHXPSF5cXiuTgGQO-7tDhWjwY&hl=en&sa=X&ei=ZOe-UpWuA4HOrQfZoICYCw&ved=0CD0Q6AEwAg#v=onepage&q=culture%20empire%20and%20the%20question%20of%20being%20modern&f=false"""
"Wee’s narrative refuses to accept the uncritical interpretation of the modernizing processes in Asia as liberation from the hegemony of Euro-American capitalism. But neither is Wee prepared to concede that all cultural initiatives in the postcolonial societies are, therefore, denied all power to devise alternative forms of expression in the face of this haunting presence. It is the persistent effort to see the many faces of modernization in Asia in their full complexity that sets this study apart.
"Readers will discover that what seems to be the modernization of a single geopolitical entity is inevitably linked to the dynamics of various agents in other locations at different times, which makes us reflect on the existence of the many “distortions” in our societies." [From NUS Press website]
http://books.google.com.sg/books/p/hkup?id=BuqgzNI_LP4C&printsec=frontcover&dq=the+asian+modern&ei=8OC-UsvyOY3CkwSM0IA4&cd=1&redir_esc=y#v=onepage&q=the%20asian%20modern&f=false"
For partially available text (in book form), see:
https://www.hkupress.hku.hk/pro/con/873.pdf [Hong Kong UP website]
As part of its curatorial formulation, the latter exhibition had assertions such as this: ‘A kind of mixture of liberal Capitalist [sic] market economy and Asian, post-totalitarian social control is being established as a new social order [in capitalist and urban East Asia]. Culture, in such a context, is by nature hybrid, impure and contradictory.’ There is a certain intellectual genealogy behind such a statement, and thus there are authors ‘present’ here, whether they have been directly read or not. Among the animating ideas would be literary critic Homi K. Bhabha’s ‘hybridity’, coming out from the 1980s, and cultural anthropologist Arjun Appadurai’s notions of unexpected disjunctive ‘cultural flows’ in the world economy and cultural resistance from the bottom up, from an influential 1990 article. Cultural theory – not only dealing with issues of class, race and gender, as Terry Eagleton mentions in the epigraph – and how it has encompassed postcolonial theory, and then through the influence of journals such as Public Culture, become what might be called transnational cultural theory, should not be simply sniffed at though, for they have enabled new research and thinking of the question of how culture, along with peoples, circulate around the world. But the question that Eagleton poses is valid.
Does cultural theory as it is sometimes used still enable analyses or does it descend into orthodox caricatures of what we now expect to see in ‘approvable’ artistic and other culturalist production: various resistance to the global oppression of transnational capital, resistance that could even lead to alternative modernities from outside the metropolitan centres that will upset or at least unsettle the present global hegemon. The result of the inflexible application of theory might be the misrepresentation of the artistic-cultural work examined, along with the valorization of only certain sorts of work.
"
"On the one hand, the transformations have led to more outlets for the ambitions of younger writers, visual artists and theatre practitioners; on the other hand, paradoxically, I suggest that it has also contributed to a lack of critical clarity of what the arts might signify in relation to the global capitalist system within which the city-state is entrenched. This essay attempts to look at two specific events in 1993 and 1994 and consider what they might retrospectively reveal to us now of this extraordinary contemporary moment."