1993 APT1 Conference : Identity, tradition and change

3 Year in the part of the world that I come from as encountering considerable economic difficulties can offer a cultural extravaganza such as this is astounding, if not misguided, and make no mistake about it for that is how it would reported and judged in Singapore. The emergence of Singapore as a new independent state in 1965 was firmly routed in the perception and belief that for it to survive and to continue to survive it must do so on economic terms. All else was and is secondary. The pursuit of such an end is considered to be single minded and unequivocal. This is a deliberate construction of both nationhood and of what the people who constitute that nation are about. The propagation of the rugged society in the latter half of the 1960’s and the decade of the 70’s was directed towards mobilising the minds and bodies of the people in attaining this goal. A sense of identity was also to be forged on such a foundation by cultivating such attributes, or we would call them in our slogan, written rhetoric as virtues as thrift, discipline, industriousness, submersion of the self, ie society before self, all of which constitute the camen of correctness and all form national slogans that are aggressively propagated and pursued. In all of this art and artistic practices have been largely marginalised. In the construction of reality that I have outlined, that is at the level of national political discourse art has neither space nor place. Having said this it must also be mentioned that there has been constituted very recently a Ministry of Information and the Arts. It is relatively recent and the status or role of art in the political calculations and configurations is not as yet clear. Still art could only be engendered after eight priori and prioritised conditions have been fulfilled and set in place. In this convention I was slightly bemused to hear Eun-Ju Choi, the Curator from the Museum of Contemporary Art in Seoul, Korea and some things might have got lost in the translation, so forgive me if I am not reporting you correctly, explain that art was inconceivable and that none, possibly was made in the course of the bloody wars in her country. That kind of an explanation, CASUAL\ARTGALL.TP1 24 May 1994