The Arts Management Programme of LASALLE College of the Arts is proud to present i-AM 2012 Arts Festival – the Singapore-based, annual arts festival for social causes.

“The i-AM 2012 Arts Festival is truly a culmination of the creativity of Singapore’s future art managers”, as opened by the Festival Director’s Message.

This exciting festival consists of 3 Main Visual Arts Exhibitions and 3 Main Performing Arts Events, with a total of 6 outreach programmes.

VISUAL ARTS EVENTS

1. INSIGHT by Evoke

INSIGHT: A Solo Exhibition by Victor Tan presents the works of established Singaporean sculptor. Victor Tan has exhibited his impressive wire sculptures (wire being his preferred medium) both locally and overseas. Outside of the South East Asian region, his works have travelled as far as the United Kingdom.

Victor’s astounding talent stems from his heightened sense of touch, which allows him to feel and manipulate his wires to his advantage. In a bid to help the public gain insight into Victor’s creative process, Evoke hopes to present Victor’s magnificent sculptures, to initiate an evocation of emotion, appreciation and dialogue amongst audience members.

Included in this exhibition will be a video presentation of Victor’s artistic process, so that the audience may gain further understanding into the vision that lies behind each piece of art.

As part of its outreach efforts, INSIGHT will be organizing an artist studio tour at Telok Kurau Studios as well as a series of hands-on workshops on print-making for students.

Indeed a meaningful play on the word, INSIGHT allows its audience to be at once “in sight of” art, as well as exposed to the “insights” of the artist in question. It is the aim of the exhibition that each and every visitor takes home the philosophy that:

Opening Date: 29.2.2012
Opening Time: 7 p.m.
Venue: Sculpture Square

Exhibition Dates: 1.3.2012 to 3.3.2012
Exhibition Time: 11 a.m. – 6 p.m.
Venue: Sculpture Square

Outreach Event #1
Date: 17.2.2012
Venue: Telok Kurau Studios
Time: 10 a.m. – 12 p.m.

Outreach Event #2
Date: 2.3.2012
Venue: Sculpture Square
Time: 9 a.m. and 2 p.m.

2. Don’t Forget To Remember by DF2R

“Don’t Forget To Remember” is a contemporary art exhibition with a slant that is rooted in tradition and history. The exhibition focuses on capturing and preserving transient and intangible memories through the tangible medium of visual art. The artists whose work will be presented each seek to cherish an important element of life in their works, in their distinctive and inimitable ways.

Hafidz Senor’s evocative photographs and poignant short film speak of a history close to his heart; Izziyana’s exquisite embroidery-on-illustrations add colour to cultures; Kamarule gives quirk and impermanence to faces with the use of the QR codes technology; TR853-1 re-interprets the role of canvasses with graffiti and a desire to retrieve a lost, unique identity.

Curated by Loredana Paracciani, viewers of Don’t Forget To Remember will embark on a journey of self-exploration to rediscover memories – the thread running through our familial, social, and national fabric.

In conjunction with Don’t Forget To Remember and the theme of Memory, an outreach programme “Insights on Alzheimer’s Disease and Art Therapy” is specially planned for caregivers of people with Alzheimer’s Disease. Guest speakers will share their invaluable Alzheimer’s-related knowledge and experiences during the talk, while the Art Therapy workshop offers a novel and practical approach in tackling this condition.

Opening Date: 1.3.2012
Opening Time: 6:30 p.m.
Venue: Print Gallery, The Arts House

Exhibition Dates: 2.3.2012 to 9.3.2012
Exhibition Time: 10 a.m. – 10 p.m.
Venue: Print Gallery, The Arts House

Outreach Event #1
Event: Insights on Alzheimer’s Disease and Art Therapy – Talk
Date: 3.3.2012
Venue: LASALLE College of the Arts, Lecture Room F201
Time: 11 a.m. – 12:30 p.m.

Outreach Event #2
Event: Insights on Alzheimer’s Disease and Art Therapy – Workshop
Date: 3.3.2012
Venue: LASALLE College of the Arts, Room G402
Time: 2 p.m. – 5:30 p.m.

3. ROOTS by Lorong 7

“Roots” is a mixed media visual art exhibition that explores the relevance of cultural heritage to the rootedness of an individual to his homeland. The works of 5 featured artists will be based on their individual reflections and emotive attitudes towards their existence in a multi-cultural society. The relevance and familiarity of the artists’ upbringing and beliefs will help audience members forge a personal connection with the exhibition.

By engaging visitors in greater cultural awareness and understanding, ROOTS will inspire youths to appreciate their heritage and consider the compelling effectiveness of contemporary art.

Enhancing the production of ROOTS will be its outreach effort, a satirical and light-hearted debate “This House Would Not Sacrifice Heritage for Progress” will be held prior to the exhibition dates. The fun and interactive discourse that will be hosted and mediated by National Arts Council’s Paul Tan and owner of BooksActually, Kenny Leck, will serve as a platform to introduce the themes explored in the upcoming exhibition. The debate will be reinforcement to the experiential learning that the exhibition will provide.

Opening Date: 2.3.2012
Opening Time: 7 p.m. – 10:30 p.m.
Venue: The Gallery, Old School

Exhibition Dates: 3.3.2012 to 8.3.2012
Exhibition Time: 10 a.m. – 11 p.m.
Venue: The Gallery, Old School

Outreach Event
Event: “This House Would Not Sacrifice Heritage for Progress”
Date: 18.2.2012
Venue: Glass Hall, Singapore Art Museum
Time: 2 p.m. – 3 p.m.

PERFORMING ARTS EVENTS

1. Poiesis by Project Ecclesia

{POIESIS} Play Poetry Slam™ is a one night-only ticketed event, hosted by Karen Tan, veteran local theatre actress. It is a unique meeting of art forms that plays up the performance element of a poetry slam, to increase accessibility and interest in the literary arts amongst young adults.

Young, budding poet-performers are selected through an open call to create original poetry pieces inspired by themes of escapism, the power of imagination, and the blur between illusion and reality within life in a big city.

To enhance the reading, the poet-performers draw on staging techniques such as dialogue and movement, in 3-5 minute „mini poetry plays‟ each. These will be judged by random audience members and literary and performance experts, with the top 3 winners receiving cash prizes and mentorship plus further performance opportunities with WordForward.

To ensure participants gain the most out of this event, a Poetry Writing Workshop conducted by WordForward Singapore as well as a Poetry Performance Workshop held by none other than Karen Tan will be organised for them weeks prior to the main event.

Main Event
Date: 2.3.2012
Time: 7:30 p.m. – 10:30 p.m.
Venue: The Hall, The Arts House

Outreach Event #1
Event: Poetry Writing Workshop
Date: 8.2.2012 and 20.2.2012
Venue: The Writers’ Centre, Telok Ayer Performing Arts Centre
Time: 7:30 p.m. – 9:30 p.m.

Outreach Event #2
Event: Poetry Performance Workshop
Date: Various Dates
Venue: The Writers’ Centre, Telok Ayer Performing Arts Centre
Time: Various Times

2. Sonnets For an Old Century by Quinta Productions

Sonnets for an Old Century, Sonnets for short, aims to be a ground-breaking theatrical production by being the first of its kind to be staged locally at the beach. In collaboration with Skinned Knee Productions, an emerging production company which specialises in revitalising classic dramatic pieces and putting their own twist on more contemporary ones, at the same time providing a platform for both established and emerging artists from the local theatre industry.

“SONNETS FOR AN OLD CENTURY is a dreamscape filled with poignant, funny, lyrical and haunting monologues from recently deceased individuals.” -Sonia Borkar, Mooney On Theatre

It is a beautiful piece by award winning Puerto Rican writer Jose Rivera, which poses the question “What would your last words be?” The play tells the story of twenty humans who are preparing to cross the ultimate threshold between life and whatever lies beyond that. Before crossing over, they are granted an opportunity to share their last thoughts with the world.

Bordering on pure comedy at times and yet heart-wrenchingly emotional at others, audiences will be pleasantly surprised at the variety of life experiences and anecdotes that surfaces throughout the monologues featured in the play.

Main Event
Date: 3.3.2012
Time: Doors open from 6 p.m. and Show commences at 8 p.m.
Venue: Palawan Beach, Sentosa Island

Outreach Event
Event: On-The-Spot, an Improvisational Theatre Workshop
Date: 18.2.2012
Venue: LASALLE College of the Arts, Room F202
Time: 2 p.m. – 3:30 pm.

3. Indigo Fiesta 2012 by Indigo

Indigo Fiesta 2012 is the music event of the year for everyone to rock out and have the time of their lives. This event brings together independent local, explosive bands like Barricade and The Marilyns, local hip-hop phenomenon ShiGGa Shay, cross-disciplinary instrumental band Fusion FM and Yamaha Asian Beat 2011 winners, Catalogue V.

To aid in the production of this event, selected groups of youths will be guided by and working alongside the production’s technical crew.

The idea and driving force behind this event is to provide these youths with the opportunity to be acquainted with the different aspects of a production process behind a performing arts show. The hope is that Indigo Fiesta will cultivate a healthy interest in the both the artistic and technical aspects of an arts production.

Indigo Fiesta 2012 promises to bring forth a most unique charity music fiesta of the year.

Main Event
Date: 4.3.2012
Time: 5 p.m. – 9 p.m.
Venue: *Scape – Warehouse @ Scape Mall

Outreach Event
Event: An Introductory Look into the Performing Arts
Date: 20.2.2012
Venue: Bukit View Secondary School
Time: 1:45 p.m.

This is a talk given by Fotis Kapetopoulos, former-director of Kape Communications, to LASALLE College of the Arts in March 2011. Since then, Kapetopoulos has taken on the role of Multicultural Media Adviser to the Premier of Victoria, Ted Baillieu.

My story, like many others in Australia, is a story about global diversity. It is also the story of my city, Melbourne, Australia’s most multicultural city.

I love cities. I sometimes have fantasies of living in regional Australia, in a kampong in South East Asia or a village in the Mediterranean but it’s in the city that I belong.

All civilizations may have agricultural beginnings but the civic centre has been the kernel of philosophical and scientific enquiry, architectural and urban innovation, economic and artistic creativity.

The cities give birth to politics. When Aristotle said, “Man is a political animal”, he underscored how a key measure of civilization is determined by people who conduct their lives in the city, the polis. People, according to Aristotle, should be involved in all civic activities, not least the arts, philosophy and politics.

Singapore is one such city. My love affair with Singapore began in the mid 1980s. As a young man in my mid-20s, I saw how, given the right urban and civic policies, Singapore could become one of the most creative city-states in South East Asia. Singapore could be an excellent conduit of other cultures, a hub for economic, creative and cultural innovation.

I believe that Singapore is one of the most important city-states in the 21st Century. It is (without extending a cliché), a real global city.

Singapore, as a civic model, has been emulated in China, albeit not as successfully, given China’s immensity and its cultural and political system.

Singapore’s social approach to urban development and a liberal approach to capitalism are premised on a partnership between state and corporations. The system has allowed Singapore citizens access to good health, education, housing and two generations of social mobility. These are key prerequisites of creativity and economic growth.

Yet, there are issues to be addressed. The state’s paternalism, possibly too much comfort and too much commercialism. This small island society, which is open to the world, can induce cultural claustrophobia.
Many Singaporeans are middle-class, well-educated; they will, in time, generate the third phase of Singapore’s creative and economic development, based on more value placed on heritage.

I see no dramatic dichotomy between heritage and contemporary culture. Too often in Singapore and Australia, we focus on our contemporary outputs in art, architecture and culture at the expense of heritage. Yet, you will find that great art, great innovations really only occur when heritage and tradition form an anchor of social relations.

I believe that Melbourne also fares well as a city in the emerging global economic and cultural order. Victoria’s traditions are liberal – there is little room for the hard right or extreme left in Melbourne.

Soon after winning the 2010 election of the Liberal Coalition Government in Victoria, our Premier, Ted Baillieu, voiced his commitment to multiculturalism and the arts. In fact, he is the arts minister for Victoria; the arts are a serious matter in Melbourne

Yet in New South Wales and Queensland, the governments have been uncomfortable with singing the praises of multiculturalism too loudly.

Migration in Victoria, like in Singapore, has played a positive role in the development of civic culture.

Not only post-War migration from South East Europe and later Asia, but also that of the Chinese, Afghans and Indians, since the Australian colonial enterprise began 200 years ago.

It is no lie to say that one can get the best coffee in Melbourne, the best fashion and great food, not least great arts.

Melbourne’s transport systems, particularly our trams, have played a key role in allowing social classes to mingle.

Sydney, as glam, beautiful and diverse as it is, has greater urban and thus cultural divides between a multicultural western Sydney and a mainstream Sydney of the centre. Other than the great China Town which Sydney has, it is a very white city in the centre.

But I must confess, I am biased – I love my Melbourne.

In Melbourne, just like in Singapore, the ability to shift classes has been a major factor in social and civic development.

In both cities, the cultural, economic, civic and infrastructural – not least political will – may allow for a new watershed in West/East creative developments.

Also, our world is connected; there are fewer watersheds, as in the past, in such a networked global society.

That is why I will be calling on us to find intangible cultural heritages that make us unique.

It is innovation of social, political and economic systems that allow for the creation of great art. Yet, we are now so global it is the preservation and facilitation of diverse and intangible cultural heritages, that will make some states different from others.

Dr Richard Kurin, Director of National Programs for the Smithsonian Institution writes in his Reflections of a Culture Broker:

“Two people, one in Tel Aviv, the other in Delhi, can pray in Hebrew and Sanskrit, respectively, to very different versions of God and then log onto the net to have a conversation in English about advanced nuclear physics.”

Maybe it is contemporary art that is homogenous and it is our cultural and intangible heritages, and the brokerage of those heritages that make us different.

To quote Dr Richard Kurin again:

“A broker, if a good one, has to examine cultural differences and make those differences understandable if not necessarily illuminate them.

A cultural broker needs to be a valuable conduit for translation and representation of cultural groups and communities, and larger society.

This does not mean that just representing some ‘exotic’ folk from the other side of the world to mainstream audiences in the west is what this about.”

The globe is confronted with dramatic challenges now, economic, environmental and social.

Yet, Singapore and Melbourne are great examples of social and economic cohesion. We are comfortable with our diversity and we are economically strong.

The disparity between classes, between the rich, the middle and working classes, while troubling, is not excessive yet, but we need to be vigilant.

There are other cities as culturally plural, such as New York or London, but there less capacity for social mobility there.

Singapore and Melbourne have a hold on history, some of which extend thousands of years, yet they are very new cities.

Melbourne is 150 years old, as is the city of Singapore. As a state, Singapore was born only in 1965.

“How, (I hear you ask), can he be saying thousands of years?”

Well, I am very Australian, but I am also a Hellene and I have intangible links to my past (real or perceived).

As do the Chinese, Indians, Italians, Anglo-Celts and others that make Melbourne what it is.

The critical ingredient to creating culturally dynamic cities tends to be culturally diverse populations working at the nexus of trade.

Historian Peter Hall, in Cities in Civilisation, takes us through a range of cities which, at points in their history, became hives of economic, creative, technological and social progress.

For example, Elizabethan London, where Shakespeare gave birth to new ‘mass entertainment’ as Hall calls it. Importantly, Shakespeare was able to rise from the status of commoner to a baron due to the growth of a new bourgeoisie.

Berlin of the 1900s was where science, art and technology ushered in the 20th Century and artists like Brecht were born. In Los Angeles, brash capitalism, married to the new medium of film, created Hollywood.

These cities, regardless of their unique histories, be it Constantinople, London, Salonika, NYC or LA, were multicultural societies.

Where would Hollywood be without Italians and Jews? Constantinople without Turks, Greeks, and Armenians and even Chinese?

Imagine Singapore without Arabs, Indians, Chinese, Malays, Armenians and Europeans.

Why, in Athens in the 5th Century BCE, Peter Hall, asks, “All of a sudden, everything should happen at once: the beginnings of philosophy, of the Western tradition in art, or tragedy and comedy, of democracy and above all humanism?”

Ancient Athens may seem familiar to Singaporeans – a poor land, but with just enough for export, the establishment of the polis or city state, but most of all, affluence and the development of economic surplus. But Babylonia, Egypt, and Syria had the same – why Athens?

The most important was the city’s position as a broker, or conduit in trade and thus culture, between East and West. Sadly, a position rejected in the development of modern Greece of the 19th Century where the focus was on being Western.

The forgetting of Greece’s oriental past, it’s great capacity to trade with the orient and the west has led to tragic economic situation. Interestingly, in this hour of economic darkness it is the Chinese and the Indians, the Turks and the Israelis who are coming more readily to Greece’s aid, not the Germans and the French. But this is a much larger and contentious issue which needs another discussion.

Hall writes: “Athens was uniquely located as the centre of trade; it was from the East that brought the exposure to higher cultures from the Orient and the eastern Mediterranean, thus producing a unique ethnic and cultural melting pot.”

Singapore is one of the most important entrepôts in the world, as was Athens, Venice, or Amsterdam – cities of great art, culture and civic development.

Great cities in civilization did not just focus on wealth, culture, faith or skill, language and learning – which they did – but importantly, the melding of cultures, and the city’s position in the nexus of trade, migration and ethnicity gave birth to new watershed creative cities.

What in a rudimentary sense does a city need to be ‘creative’?

This is a claim evident in all tourism, arts and politics marketing speak.

Great cities have all experienced an epoch, or epochs, of dramatic economic and creative epiphanies – global trade, technological innovation, great public works, partnerships between state, business and community and, most importantly for me, multiculturalism, a plurality of cultures and religions living in relative cohesion.

In Elizabethan London, social mobility was essential to its creativity and ushered in a new flexible economic empire.

Singapore and cities in Australia have the ability to facilitate social mobility, to break down hierarchies, to augment the middle and upper classes, essential ingredients to creativity.

The Internet may have made communication more democratic, open and instant. But globalism is not new.

Facebook announcements that range from cries for systemic change in Egypt, to why someone’s neighbour annoys them, share equal space, like graffiti in ancient Rome – another great global city.

Let’s not be relativist – Egypt’s change is far more important than comments about some annoying boyfriend or what you had for lunch.

Let’s go further back to London when Shakespeare was forced to head down for the Clyde, as his plays were considered ‘crude’.

If not for Queen Elizabeth I’s patronage and new middle classes, there would be no Shakespeare or his contemporaries who, at that time, created the first notion of mass entertainment.

Recently, political leaders have expressed concern with multiculturalism.

British Prime Minister Mr. Cameron warned that a “doctrine of state multiculturalism” had encouraged different cultures to lead separate lives. He called for a stronger assertion of British national identity.

I doubt he was referring to the Scotts, the Welsh, the Irish, or to the Eastern European, Jewish, Chinese, Indian Hindus, Greek Cypriots and Afro-Caribbean people of the UK.

His greatest concern has been a fear of radicalised Islamic youth, and ‘isolated’ ghettoised Islamic communities.

Interestingly, his Liberal Democratic partner, Mr. Clegg, distanced himself from the Prime Minister’s remarks, saying that multiculturalism should be the hallmark of “an open, confident, society”.

Chancellor Merkel of Germany also said that multiculturalism in Germany had “utterly failed” but I doubt she was talking about Polish, Czech and other minorities in Germany.

Both leaders, instead of announcing programmess that attempt to wrestle back traditional Islam from radicals, or programmess in the arts and community development, fell back on assimilation.

Talk about strengthening British or German values is strange as contemporary European and liberal values insist on accepting the individual, freedom of religion and independence of culture.

Victorian Minister for Multicultural Affairs and Citizenship, Nicholas Kotsiras, and his Federal counterpart Chris Bowen – one a Liberal and the other a Labor politician – pointed to the fact that neither Britain nor Germany actually has, or ever had, a policy of multiculturalism to deal with diversity and both emphasised Germany’s reliance on guest workers.

Many of these gastarbeiters are Turkish, but have been living in Germany for years, always with the view that they can never be citizens and that one day, they will return ‘home’.

Yet, thousands of kilometres away, an Anglophone democracy, Australia, developed a multicultural policy.

Singapore, like Australia (from different historical foundations), always asserts the cultural and religious diversity.

In Singapore where sectarian violence was a tangible fear in the late 1960s, multi-ethnic, multicultural and multi-faith cohesion has been a central template in national development.

Australia, a nation that between 1901 and 1969 enforced the Migration Restriction Act – otherwise known as the White Australia Policy – has, since 1972, held a bipartisan view of multiculturalism.

Very few nations actually have a multicultural policy they simply use the term to define a reality on the ground.

For many, the term ‘multiculturalism’ is confusing. Is it founded within the social rights’ movement? Is it a diverse food court, or a tourism ‘ethnic village’ festival? Is it about migration and achievement? Is it about conforming to a political reality while holding onto bits of culture acceptable to state power? Possibly it is all the above and more.

UNESCO has two crucial treaties; the Convention on the Protection and Promotion of the Diversity of Cultural Expressions and the Convention for the Safeguarding of Intangible Cultural Heritage.

It is these conventions which, to some degree, try to safeguard against globalisation and, in turn, homogenisation of art, culture and media.

Dr Kurin states that cultural exchange occurs, regardless of policy, in the marketplace, through TV, Internet, radio and so on.

As well as through the socialisation of the young by the old and vice versa, but he warns, “Such forms of communication are piecemeal and particularistic.”
Singapore’s food courts and wet markets, (if they can be maintained), Little India, China Town, the colonial architecture, are more than just tourism attractions, more than cultural curiosities. These cultural and food ways, these spaces, reflect the island’s cultural diversity and most importantly intangible cultural heritage in the context of these UNESCO treaties.

Melbourne’s Greek Lonsdale Street and Oakleigh district; our Chinatowns, the little Indias again are far more than food locations, they are centers of intangible cultural heritage reflecting Melbourne’s culture, not Greece’s or China’s or India’s.

They are also the reflection of Diaspora cultures. Somewhat divorced from their moorings and now anchored in Australia.

Their economic and social and cultural values are so important that the Victorian government has committed $3mil to each ethnic enclave; the Italian, Greek and Chinese. It did so, not for the ‘ethnic vote’ but because if these centers are not maintained they may disappear and we lose a section of our cultural heritage.

In my view, multiculturalism as a philosophy as well as a policy should facilitate the acceptance, support and inclusion of culturally diverse people in all areas of life, in business, arts and government. A good policy of diversity will make the citizens of a nation more open and more creative.

I do not eat Asian food as an exotic treat. I eat a diversity of foods as part of my diet as an Australian. I do not participate in Chinese New Year or Diwali as a tourist; these are events in our family’s calendar.

They may not have the same emotional resonance of Greek Orthodox or Catholic Easter. But I am Greek after all; my wife is Spanish and my son, who is 9 years old, changes his mind. Most recently, he maintained he was Chinese. We are all Australian.

As I have pointed out, for some, multiculturalism undermines a nation’s cultural cohesion. There are many examples of leaders from the West and from the East expressing concern over minorities. We have also seen the terrible consequences of intolerance in Europe, Russia, Africa, Australia, North America and Asia.

For most people in Australia and in Singapore, multiculturalism is ordinary life. Multiculturalism is everything from the food we eat; to the people we will fall in love with, to the art and media we consume. It is our political and social template to the future and an anchor to the past. In Australia multiculturalism’s success can only be built on the recognition of the great injustices against the Aboriginal people in past.

Equally, we need to makes sure that the gap between Indigenous and non-indigenous Australians in the area of access to economy, to health, to housing is eliminated.

Some on the left argue that multiculturalism glosses over class, masking the conflict between the ‘haves and have-nots’. The right argues that multiculturalism diminishes the state and generates cultural ghettos. For them Mosques in Melbourne or Sydney, the hijab, are symbols of a deteriorating social structure. For me, they are part of our expansive national identities. Multiculturalism is also the formal basis of artistic expressions.

Would we have Chistos Tsiolkas, the winner of the Commonwealth Literature Prize in 2009, or George Miller (Milliotis), the director of Happy Feet; and many other, Aboriginal, Asian, European or African artists? In fact, one of our biggest artistic exports to Indonesia recently has been an Islamic Rap Group, the Brothahood from Melbourne.

Recently, I had friends visiting from Greece, ‘progressive people’, educated, yet regardless of increased diversity of Greece, yet they could not come to terms with the way my family, ate Asian participated in non European traditions, and when we talked of Australians we were not speaking of European Australians but of all Australians.

They kept asking where are the surfers, the kangaroos and so on; it was extremely frustrating.

Food, music and dance, art and culture – those intangible elements, which define our cultural identity – are very significant – just like our religion, our local regional, professional and other associations.

History shows that those cities where multiculturalism thrived, where it was in the everyday fabric of society, that great creative, economic, cultural, scientific epochs came about.

Regardless of the eugenic notions in the late 19th century, which ushered the nationalism, those cities, which did not succumb to the fantasies of homogeneity, became beacons of creativity.

Diversity of cultures creates ‘enlightened’ nations and importantly, multiculturalism creates essential business and art bridges.

In the end, what do we have? The first premise is an explicit and open understanding that there are no culturally homogenous states.

The fantasy of homogeneity is a nationalist one created as part of the modernity project in the 19th Century.

Cities that have thrived in the past and those who do currently, like Singapore or Melbourne, accept and support cultural, religious and linguistic and economic diversity.

Singapore is well placed to be a cultural broker, an extension of its economic and political brokerage. Melbourne is also well placed due to its acceptance and promotion of diverse communities.

And this is where the bridges lie – the Diasporas.

A simple illustration is Greece, which is suffering one of the greatest economic catastrophes since the Great Depression.

Importantly, both cities house great and ancient Diasporas steeped in the art of survival, cross border and cross-cultural negotiation.

Look at the way Greece, so devastated economically, is now again relying on its diaspora in Chicago, Melbourne and NYC to assist it economically, politically and culturally.

China and India now look at Singapore, Australia and North America as centres of their diaspora assisting in their economic, cultural and political development.

So, it is the enhancement of policies that respond and support intangible cultural heritage and multiculturalism to have a future in art or culture.

Defining the tradition bearers in any society in supporting them and in heralding them, we can create a greater source of support for future creative development.

The acceptance of the two UNESCO treaties on intangible cultural heritage and cultural diversity are important as a template.

As the report on mapping diversity recently stated:

The dynamic relationship between the traditional and the contemporary is of great relevance for the Asian experience.

It underscored ythat artists who explore the ‘continuities and disruptions with Asian tradition’ in the ’multiple contexts of everyday life’ create great art.

In the end, there is no contemporary without tradition without intangible heritages and without diversity. There is simply no great art without diversity.

Singapore, Society and Art

In one generation Singapore leapt from a third world to a post industrial economy;1 from a traditional to a rationalizes, efficient, modern society.2 Its cultural policy (under Community Development) was an instrument of nation building3 and dealing with its three main threats: communism; communalism; and an unstable region; and creating an efficient, productive workforce as it had no local natural resources.4

The values promoted were internationalism, modernity,5 meritocracy6 and a universal culture.7 These concepts became the meta-narrative for the fractured, diverse society8 to come together as a cohesive nation.9 It employed English as the neutralizing10 and unifying language over the various ethnic languages and dialects prevalent among the people. The culture and language itself favored the abstract modern style of visual arts that was produced by the ‘second generation’11 of younger Singaporean artists in the 70s and early 80s. However, the society that resulted with the rapid modernization and paternalistic governing style of the PAP government was an ethnically compartmentalized and managed,12 passive,13 ‘kiasu’14 and hard-working anxious citizenry15 which was predominantly consumerist, materialist16 and pragmatic.17

From its early development in the 1950s, visual art suffered from lack of “art loving population”18 and “shocking indifference towards local artists”19 and most talented of artists were, “earning their livelihood in inmost mediocre ways….”20 In the 70s, The Ministry of Culture organized visual art event “Art for Everyone”21 with the aim to “bring art to the people’s doorstep,” by asking people to “come as you are.”22 In 1973, it was attended by 700 people. There were hardly any abstract paintings displayed, and none were sold. Only realist painting and traditional mediums were sold. The established artists did not participate or even visited the shows and worried about “developing a vulgar taste” among the public. The show was also criticized as an inappropriate “setting for … contemplation and enjoyment.

In spite of such efforts by the government, lack of awareness and understanding of contemporaneous arts23 forms continued in into the 70s and 80s. Singaporeans were too “businesslike and ha[d] a kind of dismissal, negative attitude towards art.” 24 People approached art with “trepidation… [and felt that it is] it is not for them.”25 Artist David Kwo, who conducted tours to explain values of modern art at the Museum, felt that “Many people still expect[ed] paintings to be realistic….”26

CVA: Testing Boundaries (1985- 1995):

By 1985, Singapore was economically strong and stable nation. The discourse shifted from the earlier universal to Asian values.27 Politically and economically, it aligned itself with the emerging tiger economies of East Asia;28 The Asian values or Confucian values were promoted to stem the flow of liberal individualism and what were perceived as detrimental social problems that come packed with capitalism and urbanization of societies.29 Hedonism and irresponsible selfish indulged behavior by individuals were perceived as ill effects modernism. Such activities were seen as liable to corrode family values and society at large leading to social decay.

At this time, arts were seen as an alternative outlet for healthy leisure activity to undermine the much despised ‘yellow culture’30 activities like gambling and other hedonistic activities. Furthermore, as the economy grew in double digits and the population became increasingly educated, productive and affluent, a need for the arts emerged.31 Realizing the changing needs for its citizenry, the government proactively worked to provide the much needed soul to its highly rationalized society; a ‘space’ for self-actualization and self- expression. Such personal-social development can be explained by Abraham Maslow in his theory of human motivation explains that once the bread and butter issues are satisfied, one looks towards increasing self-esteem and actualization through various forms of self-expression and self-fulfillment. 32

During this period, the additional rationale for developing arts and culture was the economic development33 of the nation through tourism, attraction of foreign talent and multinational corporations. Arts infrastructure was set up with the Ministry of Information and the Arts (1990),34 National Arts Council (1991), Singapore Art Museum (1996), Esplanade (2000), and allowed for the upgrading of education subsidies for NAFA and LASALLE. In 1999 the two institutions were allowed poly-technique level subsidies and extra funding to upgrade the facilities and training for staff. Till 2010, the two institutes are still not allowed to award their own degrees. The arts also served to brand Singapore as a “mature country…and a gracious society”35 with a symbolic economy.36 Sharon Zukin loosely defines symbolic economy “by three points: it is urban; it is based on the production of symbols as basic commodities; and third, it is based on the production, in a very self-conscious way, of spaces as both sites and symbols of the city and of culture.” Singapore was mature enough as a nation to own iconic symbols of a cultural city.

These developments in arts and culture ensued against the frame work of Singapore changing from a service economy to a knowledge (I.T sector, medical sectors etc) based economy37 where creativity and innovation were prized.38 Then Prime Minister Goh Chok Tong, emphasized consensus building, civic society, engaged and active citizenry with cautious relaxing of censorship laws39 within the illusive OB markers.40 This change “gave rise to the central tension between the professed wish for a dynamic creativity and the existing instrumentalizing and rationalist mental set”41 of the government. It was a conservative society that embraced modernity without the philosophical ideals modernism42 and remained wary to the threats of communism and communalism.43

In the late 80s it became socially and economically fruitful to work as a full time artist. Artists were sent abroad to work or study fine arts on various scholarships and grants but the government. Corporate sponsorships like IBM; Shell Art Discovery Scheme; and UOB – Painting of Year were established to encourage artists take up art practice as a full time work. Singapore Art Festival which began in 1977 grew in strength and audience numbers every year. Government schemes like Outstanding Singapore Artists’ Exhibition series organized by the Ministry of Community Development gave the artists incentive and a platform to work for. Statutory boards such as NTUC, MRTC began to purchase and commission local artists. Many such schemes by the government and corporates were set in motion to allocate funds, platforms and prestige to the artists.44 These also allowed for greater press coverage for the events and help raise awareness among the public.

The media coverage for the arts increased in the 80s. There were few unsystematic attempts in the main stream press to explain new art mediums like Video, Performance art from the early 80s. Art Critics like T. Sasitharan and Sabapathy wrote sporadically in the late 80s to contextualize the contemporary artworks in art history and social frameworks. In 1986 T.K. Sabapathy, noted in an article that the local artists are “conservative and introspective” and the “riding concern was decorum and they needed to be more experimental in their art practice.45

The artists to emerge in this progressive economic-socio-political environment were willing to engage in a social dialogue with the society. While the Nanyang artists – The Pioneers, forged a visual local identity by synthesizing Chinese, local and western artistic traditions, this generation, investigated a local identity based on socio-cultural issues. Besides, in the Euro-American societies as well, the artists were making art inspired by the new theories from cultural studies.46 Nicolas Bourriaud classifies contemporary visual art making of the period, a Relational Aesthetic: “a set of artistic practices which take as their theoretical and practical point of departure the whole of human relations and their social context, rather than an independent and private space.”47 In Singapore, the environment was ripe for the rise of radical contemporary visual arts.

The young artists of the times began to cut across the lines, taking risks in the choice of media, content and the way they represented it.48 In 1987, show by Vincent Leow and Wong Shih Yaw at the National Museum Art Gallery created a furor. One of the paintings- No! Mother, depicting the pain of teenage abortion was misinterpreted by the local viewers as insulting child birth; drawing “rage and loathing.”49 Sabapathy defended the artists by saying that they had provoked intense feelings in representing and “reinforce[ing] reality,” where as “The audience expects to be soothed, to see an ideal world, to escape from reality…”50

A Tang Da Wu’s performance at the National Museum Art Gallery also received cynical response as the “Audiences at the museum ogled – but some thought it was sheer audacity.”51 His artistic practice is considered the watershed for what is modern and what is contemporary in Singapore.52 He established The Artist Village (TAV) in 1988 where artists were “practicing and presenting art in ways that were startling, provoking and unsettling.”53 The art they produced was energetic, and confrontational with the political-social dynamics of the decade.

Josef Ng’s and Shannon Tham’s performance on the New Year’s Eve in 1993 at AGA crossed the threshold of what was acceptable as art by the public and the state. As part of the Artist’s General Assembly (AGA) week long arts festival, New Year’s Eve in 1993, TAV and 5th Passage Gallery organized overnight arts events at Parkway Parade shopping Centre’s rent-free space. Josef Ng performance Brother Cane was a symbolic condemnation and an attempt to critique the entrapment exercise conducted by police in which 12 homosexuals were arrested in 1993. They were jailed, caned and their names were published in the newspapers: causing them humiliation in a society that does not accept homosexuality. Josef Ng’s main performance was inspired by ritual dance which he conducted with a cane, 12 tofu slabs and 12 packets of red paint. At the end of the performance, he walked away to the opposite end of the room; turned back from the audience and snipped of his pubic hair as mark of protest. He was arrested and fined and caned for acts of obscenity in public. He was also banned from any further performances.

While, Shannon Tham, in his performance, forced himself to vomit after swallowing burnt ashes of The New Paper;54 signifying the distasteful way in which the paper had reported the arrests of the homosexuals in the same entrapment exercise by the police.55

The two artists sparked a passionate debate in the Singapore press. The debate is best elucidated by two letters. First one titled “Allow the Artists Room to Grow and the Right to Be [italics added for emphasis] Wrong”56 by Ng Sek Chow; and the reply to this letter by Ong Chair Siang, titled, “Even Artists Do Not Have the Right to Do [italics added for emphasis] Wrong.”57

On one side, the people questioned if such acts constitute as art and the limits of arts in the Singapore’s Asian heritage context. Even NAC distanced itself quickly by calling the 1993 performances “vulgar and completely distasteful [and]….by no stretch of the imagination can such acts be construed … as arts”58 The public discerned them as “crude, overtly political and without any artistic merit;”59 a threat to public morality and believed that there were other ways to protest.60 They did not believe that arts and politics should mix.

The arts community was on the other hand counter argued. In a letter to The Straits Times Ng Sek Chow from arts philosophy background expressed that he was “saddened and outraged by media’s coverage of the events and the National art Councils’ response”61 Even if the artworks were immaturely executed, the artists need ‘space’62 to experiment and fail. He further argued for alternative arts scene; the need to cultivate home grown arts instead of just importing arts from the West. The arts community argued for two essential aspects of contemporary visual arts: firsthand experience of the artworks and their reception with the context of art. Conversely, Ong questioned if “performances, and art in general, [are so] exclusive that they exist outside the greater context – our society?”63

Apart from the numerous letters to the Straits Times, informative articles were written by T. Sasitharan64 and Lee Weng Choy65 – both art critics, contextualizing the performances in the larger arts and social discourse. However Koh Buck Song explains that Singapore public was not ready for the challenging nature of performance art. “People change slowly and it is a long process of education and exposure that they might come to accept what they used to condemn.”66

Richard Florida in his book, Creative Class also brings forth a similar point. He elucidates with the metaphor of a time traveler that it is easier for a person to adapt suddenly and rapidly to an industrial- modernized society than to fast- forward in to a culturally modified society where “older order has broken down.”67 Singapore seemed to be in a fast forward mode with its rapid transformation, but a conservative social ethos. But such antagonisms are not unique to Singapore. In 1989-91, the U.S, in spite of its liberal individualistic culture went through a process of reassessing its arts funding policies. During this period some American artists produced highly controversial artworks.68 Andres Serrano and Robert Mapplethorpe created and exhibited artworks that confronted the American conventional values regarding religion and homosexuality; topics that the American public was not ready to accept in public platforms. The resultant debate in the Congress changed National Arts Endowment’s raison d’être from promoting artistic excellence to access for the public.69

In Singapore, the TAV approach ended with the de facto ban on performing arts that was imposed after Joseph Ng’s and Shannon Tham’s infamous performance at The Artists’ General Assembly on New Year’s Eve 1993. The Minister for Information and the Arts, BG George Yeo was able to firmly “plant a new OB marker”70 as the government tentatively made an effort to widen, yet contain the arts’ ‘space.’

Margins to Mainstream (1995-2005):

The next decade seems to be quieter as a “pall hung over experimental and social art.”71 Traumatized by the heavy handed dealing of the artists in 1994, and the consequent ban on Forum Theatre,72 Josef Ng and Shannon Tham, most artists stayed within the illusive OB markers by exercising self-censorship. The Substation, established in 1990, grew into a dynamic alternative arts space and played a nurturing role for experimental arts with an interdisciplinary approach. Digital art also was on the rise in Singapore with many local artist returning from arts education abroad and working with a new medium.73

Audience numbers increased74 and press coverage increased rapidly in the late 90s due to rise in the number of festivals, exhibitions, corporate sponsorships and the prioritizing of arts by the government. Life section in the Straits Times carried features and articles on the visual arts once every week. It even carried out a survey to gauge the level of increased interest in the arts by its readers.75 The local art vs. global art debate was quite pronounced as most media attention and public interest was in shows imported from the west.

As the 21st century approached, things changed with and for the younger contemporary artists in Singapore.

Increasing international surveys and literature on the economic impact of arts showed that knowledge based economies were fast developing into creative economies and revitalizing cities.76 Societies were changing from producers and consumers of goods and service to consumers and producers of experiences.77 New ideas, flexibility, openness, diversity, entrepreneurship, risk-taking were more desirable traits than a ‘Taylorized’78 workforce. This seems to be the prime motivation for the changes implemented at such a rapid pace in Singapore.79 A creative economy needs the “culture of creativity to permeate the lives of every Singaporean….The arts … can be a dynamic means of facilitating creative abilities.”80 Recognizing the need for innovative, critical thinking among the workforce, the government set out the policies for a vibrant arts scene to fuel the imagination of its people.

The government as proactive as ever quickly shifted gears to cater to a creative economy. As a result, the arts were promoted determinedly, and increased funding was provided for arts education (overseas scholarships, bursaries and even tours for students), art making, platforms and art housing from 2000 onwards. 81

In 2008 Renaissance City Plan III 82 (RCP 3), a statistical re-evaluation of the arts and culture, was tabled. The ambition was to be a “distinctive, global city of the arts,”83 aiming to be at par with cultural centers like New York and London by 2015. RCP3 spotlighted excellence and engagement. It envisions arts for the heartlanders by spreading the platforms to show case arts in various districts. The government took proactive steps to promote a vibrant arts scene and educating the art- audience.84 NAC put in place a variety of programmes and schemes to reach out to divers segments of the community with the slogan: arts for all. It revised Arts Education Programme with a focus on exposing children to quality arts from a young age so as to nurture creative minds and create a future audience.

The higher literacy levels of the new generation of artists and the audience also helped to widen the visual arts scene. Exposure through increased travel, artist residencies and internet facilitated both the audience and the artist community. The youth of Singapore grew up in the relative comfort of a strong economy in a developed country; with traumatic years on nation building relegated to history lessons, they were more willing to explore self-actualization themes.

The society eased up with processes of globalization.85 People now want to engage more with policy making.86 ‘The modern or the Western’ has been indigenized by the Singaporean citizens. As C.J.W-L Wee expounds that “The dispersal of the “west” into the ‘globe’ represents a partial decentring of the west.”87 He say, even if Asia is not the owner of the West, it has internalized Modern, even if superficially to be one with it. Hence, “The local that comes about [in art]…is not a simple bounded notion of specifically rooted culture and identities”88 but a one that transcends national boundaries, cultures and traditions.89 Nonetheless, the society in Singapore is conservative and distinctively affiliated to the Asian values.90 All these development, eventually led to a veritable explosion in the visual art scene by 2005.

The de facto ban on Performance art was reversed in 2003. There was a proliferation of artist run spaces like the Post Museum (2004), Your Mother Gallery (now closed), Instinc (2004), Farm.org (2005), SCYA91 (2007), Grey projects (2008). On the institutional front Singapore Biennale was first international visual arts event in 2006. Art market was also supported with the Art Singapore (2000), an international art fair, and smaller local galleries like Utterly Art and Fost Gallery (2006) and recently, Valentine Willie (2008).

CVA in Singapore is diverse and uses an ‘international language.’92 They use a variety of traditional and nontraditional media to create artworks that engage the society and explore a range of socio-cultural and personal issues. The artworks are about ‘experience’ and require active reception by the audience. Cutting edge visual and performance arts are now institutionalized as they are routinely exhibited at Singapore Art Museum93 or the National Museum. C.J.W.-L Wee says that there is an increase in “visual arts activity and … decline of the artistic criticality, diversity and radicalism.”94 Significantly, the artist of this generation are not confrontational in their posture, rather work the system from inside: questioning and pushing boundaries without aggravating the social structures, teasing the OB markers without transgressing them. Tan Boon Hui, Director of Singapore Art Museum, quote is pertinent:

“The ‘can-do’ spirit that marks much of the best contemporary art coming out from Singapore now is clearly visible …. While their work has departed markedly from the traditional conventions of what art should look like, it is nonetheless as thoughtful, enjoyable and beautiful as the paintings and sculptures we are more familiar with. … SAM is working also to make contemporary art accessible to as large a community as possible. As one of the few platforms that regularly provides support to nurture the creation of original local art…”95

Within a decade, the contemporary visual arts scene became vibrant. Singapore art museum extended to a new wing called 8 Q (2008) which only showcases cutting edge artworks by living artists. At Venice Biennale 2009, Ming Wong’s Life of Imitation received the Special Mention.96 As the matrix of nation building, policy, social and economic development aligned, it facilitated the societal acceptance of CVA that are challenging and critical in its discourse.

Mukta Ahluwalia graduated from the MA Arts and Cultural Management programme at LASALLE College of the Arts.

_________________________________________________________

Endnotes:

Back to post – 1 C.J.W.-L Wee, The Asian Modern: Culture Capitalism, Development Singapore (Singapore: NUS Press, 2007); and Souchou Yao, Singapore: The State and the Culture of Excess (Oxon: Routledge, 2007).

Back to post – 2 Derek da Cunha, ed., Singapore in the New Millennium (Singapore: Institute of Southeast Asian Studies, 2002),and Debating Singapore: Reflective Essay (Singapore: Institute of Southeast Asian Studies, 1994); and Kian Woon Kwok, “ The Problem of ‘Tradition in Contemporary Singapore,” in Heritage and Contemporary Values, ed. Arun Mahizhnan (Singapore: Times Academic Press, 1993) 1- 32; Kenneth Paul Tan, ed., Renaissance Singapore? Economy, Culture and Politics (Singapore: NUS Press, 2007); Souchou Yao Singapore: The State and the Culture of Excess.

Back to post – 3 Ruth Bereson “Renaissance or Regurgitation? Arts Policy in Singapore 1957 – 2003,” Asia Pacific Journal of Arts and Cultural Management Vol 1 Issue 1 December 2003; Janadas Devan, “Odd Man in,” in Renaissance Singapore? Economy, Culture and Politics; and William Peterson, Theater and the Politics of Culture in Contemporary Singapore (Middletown: Wesleyan University Press, 2001).

Back to post – 4 C.J.W.-L Wee, The Asian Modern; Souchou Yao, Singapore: The State and the Culture of Excess; and William Peterson, Theater and the Politics of Culture in Contemporary.

Back to post – 5 Modernity refers to the values of a post traditional society where capitalism, industrialization secular, rational values were employed for building a nation state and its institutions. Personal values of hard work, efficiency, rational thinking, and individual responsibility were promoted. It is understood to be different from the concept of ‘modernism’ – the philosophy supporting unbounded individual liberalism was attached later to the devolving cultures of modern societies in Europe and America.

Back to post – 6 Kenneth Paul Tan, ed., Renaissance Singapore? Economy, Culture and Politics and William Peterson, Theater and the Politics of Culture in Contemporary Singapore. Meritocracy is still a prize value among Singaporeans. For more details see Tambyah Siok Kuan, Tan Soon Jiuan and Kau ah Keng, The Wellbeing of Singaporeans: Values, Lifestyles, Satisfaction and Quality of Life (Singapore: World Scientific Publishing Co. Pte., 2010), 77.

Back to post – 7 C.J.W.-L Wee, The Asian Modern; and C. J.W.-L Wee “Creating Culture in the Globalized “Cultural Desert” of Singapore,” TDR (1988- ) Vol. 47 (Winter, 2003): 84-97, Published by MIT Press, http://www.jstor.org/pss/4488510 (accessed on 20 July, 2007). Derek da Cunha, ed., Debating Singapore: Reflective Essays; Arun Mahizhnan, ed., Heritage and Contemporary Values (Singapore: Times Academic Press, 1993) and Souchou Yao, Singapore: The State and the Culture of Excess.

Back to post – 8 Singapore emerged from a British trading post into a unique city state that was a small island in the middle of the Muslim-Malaya region; with a multi-ethnic- racial and religious population of which 90% was Chinese. C.J.W.-L Wee, The Asian Modern; Souchou Yao, Singapore: The State and the Culture of Excess; William Peterson, Theater and the Politics of Culture in Contemporary Singapore; and, Arun Mahizhnan, ed., Heritage and Contemporary Values.

Back to post – 9 C.J.W.-L Wee, The Asian Modern, and C. J.W.-L Wee, “Creating Culture in the Globalized “Cultural Desert;” Kian Woon Kwok, “The Problem of ‘Tradition in Contemporary Singapore;” Souchou Yao, Singapore: The State and the Culture of Excess and William Peterson, Theater and the Politics of Culture in Contemporary Singapore.

Back to post – 10 C.J.W.-L Wee, The Asian Modern, and C.J.W.-L Wee, “Creating Culture in the Globalized “Cultural Desert;” Arun Mahizhnan, ed., Heritage and Contemporary; Souchou Yao, Singapore: The State and the Culture of Excess and William Peterson, Theater and the Politics of Culture in Contemporary Singapore.

Back to post – 11 Second generation of artists refers to a “group of artists, including Teo Eng Seng, Thomas Yee, Ng Eng Teng, Gen Beng Kwan and Anthony Poon who created a significant impact upon their return in the late-1960s and 1970s” by introducing aesthetic values of abstract expressionism in Singapore. Kian Chow, Channells and Confluences, http://www.postcolonialweb.org/singapore/arts/painters/channel/contents.html (accessed on July 27, 2010); and Mok Wei Wei, “In Search of a Visual Identity: Local Art Expressions and Their Value systems,” in Heritage and Contemporary Values, ed. Arun Mahizhnan (Singapore: Times Academic Press, 1993) 33.

Back to post – 12 Cherian George, Singapore: The Air Conditioned Nation, 5th Edition, (Singapore: Landmark Books Pte. Ltd, 2001); 159- 163; William Peterson, Theater and the Politics of Culture in Contemporary Singapore, 54; Kenneth Paul Tan, “New Politics for a Renaissance City?” in Kenneth Paul Tan, ed., Renaissance Singapore? 24; and Kripal Singh, “Keeping Vigil,” 123 in Kenneth Paul Tan, ed., Renaissance Singapore? 123.

Back to post – 13 Kenneth Paul Tan, “New Politics for a Renaissance City?” Souchou Yao, Singapore: The State and the Culture of Excess; Derek da Cunha, ed., Singapore in the New Millennium and, Debating Singapore, Cherian George, Singapore: The Air Conditioned Nation; C.J.W.-L Wee, The Asian Modern. Recent surveys show that Singaporeans are apathetic with regard to involvement in political action. For more details see Melissa Kok, “Singaporeans Want Greater Say, Latest Poll Shows,” The Straits Times, August 2, 2010; and Tambyah Siok Kuan, Tan Soon Jiuan and Kau ah Keng, The Wellbeing of Singaporeans, 96. The Wellbeing of Singaporeans survey indicates that most Singaporeans are satisfied with various aspects of living (page 27) and that lack of democracy and human rights were lesser of the worries (page 38).

Back to post – 14 Kiasu refers to the concept of “fear of losing out” embed in the Singaporeans. Cherian George, Singapore: The Air Conditioned Nation; William Peterson, Theater and the Politics of Culture in Contemporary Singapore ; Kenneth Paul Tan, Renaissance Singapore?; Ng Aik Kwang, Why Asians are Less Creative than Westerners, (Singapore: Prentice Hall 2001); Sanjay Krishnan et al., Looking at Culture (Singapore: Artres Design & Communications, 1996) and William Peterson Theater and the Politics of Culture in Contemporary Singapore. .

Back to post – 15 Souchou Yao in his book Singapore: The State and the Culture of Excess, argues that the government has created culture of fear by re-telling and reframing the story of Singapore’s vulnerability during its early years of nation building. Kenneth Paul Tan refers to it as ‘politics of apprehension’ in “In Renaissance Singapore,” in Renaissance Singapore?; Tambyah Siok Kuan, Tan Soon Jiuan and Kau ah Keng, The Wellbeing of Singaporeans, 38. The Well being of Singaporeans survey indicates the top 10 worries are: unemployment, terrorism, health issues, natural disasters, wars & conflict, crime, poverty, nuclear disasters, economic problems in my country and illegal drugs and drug addiction. The authors say that, “[theses] reflected the vulnerability of a small country, both in terms of economic and physical size (page 39)… The attention to different concerns [in different East Asian countries] highlight the varied problems and issues East Asian countries faced as their economies and societies evolve in their unique ways (page 54)”

Back to post – 16 Kenneth Paul Tan, Renaissance Singapore?; C.J.W.-L Wee, Leong Wai Teng, “In Defence of Youth Culture,” in Looking at Cultures, ed. Sanjay Krishnan et al.; Chua Beng Huat in “Identities: A Roundtable Discussion, Chaired by Kian Woon Kwok” in Selves, ed. Kian Woon Kwok, Arun Mahizhnan and T. Sasitharan (Singapore: NAC, 2002) 250.

Back to post – 17 Derek da Cunha, ed., Singapore in the New Millennium and, Debating Singapore, Cherian George, Singapore: The Air Conditioned Nation and Souchou Yao, Singapore: The State and the Culture of Excess.

Back to post – 18 Mr William Willet, curator at University of Singapore Art Museum speaking to Unaccredited reporter, “Are our Artists Getting a Square Deal?” Singapore Free Press, December 6, 1957, 8.

Back to post – 19 Mr. Loke Wan Tho, a millionaire patron of the Singapore Art Society, speaking to Unaccredited reporter, “Are our Artists Getting a Square Deal?” Singapore Free Press, December 6, 1957, 8.

Back to post – 20 Mr. Frank Sullivan, speaking to Unaccredited reporter, “Are our Artists Getting a Square Deal?” Singapore Free Press, December 6, 1957, 8.

Back to post – 21 Wang Joo Tan, “Cultivating a Taste for the Aesthetic,” Straits Times, August 5, 1973, 10.

Back to post – 22 Wang Joo Tan, “Cultivating a Taste for the Aesthetic,”

Back to post – 23 The artists during this time emphasized abstract formalism in their visual language, one that was apolitical and universal. Traditional mediums (like batik and Chinese ink) and nontraditional mediums were used to convey these abstract ideas of European modernism from the early to mid 1900s.

Back to post – 24 Mei Lin Chew, “Abstract Art Makes You Think,” Straits Times, January 18, 1977, 10.

Back to post – 25 Thomas Yeo to Rachel Barnes, “How to Bring Art in every Home,” Straits Times, April 4, 1980, 3.

Back to post – 26 Unaccredited reporter “The Art of Appreciation the Finer points of Modern Painting,” Straits Times, January 6, 1987, 4.

Back to post – 27 Souchou Yao Singapore: The State and the Culture of Excess; C.J.W.-L Wee, The Asian Modern; Arun Mahizhnan, ed., Heritage and Contemporary Values; Kenneth Paul Tan, ed., Renaissance Singapore?

Back to post – 28 Successful Tiger economies included the Southeast Asian countries like Indonesia, Malaysia and Thailand. It was also influenced by the exceptional success of the Japanese economy in late 70s and China’s economic reforms led by Deng Xiaoping. C.J.W.-L Wee informs that China’s economic reforms were implemented in 1978 by Deng Xiaoping, effectively reducing the threat from the communist revolution in China. Cherian George, Singapore: The Air Conditioned Nation; Souchou Yao Singapore: The State and the Culture of Excess; C.J.W.-L Wee, The Asian, 109.

Back to post – 29 William Peterson, Theater and the Politics of Culture in Contemporary Singapore; C.J.W.-L Wee, The Asian Modern; Souchou Yao, Singapore: The State and the Culture of Excess; Cherian George, Singapore: The Air Conditioned Nation and Philip Jeyaretnam, “What Sort of Culture Should Singapore have?” in Debating Singapore: Reflective Essay.

Back to post – 30 Yao explains that the “term yellow culture, [is] a literal rendering of the Chinese phrase huangse wenhua; it refers to products like pornography, literature of love and romance, and pulp fiction of crime and fantasy, as well as the hedonistic and apathetic behaviours they inspire. The term also generally describes actives that sap energy …person given over [to such activities] suffers corporeally and morally….” Yao, Singapore: The State and the Culture of Excess, 54.

Back to post – 31 Cherian George, Singapore: The Air Conditioned Nation; Souchou Yao, Singapore: The State and the Culture of Excess; Terence Lee in “Industrializing Creativity and Innovation,” in Renaissance Singapore? Economy, Culture and Politics, ed. Kenneth Paul Tan ((Singapore: NUS Press, 2007), 45-67; Derek da Cunha, ed., Singapore in the New Millennium; Sharad Kuttan, “The Limits of Liberalization,” in Looking at Culture, ed. Sanjay Krishnan et al.

Back to post – 32 Abraham Maslow, A Theory of Human Motivation, Classics in the History of Psychology website, York University, Ontario, (originally published in Psychological Review 50, 370- 396). www.faulkner.edu/admin/websites/jfarrell/Maslow.doc (accessed on September 1, 2010).

Back to post – 33 C.J.W.-L Wee, The Asian Modern; Souchou Yao, Singapore: The State and the Culture of Excess; William Peterson, Theater and the Politics of Culture in Contemporary Singapore; Cherian George, Singapore: The Air Conditioned Nation; Terence Lee in “Industrializing Creativity and Innovation;” Derek da Cunha, ed., Singapore in the New Millennium; Ruth Bereson “Renaissance or Regurgitation?; T. C. Tan and W.K. Lee, “Renaissance City Singapore: A Study of Arts Spaces,” The Royal Geographical Society (with the Institute of British Geographers), Vol. 35, No 2 (June, 2003) 128-141, Published by Blackwell Publishing, http://www.jstor.org/pss/20004303 (accessed on 20 July, 2010).

Back to post – 34 It is now called the Ministry of Communication, Information and the Arts (MICA), Ruth Bereson “Renaissance or Regurgitation?; Ministry of Communication, Information and the Arts (MICA), Renaissance City Plan III (Singapore: MICA, 2008). Before 1990, Arts were managed by the Advisory Council on Culture and the Arts.

Back to post – 35 Goh Chok Tong, Pime Minister’s New Year’s Message, 1996 , Singapore government press release, http://stars.nhb.gov.sg/stars/public/viewDocx.jsp?stid=40282&lochref=viewPDF-body.jsp?pdfno=PM Goh Chok Tong- New Year Message 1996.pdf&keyword= (accessed # August 2010).

Back to post – 36 Sharon Zukin, “Whose Culture? Whose City? The Paradoxical Growth of a Culture Capital” (paper presented at Central Policy Unit, Hong Kong July 31, 2001), www.cpu.gov.hk/english/documents/conference/e-zukin.rtf (accessed on September 10, 2010).

Back to post – 37 Souchou Yao, Singapore: The State and the Culture of Excess; William Peterson, Theater and the Politics of Culture in Contemporary Singapore; Kenneth Paul Tan, “New Politics for a Renaissance City,” in Renaissance Singapore?; Terence Lee in “Industrializing Creativity and Innovation;” Derek da Cunha, ed., Singapore in the New Millennium; C. J.W.-L Wee, “Creating Culture in the Globalized “Cultural Desert.

Back to post – 38 Creative industries played an increasingly vital role in national economies of UK and the USA in the late 80s. Arts were instrumental in regeneration of old derelict areas, cities and economies.  Department of Culture, Media and Sports, UK, Creative Industries Mapping Document 2001 (London: DCMA, 2002), http://www.culture.gov.uk/images/publications/part1-foreword2001.pdf (accessed March 23, 2010); Tate, Tate Modern: The First Five Years (London: Tate, 2005); http://www.tate.org.uk/modern/tm_5yearspublication.pdf (accessed March 28, 2010); Carol Vogel, “Guggenheim Grows: The Next Stop Is Rio,” New York Times, May 1, 2003, http://www.nytimes.com/2003/05/01/arts/guggenheim-grows-the-next-stop-is-rio.html (accessed on September 3, 2009); Alliance for the Arts, Arts as an Industry (New York: Alliance for the Arts, 2006), http://www.allianceforarts.org/pdfs/ArtsIndustry_2007.pdf (accessed March 20, 2010);Centre for an Urban Future, The Creative Engine (New York: Centre for an Urban Future, November 2002), http://www.nycfuture.org/content/articles/article_view.cfm?article_id=1060&article_type=0 (accessed March 18, 2010); and Andy C. Prat and Jeff Cutt, ed., Introduction to Creativity, Innovation and the Cultural Economy (New York: Routledge, 2009).

Back to post – 39 William Peterson, Theater and the Politics of Culture in Contemporary Singapore; Cherian George, Singapore: The Air Conditioned Nation; Derek da Cunha, ed., Singapore in the New Millennium; Sanjay Krishnan et al., Looking at Culture; Kenneth Paul Tan, ed., Renaissance Singapore?

Back to post – 40 Out of bound (OB) markers is a term often used for ill defined, no-go areas for artists and the citizenry in general. In the 90s the artists were often caught off guard by the Singaporean laws and found themselves in conflict with the government. For more information read Terence Lee in “Industrializing Creativity and Innovation,” and Sanjay Krishnan et al., Looking at Culture.

Back to post – 41 C. J.W.-L Wee, “Creating Culture in the Globalized “Cultural Desert” of Singapore.”

Back to post – 42 C. J.W.-L Wee, Asian Modern, 84, Kian-Woon Kowk in “Cultural Policy and the City-State: Singapore and the ‘New Asian Renaissance,’” in Global Culture: Media, Arts, Policy and Globalization ed. Diana Crane, Nobuko Kawashima and Ken’ichi Kawasaki (New York: Routledge, 2002), 164.

Back to post – 43 Souchou Yao, Singapore: The State and the Culture of Excess; Cherian George, Singapore: The Air Conditioned Nation; Derek da Cunha, ed., Singapore in the New Millennium; Kenneth Paul Tan, ed., Renaissance Singapore?

Back to post – 44 Unaccredited Reporter, “A Chance for Young Artists to work Abroad,” Straits Times, June 24, 12; Unaccredited reporter, “Outstanding Artist a ‘beacon to the young,” Straits Times, April 13, 1989, 16; Unaccredited reporter, “Home is Where Their Art is,” Straits Times, December 31, 1989, 2 ; T. Sasitharan, “On the Path to Discovery,” Straits Times, March 12, 1988, 5; Lee Siew Hua, “Reaching Out to By Standers,” Straits Times, December 28, 1986, 2. Pauline Walker, “From Humble Start to nine-day Extravaganza of the Arts,” Straits Times, December 12, 1980, 20. Unaccredited Reporter, “A Year when the Young Hogged the Lime light,” Straits Times, December 27, 1987, 9; and Ministry of Information and the Arts (MITA), The Renaissance City Report: Culture and Arts in Renaissance Singapore (Singapore: MITA, 2000).

Back to post – 45 T. K. Sabapathy, “The Right Stuff,” Straits Times, December 19, 1986, 4; Unaccredited reporter, “Video as Art Form Emerges,” July 7, 1982, 4; Unaccredited reporter, “Tang Zeros in on Our Earth Marks,” Straits Times, April 5, 1980, 5.

Back to post – 46 Peter Timms, What is Wrong with Contemporary Art?” (Sydney: University of new South Wales Press Ltd, 2004), 15; Lisa Graziose Corrin, “The Contemporaneous Museum,” in Conversations at the Castle: Changing Audiences and Contemporary Art, edited by Mary Jane Jacob and Michael Brenson (Cambridge: MIT Press, 1998); Jean Robertson and Craig McDaniel, Themes in Contemporary Art: Visual Art After 1980 (New York: Oxford University Press, 2005), 19; Julian Stallabrass, Art Incorporated: the Story of Contemporary Art, (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2004); Noël Carroll, “Art and Globalization: then and Now,” Journal of Aesthetics & Art Criticism Vol. 65, Issue 1 (Jan 2007): 131-143, http://content.ebscohost.com.libproxy.nlb.gov.sg/pdf19_22/pdf/2007/JAC/01Jan07/24271005.pdf?T=P&P=AN&K=24271005&EbscoContent=dGJyMNHr7ESep644zdnyOLCmr0ieprVSsqu4S7WWxWXS&ContentCustomer=dGJyMPGstk%2B3rrZRuePfgeyx%2BEu3q64A&D=aph (accessed September 18, 2010).NEW POSITION BEFORE LINK???

Back to post – 47 Nicolas Bourriaud, Relational Aesthetic, trans. Simon Pleasance and Fronza Woods (France: Les Presses du réel, 2002), 113.

Back to post – 48 T. K. Sabapathy, “The Right Stuff,” Straits Times, December 19, 1986, 4; and K.F. Tay, “Cultural Bizarre,” Straits Times November 19, 1987, 3.

Back to post – 49 Siew Mei Lau, “Rage and Loathing at Artist’s Show,” Straits Times, June 6, 1989, 3.

Back to post – 50 Ibid. Siew Mei Lau, “Rage and Loathing at Artist’s Show,” Straits Times, June 6, 1989, 3.

Back to post – 51 Unaccredited Reporter, “A Year when the Young Hogged the Lime light,” Straits Times, December 27, 1987, 9.

Back to post – 52 C.J.W.-L Wee, The Asian Modern; and C. J.W.-L Wee, “Creating Culture in the Globalized “Cultural Desert” of Singapore;” and Kwok Kian Chow, Channells and Confluences.

Back to post – 53 Mok Wei Wei, “In Search of a Visual Identity: Local Art Expressions and Their Value systems,” 37.

Back to post – 54 The New Paper, various issues, October 1992 to December 1994

Back to post – 55 Sanjay Krishnan et al., Looking at Culture; and Kenneth Paul Tan, “Censorship in Whose Name?”

Back to post – 56 Ng Sek Chow, “Allow Artists Room to Grow and the Right to be Wrong,” The Straits Times, January 7, 1994, 35.

Back to post – 57 Ong Chair Siang, “Even artists do not have the Right to do Wrong,” The Straits Times, January 11, 1994, 35.

Back to post – 58 Unaccredited reporter, “Not for this Says National Arts Council, “ The New Paper, January 5, 1994, 14; and “’Art’ act at Parkway Parade Vulgar and Distasteful: NAC,” Straits Times, January 5, 1994, 3.

Back to post – 59 Koh Buck Song, “Liberalising the Arts Takes Time,” The Straits Times, February 2, 1994, 4.

Back to post – 60 Various article and letters in the Straits Times and reports in The New Paper, between January 3, 1994 and April 30, 1994.

Back to post – 61 Ng Sek Chow, “Allow Artists Room to Grow and the Right to be Wrong.”

Back to post – 62 Space here is reference to the physical as well as social space needed arts to flourish. Chang and Lee, “Renaissance City Singapore.”

Back to post – 63 Ong Chair Siang, “Even artists do not have the Right to do Wrong.”

Back to post – 64 T. Sasitharan, “See it in Context,” The Straits Times, January 25, 1993,5; and “Do not Proscribe to Political Art,: The Straits Times, February 2, 1994, 4

Back to post – 65 Lee Weng Choy, “Performance Art has Merit,” The Straits Times, February 25, 1994, 5.

Back to post – 66 Koh Buck Song, “Liberalizing the Arts Takes Time.”

Back to post – 67 Richard Florida, The Rise of the Creative Class, 4.

Back to post – 68 Margaret Quigley, “The Mapplethorpe Censorship Controversy, Chronology of Events, The 1989–1991 Battles,” Political Research Associates, http://www.publiceye.org/theocrat/Mapplethorpe_Chrono.html (accessed October 1, 2010). Jean Robertson and Craig McDaniel, Themes in Contemporary Art: Visual Art After 1980; Julian Stallabrass, Art Incorporated; Steven C. Dubin, “Incivilities in Civil(-ized) Places: “Culture Wars” in Comparative Perspective,” in A Companion to Museum Studies, ed. Sharon McDonald (United Kingdom: Blackwell Publishing, 2006), 477 – 493.

Back to post – 69 Ann M. Galligan, “Seismic Shifts in Cultural Policy, Planning, and Practice,” The Journal of Arts Management, Law, and Society, Vol. 39, No 1 (spring 2009):3-6; Gordon Shockley and Connie L. McNeely, “Seismic Shifts in U.S. Federal Arts Policy: A tale of Organizational Challenge and Controversy in the 1990s,” The Journal of Arts management, Law, and Society, Vol. 39, No 1 (spring 2009):7 -23.

Back to post – 70 BG George Yeo, “When Should one Draw the Line,” Straits Times, March 16, 1994, 3.

Back to post – 71 Joanna Lee, “The Artist Village,” in Selves, ed. Kian Woon Kwok, Arun Mahizhnan and T. Sasitharan (Singapore: NAC, 2002), 92.

Back to post – 72 Forum Theater was also banned as it was accused of promoting Marxist propoganda. For more details see William Peterson, “The Culture Crisis,” in Theater and the Politics of Culture in Contemporary Singapore , 33-50; Alvin Tan, “Theatre and Cultures,” in Renaissance Singapore? 185-200, Sanjay Krishnan, “Waiting for Theater,” in Looking at Culture.

Back to post – 73 Felicia Low, Digital Art: Pixel Perfection and art Content,” in Selves, 192-195.

Back to post – 74 National Arts Council, Population Survey of the Arts 2009 Highlights, http://www.nac.gov.sg/static/doc/population_survey_of_the_arts_2009.pdf (accessed on October 1, 2009).

Back to post – 75 Koh Buck Song, “More Going for the Arts,” Straits Times, December 16, 1995, 2.

Back to post – 76 Arts Council England reports Department of Culture, Media and Sports, UK, Creative Industries Mapping Document 2001; Tate, Tate Modern: The First Five Years; Carol Vogel, “Guggenheim Grows: The Next Stop Is Rio,” Prat and Cutt, ed., Introduction to Creativity, Innovation and the Cultural Economy; Alliance for the Arts, Arts as an Industry;Centre for an Urban Future, The Creative Engine.

Back to post – 77 Richard Florida, Rise of the Creative Class, 167.

Back to post – 78 Taylorism refers to the division of labor pushed to its logical extreme, with a consequent de-skilling of the worker and dehumanization of the workplace. John Scott and Gordon Marshal, Oxford Dictionary of Sociology, 3rd Edition, (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2009).

Back to post – 79 C.J.W.-L Wee, The Asian Modern and C.J.W.-L Wee, “Creating Culture in the Globalized “Cultural Desert” of Singapore. The rapid modernization from 1965 to 1980s and now the rapid change toward a creative economy does not allow for grounds up organic growth of the society or the culture, creating a certain degree of trauma in the people. Souchou Yao, Singapore: The State and the Culture of Excess, 155; and Derek da Cunha, ed., Singapore in the New Millennium, 11.

Back to post – 80 The Renaissance City Report: Culture and Arts in Renaissance Singapore, 33.

Back to post – 81 The Renaissance City Report: Culture and Arts in Renaissance Singapore.

Back to post – 82 Renaissance City Plan III.

Back to post – 83 Renaissance City Plan III, 16.

Back to post – 84 Renaissance City Plan III.

Back to post – 85 Globalization spread the western values in Singapore due to: increased exposure to digital media; popular culture like movies and music; international art shows; increased travel; rising numbers of tourist and foreign workers in Singapore; the boom in Vietnamese, Indonesian, Indian and Chinese art market. Ng Aik Kwang, Why Asians are Less Creative than Westerners; C.J.W.-L Wee, The Asian Modern; C. J.W.-L Wee, “Creating Culture in the Globalized “Cultural Desert” of Singapore;” Derek da Cunha, ed., Singapore in the New Millennium; Tambyah Siok Kuan, Tan Soon Jiuan and Kau ah Keng, The Wellbeing of Singaporeans, 87.

Back to post – 86 Melissa Kok, “Singaporeans Want Greater Say, Latest Poll Shows.”

Back to post – 87 C.J.W.-L Wee, The Asian Modern; 90.

Back to post – 88 C.J.W.-L Wee, The Asian Modern; 78.

Back to post – 89 Caroline Turner ed., Art and Social Change (Canberra: Pandanus Books, 2005), 3; Noël Carroll, “Art and Globalization: then and Now,” 138; Chin-Tao Wu, “Worlds Apart: Problems of Interpreting Globalized Art,” Third text, Vol. 21, Issue 6 (November 2007): 719 -731, doi:10.1080/09528820701761236, (accessed on September 29, 2009); Susan Bennett, in Introduction to Theatre Audiences: A Theory of Production and Reception, viii; Diana Crane, “Culture and Globalization,” in Global Culture: Media, Arts, Policy and Globalization, 7; and Jean Robertson and Craig McDaniel, Themes in Contemporary Art, 19.

Back to post – 90 Tambyah Siok Kuan, Tan Soon Jiuan and Kau ah Keng, The Wellbeing of Singaporeans, 68- 87.

Back to post – 91 SCYA – Singapore Contemporary Young Artists.

Back to post – 92 Noël Carroll, “Art and Globalization: then and Now;” 141; and Jean Robertson and Craig McDaniel, Preface to Themes in Contemporary Art.

Back to post – 93 As this paper is typed, Singapore Art Museum has shifted its focus on cutting edge contemporary arts as National Art Gallery (currently under construction) will take over its previous collection of Modern Asian Art.

Back to post – 94 C. J.W.-L Wee, “Creating Culture in the Globalized “Cultural Desert” of Singapore,” 88.

Back to post – 95 Art Knowledge News website http://www.artknowledgenews.com/2009-07-20-21-04-03-singapore-art-museum-to-present-presidents-young-talents-pyt.html (accessed 26 July, 2010).

Back to post – 96 NAC website News Release, June 8, 2009. http://www.nac.gov.sg/new/new02c.asp?id=400&pgID=&print=1 (accessed on August 2010).

Jovyn wrote her final dissertation on “Curating Text and Space in Contemporary Visual Art: Two Art Exhibitions as Case Studies”, supervised by Jeffrey Say, Programme Leader of the MA Asian Art Histories Programme.

Jovyn is currently an Assistant Manager at the Singapore International Foundation (SIF), where she organises and promotes people-to-people exchanges through arts and culture for a better world. Her work includes cultivating partnerships with other cultural institutions, engagement of supporters for projects, conceptualising and curating exhibitions and outreach programming, research and assessment of project proposals. She is managing the inaugural SIF Artist-in-Residence Exchange Programme in collaboration with the British Council, involving artists Michael Lee (Singapore) and Bob Matthews (UK).

Jovyn also lectures part-time at National Institute of Education for a module on arts education in museums and galleries. We wish Jovyn every success!

Tanja wrote her final dissertation on Audience development techniques employed by non-profit arts organizations in Singapore, supervised by Malcolm Tan, Part-time lecturer of the BA Arts Management Programme.

A video of Tanja can be located below, where she shares her college life and internship experiences, as well as her aspiration upon graduation.

We wish Tanja every success!

The 4th year of the i-AM Arts Festival is themed Many Hearts, Many Hands, reaching out to society in unique ways – they support and educate the public about issues that range from debilitating diseases such as Alzheimer’s to the importance of encouragement and opportunities that our youths at risk currently seek.

The i-AM 2012 Arts Festival is a Singapore-based, annual arts festival comprising a series of arts events conceptualized and organized by the Year 2 students of the Arts Management Programme, directed and produced by the School of Arts Management at LASALLE College of the Arts. It is a crystallization of the creative ideas, artistic vision and organizational abilities of these future arts managers.

i-AM 2012 Arts Festival features 3 main visual arts exhibitions, 3 main performing arts performances and 6 outreach programmes. The series of main events will take place over a 10-day period (29th February – 9th March 2012) and will offer the public a true sensual feast of art forms that span both visual and performing arts. Captivating exhibitions and enthralling performances will blur the traditional lines that exist between different art disciplines, and expose audiences to compellingly fresh and dynamic experiences. Each event is not only produced with excellence and accessibility in mind, but social issues that all Singaporeans can identify with are championed through these arts productions as well.

The i-AM 2012 Arts Festival is truly a culmination of the creativity of Singapore’s future art managers, and a glorious presentation of local and regional artistic talent. Going beyond providing just an educational platform for the arts, the i-AM 2012 Arts Festival steps further to take on themes that affect and confront our society, cultures and communities at large. It is the Arts Festival with a distinct focus on using the arts to promote social causes.

Come, join us for a good cause and be inspired!

Eilena Ong
Festival Director
School of Arts Management
LASALLE College of the Arts

An Arts Festival conceptualised and organised by Arts management Students from LASALLE College of the Arts

Nigerian Scam Letters: Shifting Cultural Sensitivity

The 3rd Annual Nigerian E-mail Conference was not a scam on a scam, but an insightful satire of one of the most widespread and lucrative frauds ever. Purportedly, the conference was held from 7–9 November 2003 at the Sheraton Hotel and Casino in Abuja, the new capital of Nigeria, 500km northeast of the port city of Lagos. As with all these frauds, the conference website operated within a credible and factual cultural and geographical framework. The Abuja Sheraton exists, it has a casino, and an image of the Sheraton Abuja is to be found at http://www.starwood.com/sheraton (2003).1

Anatomy of the Scam

Nigerian scam letters are a dominant genre within a class of criminal activity known as ‘Advance Fee Frauds’2 or ‘”4-1-9″ frauds after the section of the Nigerian penal code that addresses fraud schemes’. 3 Variations include the Sweepstakes winner, bogus inheritance and the soiled bills scams. Each depends on the victim of the scam advancing relatively small sums of money to facilitate the release and payment of much larger sums, in the range of US$1.5m to US$142m. Adam Graycar, Director of the Australian Institute of Criminology, estimated that by 1999, “some US$5 billion has been stolen worldwide through the use of these schemes over the past decade”. Given the increase in the e-mail literate population of the world today, that figure may have more than doubled. While avarice and greed are clear drivers for victims, it can’t be just, as Graycar puts it, “the greed and stupidity of people prepared to part with money in response to an unsolicited letter, offering them millions of dollars, from a stranger on the other side of the world”.4 I would argue that there are significant cultural factors behind the success of these scams.

Historical Context

Several authors, including Russell G. Smith et al5 and the United States Secret Service6, attribute the rise in these scams, in the mid-1980s, to increased corruption and social and political upheavals in Nigeria. Those factors, together with a decline in world oil prices, cut deeply into foreign exchange earnings of Nigeria, a country that relies on crude oil sales for 90 percent of its export earnings and 75 percent of its government revenues.

However, advance fee frauds are not new. Similar schemes have been recorded over the past several hundred years. Brendan I. Koerner reported that while:

[t]he scam is experiencing a digitally aided heyday…419’s roots stretch back to the Jazz Age. It’s an Africanised version of ‘The Spanish Prisoner’, a classic 1920s scheme in which suckers were convinced that a wealthy scion was rotting in a Barcelona jail. Front some cash to win his freedom, and you’d be amply rewarded for your troubles. Or not.7

Richard Hall, writing in the Australian newspaper, Sydney Morning Herald edition of the Good Weekend in 1993, told of the exploits of one Sydney entrepreneur and villain, Mick Bell, who in the 1840s, extracted an advance fee from a Mr Monies “to finance the smuggling of a mythical £20,000 worth of goods out of the colony on a phantom ship in Port Hacking”.8

My own first encounter with the scam was in 1983 when the modern G3 fax machines were just entering the Australian market. One morning, a confidential offer to share in untold wealth just popped out of our fax. My then business partner was keen to pursue the invitation but I was not. Perhaps it was a case of like frauds attract; he subsequently defrauded our company of considerable sums of money and cleared out to South Africa.

Intercultural tensions

There has been little cultural theorising about the Nigerian scam letters but my initial observations point to underlying cultural and racial tensions; if not actual hostility, then at least ideological positions that are culturally determined and capable of giving rise to antagonistic views of each party towards the other.

For example, a potential victim, Lee Warner, publisher of the US-based Xarda Publishing, reported his first impressions of an unsolicited approach on 9 Aug 2000, from a Dr. Patrick Danladi. The doctor introduced himself as a member “of the special committee newly instituted by the present civilian administration of President Olusegun Obansanjo [sic]”.9

The first iota of concern hit me when the ‘Doctor’ had trouble spelling ’sixty’ [sity in the actual text] in ‘Sixty Million’. Well, you know these billionaires… they all have trouble with spelling… particularly the ones from Nigeria…

…I particularly enjoyed the reference to ‘President Olusegun Obansanjo’. Yeah, we all know him… don’t we…? Am I delusional, or does his kind of name sound like Loose Gun Banjo?10

At the date when Warner received this letter, Olusegun Obasanjo11 had been the president of Nigeria for seventeen months and had visited the USA six months earlier, in October 1999. Warner’s comments, if taken at face value, suggest condescension, perhaps contempt, toward the author, doubt about his literary competence and intelligence, though no doubt about his motives. A naive recipient who found the offer interesting might think to themselves: “This black bunny can’t even spell. I can outsmart the bastard and get his money…if he has got any.”

The Scammer

Correspondence published on the scanarama.com website provided an insight to the attitude of some scammers to their potential victims. An Arnold Fannerman had replied provocatively to a scam letter and received this frank response from an angry scammer:

Dear Whatever your f**king name is,

First, I want to say that I am not at any time convienced that you are not a criminal. Reasons being that I am a 419 guy and have riped the likes of you with the same technology that you stupid ashole evented to manipulate we african. What we do down here is nothing to make us ashame as we are only trying to get back what you f**king bastard took from us way back. I guess you people call it reparation.

Just for one f**king moment, you probably would have thought that we Africans are set of crazy fool that are no way near your self belief intellegence but oh no, you white monkeys (Micky Mouse if you like) are even more stupid for all we care as we are really moer original than you lazy white cheap and greedy beings that would want to claim what you are not part of just about the same way you bastards riped our continent. Let me tel you this for once, have you ever sat your ass down to ask yourself what colour is the devil? Must probable you like and the likes of you would say that He was a black man. But today be it know to your sorry ass that the devil was an angel of God that was thrown down to earth. What colour does the angels have? White right? Then cann’t you see how you maniacs out there tried to change what we believed in? A wolf in sheep clothing is simply a wolf and nothing more.

Go f**k your mother f**king asshole that has being infected by the same atificiary beliefs that has beclouded your vision as a young man that is surpposed to be asking us how did we acquire our bank of knowledge. Be true to your self and give us a little tumbs up for our intelligence dommy.12

Angry yes, but also a strong indication of the disdain felt towards foreigners and an echo of resentment of Africa’s colonial past and exploited present. Such sentiments, as well as the high financial stakes in these frauds, help explain why “since 1992, 17 people have been killed in Nigeria attempting to recover their funds and the US State Department has documented over 100 cases in which American citizens have been rescued from Nigeria”.13

Characteristics of Early Letters

My interest in Nigerian scam letters was rekindled by an e-mail I received in early 2002. Unfortunately, I did not preserve it. The appeal came from the daughter of the second wife of some now deceased African potentate living in (relative) poverty in Madrid. I say relative poverty because she gave not one, but two Iridium satellite telephone numbers as her contacts.14 She sought assistance to right wrongs done to her and her family by some new regime; specifically, to shift her allegedly rightful and legal inheritance out of their reach. This was a new tack. More recently, some scam letters have taken on a strong Christian tone and include letters from authors who have been ‘rescued’ from Islam by discovering Jesus. Increasingly, Nigerian scam letters seem specifically tailored to appeal to the ideology, prejudices or guilt of the recipients.

To appreciate this shift one must look back at the traditional Nigerian scam letter many of which are still in circulation with few modifications. These were common characteristics:

Table 1: Characteristics of early Nigerian scam letters.

The authors were exclusively men and their names were blends of English and African-sounding names. Frequently, the chosen names corresponded to the genuine names of officials in banks, businesses or the civil service.15 While this mixture of English and African names in common in countries of the former British Commonwealth (the equivalent is true in Francophone countries), it may also be read as a conscious blending of the exotic and the common to evoke a sense of authenticity and reliability, especially for those with little familiarity with African affairs or practices.

However, in every case, the right of the author to the funds is problematic. Some degree of fraud is always involved or is proposed, as in the case of deceased estates. In cases of over-invoiced contracts, one fraud is built on another and the intended victim, the recipient, is asked to facilitate a third. Thus, there is a universal insistence on confidentiality.

Some letters are scrupulously researched, especially those citing times and places of deaths and this factual architecture, together with the use of author names that could be traced in various bureaucracies, contributed to authenticity in presentation. The erratic syntax, grammar and spelling however, such as seen in the correspondence above, are matters for contemplation and are the subject of discussion later in this paper.

A Shift in Characteristics

A glance at table 2 will identify some significant changes in these four characteristics. Women have become common as authors, identifying themselves as wives or daughters of a now deceased patriarch who had some legal claim to the monies.

Table 2: New characteristics of Nigerian scam letters.

A website http://www.quatloos.com, run by the Financial & Tax Fraud Education Associates Inc., lists eighteen variants of letters from author(s) purporting to be Mariam Abacha, the first wife of the former Nigerian leader General Sani Abacha. Abacha’s death in June 1998 permitted the return to democracy the following year. Several of Abacha’s sons and a number of lawyers representing the family also make appearances on that list.

There were considerable shifts in the other three characteristics as well. First, the purported location of the author and/or the funds moved from west and central sub-Saharan Africa, into North Africa, Europe and Great Britain, and more recently, Afghanistan.

The funds themselves were commonly held out to be the legitimate possession of the author or the person they were acting for and, commonly, acquired by inheritance from the now dead leader or businessman. Thus at that level at least, the funds were no longer the direct results of a prior fraud though it remained problematic that leaders of (commonly) third world countries should accumulate such massive sums legally, let alone ethically.

But perhaps the major shift was in the nature of the appeal. Here, the shift was from tapping a recipient’s greed to rewarding the recipient’s act of charity. And that act of charity was to assist in freeing funds and so relieving the author of poverty or injustice, or of allowing the recipients to shrive their souls by applying the funds to worthwhile charitable causes or honourable business investments. This refocussing of the overt appeal suggests a remarkable collective cultural sensitivity to the passing of the greed is good era, but it also contains elements that may be intended to resonate with post-colonial guilt.

Thus, when one returns to the website for The 3rd Annual Nigerian E-mail Conference16, the list of conference events takes on some extra significance. Here are some:

• Keynote Address:
  Dr. Hamza Kalu’s adds some historical perspective in his keynote address: “From Postal Scams To Email Scams: We Have Come a Long Way Infant Child.”

• Debate:
  Attend a lively debate between Lady Mariam Abacha and Mr. Godwin Oyathelem. Topic: “The Effectiveness of using all UPPERCASE characters.”

• Competition:
  Other countries are now adapting our business. Is this a threat or an opportunity?

• Linguistics:
  Damn, spam, scam, sham. And more rhymes in the “sticks and stones” category.

• Telecommunications:
  Soliciting via cell phone text messaging: Can it work?

• Accounting:
  The taxman he’s a comin’: Keeping good and accurate records.

• Workshop:
  Grammatical errors: What’s the optimal number?

• Statistics:
  Dr. Kayode Naiyeju presents his ground-breaking research: “Analyzing response rates using analysis of variance: That pesky R-squared value,” as published in The Nigerian Journal of Applied Statistics.

• Economics:
  A round table discussion: Is email now Nigeria’s top export?

Besides mentioning that at least one writer rated Nigeria’s foreign exchange earnings from the scam as high as US$2 billion, second only to crude oil exports,17 I’ll not discus these topics individually.

Though the web page for The 3rd Annual Nigerian E-mail Conference carries the disclaimer that “OK, the joke’s over. Nothing more to see here”18, one is left with a strong sense that this satire has come very close to institutionalising an informal mechanism operating in the scammers’ community, a mechanism that shares strategies and propels innovation in the genre. Certainly, the scammers themselves must be reading rivals’ work as an active process of cross-fertilisation of ideas seems to be operating.

Thus, I argue then that the Nigerian Scam letters, as a genre, have evolved to exploit differing intercultural sensitivities, to adapt to changing historical circumstances, and have, cleverly if not consciously, been engineered to strike differing cultural chords.

Of Syntax, Grammar and Spelling

The 3rd Annual Nigerian E-mail Conference advertised “a lively debate between Lady Mariam Abacha and Mr. Godwin Oyathelem on the topic: “The effectiveness of using all UPPERCASE characters”” and promised workshops on “Grammatical errors: What’s the optimal number?”1 These kinds of qualities, considered with erratic spelling and the archaic quality of some of the language deserve some examination.

As English is the language of commerce, law and diplomacy in most sub-Saharan countries, many of the social elites have a command of English superior to some native-born speaker in Britain. There are, however, local variations, especially in pronunciation, accent, syntax and vocabulary. While these don’t go so far as to create a dialect, there are sufficient distinctions to argue a West African English, just as there is an Australian English or a New Zealand English. These differences in part account for the distinctive style of the Nigerian scam letter.

Spelling

Spelling errors are not the hallmark of Nigerian scam letters as is sometimes assumed. Such spelling errors that do occur seem to be of four classes: unintentional spelling errors; intentional spelling errors; undetected / uncorrected typographic error and; errors that arise from software incompatibility.

The example of the angry scammer’s letter is an example of the first three classes. The author is spelling phonetically when he uses ‘ashole’ or ‘asshole’ for arsehole, ‘tumbs’ for thumbs and ‘dommy’ for dummy, but ‘cann’t’ may simply be a typographic error as might ‘intellegence’. ‘Moer’(more), ‘tel (tell) or ‘riped’ (ripped) might be either class but ‘atificiary’ (?) and ‘surpposed’ seem to spring from ignorance. This author has problems maintaining continuity of singular and plural endings as do numbers of the authors studied.

In the ‘Porcine Princess’ correspondence (see below) the opening letter has only three errors: ‘father?s’, ‘e.t.c.’ and ‘PLease’, and the subsequent correspondence was free of any sustained errors in spelling, leading to the conclusion that those that were there were essentially of typographic origin. This would seem to suggest that the subsequent correspondence was spontaneous while the original letter was more carefully drafted.

When the collection of scam letters collected for this project is examined, again one discovers few spelling errors. Some errors, however, appear to be intentional. Mrs Deborah Kabila’s son, who writes on her behalf, alternated between ‘I’ and ‘i’ as the personal pronoun and had a problem only with ‘Laise’ (liaise). In others, a crucial word or two was misspelt, just sufficient to make the author look a bit ignorant, just sufficient to feed feelings of superiority in the reader, the intended victim.

Minor software incompatibility can lead to apparent spelling errors. The apostrophe seems most vulnerable in transmission and can lead to ‘ThatÆs’ and ‘father?s’ or ‘father\’s’ or ‘father!&s’ rather than ‘That’s’ and ‘father’s’.

In general then, poor spelling was not observed to be a major issue in these letters.

Sentence length

The angry scammer’s e-mail, quoted above, is 321 words long and comprises 14 sentences and has 13 spelling errors. It reads more like a stream of consciousness rather than a considered and crafted letter. One sentence is two words long and the address is six words. Putting these aside, the average sentence length is twenty-six words. Unfortunately, the author’s original scam message is not available for study, but another US anti-scam campaigner, Brad Christensen, who has engaged in extended correspondence with more than thirty scammers, published his correspondence at http://www.quatloos.com

In one example, Christensen engaged in a long correspondence with an author he termed the ‘Porcine Princess’.20 Her opening email was headed

“princessmaria ojo ofem”
07/08/02 07:28PM >>>
The Royal Palace of Ogoni Kingdom,
Ogoin Oil Community,
Barr-Ogoni Kingdom,
River-State,
Nigeria.

The original text is a straightforward exposition of the circumstance whereby the Princess Maria, ‘daughter of [the late] Chief ofem [sic] Ojo, the king of Ogoni Kingdom… the highest oil producing area in Nigeria’21, has US$23,560,000 that she wants to secure offshore for the good of her persecuted family and (of course) of the recipient. The body text is 384 words long, in one paragraph comprised 15 sentences, giving an average of 25.60 words per sentence.

Chart 1: Porcine Princess correspondence: Word length of e-mails from the Princess.

Over the ensuing five weeks from 8 July to 12 August 2002, Christensen received more than 6,300 words from Princess Maria in twenty-one letter of increasingly intimacy.

On 8 August she wrote:
My Darling/most favorite,

Let me tell you one thing you must understand which am sure you will hadly [sic] believe. You are the first Man I have fallen in love with even though, I have not seen you. … Dearest, am assuring you that you are the apple of my eyes.

Except for one letter, of one single sentence of 33 words, the count of word per sentence falls in the range 9.8 to 21.4 with a median of 16.4. Princess (as she signed herself) is an author of direct exposition and limited qualifying complexity. There area few spelling errors, those that do occur, like ‘hadly’ in the above quote, are more of the ‘typo’ kind.

In addition, Christensen received 12 letters from a Mr Nnanna Scotty, who introduced himself as ‘the Financial Adviser to late King Ofem Ojo, [having been] been directed to reach you by Princess Maria.’22 The median length of his letters is 22.5 with a strong cluster in the range 22.0 to 24.2. Altogether, except for letters containing numerical information, Mr Scotty is a writer who likes his clauses and who also makes few ‘typo’ or spelling errors. The authors of the two series seem to be different persons, or maybe one person consciously and capably adopting two contrasting styles and voices.

Christensen treats both his correspondents in a rather caviller fashion. He addresses Princess with a rising mix of eloquence, affection and insult, initially as ‘My Dear Princess’, ‘My Wonderful beautiful Princess’, then ‘My Porcine Strumpet’, ‘Dearest, Most Corpulent Moll Imaginable’ and finally, ‘Dearest Most Voluminous Slattern in the Land’.23 Christensen leads the scammer(s) on. He is an agent provocateur: for him, they are only playthings, and it’s all been a game for someone with time to play.

Of course, it all ends in tears, with both victim and scammer(s) missing each other in hotels in a cyberspace Bangkok, Princess nowhere to be seen. Thus, Christensen refuses to deal and declares to Scotty, “I only hope and pray my corpulent trollop is alive, even if beaten beyond recognition and missing a few limbs”.24 There is no further communication.

This series of communications, like many scam letters, makes frequent appeals to Christian sensitivities and actively distinguishes the author(s) from other members of their ‘polygamous’ – hence, heathen – family.25 Such distinction is apparently deemed valuable, given the long divide between Islam and Christianity.

Long sentences are common in the letters studied, some exceeding seventy-five words. They seem to add status and distinction up to the point where the syntax breaks down.

Syntax and Grammar

The grammar of Nigerian scam letters runs the gambit from erratic to archaic, and the syntax and vocabulary is sometime wondrous. It is hard to construct an analysis of this because there is little variation in the examples studied, most effecting a rather pompous but serious tone. They display an overall style that is serious but unthreatening, a sense of considered, even laboured drafting, and a fear of offending the recipient with this unsolicited approach.

Prince Ken Williams, writing from the Budumbura refugee camp in Accra, opens with ‘Good day to you. How are you today? I hope that everything is fine. If so, thanks be to God’. Dr. Ben Bendewor extended ‘Compliments of the season’ from either the USA or Nigeria, although it was only 13 August. Two weeks later, Barrister Gabriel Odia, writing from Lagos, offered ‘Compliments of the season. Grace and Peace and Love from this part of the Atlantic to you.’ Curiously, another barrister, Tunde Badmus, used an identical text to address the recipient, as did Barrister Adeshola Adeyemo, both of Nigeria

More cautious authors began with ‘We might be strangers to ourselves now but as time goes on’ or ‘My Dear one, Permit me to inform you of my desire of going into business relationship with you.’ This is ‘FROM MR JONH BANGA ABIDJAN IVORY COAST’. It is a particularly fine example of the tangle of grammar and spelling:

IN A MATTER OF FACT, THOUGH WE STILL DO NOT KNOW EACH OTHER VERY WELL BUT DUE TO LAKE OF TIME, I AM BEING MANDATED TO DISCLOSE TO YOU THE AT STAKE WHICH NEEDS URGENT ATTENTION AND CO-OPERATION FROM A TRUSTWORTHY FRIEND TO ACTUALIZE THE INVESTMENT INSTRUCTION LEFT BY MY LATE FATHER.

This fifty-two word sentence exhibits three features that seem in tension: sophisticated vocabulary, chaotic syntax and gratuitous spelling errors. I would argue that this is not spontaneous composition but a carefully crafted essay in clumsy writing. If so, it advances the thesis that some Nigerian scam letters are sophisticated cultural products.

There are, of course, many examples of Nigerian scam letters that do not reveal any depth of sophistication. Nevertheless, the response rate to this kind of unsolicited e-mail is put as high as 1 per cent by Koerner, who notes that “of that number, enough people fork over enough cash to sustain an industry that ranks in Nigeria’s top five, right up there with palm oil and tin”26 and petroleum. He goes on to suggest that the demand for telecommunications infrastructure in Nigeria has been driven by scammer operations, and that this fraud is “no longer the sole domain of professional criminals, 419 has become a cozy family business, Nigeria’s version of the Greek diner or Irish pub”.27 If this is so, then it goes a long way to explain the spectrum of linguistic skill evident in Nigerian scam letters.

Conclusions

The continued effectiveness of a scam that is both widespread and, to most people so transparently a fraud, cannot be explained by greed and stupidity alone.

The more sophisticated scam letters are carefully crafted works, making complex cultural appeals to the potential victims. The less sophisticated seemingly copy from the more effective. The crafting of these letters may be, in part, unconscious or at least un-researched, but their effectiveness in unquestioned. There is evidence too, that the nature of the appeals has evolved from one aimed directly at greed to one aimed more towards social justice and, in keeping with a process of moral empathising, the title to the funds has become less problematic. Thus, one might theorise at least some informal networks among the scammers that pass on effective strategies.

Certainly, the scammers seek to tap into greed and avarice, but by instigating or amplifying feelings of cultural superiority in potential victims and contempt towards the scammers, feelings such as Christensen or Warner displayed, the scam’s potential for success is advanced by emboldening the victims.

All these factors point to a modern fraud practice that is culturally well in formed about its intended victims and sensitive to their vanities. As with effective propaganda, effective fraud is a matter of knowing the culture of your victim.

Bibliography

http://www.starwood.com/sheraton/, Accessed 24 November 2003.
Smith, Russel G., Holmes, Michael N., & Kaufmann, Phillip (1999 July), Nigerian Advance Fee Fraud. Trends & Issues in Crime and Criminal Justice, No. 121, Australian Institute of Criminology. Retrieved 24 November 2003 from http://www.aic.gov.au/publications/tandi/ti121.pdf
http://www.ustreas.gov/usss/financial_crimes.shtml#Nigerian, 24 November 2003.

Adam Graycar in the introduction to Smith et al.
http://www.ustreas.gov/usss/alert419.shtml accessed 24 November 2003.

Brendan I. Koerner, ‘The Nigerian Nightmare: Who’s sending you all those scam E-mails’, http://politics.msn.com/id/2072851, accessed 24 November 2003.

Richard Hall, ‘Sydney’s Original Sins’, Sydney Morning Herald’s Good Weekend, 20 Nov. 1993, pp. 74–75.

Lee Warner, ‘Nigerian Scams’,
http://xarda.com/nigerian1.html, accessed 25 November 2003
http://www.scamorama.com/fan-angry.html accessed 25 November 2003

Satellite ‘phones are fairly common in this business as they are considered more secure than terrestrial telephone services but we should ask Osama Bin Laden if that is so. A Sydney court heard recently of allegations that the names ‘Alan Jones’ and ‘Tim Webster’ were used in an Australian based Nigerian Scam operation. http://www.abc.net.au, On-line news, 31 October 2003, accessed 6 November 2003.
http://j-walk.com/other/conf/, Access at various dates up to 28 November 2003.

Mike Magee, ‘Nigerian email scam causes Americans to loiter in London hotel lobbies’. http://www.theinquirer.net/?article+6680, Accesses 24 November 2003

http://www.quatloos.com/brad-c/princess01.htm Accessed 2 December 2003.

http://www.quatloos.com/brad-c/princess02.htm Accessed 2 December 2003.

http://www.quatloos.com/brad-c/princess03.htm Accessed 2 December 2003.

http://www.quatloos.com/brad-c/princess04.htm Accessed 2 December 2003.

http://www.quatloos.com/brad-c/princess05.htm Accessed 1 December 2003.

http://www.quatloos.com/brad-c/princess06.htm Accessed 1 December 2003.

http://www.quatloos.com/brad-c/princess07.htm Accessed 1 December 2003.

_________________________________________________________

Back to post – 1 http://www.starwood.com/sheraton/, Accessed 24 November 2003, Search parameter: Nigeria.

Back to post – 2Russel G. Smith, Michael N. Holmes & Phillip Kaufmann, ‘No. 121, Nigerian Advance Fee Fraud’ in Trends & Issues in crime and criminal justice, Australian Institute of Criminology, July 1999. Also at http://www.aic.gov.au/publications/tandi/ti121.pdf

Back to post – 3http://www.ustreas.gov/usss/financial_crimes.shtml#Nigerian, 24 November 2003.

Back to post – 4Adam Graycar in the introduction to Smith et al., op. cit.

Back to post – 5Smith et al., op. cit.

Back to post – 6http://www.ustreas.gov/usss/alert419.shtml accessed 24 November 2003.

Back to post – 7Brendan I. Koerner, ‘The Nigerian Nightmare: Who’s sending you all those scam E-mails’, http://politics.msn.com/id/2072851, accessed 24 November 2003.

Back to post – 8Richard Hall, ‘Sydney’s Original Sins’, Sydney Morning Herald Good Weekend, 20 Nov. 1993, pp. 74–75.

Back to post – 9Lee Warner, ‘Nigerian Scams’, http://xarda.com/nigerian1.html, accessed 25 November 2003

Back to post – 10Ibid.
The correct spelling is Obasanjo. Former General Olusegun Obasanjo was democratically elected as president of Nigeria in February 1999 and assumed office in May of the same year. He was the first elected president since General Sani Abacha usurped power and imprisoned the likely winner of the presidential election scheduled for 1993. Abacha died of a heart attack in June 1998. http://news.bbc.co.uk/1/hi/world/africa/109265.stm, Accessed 26 November 2003.

Back to post – 11

Back to post – 12http://www.scamorama.com/fan-angry.html accessed 25 November 2003

Back to post – 13Smith et al., op. cit. p.3.

Back to post – 14Satellite ‘phones are fairly common in this business as they are considered more secure than terrestrial telephone services but we should ask Osama Bin Laden if that is so.

Back to post – 15In 2003 a Sydney court heard allegations that the names ‘Alan Jones’ and ‘Tim Webster’ (respectively a prominent radio shock-jock and a idolised footballer) were used in an Australian based Nigerian Scam operation. http://www.abc.net.au, on-line news, 31 October 2003, accessed 6 November 2003.

Back to post – 16http://j-walk.com/other/conf/, Access at various dates up to 28 November 2003.

Back to post – 17Mike Magee, ‘Nigerian email scam causes Americans to loiter in London hotel lobbies’. http://www.theinquirer.net/?article+6680, Accesses 24 November 2003

Back to post – 18Ibid.

Back to post – 19Ibid.

Back to post – 20http://www.quatloos.com/brad-c/princess01.htm Accessed 1 December 2003. This file runs from /princess01.htm to /princess07.htm.

Back to post – 21http://www.quatloos.com/brad-c/princess01.htm Accessed 2 December 2003.

Back to post – 22http://www.quatloos.com/brad-c/princess03.htm Accessed 2 December 2003.

Back to post – 23Ibid., specifically /princess03.htm, princess06.htm and /princess07.htm. Accessed 2 December 2003

Back to post – 24http://www.quatloos.com/brad-c/princess03.htm Accessed 2 December 2003.

Back to post – 25http://www.quatloos.com/brad-c/princess03.htm Accessed 2 December 2003.

Back to post – 26Koerner, op. cit.

Back to post – 27Ibid

I graduated in 2007 with BA in Art Management and worked in a local art gallery for one year before joining AXA Art Asia as a Business Developer and Fine art Specialist in 2008. I am the sole AXA Art Asia representative in Singapore and report directly to AXA Art Regional office in Hong Kong.
 
My key responsibilities are to develop and underwrite all lines of art insurance including private collectors, corporate collectors, museums, exhibitions, art galleries and auction houses in Singapore. The job has brought me an opportunity to interact with art market players of different sectors.

The BA Arts Management programme laid the foundation for what my job requires of me, e.g. draw up marketing plans and develop business strategies. My final year thesis project, ‘To Propose Artist in Residence Programme in Community Centre’, taught me how to do market research, business plan and SWOT analysis. All these inspired me to pursue a career in the arts industry. I am happy that LASALLE has prepared me well for my preferred career. 

Read Charles’ Interview with The Edge

Read Charles’ Interview with Lianhe zaopao