Event overview
Hear about the cultural tensions in Singapore from Audrey Wong, Head of School of Creative Industries at LASALLE College of the Arts and former Nominated Member of the Parliament
In the 1990s, Singapore declared its ambition to be a “global city for the arts”. Over the past 3 decades there has been a concerted effort to enact cultural policies to serve this vision. The “global city” dream morphed into “Renaissance Singapore” (the title of the watershed 2000 cultural policy paper delivered by the-then Ministry of Information and the Arts) and eventually allied itself with ideas of the “creative city”. In December 2015, Singapore was named a UNESCO Creative City of Design and is now “a city lively with events, 365 days a year” (Design Singapore Council). On the other hand, Singapore also has a reputation of being a “nanny-state” where freedom of expression is limited through strict laws including censorship, and is clearly a developmental state where the government is highly interventionist in shaping the economy and society.
Scholars have written extensively about the contradictions inherent in Singapore’s aspirations and policies towards “global city of the arts” status, not least of which are the limits set on freedom of expression; another strand of argument has discussed the complexity of balancing cultural policy goals of nation-building and social cohesion - seen by the government as necessary given Singapore’s multi-ethnic, multi-religious population - with economic imperatives, as successive cultural policy papers leveraged on the potential economic impact of the arts (see, for eg. Chang 2000, Kong 2012). Implicitly, there is a dissonance experienced by the nation-state’s artistic creators in the face of declared national ambitions, not least of which is balancing between the global market and local needs. At the same time, it is possible that there is another dissonance emerging in public culture and among the “receivers” of arts and culture – the audiences and public – between the discoursal construct of Singapore as a global, creative city and their own “local” and located arts and cultural experiences, a dissonance which is arguably reflected in the challenges perceived by venues, festivals, and arts organisations in growing their audiences and satisfying their multiple stakeholders.
Audrey Wong is Head, School of the Creative Industries and Programme Leader of the MA Arts and Cultural Management Programme at LASALLE College of the Arts. Audrey was previously artistic co-director at The Substation, an independent non-profit arts centre, from 2000 - 2010. She had worked at The Substation since 1996, including starting the pioneering Moving Images film programme as a then-rare platform to nurture Singapore filmmakers. Audrey holds an MA in English from the National University of Singapore and an MA in Arts Administration & Cultural Policy from Goldsmiths College, University of London. In 2009, she was nominated by the arts community for a Nominated Member of Parliament post, and served as NMP from 2009- 2011.
Dates & times
| Date | Time | Add to calendar |
|---|---|---|
| 30 Oct 2017 | 5:00pm - 7:00pm |
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