from yesterday.sg
A slew of interesting posts in the past weeks which looked back on various familiar places in Singapore:
shots@ bonham hill (view from Fort Canning Hill)
Beauty World
Lorong Chuan
Bishan Two Zero
Enjoy!
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Gotta mention this head-nodding comment from local architect and urbanist William Lim.
ReplyDeletehttp://www.todayonline.com/articles/157000.asp
I was at the National Musuem opening recently. Spectacular spectacular...Already pinned down so much of sweat, there are promises bringing down many killer shows to glamorise the local musuems. The museums are pressing onto the fast forward button to bringing our faces out from the local. Already we have Grehry for the sentosa build-up, more flames in the art industry gonna hit like a heatwave. Millions were spent on infrastructure and human capital to position themselves for the global economy and, at the same time, all for the push to be in the same league table as Gugghemin and Lourve. Fast and furious, the whole city is intensified with these urban entrepreneurialism thingy. "Selling art" will be their common theme now for the rest of days ahead.
but how much more we need to go before we could in the same league table as Gugghemin or Lourve... Or we should keep "chasing the difference"? Could we also remain a true art sovereignty by looking after our own heritage or extend our own than inviting the foreign??
I feel so much more could have been done making use our spaces – spaces that make places special. Places are meaningful by its own, whether symbolic or political. Yet many of the places, as you can see, are all under the knife of our so-called urban-renewal planners. I was riding along Changi the other day. So clean. The former accident & emergency hospital was demolished. Roadsigns carparks were everywhere, but green patches were gone to make new roads and shops. It's no longer the old mysterious Changi. It's buzzing with cries of strangers than the crickets. I very much share William Lim's views on the dying Singapore culture:
"Collective memory is a very important component in culture, in a city, but we are busy wiping it out, and we can't create fast enough to be remembered....If you focus on what interests tourists and you package it as such, that is fine, but it's not heritage. It's tokenism...But heritage is a building up of collective visual memories of the community..."
Now, I don’t know how much more they gonna do. I hope they have enough of doing and start retain the sense of “Changi” and its particularity- save its authencity. Keep those blockbuster shows coming, yet at the same time, we could stay within our circle, do what Lourve cant do. At times, think micro. Be creative in our local scene. Without importing so much of the foreign, Singapore could be unique by inventing many Little India. Hoping one day the museum will be busy naming our own locals making...Lotsa more than promoting the already famous foreign.