Mekong Review

Tag: Singapore

Writing nearby, gathering hope

Lenette Lua

How does one love a world that is increasingly fractured? A reflection on curating at Objectifs and participating in the artistic projects by Chu Hao Pei and Arie Syarifuddin in Singapore.

Resurrection

Tse Hao Guang

Waves Rising beautifully commemorates Ho Poh Fun’s life’s work, perhaps feeling like it needed to smoothen out some things bubbling just under the surface.

Singapore’s utopia of rules

Naima Morelli

David Graeber’s notion of “total bureaucratisation” isn’t just a fitting analytical tool for global contemporary life; it also mirrors, with uncanny accuracy, the paradoxes of Singapore’s cultural policy.

Political theatre

Calum Stuart

Singaporean actor Lim Kay Siu on the differences between acting in Hollywood and in Singapore, the power of theatre to raise public awareness of important issues, and getting political on live streams while playing a ukulele.

Undiplomatically speaking

Isaac Neo

While the bulk of the book focuses on diplomacy, Living the Asian Century can also be read as an introduction to the governance style of Singapore’s first generation of leaders as seen through Mahbubani’s eyes.

The forgotten lion

Liew Kai Khiun

Despite having held a number of important portfolios as a minister in the city-state’s early years, S. Rajaratnam’s legacy remains largely obscured in Singapore’s public imagination.

We are gonna make it

Ruby Thiagarajan

Instead of asking what is or how to be one’s authentic self under capitalism, Peripathetic is curious about whether capitalism leaves us with any room for authenticity at all.

Survival and unconventional success

Ariel Athwal-Yap

The lesson in Ganapathy’s book is salient and applicable to societies beyond Singapore: working class ethnic minorities disenfranchised by dominant societal structures often find themselves enmeshed with criminal justice institutions.

Grey, all grey

Haresh Sharma

Like many in Singapore, artists exist on a strange monochromatic spectrum—the lighter side provides access to opportunities and awards, the darker potentially leading to loss of employment. How should one navigate this space?

A bookworm’s haunt

Nicholas Yong

A focus on Singaporean authors, coupled with the fact that bookstores in the city have found it increasingly difficult to survive, makes Book Bar feel like an anomaly.

Barnard’s bestiary

Peter A. Coclanis

That animals and plants have been inserted, in increasingly powerful ways, in historical narratives represents a powerful challenge to human-centred accounts that have long been dominant.

Jade, Pine, Orchid, Kidney

Robert Wood

Eileen Chong’s poetry defies national categories, making its way into cracks and crevices like an orchid in cement, grown beautiful and a little wild.

“I is another”

Sasha Han

In his films, Singaporean director Daniel Hui seeks out peripheral figures, tending to them with the kind of attention usually reserved for prominent historical figures.

Living otherwise

Kirsten Han

The works featured in Joanne Leow’s monograph, Counter-Cartographies: Reading Singapore Otherwise, are examples of (mostly) Singaporeans who refuse to conform to top-down formulations of how to live on this island.

A love letter to bak chor mee

Nicholas Yong

Amid Southeast Asia’s array of noodle dishes, bak chor mee doesn’t have the exalted status of pho or pad thai. Nevertheless, it’s a beloved staple dish consumed by Singaporeans, and even became a political statement once.

Jangan buang current

Carolyn Oei

bani haykal’s work embodies durational labour, culminating in serial ruminations on topics that keep him awake at night—capitalism, environmental protection, widening inequality divides.

Polish Joe

Kam Raslan

In the two novellas, journeys depart from or hope to return to “an eastern port” (Singapore) but instead they both disappear into the obscurities of the seas.

This is not the Galapagos

Robert Wood

Like a magnificent tortoise, my aunt, the long-time Singaporean activist Constance Singam, ambles towards us to meet my children for the first time.

Just transitions

Kadal Jesuthasan

Climate activists are still stumped by the question of how to ensure that public power results in real, meaningful change. At the same time, the climate movement is setting its sights further than ever.

Art as catalogue

Jonathan Victor Baldoza

What unfolds in Pulp III: An Intimate Inventory of the Banished Book is Shubigi Rao’s documentation of her encounters with texts in varying formats that, at some point in the past, confronted ‘banishment’.

Public noise

Mikko Toivanen

Noise can be a powerful tool of protest but also healing, its cathartic value directly correlated with its loudness.

Sea change

Darren Wan

What sets Rachel Heng’s historical fiction apart is how she moves beyond this understanding of History (with a capital H) by showing how grand events are mediated by everyday interactions.

What we see

Stephanie Chok

In Now You See Us, Balli Kaur Jaswal has created a social world that magnifies the indignities and frustrations of everyday life as a migrant domestic worker in Singapore.

Apathy and nonchalance

Loh Pei Ying

This could be After The Inquiry’s intention: to rile us up and stir a sense of indignation at a system in which the truth might not win out over politics and power

Sporting attitude

Kirsten Han

Could distance runner Soh Rui Yong’s absence from Singapore’s national team point to something bigger about how things work? He thinks this could be a “good opportunity” to ask questions.

Who is Auntie?

Kirsten Han

In Ajoomma, a Singaporean-South Korean co-production directed by He Shuming, an auntie travels to South Korea to visit the shooting locations of her favourite K-dramas… but gets far more than she’d bargained for.