YOUR Art Gallery

Singaporeans and Singapore-lovers! It is time to voice your opinions on what the new National Art Gallery will be. Three designs have been shortlisted for Singapore’s new National Art Gallery, which will be completed in five years. The final winner will be announced early next year but before that the public can have a say on the final design. Channel News Asia’s website has already begun collecting opinions, something which we appreciate very much - you can post all your thoughts, and even upload images, here.

A unique opportunity to work with civic monuments of such scale and historical importance, this project will add a new dimension to the cultural and art spaces in Singapore. Optimistic and ambitious to say the least, this project will attempt a surgical feat in trying to insert a brand new program into the company of age-old buildings. The Supreme Court building and the City Hall have stood resiliently all these years, exuding a quiet strength all their own. How these 3 designs will intervene with this context will remain vague until the designs are released in a public exhibition later in October 2007.

In a recent MICA press release, Dr Balaji Sadasivan, Senior Minister-of-State for Information Communications and the Arts and Foreign Affairs, who also chairs the Steering Committee for the National Art Gallery said, “A new National Art Gallery is timely at this juncture in Singapore’s transformation to become a global city of the arts. This architectural competition is just the first step, towards building a national institution that will be owned and valued by the community, and one in which all Singaporeans will be proud of.�

Proud? Do Singaporeans even know what is going on? Most of the people we’ve asked do not even know about the project. What National Art Gallery? Where is it going to be built? It seems even more worrying that only people like georges from American Samoa are making concerned remarks about Singapore’s latest art project:

Date: 2007-08-29 23:49:41

Subject: art

“I am a little sad that the City Hall is being turned into an art gallery. Being the place that saw the end of the Second World War and the Japanese surrender, you’d think that there would be more dignity and consideration given to such a historic place. At least keep the REAL surrender chamber untouched.…”

Georges’ sentiments, we are all sure, are sure to be felt by countless Singaporeans and Singaporean residents. With so much of Singapore’s architectural heritage already being bulldozed to make way for a brave new world, will this historic mantlepiece fall victim too? The brief for the design competition held by the Ministry of Information, Communication and the Arts (MICA), clearly required for entrants to “preserve the old and capture the new”; indicating some degree of concern for history. It may not suffice, because the MICA may be culprit of asking the wrong questions - maybe not “what should be built?”, but rather something more along the lines of “should it be built?” Another seemingly harmless fast-forward into the future, and the powers that be might have, again, skipped asking the people for opinions on things that really matter to the tiny island nation.

Is it true that nothing can stand in the way of a nation’s growth and transformation? Better still, it’s transformation into a global city of the Arts? We can be certain of one thing: Singapore will certainly look like one. As many a citizen might confess, sometimes the city itself has developed too fast for its own inhabitants. How many museums and galleries can Singaporeans stomach? You’d be glad to know that statistics show that more Singaporeans are visiting the museums in Singapore.

According to a Channel News Asia report as far back as January 2006, the National Heritage Board (NHB) said visitorship to the five national museums under its wing went up by 10 percent to some 900,000 visitors last year, compared to the previous year. This is a projected figure for April 2005 to March 2006, according to their financial year. Tourists make up 30 percent of the visitors, with the remaining 70 percent Singaporeans. It has set for itself a target of drawing 4.2 million visitors for the year 2010 for all 30 public and private museums in Singapore.

Still, the decision to make the Supreme Court and City Hall the subject of an A&A (Addition & Alteration) job is at its least an alarming one, and should send most preservationists into a state of shock and alarm. It’s not that we don’t appreciate a little carpe diem, it’s just that when you are dealing with something as solid as history, the last thing you’d want to do, is a little bit of renovation. Let’s hope they preserve the old.

JJ is the co-founder of 5ft Creatives and he is now a legal alien in the USA