The Tiong Barhu Series

EXCERPT FROM "NEIGHBORS: A TIONG BAHRU SERIES

Published in Contemporary Arts as Political Practice in Singapore. Edited by Wernmei Yong Ade and Lim Lee Ching. Palgrave Macmillan, 2017.  

From the Conclusion: 

This project brought home to us just how much lived experience in Singapore requires that we make personal negotiations between its inborn transience and its historical permanence of place. Place index finger to index finger, and thumb to thumb, and two hands form the shape of the city-state. Inside this diamond play the contending forces of permanence and change. Like other island cities built in service of trade and empire, such as Manhattan or Hong Kong, Singapore bares traces of the contending forces of continuous change and assimilation at war with the physical limitations of its island footprint. Since the city’s founding, this “little red dot” on the map has seen migrations and occupations and near ceaseless change. New faces come to do business. New buildings rise above the skyline. Borrowed language inflects local slang. These are symptoms of city life organized around modern capitalism. Though Singapore occupies a fixed place on the map, its people have responded to shifts in global power, to the changing winds of trade, and to the ceaseless flow of goods and capitol of modern commerce. The city assimilates change. Thus this perpetual change gains permanence: Singapore has always been this way. Singapore may always remain a place of the present with a shift pace of change. These two constants attended our small study of Singaporean lived experience in a small neighborhood: transience and permanence.

Tiong Bahru embodies this tenuous binary as an old place in a new city. From the neighboring condominiums that tower above the district on three sides, Tiong Bahru looks like a small white tooth, a gap forever preserved in the changing skyline. The residents who choose, by accident or design, to spend their time in history’s gap, rather than in the towers that surround it, are active participants in a performance of taste, and their renewed attraction draws attention to the permanence of an historical place. Like the bounded-ness of the island nation itself, the floor-plan of a historic building offers a strict template within which to fit such a wide variety of identities and cultures and styles and tastes. Admiration of the neighborhood’s historical character is performed in day to day acts of homage: retaining a tile wall or an original light fixture; purchasing antique knick-knacks in the back room of the Books Actually; stopping the Satay man as he pushes his hot cart through the front garden; keeping a rare song bird on your balcony. These actions perform a complex negotiation between past and present: by moving in, upgrading the kitchens and bathrooms, and joining into the daily lifestyle, new residents embody change. To older generations, new residents are the agents of the transience and change they sense around them; to new residents, the older generations offer the comforting sense of connectedness to the past. Though they work together to celebrate and preserve the historical character of Tiong Bahru, these everyday actions inexorably bring change.

Photography has a unique claim to these two modes of experience—transience and permanence.  Every photographer shares a modus operandi: to make still and permanent a transient moment. To shoot a photograph is to encapsulate one moment, chosen and preserved from a lifetime of change and flux. We started out to see if we could capture one moment in the life of a neighborhood undergoing a process of rapid gentrification and change; instead, by choosing photography, we interacted with that balance between permanence and transience. Our conversations brought these two poles of experience together. Even as we talked about the neighborhood changing, with each photograph our neighbors and we pushed pins in the map, marking forever our place and our moment, in Tiong Bahru’s history. “We lived here, then” these photographs say. To respond to an advertisement to have photographers come to your home and photograph you: this is an act is of self-making, of writing the self into the historical record. We all want to stand up and be counted as one of the insiders, at home in the flux, an “original” in a hip neighborhood, and an agent of change. As we look at these images again, from our studio in New York, on the other side of the world, I can hear myself joining this silent refrain: “We lived here, then. We lived there when it mattered. This is our record of that time, that place, those people. We were one of them, too.”  I too have a stake in this story.

December 2013

Beacon, New York