Singapore Dreaming
A common complaint against Singapore’s built heritage is that despite the architectural awards we keep collecting, the city has no visual identity; no context, landscape, scale, or history. Single out the buildings of worth for ‘adaptive re-use’. Retrofit them. ‘Consult’ the public. Demolish the rest. Build new ones. The anxious dimensions of our most recent buildings reveal the insecurity behind the ambition of saying that ‘world-class’ is our house style. The most aggressive of these structures give off the giddy sensation that we are mainlining engineering, getting high on architecture. The sulky, pitiless skyscrapers in the financial district, once the crown jewels of the nation, are now overshadowed by the gleam of the newer, touristy Marina Bay skyline. There is something almost radioactive about the high vaulted ceilings and cooled conservatories, gleaming with pride. They are stately, unfatigued; a zoetrope of buildings in perpetual high-res.
Isn’t the subject of contemporary Singapore’s built landscape so jejune, so overworked? The relatively anodyne genre of watercolors depicting the Singapore skyline used to provoke my dismissive scorn. Visual tautologies of an over-determined skyline! I spurned the paintings of conserved shophouses as the hackneyed commodification of nostalgia for postcard consumption. The futuristic depictions of Marina Bay area would trigger me into an eye-rolling jeremiad on the ugliness of transfiguring dollars into steel. It goes without saying that I suffer that common cataract of the imagination whereby one’s country always seems unendurably boring, suffocating, and therefore more unremarkable than it actually is.
And yet, the art that burrows its way into my heart are often the ones I didn’t expect to move me. In Zhu Hong (朱宏)’s paintings, it’s as if I’m seeing the beauty in the city again. An architect by training, his watercolors and later oil paintings depict landmarks and streetscapes around the island. Rather than saying he captures our overdrawn city—the term implies taming, or emerging victorious over the built landscape— it feels truer to say that his works are loving acts of translations instead: they unfold our manufactured, overly-tidy urban environment into looser, more handmade rhythms.
The line, the line— Zhu Hong cares about the line, that humble lodestar of architecture. He loves the shape of things, the way they inhabit space. The reason his watercolors stir me: while his color blocking and mastery of value are faithful to the influence of the urban planner’s palette, the scenes he paints are transmuted by the friskiness of his scrawl. Pencil or pastel sketches dance across his watercolors: under- or over-drawings of scriggle, jot, and scratch. The shuttered blinds on casement windows or the detailing of iron-filigreed balconies? Curlicues and whorls, gyre and coil: artless and completely beguiling.
His paintings show me that a steady gaze at reality may not be at odds with seeing it aslant. Even as his daily ambition is a steadfast rendering of the built environment, there is a joyful improvisation that accompanies the vraisemblance: an offhandedness to the mimesis. Under Zhu Hong’s brush, the terracotta-tiled roofs of the shophouses in Tanjong Pagar soar and melt— all soft edges and roughly drawn. The neat forms of transcribed realism are scumbled with affective invention: familiar landmarks easily recognizable, but made strange through whimsical perspective. Outlines of scat, freestyle, and jazz.
Even though Zhu Hong is depicting the built environment, the energy of his work enacts a purposeful wandering. The city is less subject than verb: before the shops, the parallel-parked cars hum, idle. Overhead, the gangly skeletons of roof-mounted television antennas enact their aged monologues, and the criss-cross of telephone wires chatter their feckless lines of domestic drama. His fidelity is to color, to the temperature of the city as the texture of a place. Under his brush, Singapore’s pragmatic landscape is danced into arpeggios of movement, a cat’s redolent strut. Rather than the distinguished stateliness of architecture, what is actually translated onto the page is movement, sound— even though they aren’t depicted, I smell the exhaust coughed out of the back of a lorry, and hear the rattle of the enamel plate tossed down by the kopitiam uncle who cannot be arsed to make eye contact.
Like other local artists Lim Cheng Hoe and Lim Tze Peng, Zhu Hong paints, partly driven by an anticipatory nostalgia for scenes that will, without doubt, disappear. In his small, modest collection, Crossroads (路口), which houses a number of his watercolors, he muses on how, on a trip back to China, his country of birth, he felt an overwhelming sense of “fold” (折) upon realizing that many of the buildings he grew up with have been demolished, and now exist only in his memories. After returning to Singapore, he renewed his intention to preserve the country’s non-famous streets and landmarks such as the different lorongs in Geylang. Many of Zhu Hong’s works foreground the familiar green road signs of street names: Syed Alwi Road, Koon Seng Road, Joo Chiat Place… almost as if he’s anxious about their posterity. I’d like to believe these streets will survive as they are; tough, resolute, their human scale far from the designed-for-show brilliance of the city made for tourists. But their tenancy isn’t secure. Who knows when a Straits Times headline will read that the area is to be redone and “given new life”?
A city is the sum of the interior lives of its citizens, so Zhu Hong’s allegiance is to the places people gather, and the things they look at. He takes what the mind already knows and what the eye tends to skip over, and infuses them with a thronging, libidinal energy: the blue signpost with the white arrow that signals a one-way street, or the humdrum green, white, and red neon sign of 7-Eleven convenience stores. The clean competency of a white and red three-diamond logo of a Mistubishi Electric signboard demonstrates his fealty to the manufacturing and distributing industries as an essential part of the urban sprawl. The variety and art of restaurant signboards— evidence of Singapore’s omnifarious gustative appetites— are meticulously depicted, and the viewer encounters the pleasurable shock of recognition seeing beloved billboards such as Swee Choon Dim Sum or the machismo of Carlsberg beer’s emerald green. In Zhu Hong’s work, a taxonomist’s love meets an artist’s panache.
Instead of the kinetic spontaneity of his watercolors, Zhu Hong’s later oil paintings employ clean, bare, more reductive vocabulary. The puckish caprice of his loose plein air watercolor compositions has transmogrified: the peripeteia of his watercolors is instead given over to the imposing reach of his oils, and the subject matter of the cityscape now takes on a certain matter-of-factness. Without the playful pencil scritch and drippy translucence of his watercolors that make his buildings soar, his oils carry a more lachrymose weight of care, of responsibility. The buildings seem more solid, less dream-like.
Intriguingly, it is the uninteresting aspects of the environment that Zhu Hong redeems. An oil painting I keep returning to depicts the built scene at a junction. What made me fall in love with it was its curious spotlight on something I have never given more than the necessary amount of thought to: one of the pervasive and unexceptional blue, orange, and yellow parking signboards that litter this crowded little island. Carpark signboards, with their dull utilitarian information! Their dead-eyed workaday translation of information: coupon or electronic parking fee? Is this area open to parking on Sundays and public holidays? Are we allowed to park here at night? Zhu Hong’s unusual foregrounding of this commonplace roadside artifact interrupts the scene and makes the reader blink at the chutzpah. Ho-hum or bravo? Nothing, it seems, is too humdrum to omit.
In the top right of the same painting, there are swathes of casual white and grey squiggles gathered harum-scarum in a bunch. The squiggles and whirls obey no pattern, yet I recognized them instantly— they alluded to something, were haptic echoes of a familiar world. These haphazard scratches of grey paint, the wiggles crude yet tenderly detailed, were visual shorthands for the iconic concrete spiral staircases at the back of old shophouses in Tanjong Pagar; their sculptural shape so sedulously studied and documented on Instagram and in the soft-focused, pink-tinged stills by photographer nguan. The wriggle, flourish and curve! There is a certain pathos in these twisting forms: they seem playful as well as stymied, and document either an expressionist’s touch or a local’s exasperation. I found in these simple flourishes a crabbed independence: an architect paying homage to the built environment around him while configuring a country of his own.
Zhu Hong’s paintings depict the fickle threshold between place and home. We could read his works as crystallizations of acute anxiety— of constriction and suffocation— or as gentle, ironic contentedness. “Starry Night” is an oil painting of the familiar silhouette of the Church of Our Lady of Lourdes against the night sky. But take a second look. The stars? Chicken-scratched five-pointers a four-year-old could do. Even this I find inspiring. The starry scribbles evince a distinctive droll élan: a side-eye, a shrugged shoulder— who cares about the night sky? It is architecture Zhu Hong wants; his insistence upon the materiality of the first church for Tamil Catholics in Singapore, its belfry and spire, its porte-cochere and steeple. Skyscrapers in the background? Unimportant. His attention is directed toward the church’s white Neo-Gothic walls and how they contrast with its orange-glazed tile roof. He wants to see how its cornices, crockets, and moldings gleam against the dark tropical sky.
Maybe Zhu Hong’s paintings of existing urban scenes are too recent to be meaningful. Perhaps his work will only have weight in retrospect when these settings are gone, celebrated through the wistful lens of nostalgia. Still, I am drawn to this out-of-time artist who has his eye on the now. His work channels the dynamic and fraught relationship between the cityscape itself and the rarefied world of pure form. The original built heritage, even as it is depicted, evaporates and reappears, like condensed milk, more solid after its evaporation. Now, occasionally when I look at the familiar streetscapes and buildings, I feel the stirrings of a creeping proprietorial warmth. And I know Art (this huge, meaningless noun!) has worked its small enchantments once again, because this time something imperceptible has shifted, my proud little ironies are melting away, just the tiniest bit, and now I see them differently: the sun-burst moldings of Maxwell Chambers, the pintu pagars on Emerald Hill, the never-ending spiral ramps of multi-story carparks, the aged streetscapes of Simpang Bedok…
Publisher and writer Peter Schoppert wryly notes, “Singapore is about routes, not roots: an intersection point of the trajectories of a thousand journeys. Singapore is the sum of a hundred diaspora: at night, it seems everyone is dreaming about somewhere else.” Zhu Hong’s paintings raise a subject we brooding inhabitants may not like to entertain: our built heritage as homestead. And really, while flipping through his watercolors, I had the terrible thought that perhaps this city that I had deemed so claustrophobic and shorn of history is home. That these shophouses and malls where I go to eat and shop are part of me. That even as my urban landscape is unforgivingly scrubbed over and retrofitted, I am housed by these promenades and schooled by these streets. And that since this sense of place is inscribed within me, perhaps it was time to stop running away; however ‘staying’ might look like.
Through Zhu Hong’s furious wiggles of paint and freedom with his brush, I arrive at the surprising conviction that Singapore’s built heritage can be more interesting and complicated than what I’d imagined possible. I surrender to his way of looking at this country, as it is: over-determined yet surprising, clumsy but detailed, straight-jacketed but also full of life, and am reminded of art critic and poet James Schuyler’s line, “Look now. It will never be more fascinating.”