Disobedience Travels
by Chieng Wei Shieng
Growing up in a Chinese family in Singapore meant I was often taught to be risk-adverse and be in close proximity with obedience, a responsibility mandated for every good citizen to achieve happiness, prosperity, and progress for our nation. But being overseas for almost ten years of further studies now—first to London and now in Hong Kong—has led me to realise that disobedience to, and resistance against aspects of society’s status quo are as crucial in and to the very paths of happiness. In London, I saw students peacefully marching (it was really more like walking) on the streets for professors to have better pay; boycotts were carried out against companies that violated human dignity; and appeals were made to public art institutions to refuse funding from petroleum companies. In Hong Kong, students and the wider public took to the streets, as well as through arts and social media platforms to demonstrate against the erosion of the “one country, two systems” principle, a movement stemming from a long-seated mistrust towards the country’s leadership, judiciary system, and human rights protection.
These different contexts with their varied agendas and expressions of resistance reveal that disobedience also lends to potential happiness and equity. In suspending our assumptions of the suffix “dis” as a negative connotation, antithesis or absence of obedience, we may begin to look at the relationship between obedience and disobedience in a less mutually exclusive manner. Perhaps rather than asking who or what we are obedient and disobedient to, we may start to wonder what imaginations, knowledges, and desires shape and contest notions of obedience and disobedience. If obedience seems to be the wide and easy (or at least easier) path to society’s happiness, how could we better understand the narrow path of disobedience(s) that struggles and resists against happiness in society, and those on this path? What kinds of communities and solidarities cohere around “obedience” and “disobedience”? In short, what does disobedience do, and where could it potentially bring us?
The arts in Singapore are often seen as spaces, practices and communities of disobedience and resistance, especially in view of its tenuous relationship to the state. This relationship finds echoes through its many monikers—the desire to be a “Renaissance City” and “global city for the arts,” being termed “cultural desert,” “Disneyland with the death penalty” and even “illiberal democracy.” In comparison to its other Southeast Asian counterparts, Singapore is known today for its abundant wealth, generous budget allocations disbursed through the National Arts Council (NAC) and burgeoning infrastructure for the arts. However, relationships are often complicated where money is involved. In this case, it manifests in forms of (self)censorship, conscious or otherwise; reduced or removed funding; sometimes unceremonious cancellations of shows and removal of artworks, and perhaps also lends to precarious but seemingly-necessary obligations between artists and the state.
Ursula Le Guin’s short story, The Ones Who Walk Away From Omelas tells of the exceptional city of Omelas—filled with intelligent, mature and happy people. The secret to Omelas’ success? A child, hidden away in the basement of one of the beautiful buildings in Omelas. This feeble-minded child who remembered sunlight and its mother’s voice did not start out this way, but became an imbecile through fear, malnutrition and neglect. While it used to scream for help, the child now spoke less often, save for an “eh-haa, eh-haa” whining. The people of Omelas knew of this child and wanted to help, but felt there was nothing they could do. After all, they understood that their happiness—the beauty of their city, the health of their children and good life—depended wholly on this child’s misery: if he was cleaned, fed and comforted, the prosperity, beauty, and delight of Omelas would wither and be destroyed...
Having the opportunity to interview T:>Works’ current artistic director, Dr Ong Keng Sen, I was curious as to how he navigated the Singapore arts scene. With a list of accolades and experience in the arts and a background in law, one may think it gets (or has gotten) easier for him to navigate and chart new terrains around the tenuous, love-hate relationship between the arts and the state over the years. Immersed in such a context, Ong reflects on how he navigates, “I can't speak for others but for myself, I do think twice before I take the handout. We have to acknowledge that Singapore is a one-employer country, which is the government.” In his pursuit of thinking about the arts, censorship, and disobedience, Ong shares, “I suppose I don't begin by thinking about who has inspired me from within the art world. Something that’s framed my thinking a lot was my background in constitutional law. Because of that, my whole relationship is with the Constitution. Together with all the case studies and different people who have fought constitutional law, including activists like Rosa Parks who refused to step to the back of the bus, these are the people who have inspired me.”
“At the same time, enlisting in the army changed me. That was the first moment that my body was placed into a very strict discipline, and the background of National Service* made me question, ‘Why do we have to do this? Why do we become disciplined for something quite abstract?’”
One of T:>Works’ new mission statement is to investigate current urgencies of being located in Singapore through different creative expressions in the public sphere. Can you share some of these urgencies with us?
There is a danger that we become too isolated. For example, if you look at the other Asian artists around us, they have no money, and there is mostly no state support. Of course, if we have state support there are issues. The state becomes some kind of financial sponsor, and of course there are obligations. The state becomes your patron in a way. Also, because of our very strict rules of defamation, with our justice system and the courts, I think many newspapers are afraid to touch us in many ways. When the New York Times was talking about Asian and Pacific countries looking at zero Covid-19 cases, they don’t really dare to mention Singapore. So Singapore becomes a blind spot… I feel like we then actually become disconnected in some kind of bubble. And I think this is something T:>Works is concerned about.
Singapore thrives on saying that it's different—“We are different,” “What an economic miracle”, all of these exceptions. It then becomes a kind of a situation where if you're so exceptional then you're just not interesting, For example, places like Saudi Arabia, Qatar, and Dubai are so exceptional because they're so rich, but do they have anything to say to the rest of the world? Perhaps not.
So the question is, what is valued? I think that there's a whole question of what the set of values is that Singapore wants to premise itself on and to develop in the arts. Obedience is a good set of values for example, but is that going to make you into, or bring you to Documenta? It’s unlikely.
"Sometimes people who visit the child do not go home. They walk down the street alone, subsequently straight out of Omelas through the beautiful gates, into the darkness. While leaving the city of happiness to an unknown place is unimaginable to the people of Omelas. The ones who walk away seem to know where they are going…"
Those of us as artists or involved in culture and critical discourse constantly think about power, vis-à-vis the state. Has the state become an unhealthy obsession for some of us, such that we can only think disobedience vis-à-vis oppression, but miss out on the microsites of resistance in the everyday that take place in different communities?
I think that this conversation with the state is an energy suck because the conversations have been so skewed to thinking about a national space and the nation. This question of moving into micro-spaces is really the only space that's left for us. They create a certain kind of utopic space, but it's not really going to change the deep realities. It’s a little bit like—we may be safe in the neighbourhood, but this neighbourhood is still existing inside Singapore. There’s a certain point where we perhaps will reach the wall again… I think when we realise that this space and the state need not be the only space, then of course we go into these other organic micro spaces and continue to travel with it, as far as we can, and perhaps there will be some change. But it's hard to really see it as that. I think those statements like “I want to make political change” are no longer possible.
Is there space then to be shrewd, cunning, or subtle in artistic practices and expressions, obscuring and yet just hinting towards something that's uncomfortable?
I feel that in today's age, our lines of flight—according to [French philosophers] Deleuze and Guattari—already pierce through Singapore. I don't need to be subtle and find a way to say what I want to say in Singapore. In a way, Singapore means less and less in a strange way: if you're the recalcitrant child who wants to scream and shout and insist on your way, I'm just going to leave and go to the next house or the next road. I don't see you anymore. This for me is my disobedience personally, because my lines of flight take me away from all these artificial illusions that Singapore is the only place to be… I think that this disobedience outside of Singapore is more powerful than disobedience in Singapore, because outside, it's completely destroying its pretensions of being a democracy. For me, this is where the lines bring me elsewhere. I think it's a very different conversation from that of Kuo Pao Kun’s, thirty years ago, where he had to write in this metaphor of a little girl and the funny old tree. Nobody cares about that anymore because your garden is more than Singapore… I think that this whole question of disobedience needs to be radically rethought—that disobedience is not just about being in Singapore.
"Those that walk away from the happiness of Omelas do not come back. To walk away from happiness—to be against forms of power concealed under signs of happiness—does not necessarily mean becoming unhappy. Rather, walking away and deviating from happiness means scouring for and opening up new terrains of possibilities—the imagining and working out of what is possible, when possibility seems to have been negated or lost before it can even be recognised."
How would you envision art and its role to disobedience and resistance?
I think the great thing about art is that it remains behind. I don’t mean artworks, but I'm talking about performance, and performance remains. Rosa Park’s resistance, where she refused [to give up a seat to a white man] is a good instance. Her refusal became a performance that remains, we then take on that same action again of refusing to leave—"I’m here, you have to evict me.”
I'm interested in how art remains and creates potentials for the future. And in the traditional sense of what is useful. People are increasingly saying that perhaps in this useless thing called art, there is some humanism that’s important. I tend to keep revisiting this concept—that in this “useless” thing and this “useless” space, we can then become emotional again. And in this useless thing where there is no economic benefit, maybe even no communitarian benefit, there is some different value. So perhaps by acknowledging that it's useless, we then arrive somewhere else. Like when we say, a mother's love for a child is just personal. It's nothing “useful” beyond the mother and child. But that profundity of the emotion or the acts that they do for each other gives value.
I think of it as a wasteland of art. I feel that as long as we think that art has financial value, we buy into neoliberalism, but when we see a wasteland, there's nothing there. And in that nothingness, you make something. Nothing is not nothing, it’s something else. I think the wasteland attracts dreamers and thinkers whom nobody values in a larger sense of things. Thinkers who can think of how to get 30% more food by the year 2030 are going to be sucked up by the government. But the thinkers who are thinking about other things will be in this wasteland, including magicians, alchemists, all sorts of different people.
Following the example of Rosa Parks, what are possible ways that we, the everyday person in Singapore, could be shrewdly disobedient or resistant, not so much to deal solely with censorship, but to allow time for certain varieties of resistances to gain traction and solidarity among different groups?
I think the strongest thing that Singaporeans lack is solidarity, because everyone wants to attack everyone. If you can just develop more solidarities between different factions and try to form more coalitions, it will become very different. There is a Zapatista* saying where it talks about resistance as building up a world. I think that's a very strong message when you see resistance as that—you’re building a different world, where your world is included, but it's not the only world. The resistance has to be built through solidarities. It’s not an us-and-them issue.
I think the reason why many people support the government today in Singapore is because the government is aligned with their personal agenda of making money… the man on the street, I feel, is more likely to support the government because the financial benefit is that is that your apartment is $1 million, and the financial benefit means that because the property value is high, you are not poor.
To the common man on the street, I think that art is really very unimportant to them. Because if we can't even get a law changed about, let’s say 377A**, I think we can't go anywhere near to discuss about art and society. So we have to go in through other ways of working… building solidarities from outside the art world. That's a message for the art world and at the same time it's a message for the people on the street who are not interested in art at all.
End Notes
1. National Service is a mandatory conscription and duty that every male Singaporean citizen and permanent resident must undertake upon attaining the age of 18.
2. The Zapatistas' Dictum: A world in which many worlds would co-exist. "Because we are all equal, we have the right to difference."
3. The Zapatistas taught many of us that to change the world as it is may be an impossible task, but to build a world in which many worlds would co-exist is a possible task." – Walter Mignolo, Decolonial Thinker.
4. Section 377A is a Singaporean law criminalising sex between consenting male adults. This was added to the penal code in the 1930s.
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