Evolution of protest art in Singapore : examining protest tactics in Brother Cane and Don’t Give Money to the Arts

• Main Author: Goh, Wei Hao
• Other Authors: Walid Jumblatt Bin Abdullah
• Format: Final Year Project
• Language: English
• Published: Nanyang Technological University 2020
• Subjects: Social sciences::Political science::Political institutions::Asia::Singapore; Visual arts and music::Art history
• Online Access: https://hdl.handle.net/10356/138850
• Institution: Nanyang Technological University

This paper contributes to our study of art as political discourse through its focus on protest art in Singapore. Its aims are to produce the first definition of the art form and identify how protest art evolved throughout 1990s Singapore. This is achieved through a comparative analysis of two protest artworks, Brother Cane (1994) by Josef Ng and Don’t Give Money to the Arts (1995) by Tang Da Wu, that is split into two sections. First, I established the political and art historical context for our study of the artworks by examining how cultural hegemony is created and maintained in Singapore in the 1990s. I found that the four key hegemony-making apparatuses used by the Singapore government are cultural institutions, physical spaces, public funding and censorship tools. Next, I identified the different tactics used in both artworks, focusing on how Tang managed to escape penalisation for dissenting performance. I argue that Tang’s performance differed in three important ways: the aesthetic techniques used, the site of resistance, and the control of documentation. The methods and findings in this paper present a novel framework for future research on the intersection between politics and the arts in Singapore.