This book covers Singapore's key arts policies and art institutions which have shaped the cultural landscape of the country from the 1950s to the present.The scholars and experts in this volume critically assess arts policies and arts institutions to collectively provide an overview of how arts and culture have been deployed by the state. The chapters are arranged chronologically to cover milestone events from the forging of 'Malayan culture'; the government's 'anti-yellow culture' campaign; the use of 'culture' for tourism; the setting up of the Advisory Council on Arts and Culture, the Renaissance City Report, the setting up of the School of the Arts, and others.Putting to rest the notion that Singapore is a 'cultural desert', this volume is valuable reading for students of cultural policy, policy makers who seek an understanding of Singapore's cultural trajectory, and for international readers interested in Singapore's arts and cultural policy.

The taken-for-granted assumption about the place of the arts in liberal or social democratic states and the role of the arts in supporting or opposing the ideological work of government and non-government institutions is been the issue of this book. The challenges posed by the state to the arts and by the arts to the state, focusing on several transformations of the interrelations between state and commercial arts policies in the current era. These ongoing challenges include the control of repressive tolerance, complicity with and resistance to state power, and the commoditization of the arts, including their accommodation to market and state apparatuses. The contributors tackle social and cultural policy and practice in the arts as well as connections between national states and dissenting art from a range of genres.

What Can Space Do for the Arts?; What Can Arts Do for Space?; and What Can Arts and Space Do for the Community? Through the lenses of creative placemaking and neighbourhood arts ecology, Trivic re-examines the position of community arts in the spatial, social and cultural landscape. Emphasising urban design considerations of complex interdependent relationships between arts, space and people, he re-explores the role of community-based arts activities in shaping urban neighbourhoods, enriching public life and empowering communities. This is divided into an analysis of spatial opportunities for the arts in the neighbourhood; and a study of the impacts of bringing arts and culture activities into local neighbourhoods and communities, using Singapore’s nodal approach as a developed case study. Using spatial opportunity analysis, the book demonstrates a step-by-step procedure for identification and evaluation of the neighbourhood spaces that work best for community arts and culture activities. In the study of impacts, Trivic proposes a holistic framework for capturing and evaluating the non-economic impacts of arts and culture, on space, society, well-being, education and participation. An invaluable template for arts event organisers and artists to assess and maximise the outcomes of their creative efforts in local neighbourhoods, as well as an important reading for students and practitioners of neighbourhood planning, urban design, and creative placemaking.

This book is the first overall study of research-based art practices in Southeast Asia. Its objective is to examine the creative and mutual entanglement of academic and artistic research; in short, the Why, When, What and How of research-based art practices in the region. In Southeast Asia, artists are increasingly engaged in research-based art practices involving academic research processes. They work as historians, archivists, archaeologists or sociologists in order to produce knowledge and/or to challenge the current established systems of knowledge production. As artists, they can freely draw on academic research methodologies and, at the same time, question or divert them for their own artistic purpose. The outcome of their research findings is exhibited as an artwork and is not published or presented in an academic format. This book seeks to demonstrate the emancipatory dimension of these practices, which contribute to opening up our conceptions of knowledge and of art, bestowing a new and promising role to the artists within the society.

This book provides a comprehensive examination of the contemporary English-language theatre field in Singapore. It describes Singapore theatre as a politically dynamic field that is often a site for struggle and resistance against state orthodoxy, and how the cultural policies of the ruling People’s Action Party (PAP) have shaped Singapore theatre. The book traces such cultural policies and their impact from the early 1960s, and shows how the PAP used theatre – and arts and culture more widely – as a key part of its nation building programme. Terence Chong argues that this diverse theatre community not only comes into regular conflict with the state, but often collaborates with it - depending on the rewards at stake, not to mention the assortment of intra-communal conflicts as different practitioners and groups vie for the same resources. It goes on to explore how new forms of theatre, especially English-language avant garde theatre, represented resistance to such government cultural control; how the government often exerts its power ‘behind-the-scenes’ to preserve its moral legitimacy; and conversely how middle class theatre practitioners’ resistance to state power is strongly influenced by class and cultural capital. Based on extensive original research including interviews with theatre directors and other theatre professionals, the book provides a wealth of information on theatre in Singapore overall, and not just on theatre-state relations.