Cultural Policies in East Asia

Dynamics between the State, Arts and Creative Industries

H. Lee, L. Lim, H. Lee, L. Lim

• Publisher: Palgrave Macmillan
• Year: 2014
• Print ISBN: 9781137327765
• eBook ISBN: 9781137327772
• Topic: Politics & International Relations
• Subtopic: Art General
• Index: Politics & International Relations

This book provides a detailed snapshot of cultural policies in China, Japan, Singapore, South Korea and Taiwan. In addition to an historical overview of the culture-state relationships in East Asia, it provides an analysis of contemporary developments occurring in the regions' cultural policies and the challenges they are facing.

Part I

Cultural Identity Formation and Nation Building

1

Bureaucratic Imaginations in the Global City: Arts and Culture in Singapore

Terence Chong¹

Among the many tensions in Singapore, there are few as pervasive as that between the economic desire to be a global city and the primordial need to be a nation. The island’s history as a colonial entrepôt and its unexpected independence in 1965 have been discursively synthesized by the postcolonial ruling People’s Action Party (PAP) into a durable narrative of a country that cannot survive should it ever flounder as a city open to the world. Being a global city is therefore no mere expression of state vanity but a deep-seated belief among the ruling elite that the little nation, bereft of natural resources, can only thrive if it is plugged into the international market. Speaking in 1972 to the Foreign Press Club, S. Rajaratnam, who first used the term ‘global city’ about the country, explained, ‘once you see Singapore as a Global City the problem of hinterland becomes unimportant because as a Global City, the world is its hinterland’ (Chan and Ul Haq 2007, p. 217).

During the early industrializing years, this tension was, to a large extent, cushioned by rapid economic growth, material affluence, and the visible expansion of the middle class. In the last decade, however, it has bubbled to the surface of public debates with increasing frequency. The widening wage gap, uneven distribution of wealth, and stagnant income of the working class have animated this tension in a variety of ways. From apparently disparate issues such as liberal immigration, the overwhelming presence of global capital, citizens playing second fiddle to foreigners, to the loss of cultural heritage, the interests of the nation are often quickly and starkly brought into diametric opposition to those of the global city. This is because the nation is perceived as exclusive, reserved for citizens who have deep attachment to the land and community while the global city, necessarily inclusive by nature, is cosmopolitan, fluid and dynamic. Here the nation is only deemed ‘authentic’ if it is successfully constructed as ‘timeless’ and ‘pure,’ stable and constant, in contrast to the impersonal and capricious nature of neo-capitalism and modernity (Duara 1998). This timelessness is where citizens can find security in the collective memory and go on to form emotional bonds. In short, the nation is where citizens’ lives find meaning, while the city is where they make a living. There are few places where the Singapore state’s attempts to reconcile these tensions are more apparent than in the arts and culture.

Unlike today, the arts and culture had a straightforward role during the early years of independence. A host of pressing national priorities such as unemployment, housing and infrastructural needs, as well as defense and healthcare development occupied the postcolonial government. Consequently, the arts and culture were relegated primarily to the ideological task of nation building. Whether to create a ‘civilized’ citizenry or to play out official fantasies of multiracialism, the arts and culture were tasked in the early years to visualize and perform a distinct national identity for the masses of a young nation (Chong 2010). It became de rigueur to use the arts to idealize racial harmony, with ethnic costume dances performed by students in schools or in the national day parades. As the then Minister of State for Culture, LEE Khoon Choy, declared just a year after independence, ‘The days of Art for Art’s sake are over. Artists should play an integral part in our effort to build a multiracial, multi-lingual, and multi-religious society where every citizen has a place under the sun.’ (Lee 1966) More vividly, JEK Yeun Tong, Minister of Culture, observed in 1972,

Our national culture should therefore not only reflect the culture of our forbearers but should also express and embody the new character and personality of Singapore’s modern society – its dynamism, its industrialism, its multiracialism and its ceaseless endeavours to create a better milieu for all. A modern Singapore should portray this hope and optimism of the people, whether these be expressed in dance or song, art, literature or drama. (Jek 1972)

This nation-building agenda continues to shape national policies on arts and culture to this day.

Since the 1990s, however, these policies have become increasingly layered with economic objectives in order to achieve global city status. In practical terms, this meant developing the city-state into an international base for multinational companies in manufacture and service, as well as establishing its credentials as a regional, if not global, centre for education, medical services and finance. To achieve this vision, the ruling elite began to actively compare and contrast the city-state with top-tier cities like London and New York, and second-tier ones like Sydney, Hong Kong, Edinburgh and Melbourne. As the national economy reached the limits of cheap labor and low-skilled manufacturing, the ruling elite’s desire for greater cultural sophistication grew to complement the economic imperative to move up the international division of labor.

Tailing these broad economic efforts was the arts and culture. A relatively new area in Singapore’s globalizing thrust is the arts, culture and entertainment. In this area the government envisions Singapore as a ‘Renaissance City,’ a place where local, regional and international arts and culture are displayed and consumed and a ‘cosmopolitan city plugged into the international network where the world’s talents and ideas can converge and multiply’ (Chang 2000, p. 818). This marked a profound shift in the way bureaucrats viewed arts and culture in Singapore.

This chapter looks at the bureaucratic imagination of art through the lenses of various arts reports. It defines the bureaucratic imagination as the application of art and its imagined qualities as a solution to economic or socio-political challenges thrown up by the global city-nation binary and demonstrates the evolving mechanisms of imagination over the years. It proceeds to examine the Advisory Council on Culture and the Arts Report (1989) and Renaissance City Report (2000) as key documents. As documents of bureaucratic imagination, they reveal the ideological role assigned to arts and culture and the romantic interpretations that bureaucrats held to, both of which were ultimately limiting. The chapter goes on to examine the Arts and Culture Strategic Review Report (2012), and demonstrates how it has conjured up imaginations of ‘community.’ It will conclude with examples of challenges to this imagination from the artistic community.

The bureaucrat and the bureaucratic imagination

The Singaporean bureaucrat is the most important art critic in the country. Perhaps more than any other cultural intermediary, the bureaucrat has been the most powerful and influential when it comes to defining art and circumscribing its role. In light of the relatively small pool of artists and public intellectuals, as well as the particularities of the power structure across the arts and cultural landscape, the bureaucrat has emerged as the nation’s chief visionary for the arts. This is not surprising in light of the city’s characterization as an ‘administrative state’ (Chan 1975) where ‘a skilled, efficient bureaucracy with an emphasis on scientific management’ (Ortmann 2010, p. 64), steeped in developmentalist values, has its hands on the levels of power. Indeed, the intimacy between the bureaucrat and the politician stems from the PAP’s concerted effort to change and shape the values of the bureaucrats during the early years of independence in order to establish a close working relationship when the threat of communism was tangible (Chan 1975). The result of this close working relationship is ‘a cohesive power elite which is made up of the political elite, the bureaucrats and the select professional elite’ (Chen 1978, p. 9).

The state’s elitist selection process has ensured the convergence of well-educated individuals in the higher ranks of the bureaucracy, many of whom have rotating portfolios. Arts-related portfolios include regulatory bodies like the Media Development Authority (MDA), arts funding agencies like the National Arts Council (NAC), and the Ministry of Culture, Community and Youth, the senior management of which consist of well qualified and highly competent career civil servants, many of whom are government scholarship recipients who may or may not have an interest in the arts. Very often, the absence of artists or academics is compensated through the co-option process, where the latter are invited to sit on committees or resource panels for their domain expertise.

Consequently, the history of arts and culture in Singapore has been less defined by artistic periods or philosophical movements than it has by policy announcements, government reports, and key speeches by top bureaucrats and politicians (see Chong 2010). As a result, bureaucratic slogans like ‘global city for the arts’ and ‘renaissance city,’ and state documents like Report of the Censorship Review Committee (1992) have become more efficient signposts in the nation’s cultural history than artistic styles and movements. Collectively, these have served as the platform for the bureaucratic imagination of arts and culture.

The bureaucratic imagination is defined as the selective and rudimentary application of art and its imagined qualities as a creative solution to perceived economic or socio-political challenges in order to reconcile the interests of the global city and nation. It is an imagination conjured up from the deeply ingrained conventions of the bureaucrat, such as problem-identification and problem-solving, the harnessing of resources for maximum gain within the frame of scientific management guided by a developmentalist logic. While open to external challenge, the bureaucratic imagination may reflect some sort of elitist triumph in the bureaucrats’ ability to temporarily transcend their field, or in corporate lingo, ‘think outside the box,’ in order to engage with so-called ‘stake-holders’ – usually taken to mean artists. After all, the narrow focus of the bureaucracy and its commitment toward specific outcomes (see Weber 1991) may raise its consciousness of its own limitations, prompting the co-option of experts and practitioners into its fold when preparing major arts reports or policy consultation, thus enabling bureaucrats to unlearn the stiffness of ‘bureaucratese’ and to pick up the softer patois of arts and artists.

The bureaucrat has imagined art in several different ways through the decades. Art may be imagined as a social unifier. Here, art is seen to possess the ability to bring different people together, and this is most obvious in its exploitation as a vehicle to promote racial or social harmony through cultural performances. Art may also be imagined as a great ennobler where moral aesthetics are called forth to nurture a more gracious and cultured society. In other words, ‘Music, painting, drama, literature and a concern for beauty generally are what transforms a prosperous society into a civilized society.’ (The Mirror 28 December 1972) Art is also imagined to be a national anchor that keeps Singaporeans emotionally rooted to the country: ‘Culture and the arts are important to us because they enhance our quality of life, contribute to our sense of national identity, and add to the attractiveness of our country’ (Renaissance City Report 2000, p. 4). It is believed to be a medium from which national identity and culture can be explored and expressed, resulting in a more anchored citizenry in an age of globalization. National culture and identity are presumed to be inclusive and unproblematic experiences without the messy cultural politics that arise from tensions between ethnic majority and minorities.

Art can be imagined as offering creative solutions to economic challenges. Whether in the service of creative and design industries or the knowledge-based economy, the promotion of art and culture has become synonymous with the promotion of creativity, inventiveness or innovation: ‘A thriving arts scene also generates the economic benefit of engendering a more creative people and a more attractive global city. These economic imperatives add impetus for greater state support for the arts.’ (Renaissance City Report 2000, p. 47) Finally, art is imagined as a cosmopolitan lens that allows the parochial citizen to rise above local and immediate interests in order to be endowed with a global perspective on various issues. Art here is believed to imbue citizens with a global sensitivity that embraces the values of inclusivity and diversity, both of which are key for global city ambitions.

The bureaucratic imagination of art occupies a privileged position for three reasons. Broadly and historically speaking, the calculated move to form a nation from disparate immigrant identities led the young postcolonial government to practice ‘selective amnesia’ in order to exorcize ‘ancestral ghosts’ (Hong and Huang 2010). This meant that the civilizations of China and India, from which the two main immigrant groups came, were deemed unsuitable as cultural or artistic resources by the postcolonial elite, for fear they would undermine the multicultural nation building project. Without these civilizations to tap on, art and culture in Singapore were more readily re-directed and co-opted by the state.

Another reason was the way very few public intellectuals or artists challenged state definitions of art and culture. The pace of industrialization during the early years, the crackdown on political dissidents, and the efficient delivery of public services all combined to offer little room for intellectual or ideological challenge, whether in the form of aesthetics or politics, to the ruling PAP. This often left the PAP ruling elite as arbiters of taste and morality. The postcolonial government invariably gravitated toward politically conservative art. Master bureaucrat GOH Keng Swee, at the opening of the Japanese Gardens in 1973, lamented:

I refer to the widespread popularity of the barbarous form of music produced by the steel guitar linked to the ear shattering system of sound amplification. Voice accompaniment takes the form of inane tasteless wailing. It is barbarous music of this kind that is mainly responsible for attracting the mindless young of Singapore to the cult of the permissive of the western world. It is hardly a coincidence that the problem of drug addiction has become serious where performers and audience foregather. I trust the Ministry of Home Affairs will take stern action against this menace. (Goh 1973)

Finally, in practical terms, the state remains the biggest funder of arts and culture. As the gatekeeper of public funds, the bureaucrat’s power over the arts is often justified as good governance. The bureaucrat, in needing to justify expenditure, becomes the de facto connoisseur and patron of art in Singapore. This ability to define art and to fund it makes the bureaucrat more powerful than any individual in the arts and culture.

Nevertheless, bureaucratic imagination of art, while generally instrumentalist in character, may be also be a powerful and progressive force. French Cultural Minister Andre Malraux’s drive to fulfill the ideals of droit à la culture (the right to culture) saw a cultural democratization process which resulted in concrete infrastructural changes such as the establishment of regional cultural centers around the country. Such forms of cultural democracy were not alien to Singapore either. The ‘Art for Everyone’ exhibitions, launched in 1971, encouraged ordinary citizens to partake in the art production process (see below). Indeed, these examples demonstrate the possibilities of progressive regimes and structures that may emerge from bureaucratic imaginations.

The mechanisms of bureaucratic imaginations

Bureaucratic imaginations are more than mere visions of art. They...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Title
• Cultural Policies in East Asia: An Introduction
• Part I  Cultural Identity Formation and Nation Building
• Part II  Negotiations between Culture and the State
• Part III  The Rise of Creative Industries Policy
• Index