Hey,

I’m slowly but surely moving everything here and future posts to my own domain, http://justrambling.sg. This is to help me maintain a better portfolio. See you over there!

From a visual perspective, the logo is very intriguing because it literally contains more than one “U” depending on how you look at it. And this is a deliberately done to encompass what the union stands for:

1. The small U that stands for working people of all collars, ages and nationalities in Singapore, and their families. 
2. The big U that stands for the Labour Movement, made up of our affiliated unions and associations, social enterprises, staff, members and partners. 
3. The invisible U that stands beside working people and their families at work, live and play, to help them earn a better living and live a better life.

Moreover, as compared to the old logo designed by architect William Lim in 1971, it is much more versatile to accommodate the wide range of services that NTUC provides as seen here:

In fact, the best testimony of this can be seen at NTUC Centre building at Marina Boulevard at night where the logo on the side of the building is lighted up and constantly changes like a chameleon.

The new logo definitely reflects a sign of the times and is very much part of the Singapore ideology as it wants to be “progressive”, “dynamic” and “forward-looking”. Contrast this to what Lim was attempting to symbolise in 1971:

•  Eight cogs of a wheel, representing: 
  • national solidarity and well-being
  • dignity of labour
  • brotherhood of workers
  • industrial peace with justice
  • modernisation of the Labour Movement
  • progress of labour
  • cooperation of labour
  • co-equal in the tripartite partnership of labour, government and management in the social, economic and political advancement of Singapore.
• A spanner, portraying hopes and aspirations of the working class.
• Octagon shape, portraying multi-racialism in Singapore.

What use to dominate the old logo was the the “hopes and aspirations of the working class”, but in today’s logo the worker has been relegated to a “small U”. And just like how the “U” in the logo has smoothened out from the old to the new, the values the logo symbolise have also blunted and, in a way, fallen more in line with the government. There is almost a deliberate attempt to sound broad and vague so that it can be everything and nothing all at the same time and the chameleon-traits of the new logo serves this purpose very well.

Symbolism aside, I think this logo was very well-designed to suit the current values of NTUC, it’s core message stands out strong and it is flexible enough to suit a wide-range of purposes, but I can’t seem to say the same about the union that it represents.

It got me thinking again about the remarks that the chairman of the Orchard Road Business Association made in a Straits Times interview on Monday about clearing the streets off beggars, flyer distributors and street buskers because they were unsightly. Today, someone wrote back in Life supporting the chairman’s point-of-view. 

As in my letter to the forum, I feel that these people are missing the point. They seem more concerned with the image of Orchard Road or their own interests than why these people are out on the streets doing what they do. Would any one of us enjoy putting ourselves out there begging people for money? Or enduring the terrible weather and dirty looks giving out flyers? Perhaps, even the street busker prefers to perform to crowds in a nice amphitheater. It’s so easy to talk about “clearing them” but where do they go after that?

RECLAIM LAND

The other argument in this issue is why is our public space increasingly encroached by the interests of commercial entities. Personally, I think it’s bad enough that the park next to Orchard MRT has become another shopping mall. I’m sure the Filipinos who used to picnic there feel the same way too. Today, they try to do the same around Lucky Plaza and this is what happens:

Indeed, the shopping mall has every right to exert their claims to the space they own, but who then is fighting for the public’s space? With every inch increasingly taken over by the state (should they be doing more for the public?) and commercial entities, it’s no wonder people feel there is not enough space in Singapore. But, let’s not be too pessimistic about things, here’s something I came across recently:

It would be churlish to suggest that Singaporeans are not happy to comply with such imperatives. That public space is policed, surveyed, homogenised and corporatised is part of the pay-off for living in a safe, clean and reasonably affluent environment: and people subert it in their own way. Any new pavement not respecting the most direct route from A to B will go unused, while a more practical path is worn in the grass within days. The lack of public seating  is compensated for by the inveterate co-option of stairs; and sub-cultural groups, from breakdancers and skateboarders to picnicking Filipino maids, effortlessly seek out and appropriate architectural features that meet their needs. In addition, one only needs scratch the surface to realise that people are unwilling to take Singapore’s social spaces at face value. More arresting even than the corporate feng shui that determines the design of some of its most significant developments (such as Suntec City), the island is teeming with altars, positioned everywhere from the foot of great trees and the space beneath flyovers, to ledges in otherwise pristine shopping malls. During the Hungry Ghost Festival in August, when offerings are left by the roadside, Chinese opera performance and pop concerts (ge tai) are held on temporary stages to entertain the ghosts. It is at times like these that one is reminded most powerfully that, however policed and privatised public space may appear to be in Singapore, it is never entirely dominated or possessed: from inter-personal negotiations and ad-hoc improvisations, to the overlaying of the physical space with other worlds — and other inhabitants — space in Singapore is multiple,contested, and highly charged.

Paul Rae in At Large in a Small Town: Theatrical and Civil Space in the Works of The Necessary Stage (2004)

It sounds exactly like what my FYP, Reclaim Land: The fight for space in Singapore, is all about, and I’ve actually linked the relevant pages to the quote.

Perhaps how it is done with Singaporean products, like how Homespun have done with some of their products? Or like how Larry Peh does with some of his designs?

Or should it be designed for a Singaporean?

The grammar of Singapore design needs to be defined so that the people doing it can make products that serve the needs of Singaporeans and better reflect our identity.

WELCOME HOME
For Rent, The Same Ties That Bind, The Funeral, 無蟹可擊 Crab! and The Healing Touch

The documentary For Rent brought us into the homes of the lesser known population of Singapore that live in rental flats. Over 80 per cent of Singaporeans live in public housing and this has always been touted as a success of the state in providing a roof and an asset for its citizens. But behind every gleaming upgraded facade in these featured Boon Keng flats we see how less fortunate Singaporeans squeeze themselves into one-room flats to enjoy public housing. Indeed, the image of home as a place of comfort is questioned when one sees how a family of twelve people into an apartment built for two and one is left to wonder what other stories could lie in the neighbouring units.

But a home is not just a physical entity, it is also a collection of relations between people. This is explored in The Same Ties That Bind, a documentary about the acceptance of gays by families. It advances the discourse about the controversial place of gays in Singapore right to the heart of things: family and religion. The interviewee’s frankness in front of the cameras makes it almost like post-dinner conversation, although in reality, would talking about gays in the family make it palatable? While the documentary take on religion is solely from the Christians’ perspective, with the recent AWARE saga it does gives this part of the film heightened relevance.

The issue of religion in family is also taken on by the drama, The Funeral. The death of a little brother prompts a debate between a Christian sister and a Taoist brother over how to settle the rites for his funeral. This piece is loaded with references for the film aficionado and its production is stellar, coming especially from students. It shows how a good drama can convey so much more than an objective documentary, but to do so, one has to be able to read the depth this film tries to provide. But in each scene, one can easily be overwhelmed with either how good the shot looks or what is going on. It felt like this was the “best of” compilation of a hour-long film and one just longed to have some dead space in between to reflect.

無蟹可擊 Crab!, is also another family drama, but a much more light-hearted one. Reminiscent of Channel 8 dramas, it follows the journey of how a son is tricked into taking over his family’s crab bee hoon business. The cast for the film are a host of familiar faces from television commercials and dramas that provide comfort for the viewer but they struggle to hold together a film whose script becomes predictable after a while. Like the crab bee hoon the lead cooks at the beginning, it’s a potentially great dish with good ingredients, but the chef still needs to improve on its cooking.

The same might be said of The Healing Touch, a documentary about Reiki healing, a spiritual approach to health. The film comes across as a very objective informercial rather than a partisan documentary. Ironically, the soothing voice-over and background track may only further discomfort the viewer who for most part of the film is extolled the benefits of this healing by Reiki practitioners. It becomes almost an afterthought when the documentary ends with a medical doctor and an academic weigingh in on the potential placebo effects of such healing.

MOVING OUT OF THE HOME
做到老 Live. Work. Die., Trust, Make.Shift, LOL.SG and 家,不家 Home

Taking us out of the family and into the larger home of society, 做到老 Live. Work. Die., documents the quest of one elderly man to find a job in Singapore. This documentary takes on a Michael Moore-esque style where the filmmakers are very much visible — one of the producers stars in the film and there are scenes where the filmmakers sit together to discuss what to do next. Perhaps it was out of one of such discussions that this film was conceived and they set out to do it all in one day. The documentary does have the feel of a Michael Moore film but it lacks the thought. The former is professionally amateur but the latter is just amateur. Still, kudos should be given to a documentary that challenges the way this form is done locally.

The drama, Trust, touches on an issue that has only been recently introduced in Singapore: terrorism. This piece is heavily dependent on its actors carrying out a dialogue driven script but alas the actors do just a decent job and the film fails to live up to its potential. The camera work and the props in the film do little to mask this too. The ending may surprise some but by the time one gets there, the initial question of, what would you do, gets lost in a plot that tries to take on world domination but is just too big for it. 

While home is a permanent place for most of us, in Make.Shift we see how the business of night markets, popularly known as pasar malams in Singapore, are always on the move for a home. At 17 mins, one of the shortest films of the night, this documentary highlights a community that is well-known in the Singapore cityscape but just doesn’t bring it home. We hear a lot about the economic struggle of this industry, including an interesting juxtaposition of the in-fighting between the big players but one was left wondering: why should I care? Perhaps by overly-focusing on the economics of things, the soul of the pasar malam space, it’s myriad offerings of ordinary things, the sights, sounds and smells just got lost.

Similarly, LOL.SG, a documentary about the local comedy scene begs the question of why should I care. From start to almost end, one chuckles through the film and realises how difficult it is to do comedy here, but so what? This was enjoyable and novel because no one has taken a serious look at what’s funny here but one might just laugh it off without the context to make this an issue. What might also be worth looking at is non-English funny people too, after all, how many Singaporeans actually watch Channel 5 or stand-up comedy?

The search for home is taken to China in 家,不家 Home? where this documentary looks at the rebuilding efforts of survivors in Jinlong, Sichuan after the May 12 Earthquake last year. The stories are touching and what one would expect — uncertainty, red tape and struggles — but these are told to us by the survivors straight onto the camera. That is where one might lose the connect as one wished to see more of the disaster site to see how things were and could become.

HOME COMING

The audience were also entertained at the beginning and intermission of the screening by post-, an audio project inspired by the students’ time at WKWSCI. A track that stuck was Everything At Once that seems like a perfect track to accompany a drive across the expressway on a rainy day — perhaps an ode to the long journey many of us take to school?

So for two nights, the Singapore Art Museum became a temporary home for the different generations of WKWSCI students: juniors awaiting to start on their final-year projects, current final-year students and seniors who returned to see how things were changing. An interesting note was that the theme, “A Site For Home” was never set out when the students began work on these final-year projects in August last year, but when they got together to organise Filament ’09, it became apparent that almost all the films had, literally, come home.

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DISCLAIMER: I am also a final-year student at WKWSCI and my group’s project Reclaim Land: The fight for space in Singapore was also featured in Filament ’09. For objectivity sake I have left it out in this review.

How often is this element found in Singapore photography, and could such an element in our visual language say something about the country? 

I think it may reflect the kind of environment the photographers are in. When trying to take photographs in the public, they get unfriendly stares, hands-covered faces or stern-looking security guards questioning their right to take photographs. Why go through so much hassle to take photos? Why not just turn the lens at yourself?

A society of “mind-your-own-business” further discourages photographers from being pesky and getting themselves out of their comfort zones. So they turn to what is easily available and comment on themselves.

It may also be due to the need to express themselves because of how small one feels in Singapore. Unable to express themselves freely in the presence of larger voices like the state, documenting personal artifacts and lives becomes a way of contesting the domination and assuring their existence as individuals.

These also lead to photography that is often conceptual and abstract. So what they cannot say or document, they hide behind photography that allows them to say something but not say it, all at the same time.

Formula for the language of Singapore Photography:

Introspection + Abstract = A form of self-censorship

What do you think?

The problem I usually face with feedback from friends and close ones is also highlighted by NYTimes.com’s Design Director Khoi Vinh: eliciting honest and critical comments. After all, the point when sharing a work is not  to receive a ego massage, but pointers to improve on the work.

But as I have written elsewhere, it is so easy to criticise but so darn hard to be critical, so maybe that is why people don’t want to fall into the trap of saying things they can’t really explain and end up hurting friendships.

Indeed, a city is built to be seen, a visual showcase of wealth and power such that when you live in one you find yourselves more often than not looking up. Towering above you are skyscrapers, office towers, shopping malls, statues — the scale of things make you feel small.

If the vertical compression is not enough, you find yourself surrounded by crowds, cars, advertisements all around. You wish you had that little bit more elbow room to move, to think, but you are distracted by the sights around you. Should you move, or stay still? Either way, the barrage of the city weighs on all your senses and that is when you cave in.

But that is also when you learn its language and you find ways to ignore it. You build your own walls of resistance — listening to your iPod, taking short-cuts, ignoring what is around… and you forget the person next to you is doing the same as you.

The city squeezes more of us into the same space, but in doing so, puts just as much distance between you and I.

The annual showcase of final-year projects of my school is coming up. While there isn’t an official theme, a common thread that ran through the various films and multimedia projects this year was this idea of family, Singapore or what we call home.

In a way, that’s what WKWSCI has been for me the last four years. And before I leave it, I’m happy that my own final-year project will be showcased at this student-initiated event that was started two years back by a friend. The poster you see is also a design I did and I’m also working on the brochure for those who attend the event. 

So come visit our home on the 27 & 28 April at the Singapore Art Museum.
There’ll be food, films and friends — what every home needs.

One of the many bittersweet but very nicely drawn portraits from an online picture book, I love you but…,
there is just something about wanting to know why you are not loved that kept me clicking one after another.

Some friends might love this below.