Joo Chiat has everything — culture, luxury, grit and sleaze — to dispel the outdated notion that Singapore is a cookie-cutter society.
Alongside age-old shophouses and expensive condominiums you see an old barber cutting hair in a back alley, near a cramped dormitory for migrant workers. When the sun sets, the five foot ways are littered with women who make money entertaining mildly intoxicated uncles.
Interesting, right?
That’s why it’s exciting that the next OH! Open House, on the last three weekends of March, will be held here.
OH! Open House is a popular art-centric walking tour where people are taken to unique areas hosting site-specific works by select artists. This year’s edition has seven spaces and 12 artists, including Randy Chan, Guo Yixiu, Mike HJ Chang and Mark Thia.
Previous OH! Open House tours were held in areas that bordered on homogeneous — Tiong Bahru’s art deco houses, brutalist HDB flats in Marine Parade, Marina Bay’s high-rise buildings — but this year it promises to reflect the “diverse, complicated and chaotic” nature of Singapore’s first-ever Heritage Town.
One of the featured spaces is a well-photographed 1927 shophouse on Koon Seng Road (pictured above), occupied by Mr and Mrs Tan and their dogs. They were matched with young visual artist Guo Yixiu.
The Tan residence is bursting with clutter collected over decades — in the living room, kitchen, bedroom, everywhere. But the couple won’t be asked to store or organize their treasures when they open their doors to the public.
“I really like the idea of ordinary things, and of things being so humble and insignificant but also carry so much meaning,” explains Guo. “I wanted to create a work that would complement the space but not fight against it.”
For OH! Open House, she strategically placed colour-coded floor mats to form a trail from the Tan’s back garden into their living room. The square-shaped mats are punctured with flowers made from plastic bags, to echo the design motif of the Peranakan tiles in the living room, and to reference the “We Love SG” flowers used in the recent Chingay parade.
Guo’s installation work, “Ordinary Things”, is a trail of different-colored floor mats that lead people from the back garden to the living room.
Architect Randy Tan, another featured artist, will collaborate with two other people. They are going to mount an eight-meter long boat on a 2.7-metre high platform. Called “SS Nimby”, it’s their take on Noah’s Ark. The interiors will look like a labyrinth and be able to accommodate only eight people at a time. Inside and around the boat will be objects collected from Joo Chiat residents who were asked to lend items that are precious to them.
It’s as if they were told, if you could only bring one item with you to the ark, what would it be?
There’s an earring from a migrant worker which he had bought with his best friend (they kept one each); a chair that’s been around the world with its owner; a cheongsam from Joo Chiat’s oldest original resident, Maggie Xiew, who in her 20s wore the dress and received a compliment which she can still happily recall.
Randy Chan with Mrs Maggie Xiew, the oldest original resident of Joo Chiat at 95 years old.
One of OH! Open House’s more unusual venues this year is the budget Fragrance Hotel, where artist tandem Mark Thia and Mike HJ Chang turned two windowless rooms into an art statement.
In one room is a sculpture that looks like creased white curtains. It hangs where windows should be. A large mirror on the facing wall reflects the sculpture and amplifies the illusion. Above the headboard is a lightbox with a photo of someone piercing the fog with a torch. A similar image plays on the television screen.
The second room, located a few doors away, is a mirror image of the first room.
Collaborators Chang and Thia create a dialogue between two rooms in Fragrance Hotel.
“People might think Joo Chiat is about food, or shophouses, or Peranakan culture. But there’s a lot more going on — look at the back alleys and small streets, look at it night and day. Joo Chiat is diverse, complicated and chaotic,” says Oei.
“There are only so few ways of thinking about Clark Quay, Chinatown or Tiong Bahru — each of them has become a cultural trope and chiché. Joo Chiat resists the trope, and thus the hubris of the urban planner. In its very old Singaporean way, it become so unlike the rest of Singapore,” he adds.
OH! Joo Chiat: No Man’s Land is on 14 & 15, 21 & 22, 28 & 29 March, 4-10pm. Tickets: $25 ($20 until 8 Mar), www.ohopenhouse.org.
Photos: Lester Babiera
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