Earlier this year, I found out that Dr. Woo Yen Yen, educator, entrepreneur, filmmaker, publisher and professor of education had returned to Singapore, to lead the MA Arts Pedagogy and Practice Programme at the LASALLE College of the Arts. If you’re of the right vintage you’ll remember her award-winning 2006 film with Colin Goh, Singapore Dreaming, a classic tale of Singaporean consumerism, avarice and hyper-competitiveness. It’s also a story of the delicate and precious ties that hold our communities together, and remains — in my view — one of the best films about the Singaporean psyche that’s ever been made.
Yen Yen sat down with me for a chat about Kampung Halloween, as well as her reflections on the past 20 years spent in New York and what she hopes to achieve now that she’s back in Singapore.
Read on for more.
How do you think about art and creativity, having spent close to two decades in New York?
When I left Singapore, I left as a school teacher. One of the key things about being in New York is that it’s a place where a lot of ambitious people in the world, especially creatives, end up going to test themselves. At the time, I didn’t know whether my work was world-class or not. There’s a kind of benchmarking that takes place organically when you’re there. It made me realise where I stood in the world and what about my stories appealed to different people.
For example, when I made Singapore Dreaming, the feature film, I was looking for a woman cinematographer, and Martina Radwan responded to my call. I can’t even remember where I had posted it — it might have been on Craigslist or something like that — and, at that time, her short documentary had just been nominated for an Academy Award. She said she wanted to read my script and consider working on the project.
So when somebody like that reads your script and says, “Oh, this is a great script,” it changes how you think about your work.
You understand where your work is, you get to work alongside a different set of people, and the concept of “world-class” becomes closer to you.
Did this trigger any realisations on your part?
One key realisation I had was in how finding my own voice was integral to my work. Having cultural confidence in who I was was also extremely important. I felt very comfortable telling Singaporean stories in an international context, and I started to develop an understanding of what made me feel cringey and what made me feel proud and confident. For example, when I attended an event in New York where a Singaporean singer was singing Fly Me to the Moon, it made me cringe because it felt like selling coal to Newcastle. One thing I realised about seeing a lot of different works is how important it is to know who you are and to be confident in your culture, because that’s what’s going to take you global.
Singers like Björk from Iceland and AURORA from Norway for example, have this very unique voice, which makes them stand out against the mainstream sounds of American pop. And look how Japan focused on 2D animation instead of the 3D animation trends of Hollywood — then built on the “Japanese anime” style.
What then — to you — is the Singaporean identity?
I don’t think about the Singaporean identity because it’s not helpful to me. How I am as a Singaporean is different from how you are as a Singaporean. I think about what’s true to who I am and then I create what’s true to who I am.
I feel like there are times when “Singaporeanness” is limiting and I’ll explain that. When I initially left Singapore, I left with some anger because I was a school teacher and I had all these ideas about education to help kids find their purpose. But this was a point in time when schools were ranked in the newspapers and there was a great emphasis on exams. For literature teachers, there used to be a practice of generating model answers for students and having them memorise these essays — it made me angry. So when I initially worked on Talking Cock [a satirical website] together with Colin Goh, I was exploring the use of humour, but there was also some part of me that was angry — about stuff like censorship, the devaluing of Singlish, the education system. When I think about “Singaporeanness” I think that one way in which it can be limiting is when we let our anger about an issue dictate what we create. We then forget that there are so many other possible relationships with our culture.
Our work can be meaningful locally and also tap into universal values and struggles. The film Parasite for example, is very Korean, but also very universal. Focusing on “issues” alone can make our work “blah.”
I do think that ultimately it’s about digging deep into who we are, and that’s a very important thing in being able to go global. If we don’t understand who we are, we will always be a copy of something else. And I really think that we can’t do this “digging” alone. We need our tribe, our kampung to support us, to bounce ideas off each other, to tell us the effect of our work on them. It means turning up for other people, and having other people turn up for you. To discover our own voice, we need each other.
Can you think of an example of something has been made in Singapore that illustrates this?
One of the Kampung Halloween works was by the dancer Adly Azizi and sound artist Danial Ahmad. Together, they created this work that was about the Orang Minyak [a figure from local mythology].
It was just mind-blowingly good — incorporating dance and sound in shadow form. It generated a crazy energy in the room, and to me, it was in the direction of world-class. And it wasn’t about anger, it was about excavating the artists’ own culture and for Azizi, the unique form of his body, to see what they could derive from it.
So I think that creatively, letting go of that narrow anger can actually open up many new possibilities for our own storytelling. For me, at this point in my life, it’s about identifying what I find pleasurable about my culture and our stories, and then digging into those pleasures.
So why did you move back to Singapore?
There were personal reasons. A big part of it was that I had separated from my ex-husband and I wanted my daughter to be able to spend time with both parents in the same country, and also have family around her. I’ve also been away for so long, and missed working with Singaporean artists, so I was looking forward to coming back and playing with my friends.
What do you hope to do here?
Create a lot! With my people.
I create as a teacher and I make as a teacher — whether I’m making films, websites, comics, shows, or a festival. I enjoy integrating the lowbrow and the highbrow, starting from what people know to take them to new discoveries about themselves and about their culture.
Kampung Halloween was that attempt to work with artists to do this kind of cultural work. It was deeply satisfying seeing artists excavating local ghosts and creatures to create new works. Many of the stories are what we vaguely remember hearing when we were children, and this festival allowed us to discover the memories in a new way.
Kampung Halloween gave me a sense of the power of the tribe in our arts ecosystem. The festival itself was the work of many alumni, students, and faculty from LASALLE and NAFA [the Nanyang Academy of Fine Arts] coming out to produce and create in a generous way. I saw a lot more visceral work: work that’s based on the body, the image, and sound — not necessarily word-based. I’m also seeing a lot of openness to collaborate across schools and disciplines which is something I’m very excited about.
For several artists in Kampung Halloween, it was their first time presenting work. Many of them had been working for other artists, doing sets or sound, but had not presented their own work. They told me about having a growing sense of confidence when they see people enjoy and appreciate their creations. They also felt that after seeing the high quality pieces made by others, they had to level up. Even though it was experimental, it was super exciting. It’s wonderful that the Arts Resource Hub became the home for this kind of developmental work.
At this point in my life, I have personally veered away from satire, also because of how I am reading the cultural-political dynamics in the US. Satire as a form includes and also excludes. It includes people who share a joke and then excludes people who don’t share the joke. What’s happened in the US is that a group of people feel they have been excluded and have gotten angry.
At this point, I feel like cultural work that increases dialogue is helpful for our world. As Programme Leader in LASALLE’s MA in Arts Pedagogy and Practice, I am increasing working with my students not only on teaching the arts, but also on how the arts can change culture. In the book This Is An Uprising by Mark and Paul Engler, the writers document the trajectories of mass movements that have reshaped culture, including how same-sex marriage was taboo in US politics in the 1990s but by 2015 became legal in 50 states. They charted what happened in the intervening period and attributed a big part of it to Will and Grace, the TV series, which depicted two gay men and one straight woman living together.
Will and Grace wasn’t about telling people that same-sex marriage was good, or that it was okay, it was just about people trying to live their everyday lives. Audiences of all political persuasions laughed with the characters and cried with them, and that was very effective in creating a cultural shift — much more effective than angry discourse and satire. It’s only when we share time and space with each other that it becomes possible to have this kind of dialogue.
What are your thoughts on the large amount of government funding in the Singapore art scene?
It is absolutely necessary. The arts are a public good.
The danger of that, of course, is that if there’s only one major commissioner of work, then the content is also controlled by that one paymaster.
The NAC [National Arts Council], as a public entity, will naturally always be concerned about what the public thinks, and because of that, there will always be this tussle between pleasing the audience and experimentation.
To cultivate great works from Singapore artists, public funds must go into experimental works that dare to do something different. So that artists can create and make the mistakes that will sharpen their work.
Many people worry about government regulation of content, but in a sense, that’s manageable. What’s harder to manage are the trolls and the complainers — they have long-lasting effects that are much harder to manage. Even our government agencies and our civil servants are afraid of trolls and “feedback from unnamed members of the public.”
That is a very unproductive space to be in as a creator — you just don’t have energy to fight on so many fronts. Even for our schools and institutions, it takes a school or funding agency one single round of having to manage complaints to decide to self-censor the next round. It is very worrying and scary to have online commenters making extreme judgements, when all we want to do is just to make our work, right?
I also think that the market itself is a form of inevitable censorship. I could want to make a film that’s very different, but if the market will only pay for Jack Neo films, there will be a sameness to the content produced. I’m not saying Jack Neo’s films are bad, it’s just that the demands of the market at play make it hard to take creative risks. It’s the same with the other art forms. In the tech startup sphere that I also work in, it is hard to raise funds from private investors to “educate the market” if you are ahead of the curve. That’s why public money should be spent on supporting the exciting, edgy work — because the market will not support it.
What do you think are the differences between local audiences and the audiences in a place like New York?
New York is a place where audiences from all over the U.S. come to see shows. It’s a big country, so the numbers are very, very different. The audience is also quite varied — with both traditional audiences looking for the Broadway musicals and more experimental audiences. Singapore also has varied audiences, just much fewer of each type.
In Singapore, even if we increase audience sizes, it’s still a very small market. Artists in Singapore are constantly thinking of how to access overseas markets. Korea is always the “promised land,” showing us how culture can be exported, but it wasn’t so long ago that they weren’t the promised land. They did a lot to cultivate a domestic audience, relax censorship, and improve living conditions for artists.
There’s a story that I have told myself before — that maybe an artist has to make it big in another market, probably a Western market, before gaining recognition in the domestic market. I’ve changed my mind. For those making original work, cultivate the audience near us first — they are the “cheapest” to cultivate. If I can’t get my ten or hundred friends to like and pay for my work, how am I going to get the thousands to like and pay for my work who are many miles away?
How do you think we can draw audiences to experimental work?
With any arts programming, it’s about holding the tension between the audience and the artwork. If there’s not enough tension, you’re just pandering to the audience. If there’s too much tension, then the connection with the audience breaks. It takes both the maker and the audience to create that tension. The maker has to first present in a way that lures people in, build trust, and then introduce them to something unfamiliar. This is what good teachers do too.
Do you have any advice for students about having a career in the arts? Should they be looking for a job that’s more financially stable?
It’s really not either-or. We have pretty long lives to play different roles at different points in our lives.
Having a stable job is a good thing! I take many risks in my work, that’s why I like having some kind of stability in my life. I also think that having varied experiences at different jobs is good for art-making because these life experiences become material for your artwork and you build networks in different fields.
In New York, the go-to job for many actors and singers is restaurant waiting, because you could take off in the middle of the day for auditions and callbacks. In Singapore, teaching or tutoring is probably a good income generator for artists.
Surely the downside to that is that it puts people under severe amounts of stress, juggling too many jobs?
I think it’s about the different phases in your life.
I’m a mum, so for me, juggling many things is my default state. Being unable to provide for my daughter introduces even more stress in my life. It would be the same for someone with an older parent to care for. Being unstable introduces that tremendous guilt of not functioning as a responsible person in a society. I could take certain risks in my 20s that I can’t take now.
So, I think it’s about where you are in your life. I don’t believe in telling people to just go to make art and give up everything, when it’s not possible under their circumstances. But if you have no responsibilities and you are going to and can give it all you have got — go for it!
I’ve also met many artists who choose art as a full-time job for some years with a fair amount of success, and find a lot of satisfaction returning to a more traditional job such as teaching later, because it gives them stability and the opportunity to teach what they love. I think the hardest moment for an artist is probably giving up a traditional path to do what they love and realising that they are doing projects they don’t like to make a living. That’s a hard realisation.
So, as a mum and a daughter, having a job I love, a monthly paycheck, and health insurance, are actually really good for creativity. I’m very Singaporean.
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Follow Woo Yen Yen on Instagram: @wooyenyen.
Header image: Woo Yen Yen at Kampung Halloween. Courtesy of the artist. Photo credit: Zhong Hao.
