LGBTQ art in Singapore

LGBT art in Singapore, or queer art in Singapore, broadly refers to modern and contemporary visual art practices that draw on lesbian, gay, bisexual, and transgender+ imagery and themes, addressing topics such as LGBT rights, history and culture in Singapore. Such queer art practices are often by Singaporean or Singapore-based visual artists and curators who identify as LGBT+ or queer.

Queer visual art is a notable countercultural facet of contemporary Singaporean society, which formerly criminalised, albeit unenforced, consensual, private sexual acts between men (legal for women) through the presence of laws such as Section 377A of the Penal Code.

As homosexuality has been considered a taboo subject, practitioners in Singapore have historically contended with a host of limitations, with the avoidance of positive queer representation in local mainstream media, to operating with the risk of being blacklisted by the state, or vilification due to homophobia and transphobia from conservative aspects of wider Singaporean society.

In August 2005, after organisers of the annual Nation party had their application to hold the event in Singapore abruptly rejected by the police, gay activists organised Singapore's first month-long gay pride celebration called IndigNation.

Ever since the early 2010s, LGBT+ topics have been gradually liberalised, with regular discussions about such topics in the public sphere and local mainstream media. This was also in tandem with the rise of Pink Dot SG, which has now also influenced such events in many countries around the world.

In Singapore's contemporary art history, openly out queer artists whose art practices engage with notions of queerness have been documented since the 1980s. Queer art practices from Singapore have also been exhibited internationally, more often beyond the specific curatorial framework of a queer art exhibition. These art practices are loosely connected, and not determined by a specific medium, spanning wide-ranging forms such as performance art, installation art, video art, drawing, painting, sculpture, photography, film, and mixed media, for instance.

Regulations

Practitioners of LGBT+ visual arts have to contend with various restrictions imposed by Singaporean law.

At the end of May 2005, in an amendment to the Public Entertainment and Meetings Act (Chapter 257), nine categories of arts entertainment events including "displays or exhibitions of art objects or paintings" were exempted from having to apply for a Public Entertainment Licence from the Media Development Authority (MDA). The decision was made after consultation with MDA's arts advisory groups, following the recommendations of the 2003 Censorship Review Committee appointed by the Government arts watchdog of the time, the Ministry of Information, Communications and the Arts (MITA) to exempt more arts entertainment from licensing. The 2005 exhibition at The Substation, Bao Bei, by Singaporean artist Jason Wee, which featured pixelated male genitalia, was mentioned in the press release and deemed to be "innocuous" by the state.

History

Prior to 1993

From the 1980s to 1990s, artists such as Jimmy Ong, Teng Nee Cheong, and Ho Soon Yeen were notable for being some of the few openly queer artists of the time, or whose practices engaged with notions of queerness in Singapore. Ong's work from the 1980s, for instance, would feature black-and-white charcoal drawings that depicted nude, queer male bodies in various contexts and relationships. Around the same period in the 1980s, Teng would be known for figurative works across watercolour, pastel, charcoal and oil, with sensual and homoerotic depictions of male nudes. One of her paintings on display was a self-portrait, titled Monkey & Thinker, now in the collection of NUS Museum and shown at their 2017 exhibition, Radio Malaya: Abridged Conversations About Art.

1993: Art as protests

From 20 to 28 February 1993, Singapore artist Tan Peng and American artist John C. Goss held an exhibition entitled Flowing Forest, Burning Hearts at The Substation gallery, and Tan notably came out publicly in mainstream press as a gay man. Tan's large pastel drawings tackled topics such as HIV caregiving and police entrapment.

From 26 December 1993 to 1 January 1994, the Artists' General Assembly (AGA) was held at the 5th Passage art space, an arts festival co-organised with The Artists Village. Media coverage of the performance portrayed this as an obscene act. Red + White = Pink was held at Utterly Art, and Private Edge at B2G Gallery (solo exhibition by Norm Yip).

In May 2005, New York-based Singaporean artist Jason Wee held an exhibition at The Substation gallery titled Bao Bei, which examined the ways through which identity was constructed in gay online personal ads, also using online self-portraits to recreate a scene from the late Singaporean playwright Kuo Pao Kun's Descendants of the Eunuch Admiral. From 10 to 16 August, the second art exhibition of IndigNation was held at The Box, entitled Solitary Desire and featured pieces by Ong Jenn Long and Steve Chua, both of whom were young artists.

At the 53rd Venice Biennale in 2009, Ming Wong represented Singapore at the national pavilion with Life of Imitation. The exhibition explored cinema history and featured video installations in which Wong cross-dressed to play various characters from world cinema. This performance was viewed by Wong as a form of drag.

2011–2016: Censorship

At the 3rd Singapore Biennale in 2011, Japanese-British artist Simon Fujiwara's work, Welcome to the Hotel Munber (2010), was censored by the Singapore Art Museum, despite appropriate advisory notices put up by the museum itself as the organiser of the Biennale. In December 2012, Loo organised his first solo exhibition Archiving Cane at The Substation, which consisted of an installation of 12 artefacts from Cane and Loo's artistic practice, along with a durational performance.

Loo Zihan would open the M1 Singapore Fringe Festival 2015 with With/Out, a performance installation based on The Necessary Stage's Completely With/Out Character (1999), a monologue by the late Paddy Chew, the first person in Singapore to come out as being HIV-positive. In the same year, Loo was awarded the Young Artist Award by the National Arts Council of Singapore, and selected to exhibit for the President's Young Talents competition at the Singapore Art Museum.

In 2016, the queer-themed exhibition, Fault-Lines: Disparate And Desperate Intimacies, was held at the Institute of Contemporary Arts Singapore, guest curated by Singapore-based curator and writer Wong Binghao. The jury felt that the depiction of gay marriage and topics addressed by the film were important and that the personal approach by Tan made it "even more poignant".

As part of Toy Factory Productions Ltd's director-mentorship programme, "DIRECT ENTRY" returns for the second season in 2022. Theatre director Adeeb Fazah was presented a well timed original script titled "For My Highness – Sex, Drugs & A Mother's Prayer" which spotlights on the detriments of substance abuse, societal rejections and the imminent strains it places onto familial ties portraying the reality of those who identify themselves with the LGBT community in Singapore. The show ran from 25 to 27 November 2022 at the Black Box, Stamford Arts Centre with a duration of one hour and twenty minutes with no intermission. The play was written by Shaleihin Pi'ee, who is deeply inspired by the collective stories from a Malay/Muslim perspective and a gay man's journey to navigate life as an LGBT in Singapore.

In partnership with the supporting healthcare partners WE CARE Community Services, The Greenhouse, Playwright, Director and Cast Team a thirty-minutes post-show dialogue for both the 3pm and 8pm show on 26 November 2022 was held.

On 29 September 2023, Nanyang Technological University Centre for Contemporary Art (NTU CCA) commissioned a series of arts performances to celebrate its 10th anniversary. One of the shows, Queer-tai, was a segment by Intervention, "a queer party collective". The segment featured a half-hour karaoke led by a few people, including some dressed in drag, followed by a DJ setlist and also a drag queen, playing the tune of National Day theme song "Home", by Kit Chan, on a trombone. Today published a transcript of the interview defending its article. NTU also said it would reviewed its internal processes.Today in an editor's note accepted NAC's clarification and apologised for the published article.