Jeremy Tiang 3
Details
Jeremy Tiang 3
Metadata (MODS) |
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|---|---|
| Titles | Jeremy Tiang 3: Clip 3 |
| Name | Jeremy Tiang |
| Name | Dr. Joanne Leow |
| Type of Resource | sound recording-nonmusical |
| Genre | Interview |
| Identifier | Interview |
| Identifier | Jeremy Tiang Clip 3 |
| Abstract | Jeremy Tiang talks about the social and status stratification within Singapore and how the government enforces certain boundaries between various people in relation to his depictions of migrant workers in "National Day." |
| Extent | 8:36 |
| Form | sound recording |
| Note | Jeremy Tiang: I was drawing from traditional art, which is also referenced in the cover of one of the Epigram books, I think it’s Pongulu, where the sea is depicted as little triangles, and then that I think shows up in quite a bit of Malay art, where it’s a very stylized depiction of the water. But, when I was on the boat going to Saint John’s island, I looked out, it kind of did look like that. The waves were really startlingly regular, and I thought “oh, so maybe it’s not stylized maybe they’re just drawing what they saw,” but because we don’t go out that much and look at the water in that way—you look at the water from shore, you don’t look at it often from the boat—we aren’t aware of that way of looking at things. And also, with the defamiliarization, that’s something that I found…because I’ve been around Sentosa, I got to go into a couple of those fancy houses because through a bizarre series of circumstances I ended up acting in a property ad. I was taking a series of very weird jobs while I was writing my first book, and one of the jobs, because I could play the cello, was to be Yo-Yo Ma’s body double in this ad they were doing for Sentosa Cove. So I basically had to sit in these houses, and they filmed in all the different rooms, and I just sat there playing my cello, and they were going to dub in Yo-Yo Ma and film him for the real thing, but… [1:34] Joanne Leow: That’s incredibly surreal. Jeremy Tiang: Oh it was amazing. Joanne Leow: (laughs). Jeremy Tiang: I’ll write another story about that someday. Joanne Leow: I think you need to. [1:42] Jeremy Tiang: But that allowed me to see inside of these houses and see what the development was like, and yet when I was on the boat it took me a long time to realize that I was looking at the same houses, because from the other side, from the water side where they’re not designed to be looked at, they’re kind of scruffy. They’re not beautiful, and they look like—it’s like, oh so people actually do live there. And their backyards, they don’t bother making it look nice, and they just leave the kids’ toys out or whatever. And I was like, on one hand it’s quite heartening that even very rich people are still normal and like, still have scruffy back gardens, but on the other it was something about the contrast between how ostentatious the front of those houses were, and how unrecognizable they look from the back, that made me think, well, what is this? Like what is this lifestyle where ultimately you’re just living like a regular person? But then there’s also the need—and it feels like that’s where most of the money goes, right, it’s the ostentatious upkeep of the front of the house, and like that exclusive address, and that manicured front lawn, but actually the bit you spend most of your time in might be bigger, but it’s really no different to anyone living in an HDB flat. [2:59] Joanne Leow: And I love the description of how that switch happened but also the abstract and concrete that you were talking about with the sea. One of the last questions I have is that extract on 162 when, they start to threaten to call the police and call the coast guard and turn this into a particular kind of space, and the ending as well in particular when he just leaves and he just goes into the water and starts swimming. What were you trying to express about that space, then? That kind of almost liminal space between sand and water but mainland and offshore island? Something about power, I think, really struck me. [3:36] Jeremy Tiang: I think it was about defining who gets to be in what spaces. Like, it’s this island that feels like no one lives there and who cares and it’s free for all, but actually there are all these rules, and in fact you aren’t allowed to be there overnight unless you’re in this government sanctioned camp. And around the time I was writing it there were a lot of—I mean this is something that comes up again and again—but there’d been a spate of stories about void decks, and foreign workers not being allowed to congregate in void decks, and it’s like well hang on, these are public spaces where everyone’s allowed, so how can you not allow a certain group of people? And there’s all kinds of stories I’ve heard, like a number of my friends who live in condos say that, “oh maids aren’t allowed to use the pool,” and it’s like a) they all seem okay with that, which is really weird to me, but also b) I don’t know how you necessarily tell someone’s status, unless you live in a very unequal society where it’s immediately obvious whether you’re a house-owner or a maid. I don’t think it can just be a question of nationality or appearance, it’s something about bearing, it’s something about…the way Singaporeans carry themselves is with a certain amount of entitlement that makes it very obvious who belongs in certain places. And I think I’ve been away from Singapore for long enough that I’ve lost a bit of that, so there have been times when people have been like, “should you be here,” and it’s like okay, that’s interesting. Because, of course, you see that everywhere, right? You see who’s welcome in certain public spaces here as well. Most rich nations…there has to be a redefining of the word “public” because we want to exclude certain groups of people whilst pretending we’re not doing it, so we do it very quietly. And I think, if I remember right, I wrote that not long after the Little India so-called riots, which made me think a lot about who’s allowed to express themselves, and particularly—well, what else is going to happen? If you don’t give people a way to speak out in any other way then of course they’re going to set cars on fire in the streets. But we act as if this is some terrible thing…like, well, what do you expect them to do? Are they going to write a letter to the Straits Times forum page, would the Straits Times publish it, you know, what can they do? And it’s something that we’ve seen since then, in a lot of places around the world, that if you render people powerless, then they’ll find a way to take power back by force. And that’s a lesson that Singapore doesn’t appear to be learning. At least in this story, in a small way, there are tiny acts of rebellion, and it’s, on one hand, not going to change anything, but on the other hand I think that describes most of life. Like we just negotiate with our own, the spaces we’re in, and we maybe enlarge them a little bit but very very few people actually take actions big enough to have major change. And I think…I had written a wish fulfillment version of this story where they did manage to defeat the bureaucracy and did manage to claim a bit of power back, but then I thought, actually that never happens. On the very few occasions when we even hear from foreign workers, like the—again the bus drivers so-called illegal strike, they’re very quickly clamped down on and punished and then nothing changes. So, I wanted to express futility and powerlessness and, I think, the way to do that is by showing these invisible boundaries suddenly becoming visible. And it’s like an electric fence when you realize it’s electric; it’s like, oh, okay, so actually that’s happening, actually, I thought I had a certain amount of freedom, but if I choose to try to exercise it then I realize that I don’t. And Singaporeans, whilst being much more privileged, actually suffer from a similar version of this, where you think you can do certain things and then you, for instance, write a Facebook post that’s set to ‘friends only’ and then you find yourself being charged. |
| Access Condition | Contact Dr. Joanne Leow |
| Subject Geographic | Pacific Ocean |
| Subject Hierarchical Geographic | Asia--Singapore------Singapore |
| Subject Local Name | ----economy--Surveillance--Social Status--Pacific Ocean-- |