Singaporean creatives forced home rediscover the Lion City’s unique characteristics
- Significant numbers of Singapore’s artistic diaspora have returned to the city state amid the pandemic and found a new-found appreciation for their home
- The resulting flowering of artistic output reflects on its rich tropical environment, politics and the effects of the pandemic
When California-based performance artist and actor Loo Zihan returned home to Singapore in March, he began taking long walks along the Rail Corridor – a stretch of greenery that spans the country’s old railway line. The three-hour, 9.5km (6 mile) hikes through nature were a balm for the social isolation he endured during Singapore’s partial lockdown, when people were only permitted to leave their homes for essential business or exercise.
“Being a performance-based artist, I was interested in observing how the body adjusts to restrictions of mobility, and how it adapts to being confined within a limited space for long periods of time,” says Loo, who decided to return to Singapore at the urging of friends and family worried about the rapidly worsening spread of Covid-19 in the United States.
His isolation walks inspired him to create a performance project titled Temporary Measures, a series of one-on-one long-distance “processions” along the Rail Corridor accompanied by donors to a fundraiser for migrant workers. During these three-hour walks, run by the Coda Culture art gallery, Loo discussed prearranged subjects with the donor and introduced them to a little-visited, wilder stretch of the Lion City.
“This performance was a way to share with others the underexplored areas of Singapore I discovered during the long walks I took in social isolation,” Loo says.
He is not the only overseas-based artist inspired by a return to Singapore, a place affectionately known as the “little red dot”.