The Land of The Lion

April's Messes - Singaporean Architecture

Just returned home from a trip to Singapore that left me breathless with electric delight! :D An exhausting three days of wandering all over the island with my studio, glowering at transits and dollars and soaking up its fusion of Asian-European architectural aura. The walk through the unnervingly clean metropolis led us to various sleek galleries, historical monuments and iconic structures. Not so much as a relaxing vacation, more of a kids, let's bomb you with a nuclear of knowledge (oh and exercise), but something that I honestly found pretty epic too :)

City skyscrapers. 

Singapore, like Malaysia, founded itself on quite humble roots. The huge difference is, I suppose, it's developmental success is down to the fact that the city was planned, quite intelligently, very early on. And for a country that is quite small, regulating growth and a civil system wouldn't be as challenging as with a larger country. Countries of greater land mass and population naturally tend to have more issues (leaning towards the social and, maddeningly, political sector) to counter. Its strategic location also helps, allowing for commercial success (the city's known to have one of the busiest cargo harbours in South East Asia).

We visited a couple of pretty cool landmarks: the highly famous, textured (Durian, I say!) Esplanade, a beautiful As Syafaar Mosque. My friends and I managed to catch a jaw dropping birds eye view from the top of Skypark Observation deck, the 'banana' on top of Marina Bay Sands. We scampered to the decked roofs of Vivo City for a sparkly night view of Sentosa Island, lingered in front of a sex shop in Jalan Bugis, ate a whopping murtabak-canai-sup tulang merah-briyani dinner near Arab Street. Our modest hotel was located on the beautifully coloured (and preserved) shop lots of Chinatown. 

I was fascinated by the constrast of sleek modern against a colonial back drop of Clarke Quay. I was even more swept away by the design of Marina Barrage. Hands down, my favourite structure in the country. From its sweeping entrance to its exposed concrete structure work, to its humongous scale, buildings program and civil function - perfection! I adore how Singapore has managed to preserve, restore and maintain their heritage trails and historical sites, and how they've planned the city very well, including all types of artwork and installation in the public areas, alleys, subway stops. 

We visited Singapore Museum, where a Lucid Dream exhibition by Lee Wen was displayed. Abstract (philosophically inclined?) art is still a boom :) There were wall sized paintings of his body in yellow. A bunch of my studio mates took part in the very cool interactive games at Singapore City Gallery, a whole exhibition dedicated to the country's urban development. You tend to put down museums as very boring, bland posters on walls but galleries nowadays see a lot of interactive visuals and personalised touches. If you're game enough, they're very eye opening and interesting. 

The pinnacle of our artistic jamboree was of course the Art Science Museum on Marina Bay, for its Andy Warhol and Titanic Exhibition. I've been fascinated with Warhol's colourful pop art my whole childhood (visionary, genius!) and to see his personal strokes and works in real life was amazing. And if you're into theatre and movie sets the Titanic Exhibition would've been a jewel. We were welcomed with boarding passes and 'passengers' walking around in period gowns and morning suits with top hats. They even had an ice berg inside one of the halls to illustrate the temperature of the water, models, artifacts. Seriously, cool. (Y)

View of Marina Bay.