How many children's imaginations have we constrained with our rigid focus on black and white, asks Channel NewsAsia's Bharati Jagdish.

SINGAPORE: The Land Transport Authority (LTA) recently found itself sucked into a vortex of vitriol and it had nothing to do with trains or buses.

It had to do with, of all things, art.



LTA had put up plaques describing the art work to accompany local artist Jing Quek’s collages installed at Tampines West and Tampines East MRT stations as part of its Art in Transit programme.

Welcome to Jingapore featured images of people, places and objects found near the stations. Among the many words on the plaques, the one that screamed the loudest for many Singaporeans was “Jingapore”, which many saw as a misspelling of “Singapore”.

Bewildered commuters posted pictures of the plaques saying that they were “disrespectful”, “shameful”, and made Singapore “look bad”, among other things.

LTA later explained the wordplay behind Jingapore: A combination of his name Jing and Singapore, an attempt by the artist to “portray Singapore through his eyes”.



Admittedly, it’s probably instinctive to see a word like “Jingapore” and do a double take.

What’s disappointing is for so many people not to have stopped to consider that it may not have been a mistake.

Instead of passing judgement immediately, it would have been heartening to see people attempt to decipher why it was spelt that way, even if they had not made the immediate connection between the title of the work and the artist’s name.

THE SKY IS YELLOW

How many people saw and commented on the “misspelling” without actually seeing Quek’s name and his work?

Have years of rote learning made us an unimaginative and rigid people and quick to point out mistakes simply because our own mistakes were readily pointed out by our parents, teachers or fellow classmates?

Many of us grew up in school being told there is a right and wrong answer, it’s black and white with very little grey and there’s really no point in trying to comprehend the grey.

How can kids pick up their mother tongue if their parents are not fluent in the language, without recourse to expensive tuition classes? (Photo: Pixabay/weisanjiang)

When children coloured the sky something other than blue in picture books, they were often told they were wrong. Very few parents or teachers might have stopped to ask why the child coloured it yellow. Could they have envisioned the sky flooded by sunlight that rendered the blue insignificant?

To accept that the sky is not blue is a call that education experts have been making for years now, but how many of us have actually accepted it?

How many children’s imaginations have we constrained and constricted with this world view?

Yes, the world often operates in black and white and many things are so.

But there are many other things that aren’t black and white – the arts being one of them.

Human emotions and opinions are rarely black and white too.

This is one reason many artists declare that an understanding of literature and the arts helps us be better people, in addition to being more imaginative and innovative – something that we are struggling with today.

In a recent interview “On the Record” with me, playwright, Haresh Sharma explained the problem best when talking about his 1993 play, Off Centre.

His concern was with larger institutions in Singapore.

The play was commissioned by the Ministry of Health (MOH) with the aim of casting the spotlight on the challenges mental patients face when trying to re-integrate into society.

When the script was submitted, the ministry asked for technical changes to be made. A ministry spokesperson said the play “presented a prejudiced view of mental disorder, its treatability and the therapists, besides ridiculing God, religion and National Service”.

Years later, as Sharma sat across from me, he was as vociferous in defending the work as he was 24 years ago.

According to Sharma, MOH took issue with the fact that the male protagonist in the play, Vinod, has a breakdown while serving National Service and that at the end of the play, he commits suicide.

“It's very black and white for them. They essentially said, 'because he had a breakdown in the army, you are saying the army is bad' or 'he committed suicide, so you’re saying mental disorder cannot be treated,'” he said.

“But my question is: You mean (you) can't have a breakdown in the army? Why don't you say: He had a breakdown. Period. Let's help him. Why must you say he had a breakdown in the army, and therefore, we should not support this play because it makes the army look bad?”

“What about the suicide?” I asked him.

He said:

It's like saying Romeo and Juliet should not be studied because 'got suicide'.

By the way, the female protagonist in the play, Saloma, who also suffers from a mental illness does not commit suicide. Some would say Off Centre is merely presenting the various outcomes, not necessarily saying that mental disorders are not treatable, as the authorities might have interpreted it.

Sharma’s The Necessary State ended up losing S$30,000 in sponsorship and staged the full version of the play on its own.

Playwright Haresh Sharma, on one of several purposes of art: "There is also art that brings up uncomfortable questions that you might not be willing to hear and talk about, or you might see conflicts that you are not totally at ease with."

TREAT OUR MYOPIA WITH CRITICAL THINKING

Today, Off Centre is used as an academic text at the tertiary level and as part of the Ministry of Education’s GCE O-Levels literature syllabus.

Have things changed and minds opened?

“I don’t know. The more I deal with these institutions, the more I realise I don't want to say the MOH had a problem with it and MOE didn’t. I would say that maybe one or two people within that ministry had a problem with it and they had the power to make the decision. It just seems that way to me,” said Sharma.

Organisations and individuals should have more dialogue with each other before coming to such decisions. Let’s not take the easy way out by playing it safe out of a fear of causing offence. Some might say the LTA’s decision to take down the This is Jingapore plaques is reflective of this fear as well. Unfortunately, such actions could further impede our ability to mature as a society.

Sharma says even today, he notices among his audience and government agencies, a lack of comprehension and the inability to debate multiple interpretations and viewpoints.

He said:

We need to empower ourselves and society in general with a keener sense of critical thinking, ability to evaluate, analyse works of fiction, and not take things too black and white, or too literally.

IT’S A “LIFE” THING

The arts can help us develop critical thinking and can have a positive impact even beyond art, at least according to Sharma.

“So if you watch something, it is text, subtext. That's life. When you are dealing with people, sometimes people say things but they mean something else. Don't you want to have that ability to have empathy, or have understanding on how people are feeling, rather than just take everything at face value and not be able to go deeper? This is not just a theatre or arts thing. It's really a 'life' thing,” he declared.

I would argue it would have a positive impact on the quality of public discourse on important issues that affect our society – the ability to hear someone out, understand the merits of others’ arguments, realise that even if you disagree with them, they are entitled to their viewpoint and that there is no need to take disagreement personally.

To have empathy, or have understanding on how people are feeling, is not limited to arts or theatre, but is part of living in a society. (Photo: Singapore Art Museum)

An appreciation of literature could similarly help us according to poet and cultural critic, Kirpal Singh who said in another “On the Record” interview: “Literature begins by saying: 'What do you think of this character?' In a way, you’re forced to think and discuss. My worry is that a lot of us have been nurtured in a very formulaic society with answers that are usually imparted rather than self-developed and self-explored. Very often in school, teachers say, 'I don't really want to know what you feel. I want to know the right answer.' This is a problem. It smacks of arrogance to say that this is the answer because we’re finding out, in very simplistic terms, what was the answer yesterday is no longer the answer today whether it’s in life, or our jobs, or in business.”

So let us not be arrogant and say Jingapore doesn’t make sense simply because we believe there is only one “right answer”.



IT’S IN HOW WE DO IT

There is no lack of art and culture in Singapore today. The government has invested heavily in making Singapore an arts hub. In fact, the LTA’s Art in Transit programme is one of many initiatives designed to further this broader vision. There are even campaigns such as READ! Singapore to encourage reading among the general population.

The Ministry of Education announced this year that the number of schools offering upper secondary literature increased from 85 per cent in 2015 to 90 per cent.

On paper, Singapore is not a cultural desert.

However, booksellers have told me that getting people to read fiction over self-improvement books is an uphill task.

“They would rather read about how to make a million dollars than read a work of fiction, but it is through fiction that you learn how to open your mind,” said one who declined to be named.

A society conditioned to value utility over everything else might consider fiction an utter waste or something you only engage in if you have the luxury of time.

This is partly why when some artists talk about literature and the arts, they pitch it as something that can help people be creative – a trait that is valued at the workplace or in business. Some artists feel it is sad that people can’t appreciate the arts for its own sake or that a lot of the art we are exposed to here is more entertaining than thought-provoking.



Kirpal Singh (centre) commented in an interview that, "if we don't, from very young, stimulate the child's imagination in ways which are different from the norm, we are never going to get creativity working very successfully." (Photo: Kirpal Singh)

But let’s give ourselves time. After all, the world is not black and white, is it? The more people understand this, the more varied our exposure will be.

Another important issue is while literature and the arts are part of the school curriculum, how they are being delivered to students is vital. Are teachers open to having discussions and accepting various interpretations? Or does the classroom operate on “black and white”, “right or wrong”?

Ezra Pound said: "Great literature is simply language charged with meaning to the utmost possible degree." Let us find it in ourselves to discover that meaning instead of declaring something right or wrong too quickly.

The artist behind This is Jingapore, Jing Quek said on his Facebook page when his art work was first publicised in the media: “In spite of all the headwinds art faces in Singapore, once in a while a major initiative like this slips through that allows art to leave an indelible mark on the landscape for the next decade.”

This was before the kerfuffle over Jingapore. Let’s hope it is truly his work that leaves an indelible mark and not just the kerfuffle.



Let us be positively bewildered because our imagination takes us to unimaginable places, not because we have decided that others are wrong simply because they’ve not gone by the book - or by our book.

Bharati Jagdish is presenter and senior producer for Digital News at Channel NewsAsia.



