Art by decree

 Meanwhile, the Affordable Art Fair is taking place in the Pit Building  on Marina Bay. It’s a half-hour drive from Block 5, that takes us through the hipster Chip Bee Gardens district with its design shops and cafés, and on past the glass skyscrapers of the banking district. The first evening, there’s a veritable rush on the 74 galleries – who knows, maybe there’s a future star among the artists? “And plus, the white wine is free,” Daryl Goh adds conspiratorially, alluding to the high price of alcohol. The 27-year-old artist and curator is visiting some gallery owner friends, but finds the quality of what he’s seeing “mixed.” One artist has copied classics like the Mona Lisa but added cat motifs. Another work immortalizes in Warholian pop colors the state’s founding father, Lee Kuan Yew, who died in March. Lee was the country’s prime minister from 1959 to 1990, and it was the rule of iron discipline he imposed on his fellow Singaporeans that helped them achieve prosperity. Given his mantra,“The exuberance of democracy leads to undisciplined and disorderly conditions…inimical to development,” it’s no wonder that for a long time there was little demand for cultural diversity.

Later on, Goh calls in at the Timbre , a bar with several rows of tables and taut sunshades set out in front of a yellow-and-white colonial building on the banks of Singapore River. Goh has built up a group of collectors from financial circles. At the moment, he is organizing a program to provide artists with studios in an old printworks. People here, he tells me, still have o bonuses? “In their eyes, you either lead a glamorous life or you’re totally destitute.”

If there’s one place showing exciting art, it’s The Deck , says Goh. A container building on a small plot of wasteland, it was modeled on the Platoon Kunsthalle in Berlin. “We are the first establishment of our kind that wasn’t set up by the government,” says Gwen Lee, 38, curator and co-founder of the photo gallery. “And we aren’t commercial.” An unusual statement in a city where consumerism is the measure of all things.

Students wearing baseball caps wander through the exhibition blocks. Inside darkrooms, the founders demonstrate how photos were developed before the dawn of digital memory cards. Visitors to art openings behave differently here than in Europe or America. At first they are too shy to enter because they think they will have to buy something. Then they stand in front of huge paintings loudly engaged in Facetime phonecalls. Smartphones are ubiquitous. Whether walking, standing or appraising a picture, everyone is busy swiping or writing on some mobile device or other. Even visiting gallerists have adapted to this trend and now upload pictures onto Instagram in a bid to reach clients.

 Lee is glad about the opportunities Singapore offers artists today, but she is also skeptical about whether every initiative makes sense. Gillman Barracks  is a case in point. The former barracks was converted into a gallery complex in 2012 with the aim of bringing the international art market to Singapore. But for many, it feels alien, unconnected to the local scene. The barracks, built in 1936, still has its old entrance barrier, but instead of a soldier checking papers, today, there’s a machine dispensing car park tickets. Inside the leafy grounds, ShanghART from Shanghai, Mucciaccia from Rome, and Arndt and Michael Janssen from Berlin are just three of 17 galleries exhibiting their artists’ work. But the passing trade and crowds of art lovers out for a day’s stroll cannot compare to those in Soho or Kreuzberg, and openings are attended mostly by local buyers.

Although Singapore’s art scene has in recent years taken possession of some unusual venues, such as Gillman Barracks and The Deck’s containers, art is still not permitted to stray outside of the state-decreed framework. That goes for street art, too, as two sprayers from Leipzig discovered last year, after they graffitied a subway car – and ended up spending nine months in jail. Legal wall art does exist at the Blu Jaz Café  in the Arab quarter, though. There, huge murals adorn the walls of the laneway, where tourists and locals sit at tables over wine and beer – talking, perhaps, about which painting they will buy next.