Just 28 years old, local playwright Joel Tan has a lot of feathers in his cap: several of his plays have been produced by major theater companies; his first book is just out and he’s part of a contingent of artists travelling around the world with Singapore: Inside Out (www.singaporeinsideout.com). But what does it mean to be a state-supported artist? Here he talks about all that, his skepticism about Singaporean nostalgia and his weird relationship with Pasir Ris.

I’ve lived in Pasir Ris since I can remember, ever since I was eight.

It’s at least 20 minutes away from anywhere I need to be—which I realize is not that long an amount of time to travel, but it feels terrible.

There are only two reasons people travel to Pasir Ris—one is to go to the chalets and the other is to go to the army because it is where the army boys take the bus to the ferry to Pulau Tekong.

Pasir Ris is a nice neighborhood actually. I live five minutes away from the beach, and just down the road is a mangrove swamp, underneath a pedestrian bridge. That’s quite magical. 

We just launched my first collection of plays, and I was very ambivalent about it. Only in Singapore can you have playwrights such as myself, only 28 years old, doing it professionally for three to four years, and getting a full volume of plays. 

Another funny thing about my career so far is that all the plays I’ve written have almost always gone into production. I have friends from other countries in the UK and the US, and it’s just impossible to find a theater that’s willing to stage you. 

It says less about me than it does the ecosystem. I don’t think I’m phenomenally talented. I just happened to
luck out. 

Once you get sucked into the cycle of production, you become a playwriting machine, in a way. I get commissions from other theater companies now, and lately I feel like I’ve been writing things for other people more than for myself. There’s a kind of industry complex that is quite limiting. 

When you’re a jobbing playwright, you get sucked into questions like: who’s going to produce me, I want to get this stage, who should I approach, what’s next. I don’t think those are healthy questions for any writer. I rather be dwelling on other questions. Where am I now? Where have I come from? What do I want to say?

I’ve been thinking of doing post-grad studies in dramatic writing, because a program like that allows me to ask those kinds of questions. Those programs don’t really exist here. 

My generation is sick with nostalgia. My theory is that we grew up seeing how our parents’ memories and childhoods were systematically erased and trivialized. A lot of our generation has seen that happen to our parents, and the sadness that lingers around that. Maybe part of it is a fear that this could happen to us, too. 

In a place like this, things change very fast, and that’s scary. Nostalgia is a way to hang on.

Nostalgia is also a thing we’ve inherited from abroad.
If you look at how merchandise is packaged—there’s a kind of vintage throwback we’ve inherited from
global culture. 

I’m very allergic to nostalgia actually. There’s a tacky, slick, commercial cheapness to it, where you can package old things and sell them as trinkets or novelties. 

Where’s your critical relationship with the past? The past was not this rose-tinted hinterland of wonderful things. There are many things that you cherry-pick from the past, but don’t discuss. 

A lot of artists in their 40s and 50s are nostalgic about the old Zouk, which used to be our equivalent of
Studio 54. 

I wonder what that says about the way we make art today. It’s very professional, it’s very state-endorsed, it’s very neat, it’s very packaged. There’s a much smaller sense of a fringe or outlier complex than there was in
the past. 

Even the process of filling out a form to ask for a grant pigeonholes your work. What genre is this? What kind of work will it be? Who is your target audience?

Finding ways to work outside mainstream theaters is important, because they’re expensive—you’re talking close to half your budget. There’s something that arts practitioners have been petitioning the state to look into for a long time. 

We need to start looking for spaces outside of mainstream theaters to do work: community centers, libraries, restaurants, cafes. 

It’s something I have to start investigating, because it means more freedom—even though you still have to apply for an MDA license. You’re never completely free.

[Someone was joking] that for the longest time in order to be published in Singapore you needed to be either Lee Kuan Yew or you needed to write a cookbook. But that seems to have changed.

You want to increase the readership of your work beyond the shores of your hometown. But the problem is: what does it mean to make works about Singapore? Who should be reading these works? Who is the
primary audience?