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Society: Our money managers
“Are Singapore’s investment giants being left behind?” was the headline of a marvellously reported, and often scathing, look at GIC and Temasek by the Financial Times (FT). Their roughly five percent annual average returns (in US dollar terms) over the past decade means they are “among the weakest performers among 50 similar global organisations over a 10-year period, according to Global SWF data, despite being among the largest and best resourced.” (Comparisons were in nominal terms and without adjusting for the level of risk.)
The FT said that Temasek, with a S$434bn portfolio, “has been beset by a litany of mis-steps, including from its forays in China and with start-ups.” One notable muck-up was its investment in FTX, a crypto exchange later revealed to be a fraud, in which it’s unclear if adequate due diligence was done by Temasek (and other investors). It’s since reduced its exposure to China and dampened its enthusiasm for early-stage investments. “In recognition of the need to make its portfolio more resilient, Temasek is in the middle of a broad restructuring to improve accountability among managers,” the FT said. This will see it split into three entities that correspond to its portfolio: domestic firms (41 percent of assets); global businesses (36 percent); and fund partnerships and asset management companies (23 percent).
The FT was less critical of GIC—whose portfolio is estimated by Global SWF to be US$936bn (S$1.21trn)—noting its conservatism given a modest remit: “Senior managers at GIC say their explicit mandate from the finance ministry is to beat global inflation by a couple of percentage points, a yardstick it tends to perform well against.” (Even as returns lag a “reference portfolio”.) The article discusses much else, from GIC’s asset allocation strategy and Temasek’s evolving approach to investments in India, the Middle East, and the US, to the drafting of Gabriel Lim, highly-rated civil servant and hitherto prospective politician, to help clean up the mess at Temasek. All this should concern Singaporeans because the two entities, along with MAS, contribute roughly 20 percent of government revenue (in line with the formula dictating how reserves are tapped). Amidst an ageing population and rising healthcare and other costs, we must closely scrutinise how our money is being managed.
Is there sufficient transparency and accountability at these organisations? Was Ho Ching, a trained electrical engineer, the best person to lead Temasek for almost two decades, overseeing at least some of the “litany of mis-steps”? How much did she earn, and how much do her successors and all the others? (Many funds around the world disclose executive compensation.) Why is it that a newish journalist to Singapore at the FT is able to write such an exhaustive piece, including interviews with numerous sources with ties to these organisations—but our own mainstream media journalists, funded by our money, cannot? These are not new questions. But we must keep asking them.
Some further reading and viewing: responses by academic Donald Low; the 1M65 YouTube channel with a 14min video; and a lively Reddit thread with over a 100 comments.
Society: Mutants
Deep inside a bacterium, a biological photocopier replicates the chemical “letters” of its DNA. It’s a necessary step for a new cell, a new progeny, the next generation. T begets T; C begets C; G begets G. TCG. Each replicated trio an instruction in life’s recipe.
G -> G; G -> G; T -> T, it goes.
C -> C; G -> G; A -> A
G-> G; T -> T; T -> T
But sometimes, it goes:
A -> A, C -> C; C -> G
Most errors don’t matter. On the rare occasion though, they ripple and magnify down the line. A protein folds differently; the bacterium’s shape shifts a bit or its behaviour alters slightly such that an antibiotic or another microscopic “predator” can no longer grip or disable it. Even as its peers fall, this outlier survives, and its progeny inherit the “error”, and theirs too, and so on. This is evolution by natural selection—a chance mutation that makes those carrying it likelier to proliferate.
Scientists have worried that random DNA copying errors could work in tandem with errant human behaviour to supercharge mutations almost from the moment the world’s first antibiotic, penicillin, became commonplace during the second world war. Its discoverer, Alexander Fleming, warned during his 1945 Nobel lecture: “The time may come when penicillin can be bought by anyone in the shops. Then there is the danger that the ignorant man may easily underdose himself and by exposing his microbes to non-lethal quantities of the drug make them resistant.” Underdosing—taking too little, or not finishing a course—kills off highly sensitive bacteria, letting hardier ones dominate. Overdosing—taking too much, too often—wipes out even normal bacteria, allowing rare mutants dibs on all resources. Misdosing—taking antibiotics when unnecessary—also boosts deadly microbes over the ramparts of our immune systems.
Today, antibiotic misuse is rampant. About half of outpatient antibiotic prescriptions in Iran and India, and nearly a third in China, are medically unjustified. But really, the problem spans the globe. From South Africa to France, from the USA to South Korea, where infections from resistant “superbugs” have spiked, raising terrifying visions of a pre-antibiotic world where minor cuts could turn fatal. In 2019, the World Health Organization named “antimicrobial resistance” one of the world’s top public health threats.
Beyond education and tighter regulation, newer classes of antibiotics—none have been approved for decades—can help us out of this morass. Scientists are trawling through Chile’s salt pans for organisms that could yield potent new drugs; using AI to sort through billions of known chemicals in the hopes of repurposing them; and conjuring new compounds in labs. Meanwhile, the biological copier carries on: T-> T; G-> G; A ->….C?
Society: Will the kids be alright?
Australia’s intensely anticipated social media ban for children took effect on Wednesday. Those below 16 can’t create accounts on TikTok, X, Facebook, Instagram, YouTube and Reddit, among others. Existing accounts will be wiped. Companies that fail to comply risk fines of up to A$49.5m (S$43m). Malaysia and Denmark are considering similar moves. Instinctively, this feels right and good. Especially given recent allegations in the US that Meta—owner of Facebook and Instagram—was aware that “millions of adult strangers were contacting minors on its sites; that its products exacerbated mental health issues in teens; and that content related to eating disorders, suicide, and child sexual abuse was frequently detected, yet rarely removed.” Worse, one former Instagram executive revealed that accounts were allowed 16, sixteen, violations for prostitution and sexual solicitation, before the platform suspended them.
Bring on the ban, seethe our vengeful, self-righteous, worried-sick selves. Should they be heeded? The most obvious objection, if it can be called that, is around efficacy: there is little doubt that suitably motivated teenagers will find ways to access platforms that control their developing brains’ dopamine spigots. Some already have. But some also find ways to smoke, drink, and drive underaged: that alone shouldn’t scuttle good policy. A sharper criticism is that instead of forcing platforms—the fines are a joke for these trillion-dollar gargoyles—to get clean, the ban deprives youngsters of the connections and community built over years. The more enterprising ones have built entire businesses online, or boosted offline ones through savvy social media use. The New York Times interviewed Lily Gaulton, who has autism and cerebral palsy: “It [social media] would allow me to…communicate with other people and empower people and understand that they’re not alone.” For all its catastrophic failures, social media still shows glimpses of the rosy promises it once held.
But we’d been on the cusp of this cultural moment for a while. The parents’ groups, the bestselling books, the academic papers, the podcasts, the real-life cases, and the record-breaking OTT shows had created such pressure that something eventually had to give. The truth though is that no one knows how this shakes out. Are kids really being given back their childhoods? And what of those who will, ironically, be more isolated because of the ban? Will it unwittingly shepherd them into darker, nastier corners of the internet? And what about AI, with all its inherent insidiousness. Do we outlaw that next?
The actual solution lies in making big companies answerable: for their users, their algorithms, and their policies. Parents too should educate themselves better on existing and emerging technologies; only then can they exercise vigilant, caring guardianship. But perhaps we have to stumble around a bit first in search of this balance. May the harm we cause in the process not be irreversible.
Society: Flipping the script
Tanned skin, sandy soles, and freckled, sun-spotted faces; the ocean gently lapping on the shore behind. There were no waves to surf in the dog days of summer, so teenagers and 20-somethings started darting around the beach-hugging carparks of 1950s’ southern California on wooden pallets with clay or metal wheels, scavenged and disassembled from their roller skates. Soon, kicktails and concave shapes were introduced in the makeshift boards’ designs. And so the skateboard was born. In time, those atop it moved from the busy beaches to the quieter suburbs where the skateboard allowed the body to experience the smallest irregularities and gentlest curvatures of the tarmac.
The sport really boomed from the late 1960s though, when skateboard companies like Hobie and Makaha hosted “sidewalk surfing” competitions. Tousled-haired teenagers became pros featured on magazine covers, defining “cool” not just in the US but the world over. Skateboarding rolled onto our shores around 1976, offering riders a cartographic experience of Singapore's rapidly changing urban landscape. For a time, they whizzed across kampongs and HDB estates as the unlikeliest of links between the old world and the new.
But conflict soon followed. When motorists complained, the Ministry of Home Affairs deemed skating an “unhealthy and dangerous game”. Skaters were forced into a makeshift rink in Sentosa; even that was closed in 1979. They turned to void decks, which led to protests from residents, and surprise, surprise, an HDB ban. Skateboarding became an “elitist sport as only those with spacious homes would then be able to indulge in it”, wrote Dana Lam for The Straits Times (ST).
In the US, the 1980s were the “golden age of skateboarding”, with the emergence of Rodney Mullen, inventor of the kickflip, heelflip, and 360-flip; and Tony Hawk, who landed his first 720 (two full mid-air rotations) in 1985. Glossy skateboard magazines like Thrasher and Transworld Skateboarding recast the sport as an act of skill and daring. Singapore’s own skateboarding resurgence is harder to trace. Likely, children from middle-class families, a growing demographic, had greater access to foreign media—and with it, new subcultural influences. Meanwhile, rising affluence brought more cars, and with them, a renewal of the friction from a decade ago. Complaints stacked up about skaters hitching rides on bumpers and carving lines where they shouldn’t; the skaters insisted on their own right to the asphalt.
Then came 1989. Chingay Parade made skateboarding a televised spectacle, and the state followed, citing the need for “healthy outlets for an increasingly affluent people”. The Ministry of National Development framed skateboarding as a discipline of fitness and coordination, and rolled out new facilities. In 1990, the first skatepark—Rock and Roll on Petain Road—opened: 2,000 sqm of concrete accessible at S$5 an hour. From that seed, a dozen arenas spread across parks and HDB estates.
Skateboarding now sits firmly in the mainstream. Its debut at the 2020 Tokyo Olympics and its place in public design—the two-decade old Somerset Skatepark was recently expanded as part of ongoing efforts to revive the Somerset belt—have reinforced its legitimacy. At the upcoming SEA Games, 19-year-old Tina Wan will represent Singapore in the Park event—three trick-filled 45-second runs. Joining her on the men’s side are veteran Farris Rahman, 31, and debutant Felix Balzer, 11. Medals for any of them would simply be the final step in the sport’s evolution from national nuisance to national pride.
Society: Catch my whiff?
On a recent episode of “Subway Takes”, Asim Chaudhry, aka Chabuddy G, offered his theory on “getting women”. It’s not the size of your bank account or your willy, the British comedian and rapper postulated, but your scent. “[R]emember, lads, the first hole you penetrate is her nostril.” Before you raise a stink at the double entendre (it reeks!)—and we can certainly debate the merits of his “take”—Chaudhry was on the nose about olfaction’s evocative power. “Nothing is more memorable than a smell,” wrote Diane Ackerman in A Natural History of the Senses. “One scent can be unexpected, momentary and fleeting, yet conjure up a childhood summer beside a lake in the mountains.” This so-called “Proust effect” describes how smell and taste trigger involuntary autobiographical memories. Scientists note that odours take a direct route to the limbic system, including the amygdala and the hippocampus, regions in the brain tied to emotion and memory. The same goes for food: “When you are eating all the beautiful, complicated flavors… they are all smell,” said neuroscientist Venkatesh Murthy.
What the nose knows, brands know too. BMW, Hilton Hotels, Lush, and Nike all use scent marketing to shape consumer behaviour, creating comfort, familiarity and loyalty through memory association. Meanwhile, the global perfume market, worth US$60.7bn (S$78.6bn), is projected to surpass US$101.4bn (S$131.3bn) by 2034. Asia-Pacific is now the fastest-growing region, driven by Gen Z’s rising disposable incomes and hunger for self-expression and self-care. One report found that 73 percent of them wear fragrance up to three times a week, while investment banking firm Piper Sandler noted a 44 percent jump in yearly spending among teenage boys. “Smellmaxxing” has taken hold here too: tween and adolescent male “frag heads” are spritzing away hundreds of dollars to smell good and posting reviews on TikTok.
Perhaps this collective fixation on odours lingers from January’s intense debate over whether people should shower before their morning commute. Whatever your stance, dousing oneself in a wall of perfume to mask musk is hardly better than smelling like you’ve “marinated in months of night sweat and hair oil”. As a Facebook commenter put it: “I shouldn’t have to taste you when you walk past!” Perfumes may make our world smell better, but they’re no substitute for basic hygiene. Plus, they come with health and environmental risks. Overpowering scents can trigger allergies and headaches, worsen asthma, and cause nausea. Chemicals like volatile organic compounds can contribute to air and water pollution. While unsustainable sourcing of natural ingredients disrupts habitats and drives overharvesting.
Maybe, the first milestone on the road to “getting” anyone, is a warm, soapy shower.
History Weekly by Faris Joraimi
Earlier this month, the HDB announced a new framework for playground design built around three dimensions of play: physical, social, and creative. Growing up in eastern Singapore, I often hung out in the playgrounds of Tampines Central Park and the Adventure Playground of Pasir Ris Park until my early teens. With primitive phones, we recorded blurry videos of mock adventures, staged on and around the synthetic terrain of astroturf hills, stainless steel ladders, and rope pyramids. At Tampines Central Park, giant watermelons and berries formed caves and tunnels. Lee-Loy Kwee Wah designed these in the 1980s, inspired by the fruit farms of rural Tampines that made way for a high-modernist town. Her designs constituted the “second generation” of HDB playgrounds, succeeding those of Khor Ean Ghee, the HDB architect who designed the dragon playground of Toa Payoh, the pelican of Bedok Reservoir, and the dove of Dakota Crescent. I recently saw prototype drawings he made for these spaces from the 1970s, blueprints featuring dimensions and technical specifications, the serious craft serving child’s play.
A 2018 exhibition at the National Museum, “The More We Get Together: Singapore’s Playgrounds 1930-2030” recounted how functional the early versions were. Slides, swings, and see-saws were separate structures. From the 1960s, HDB’s designers experimented with bolder architecture, promoting local symbols and identity as playgrounds were integrated into “new towns” for nuclear families and their rugged children. But there were no playground experts here. Khor, an interior designer, drew geometric forms that became lasting images of Singaporeana, co-opted into a national childhood memory. Most of the physical structures are now demolished, with his dragon playground widely commodified as keychains, pins, door stoppers, and other merchandise for a brisk market of nostalgic consumption.
But as an essay by Justin Zhuang argued, Khor’s works engaged with global theories of playground design that emerged after the second world war, in line with growing beliefs about exposing children to “free play” rather than sheltering them from the dangers of city living. Zhuang connected some of Khor’s works to the “playground sculptures” of mid-20th century British, Japanese, and Scandinavian artists. And they do indeed appear sculptural, works of public art in their own right within a practical, lived environment. These spaces are where children first learn the physics of the external world: tension, motion, gravity, light, and dark. Playgrounds, no less than cartoons and illustrated books, are another genre of the first art forms they engage with. But all that creative experimentation—where you’d least expect—was reined in during the 1990s when a foreign playground expert was brought in to review HDB’s designs. These days, some think that the “thematic” playgrounds of newer BTO estates are too minimalist and lack character. Though the children who continue to play there suggest that you’re never too young to get abstract art.
Arts: Beguiled by the Nanyang Style
Three plump mynahs squat on a bough so laden with durians we fear it might break. A startled clutch of geese, mid-squawk, flock together against sprays of peach blossoms, all dusty pinks and blushing reds. These are the vibrant ink paintings of Nai Swee Leng, a second-generation artist known for his buoyant depictions of bird and branch. When it comes to local masters of Chinese ink, we tend to think first of the late Chen Wen Hsi, whose swinging gibbons you can find on every S$50 banknote. But Nai has finally got his due: the 79-year-old was awarded the Cultural Medallion at the annual ceremony at the Istana on November 27th. So was Goh Boon Teck, theatremaker and artistic director of Toy Factory Productions, perhaps best known for his sprawling Mandarin musicals and dramas. It’s a particularly safe and Sinophone year for Singapore’s highest cultural honour, both alumni of the Nanyang Academy of Fine Arts who’ve either stuck by, or paid homage to, traditional Chinese forms, be they ink painting or street opera.
Many of the senior visual artists favoured by the award tend to be practitioners of the Nanyang Style, a folksy blend of Western conventions with South-east Asian sensibilities that emerged in the mid-20th century. Cheong Soo Pieng, Georgette Chen, Liu Kang—all names synonymous with a movement that both pastoralises and romanticises regional subjects and sceneries. Chen, one of the few women to enter the canon, still holds the record for the most expensive sale of a first-generation artist’s work, when her lush evocation of durians, rambutans and mangosteens went for S$2.47m at a Christie’s auction in 2023. Nai and Chen aside, these languorous paintings—largely by Chinese men—may bring to mind French post-impressionist Paul Gauguin’s sun-soaked, sexualised oil paintings of Tahitian women: a difficult intersection of stunning technique and a suspect colonialist gaze. Curator and critic Louis Ho, writing for ArtAsiaPacific, makes the case for other pioneering schools more sensitive to sociopolitical stirrings: the social realism of another cohort of Chinese artists, such as Chua Mia Tee and Choo Keng Kwang, who were determined to represent the working class on canvas as they made sense of complex nationalist and socialist sentiments post-independence. “[A]t one of the most turbulent and consequential periods in the country’s history,” Ho writes, “Georgette Chen opted to pay tribute to her adopted home with pictures of tranquil landscapes and staged scenes of satay sellers.”
Among this year’s Young Artist Award recipients are those who conceive of our relationship with South-east Asia quite differently than our forebears. They include Syafiqah ‘Adha Sallehin, a composer and performer of traditional Malay music who draws her inspiration from a dizzying variety of sources, from the itinerant Orang Laut to Asli Malay music and jazz. You may recognise her from her trusty musical companion: the accordion. “It’s not a question of taking something here, something there, and putting it together,” the 35-year-old told ST of her careful process, “but—if I am borrowing from different cultures—looking at how I can draw out the essence of that particular music.”
Arts: Archives come alive
“Performance’s only life is in the present,” wrote Peggy Phelan, performance studies scholar, in her iconic essay on the transience of the performing arts. “Performance cannot be saved, recorded, documented...once it does so, it becomes something other than performance.” She argued this in 1993, a time when video-recording technology existed, but the world had not yet been terraformed by the internet, social media or the pandemic. From the fertile breeding grounds of Covid-19 lockdowns came the infectious pleasures of livestreaming and other short-form content that thrived on our hyperattention: the rapid toggling of focus between competing tasks, information streams, and every new dopamine hit of stimulation. During this time, performing arts groups and artists in Singapore also quickly honed in on several ways of making a living and connecting with their audience when they couldn’t take to the stage: experimenting with digital performances in the present, and uploading recordings of performances past. Many soon realised that the quality of their archival videos—static, single-camera takes eclipsed by streaming powerhouses like Netflix or Twitch—would never pass muster in a crowded attention economy. London’s National Theatre has mastered the art of these live recordings, optimising their swooping cinematography of the stage for the big screen, from lighting to makeup. Singapore’s national performing arts centre is hoping to do the same.
The Esplanade has released over 30 full recordings, films and excerpts of performances on Offstage, its curated repository of documentary materials. Clarissa Oon, the Esplanade’s head of digital and content, persuades us that the past lives of performance can very much exist in the present. “The audience’s applause and laughter can also be heard at various points through the archival recording of [National Broadway Company].” she writes, “It is a reminder that live performance is a communal activity, and that for such works of docu-performance, we are remembering and processing our memories and feelings as a community.” The Esplanade wants to make its archives “an open, communal space”, and it’s starting with a range of dance, music and theatre across nine thematic collections. Some recordings will be taken down by the end of the year, so the holiday season may be a good time for a catch up. There’s work that confronts mortality in the Singaporean context: “A Good Death” looks at palliative care through the eyes of a burnt-out doctor who’s also caregiver to a father with dementia. There’s work by international dance supergroups: Taiwan’s Cloud Gate Dance Theatre, and the UK’s Akram Khan Company. And there’s homegrown music across genres, from both the Singapore Symphony Orchestra and singer-songwriter Linying. Archival recordings may not be the “real” thing, but these performance afterlives can very much still be a “reel” thing for those who missed it the first time, or want to revisit a dog-eared memory of a beloved show.
Some further reading: “Is this thing on? Singapore theatre in the midst of a pandemic” by Nabilah Said in ArtsEquator
Faris Joraimi, Abhishek Mehrotra, Sakinah Safiee, Corrie Tan, Tsen-Waye Tay, and Sudhir Vadaketh wrote this week’s issue.
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