One of Three Winners of the 2022 Singapore Unbound Awards for the Best Undergraduate Critical Essays on Singapore and Other Literatures

Being (in the) Present: Analyzing the Productive Nostalgia for Pearl Bank Apartments in Tiong Bahru Social Club and Online Responses

By Timothy Wan

Abstract: With the demolition of Pearl Bank Apartments in 2018 came a surge of nostalgic responses for the complex––yet, even before the announcement of its demolition, responses mourning the loss of Pearl Bank could be found. This essay explores that phenomenon: using Pearl Bank as a focal point, this essay offers a reconsideration of how Singaporeans engage with nostalgia. To do so, the essay first engages with Gaik Cheng Khoo’s study on nostalgia projects, unpacking her understated critique of productive nostalgia. It then demonstrates how her critique can be observed in nostalgia projects on Pearl Bank, analyzing a variety of texts––ranging from online forum posts to short videos documenting the building––that attempt to remember Pearl Bank Apartments. Finally, through a more extended close reading of Tan Bee Thiam’s 2020 film Tiong Bahru Social Club (2020), the essay draws out an alternative means of engaging with nostalgia in ways that are more empowering. A key finding of this essay is that for nostalgia to be a helpful response to change, it should not simply be productive, since it is the lean towards productivity that both facilitates and drives the change in the first place.

–

Imagine yourself in the future, remembering this moment in the
present. Savour it.

– Ng Yi-Sheng, “Gone Home”

*Alecia Neo - Home Visits (2009), archival photograph, Blk 152 barber and landlord*
Image description: An old Chinese man in a light-green, short-sleeved, button-up and gray trousers sits in an old barber chair in a brightly lit room. He is surrounded by several miscellaneous items. A large, white curtain and several printed photos hang behind him.

In 2018, it was announced that Pearl Bank Apartments, the landmark horseshoe-shaped apartment complex, would be torn down for redevelopment after being sold en bloc to CapitaLand in its fourth attempt to do so (Luo). This redevelopment can be situated within a series of considerable other changes to Singapore’s urban landscape such as the proposed redevelopment of the Bukit Brown Cemetery and the Keretapi Tanah Melayu (KTM) Railway. Such rapid changes to one’s environment can result in feelings of alienation and confusion, or at worst, a sense of “placelessness” (Farrar 726). Necessarily, the need for methods to cope with these changes arises. Gaik Cheng Khoo unpacks one such coping mechanism in her analysis of “nostalgia projects” (Gaik 32). In her essay “Of Diminishing Memories and Old Places: Singaporean Films and the Work of Archiving Landscape,” she identifies the productive nostalgia present in films and social media that document Singaporean landmarks. While she acknowledges the important roles these nostalgia projects play in providing a sense of “spatial and temporal anchoring," she does not definitively make the case for or against their use (44).

Gaik’s ambivalence seems to signal a nagging doubt about productive nostalgia, and raises questions over its helpfulness for Singaporeans who are attempting to cope with the rapid, constant changes to the environment around them. In this paper, I build on Gaik’s concerns by arguing that productive nostalgia is a problematic coping mechanism for Singaporeans, as being future centric views the Singapore landscape in perpetual hindsight. To demonstrate this claim, I unpack the problems of productive nostalgia in nostalgia projects focused on Pearl Bank––specifically, in terms of how they document the building in seemingly productive ways, but that offer little resistance to the building’s demolition. Such productive nostalgia is depicted and critiqued in Tan Bee Thiam’s film Tiong Bahru Social Club, which I argue, offers an alternative, more empowering form of nostalgia that ultimately grounds its subject in the present.

The need for any coping mechanism at all arises from the rapid changes in the Singaporean landscape, driven by the government’s desire to develop the land to its fullest economic potential. These changes are driven by the twin factors of scarce geographical land available for use and the state’s prioritization on maximizing the utility of urban spaces. These factors have led to tensions over how best to use the limited space, resulting in Singapore’s landscape becoming what Gaik boldly declares as “the most highly and visibly contested terrain in the media and popular imagination today” (33). What is contested here is not simply the most viable use of the land economically, which requires constant change and redevelopment, but the significance of the landscape in the formation of a Singaporean national identity and sense of home.

The landscape that Singaporeans interact with on a daily basis has profound implications on their ability to form a stable sense of identity. As Gaik notes, the environment around them both “emplaces” and “emplots” them into a national identity that “[holds] for them personal memory and emotional significance” (34) [1]. In other words, the formation of a national identity requires people to know that they live in a set time and a set place. Consequently, the changes to one's landscape through rapid urbanization and redevelopment renders one’s sense of time and place indistinct and in constant flux, thereby impeding the formation of a national identity. Gaik suggests that this lack of an identity has resulted in residents feeling “confused and alienated” (34), generating a need for methods of coping with the resultant disorientation.

The feelings of alienation and confusion generated by these rapid changes culminate in what Gaik identifies as nostalgia projects: films, social media posts and websites that “help to collect, collate, document, preserve, and archive memories of these places in the race against time and development” (38). She draws on Andreas Huyssen’s work on “memory practices” to argue that by capturing the details of a given place before it is changed or demolished, these projects provide “spatial and temporal anchoring” (Huyssen, qtd. in Gaik 38). Their use as coping mechanisms is evident in the metaphor of the anchor itself: an anchor keeps a ship tethered to a set place, preventing it from floating away and being lost. Likewise, Gaik suggests, for a Singaporean sense of place and identity that can too easily be free-floating and therefore in need of a weight that can hold it in place, nostalgia projects provide anchoring by capturing the distinct peculiarities of places that hold significance for a specific set of individuals. To demonstrate this anchoring function, Gaik analyses a variety of such projects, focusing particularly on how Royston Tan’s film Old Places and Eng Yee Peng’s Diminishing Memories I and II serve as repositories of memory for places slated for redevelopment.

In doing so, these projects fall under the category of productive nostalgia, a categorization Gaik problematizes almost as quickly as she identifies. Borrowing the term from Alison Blunt’s study of Anglo-Indians in McCluskieGanj, Gaik summarizes productive nostalgia as “a longing for home that is embodied and enacted in practice” and “values the present and looks to the future” (Gaik 45). These projects are deemed productive because they actively seek to conserve the memory of places by documenting them, which “is not about prioritizing the past over the future, but rather envision[ing] a better future” (Gaik 45). In that sense, these projects are productive because they consider how the memory of these buildings can be preserved for the future, actively driving efforts to capture these memories. That these projects “[demonstrate] productive nostalgia at work,” however, does not seem to help Gaik evaluate their usefulness, as they do not resolve the problem of the “premature . . . mourning” (Gaik 45) that films like Old Places and Diminishing Memories embody, nor do they function as a fitting “substitute for living physical space” (Gaik 47).

I posit that Gaik’s concerns over productive nostalgia arise from concerns over a focus on productivity itself. Although Blunt suggests that productive nostalgia is concerned with the present, I argue that in a Singaporean context it is much more centered on the pragmatic concerns of the future. The very notion of productivity requires that one must perform actions that will allow one to reap the most benefit in the future. Therefore, productive nostalgia prevents one from getting trapped in the past, but it also forces one to experience the present as past, captured succinctly in the Ng Yi-Sheng quote that Gaik references (and that serves as the epigraph of this essay): “Imagine yourself in the future, remembering this moment in the present. Savor it” (Ng, qtd in Gaik 45). While Gaik does not explicitly read the quote as such, she seems to allude to the fact that productive nostalgia positions individuals in the vantage point of the future, looking back on the present. Productive nostalgia, evidently, operates under the presupposition of future loss; the reason why the conditions of the present can be savored is because, in the future, these same conditions will be past.

Though Gaik does not make it explicit, it is this focus on loss that generates many of the problems she identifies with the projects: because these projects take a potential and inevitable loss as given, the nature of their documentation carries tones of “fatalism” (Gaik 43) and “mourning” (44). Not only so, but they inadvertently limit their own agency by situating themselves within the “teleological discourse of national development” (45).

This extended reading of Gaik’s argument highlights the problems of productive nostalgia present in the responses to Pearl Bank. While Gaik suggests that “such 1970s modernist buildings with architectural value are considered too recent to have heritage value” (38), the responses to Pearl Bank have been varied. The nostalgia felt for Pearl Bank is connected to a lost sense of connection to the time era that the buildings evoke. Independent media particularly harped on the supposed nostalgic qualities of the building, with one article from The Smart Local claiming that Pearl Bank Apartments “boast aesthetics as well as nostalgia” (Cheng). Likewise, Time Out in “The Lost Landmarks and Buildings of Singapore” declares a “[m]ajor nostalgia alert” in its opening paragraph (Khalid), while Must Share News published an article with the subheading “Pearl Bank Apartments’ Last Photos Make Singaporeans Nostalgic” (Zainalabiden). While the use of the word nostalgia tends to be somewhat muddled, they are often connected with a sense of loss: lost landmarks, lost buildings, and last photos.

It is this desire to hold on to the memory that drives many of the nostalgia projects, many of which can be said to fall under the category of productive nostalgia. Consequently, many of the projects that center on Pearl Bank Apartments center on trying to recover as many details of the buildings as possible. Projects in photography and video have been notable here. Photographer Darren Soh features Pearl Bank as one of three buildings in his short documentary, Before It All Goes: Architecture from Singapore’s Early Independence Years by Darren Soh (Soh). He also conducts interviews with residents in the buildings to collect the stories there. The 19-minute video focuses as much on the fates of these buildings as much as it does on documenting them.

While Soh’s work provides a beautiful detailing of Pearl Bank, his video is certainly not the first attempt to do so. One of his interviewees is a fellow photographer, Sit Weng San, who remarks that:

My first ever photo project was in this building. I knew immediately I wanted to photograph in Pearl Bank, and, I mean, I had the sense at some point it’ll be gone (Soh 00:09:25-36).

Sit’s premonition that the building would be gone is echoed by another photography project that dates back as early as 2008. On a photography forum, a user named “andrewtansj” published a series of black-and-white photographs of the building with the aim of providing “a brief look at the building before it’s gone (not sure when it will get enbloced [sic]) . . . the place really gives a nostalgic atmosphere” (@andrewtansj). The assumptions made by these artists that it was only a matter of time before Pearl Bank would be demolished both drove the need to document the place, thereby preserving the memory, but also renders the tone of these projects elegiac and mournful.

The most prominent of these projects, however, was undertaken by none other than CapitaLand itself. In 2019, CapitaLand published a press release detailing the work it had done to document Pearl Bank using “drone scans of its external façade,” “3D laser scans of various apartment types and the common areas,” and “detailed images and videos” (CapitaLand). These advanced technological methods make it possible to digitally recreate Pearl Bank with pinpoint, photorealistic accuracy, which it later submitted to the Urban Redevelopment Authority for archiving. CapitaLand’s efforts mark the fullest realization of Gaik’s nostalgia project: while in her essay she says that the attempts made to capture the memory of place can be likened to “external hard drives, if you like” (Gaik 39), CapitaLand’s extensive project literally allows the building to exist on a hard drive. In that sense, all these projects allow the memory of Pearl Bank to exist outside of the building itself.

*Alecia Neo - Home Visits (2009), archival photograph, Longzhi and Dan Dan*
Image description: Two Chinese girls standing in a dimly lit laundry room, next to a washing machine with several articles of clothing hung from the ceiling. The girls are dressed in fashion styles from the 2010s. Minimal sunlight peeks through the metal grille window, which has a small, white, ventilator fan attached to it.

The focus on documentation for future generations allows these projects to be categorized as productive nostalgia. Many of these projects do not simply mourn the loss (or, as @andrewtansj and Sit have said about their own photography, potential future loss) of Pearl Bank Apartments, but acknowledge the need of some form of renewal. The buildings were not maintained well. As Sit notes in her interview with Soh:

Structurally, there’s a lot of problems with the building. There are termite infestations, there is a lot of water leakage in the building. Towards the later part, I understand why people voted for en bloc . . . The longer it takes, the less value there is (qtd. in Soh 00:10:35-59).

Sit’s comment that it is difficult to keep the building in its current state points towards an underlying attitude of practicality to the decision to demolish the building. A similar attitude can be observed in CapitaLand’s efforts to document the building through its guided photo-walk, in which it invited Instagram users to document the area using the hashtag #OnePearlBank (CapitaLand). The aim of this photo-walk, according to Mr Ivan Kuek, one such Instagram user, was not simply to document the area, but to allow them to “experience first-hand the current condition of the building and understand the reasons for redevelopment” (Kuek, qtd. in CapitaLand). As such, because such projects acknowledge the need for the building’s redevelopment, these projects can be understood as performing the productive memory work that allows the memory of the building to continue to exist, even after the physical building is torn down.

Nonetheless, drawing on Gaik’s findings, I would argue that it is the productive nature of these nostalgia projects that enables the buildings to be torn down. Gaik herself notes that this ability to store the memory elsewhere “relieves the state of its burden of conserving existent physical structures and natural landscapes that might have historical (and environmental) value” (Gaik 49). By shifting the responsibility of preserving memory to these nostalgia projects and away from the state, these projects offer the state a reliable means by which redevelopment or demolition can be made acceptable. Productive nostalgia, in the context of Singaporean nostalgia projects, takes as given that such redevelopment will happen and therefore seeks to do the only thing it can do: to document the memory of the places before it is too late.

Consequently, the nostalgia projects surrounding Pearl Bank preempts the demolition of the building. Even concerted conservation efforts (which, by way of extensive documentation arguably functions as nostalgia projects as well) appear to be based on the premise that the state may well take the land. Conservation Conversations: Pearl Bank Apartments, a 2018 student publication, for instance, features a section that considers four different options, one of which is “Demolition” (Quek et al. 64), as though already making accommodations for such a demolition. We might observe a similar attitude in a position paper put out by Singapore Heritage Society in the same year, strikingly titled Too Young to Die: Giving New Lease of Life to Singapore’s Modernist Icons. The paper describes in immaculate detail the dimensions, layout and facilities of Pearl Bank Apartments to argue for its preservation (Chua 17). Its tone, however, is somewhat elegiac; it uses grainy black-and-white photography that imbue the building with a sense of solemnity and gravitas. Much like the black-and-white photography employed by @andrewtansj, it seems to use a pre-emptively mournful tone even as it attempts to justify its preservation; its detailed account of the building productively doubles up as a memorial. While productive nostalgia may preserve memories of demolished buildings, it also subscribes to the attitude of practicality that makes the demolition of such buildings necessary.

Of course, the problems that I have raised over productive nostalgia require a consideration of viable alternatives. Its problems notwithstanding, an unproductive nostalgia does not sound any more helpful. I argue that one possible alternative can be found in filmmaker Tan Bee Thiam’s “nostalgia that empowers” (Tan 2015). Tan, in a 2015 talk on “Nostalgia” in which he has discussed the nostalgic devices he has used in his films, uses the term in his statement that:

What really interests me most is not just nostalgia that recalls the past, but nostalgia that empowers, something you can do something about. The audience leaves with a sense of mission . . . Nostalgia that connects with concerns of the present (Tan B., "#Nostalgia 00:07:00-40).

For a film’s nostalgia to be empowering, according to Tan, it should not simply sentimentalize or revisit the past, but spur action from the viewer. Where empowering nostalgia differs from productive nostalgia is in its temporal focus; the latter, as Gaik notes (as discussed in the preceding paragraphs), considers all things in relation to the future, while the former is firmly situated in the present.

To demonstrate the potential of empowering nostalgia, I will perform a close reading of Tan’s film Tiong Bahru Social Club (TBSC), in which he provides a critique of a productive nostalgia and demonstrates how a nostalgia project can instead be empowering (Tan B.). The film follows Ah Bee, a 30-year-old office worker who lives with his elderly mother, Mui, in Pearl Bank Apartments. Ah Bee leaves his job to work as a happiness agent at Tiong Bahru Social Club, a reimagined version of Tiong Bahru housing estate that uses a data-driven algorithm to maximize the happiness felt by its elderly residents. While the film does not promote itself as a nostalgia project that documents Pearl Bank Apartments, reviews of the film have noted the film’s engagement with nostalgia. Nonetheless, the nature of this engagement remains unclear. Some reviews suggest that nostalgia is a theme that emerges, reflecting “the paradoxical nature of present-day nostalgia” (Korbecka) as well as “community life, historical consciousness, and nostalgia in relation to urban spaces” (Aquino); others allude to it as a cinematic device Tan uses, noting how he “plays well with color and nostalgia” (Chang), “flirts with Art Deco nostalgia” (Sci-Fi London), and is “[d]renched in color and faux nostalgia like a Singaporean Wes Anderson dystopia” (Goo). Evidently, the film’s engagement with nostalgia, and therefore its use as a Pearl Bank nostalgia project, is as prevalent as it is difficult to pin down.

While a possible object of the film’s nostalgic gaze is Pearl Bank Apartments, the film presents pragmatic characters that do not share the same nostalgic attitude. Concurrent with Ah Bee’s search for happiness at the social club is Mui’s processing of a potential en bloc sale back home: together with the other elderly residents, she considers living options in other neighborhoods, decides what she would do with the money, and wonders whether the often alluded to “en bloc sale will go through” (TBSC 27:07). While she comments that “[i]t was good living here” (27:35), her concerns are primarily practical in nature, as are the other residents’. The money-focused mindsets of the residents are revealed in an early scene where Mui witnesses a young protestor (literally standing on soap box) trying to convince an angry mob not to go through with the en bloc sale:

PROTESTOR. These are our collective memories, our cultural heritage. We should preserve them!

CROWD. What’s the use of memories? We want money! (TBSC 27:40-47)

The protestor’s later appeals to the residents to conserve collective memories and to leave something for future generations are rendered ineffective, drowned out by the old folks’ desire for money. It is quickly revealed that the protestor does not actually live in Pearl Bank, and he is promptly picked up and carried out by the elderly mob. The scene is played for laughs: the conservationist efforts are presented as wholly out of touch with the residents’ actual, pragmatic concerns. Nostalgia for Pearl Bank, evidently, has no place in the residents’ lives because it stands at odds with their sense of pragmatism.

The social club, then, offers its clients a more acceptable sense of nostalgia that aligns with these pragmatic values. This mix of nostalgia and productivity can be read in the three advertisements the club puts out. The club frames its activities using economic language, touting pioneer rewards and promising that the data algorithm “ensures higher returns on your property investment,” while the staff-resident relationship is framed as one between senior clients and happiness agents (TBSC 06:52-07:30). The advertisement’s tagline, “Everyone’s happiness is our business” alludes to the fact that the seniors’ happiness is as much a matter of concern of the club as it is an economic prospect. At the same time, the advertisements mimic the look and feel of a product of the 1970s or 1980s––the video occasionally wavers like a VHS tape would, grainy synthesizer music plays in the background, and even the aspect ratio changes to a 4:3 format, much like the screens of the past. Such devices couch the economic concerns of the residents in what Paul Grainge, summarizing the work of postmodernist critic Fredric Jameson, dubs the “nostalgic mode” that “indiscriminately plunders [the past] for style, refracting the past through fashion and glossy images of ‘past-ness’” (Grainge 30) [2]. Here, the familiarity of the past allows the club to perform the “social function” of nostalgia: “helping people and cultures adapt to rapid and momentous change” (28).

By combining pragmatic economic considerations with familiar nostalgic feelings, Tiong Bahru Social Club is a depiction of productive nostalgia at work. What the advertisement promotes on a smaller scale, the club itself performs on a larger one: they both reconcile and appeal to pragmatic and nostalgic desires. The club’s pervasive drive towards productivity is signaled to by the constant references to metrics like the “Gross Community Happiness Index” and the need to meet “KPIs” (Key Performance Indicators), which take the form of a “Happiness Contribution Leaderboard” (TBSC 33:00). Indeed, the club’s data-driven algorithm that maximizes happiness and optimizes the experience suggests a highly pragmatic, technological approach to finding happiness. The look and feel of the club, nonetheless, is evocative of a nostalgic past, featuring the iconic landmarks of Tiong Bahru, built in the 1920s, and restaurants that mimic the style of an old-style coffee shop (TBSC 23:53). In that sense, TBSC can be said to utilize nostalgia in a productive manner: rather than being trapped in the past, its use of past imagery and icons propel its residents into the future.

Nonetheless, while this nostalgia is shown to be productive, it is also the object of the film’s critique, presented as inauthentic. The excessive drive towards productivity generates an obsession with the measurable, even pervading activities that might normally occur spontaneously or naturally: smiles appear plastered on, laughing exercises are conducted, and guided pamphlets with arrowed diagrams on how to have physical intimacy are provided. Consequently, while such nostalgia produces effective facades, it also leads to a sense of inauthenticity. As Ah Bee begins to climb the social ladder in the club, he is reminded by the algorithm (personified as a figure dressed entirely in black) that he has “a beautiful apartment, a perfectly matched partner, and a job that gives [him] a purpose” before being declared “a winner” (TBSC 55:16-30). However, as his social status grows, so too does his sense of emptiness. He laments:

AH BEE (voiceover). If I’m a winner, why don’t I feel like I deserve it? Maybe it’s all written in the stars, like an instruction manual. But when I look up, all I see is one big emptiness. (55:50-56:10)

Ah Bee’s nagging doubts point to the failure of external measures of success in providing him with a sense of genuine fulfilment.

*Alecia Neo - Home Visits (2009), archival photograph, War Veteran*
Image description: An old, balding, Chinese man with white hair in a dark-green, muscle tank and white trousers stands barefoot in the middle of an old, dimly lit, living room. He holds a white plaque in one hand, which has several military medals pinned to it. At his feet lies an open suitcase with several old documents and photographs. Behind him, chairs are stacked upside down on the dining table. Also behind him is a large, white cross on the wall, alongside framed photographs. The largest framed photograph is of a little, smiling girl, who is likely his grandchild.

Ultimately, the film’s critique of the Tiong Bahru Social Club's productive nostalgia can be extended to a critique of nostalgia projects in general. An understanding of what the social club represents sheds light on the film’s final reveal: Ah Bee returns home only to find out that the buyer in the en bloc sale was the Tiong Bahru Social Club, and Pearl Bank Apartments is slated to become Pearl Bank Social Club (TBSC 1:22:56). Ironically, the nostalgic imagery of iconic buildings, used by the social club to couch its economic aims, has started to subsume the buildings themselves. In a sense, the Pearl Bank Social Club is a productive nostalgia project taken to its logical extreme: it co-opts the space for more pragmatic usage while superficially conserving its memory.

Nonetheless, I would argue that the film itself is not anti-nostalgic about Pearl Bank. While the film’s depiction of Tiong Bahru Social Club’s productive nostalgia is ironic, the film’s own attitude towards Pearl Bank Apartments seems genuinely sentimental. Its final shot, a sepia-tinted drone shot that slowly pans away from the building, presents the building in a sentimental light that betrays no winking sense of irony or absurdity (TBSC 1:23:53). In its shots in and of the building, the film uses bright, pastel colors that evoke the nostalgic mode as much as the social club does. In doing so, the film documents Pearl Bank in the same way that Old Places or Diminishing Memories does and can be said to function as a nostalgia project itself.

However, TBSC avoids the trappings of productive nostalgia by using this nostalgia for more empowering aims. While productive nostalgia projects aim to document the lost (or soon to be lost) building for future generations to remember, Tan’s documentation pushes the audience back into the present. In the film, the nostalgic shots of Pearl Bank do not suggest a longing for the building of Pearl Bank itself, but rather Ah Bee’s longing to return to the person within it: his mother. It is this relationship that ultimately informs the film’s nostalgia for Pearl Bank. The film’s nostalgia is not productive: in fact, it problematizes and eschews productivity. Ah Bee’s homecoming requires him to let go of the productive measures that make him a "winner" as he becomes unemployed to live with his mother. What this rejection of productivity means for TBSC as a nostalgia project, therefore, is that Tan’s nostalgia empowers and pushes the audience to be sentimental, but lets that sentimentality drive them back into present concerns.

What does this mean for the future of nostalgia projects? As Gaik hints at in her essay, the future-centered focus of nostalgia projects is problematic as it considers the Singaporean landscape in terms of what future generations ought to know, and seeks to preserve a legacy for them. While this future centeredness achieves its aims of preserving memories through increasingly advanced technological methods, it also views the Singaporean landscape in perpetual hindsight; such landmarks are precious when imagined what it must feel like to lose them. Productive nostalgia projects that view landmarks through the lens of loss has two interrelated consequences: it ascribes a mournful, fatalistic tone to many of these projects, while enabling the government to continue redeveloping or demolishing these buildings. In light of the problems of productive nostalgia as a coping mechanism for the rapidly changing landscape, Tan’s film offers not only a critique of productive nostalgia, but also an alternative to it. As a nostalgia project, it sentimentalizes Pearl Bank Apartments not by considering what the loss of the buildings will be like. Rather, Tiong Bahru Social Club gestures towards a more empowering nostalgia project that seeks to capture the lived experience that makes the building worth remembering at all. To perhaps revise Ng Yi-Sheng’s exhortation, such a nostalgia project allows the viewer to experience the present not as the past, but as the present.

Acknowledgements

I am indebted to the filmmakers of Tiong Bahru Social Club for sending me a screener of the film for me to write on the film. I would also like to express great thanks to Dr Lo Mun Hou, who guided the research and writing process for this paper – and, upon my dismay at visiting Pearl Bank Apartments only to find it fully demolished, was kind enough to share some Pearl Bank memories of his own.

Endnotes

[1] Gaik borrows the term “emplot” from the field of historiography; just as to be “emplaced” is to be situated in a particular place or position, to be “emplot[ted]” is to be situated in the context of a historical narrative.

[2] In his essay on “Postmodernism and Consumer Society”, Jameson writes on what he terms ‘nostalgia film[s]’ that do not “reinvent a picture of the past in its lived totality; rather, [they reinvent] the feel and shape of characteristic art objects of an older period … to reawaken a sense of the past associated with those objects” (18-19). It is in this sense that I invoke the ‘nostalgic mode’ that the club’s advertisements embody.

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– – –, cowriter and director. Tiong Bahru Social Club. Tiger Tiger Pictures et al., 2020.

Tan, Royston, et al., directors. Old Places. Objectifs, 2010.

Sci-Fi London. “Tiong Bahru Social Club.” Sci-Fi London, sci-fi-london.com/tiong-bahru-social-club/.

Zainalabiden, Fayyadhah. “S’pore Photographer Takes Final Photos of Pearl Bank Apartments till Last Residents Leave.” Must Share News, 2 May 2019, mustsharenews.com/pearl-bank-apartments-close/.

Timothy Wan is an English Literature undergraduate student at the National University of Singapore.

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Alecia Neo is an artist and cultural worker who develops long-term projects that involve collaborations with individuals and communities. Her socially engaged practice unfolds primarily through lens-based media and participatory artworks that address modes of radical hospitality and care labour. Her recent projects include a dance film ramah-tamah, Power to the People, Karachi Biennial 2022 and Care Index, an experimental platform which aims to collect, distill, and visualise data relating to care labour, Between Earth and Sky, a collaboration with Sharda Harrison, Ajunta Anwari and a group of caregivers in Singapore.

She is the co-founder of Brack, a collective for socially engaged art, and Ubah Rumah Residency in Bintan. She also runs Unseen Art Initiatives, a Singapore-based platform for disabled professional and emerging artists. Alecia has been an artist-in-residence at diverse art institutions such as Bamboo Curtain Studio, The Substation, NTU CCA Singapore and UNIDEE in Biella, Italy. She received the National Arts Council’s Young Artist Award in 2016. She is an Associate Artist of Dance Nucleus (Singapore).