The Constellation Around
THE CONSTELLATION
The people who appear in this essay, in order of first appearance. Roles and dates are limited to those relevant to this account or to the wider public reach of each figure.
01 Kuo Pao Kun Founder and Artistic Director, 1990 to 1995.
Position, field or public reach beyond The Substation
Playwright, director and arts educator. Co-founder of the Singapore Performing Arts School in 1965 and Practice Theatre Ensemble in 1986. Detained under the Internal Security Act from 1976 to 1980. Singapore citizenship revoked in 1977 and restored in 1992. Cultural Medallion recipient, 1989. Adviser to the National Arts Council, 1991 to 2002. Co-founder of the Theatre Training & Research Programme, now Intercultural Theatre Institute, in 2000.
02 Goh Lay Kuan No formal Substation role.
Position, field or public reach beyond The Substation
Dancer, choreographer and arts educator. Principal dancer at Ballet Victoria before returning to Singapore in 1964. Co-founder of the Singapore Performing Arts School in 1965. Detained under the Internal Security Act in 1976 and released after several months, after which she continued running the school. Cultural Medallion recipient, 1995. Later Artistic Adviser to The Theatre Practice.
03 Bertolt Brecht Historical reference. No Substation role.
Position, field or public reach beyond The Substation
Playwright and theatre theorist associated with epic theatre, which disrupted theatrical illusion to encourage audiences to examine the social and political conditions represented on stage. The Singapore Performing Arts School staged The Caucasian Chalk Circle in 1966.
04 Jek Yeun Thong No formal Substation role.
Position, field or public reach beyond The Substation
Journalist and PAP politician. Detained after the banning of Sin Pao in December 1956 on allegations of subversion and released in April 1958. Political Secretary to the Prime Minister from 1959. Minister for Labour from 1963. Minister for Culture from 1968, later concurrently Minister for Science and Technology. He was Minister for Culture when Kuo Pao Kun and Goh Lay Kuan were detained in 1976.
05 C. J. W.-L. Wee No formal Substation role.
Position, field or public reach beyond The Substation
Scholar and cultural critic. Professor of English at Nanyang Technological University. Author of Culture, Empire, and the Question of Being Modern and The Asian Modern. Editor of The Complete Works of Kuo Pao Kun, Vol. 4: Plays in English. Guest editor of the 2020 Inter-Asia Cultural Studies special issue on Kuo Pao Kun, including the study cited in this essay.
06 Lu Xun Intellectual reference. No Substation role.
Position, field or public reach beyond The Substation
Chinese writer and critic, 1881 to 1936, whose work examined literature, politics, social transformation and the responsibilities of the intellectual. Kuo Pao Kun revisited his writing during detention, particularly Lu Xun’s reflections on the divergent paths of art and politics.
07 Ong Teng Cheong No formal Substation role.
Position, field or public reach beyond The Substation
Architect-planner and politician. Acting Minister for Culture, 1977 to 1981, during which he launched the Singapore Cultural Foundation in 1978 and instituted the Cultural Medallion in 1979. Chairman of the Advisory Council on Culture and the Arts in 1988, whose 1989 report helped lead to the establishment of the National Arts Council and the performing arts centre that became Esplanade. Secretary-General of the NTUC, 1983 to 1993. Second Deputy Prime Minister, 1985 to 1990. Deputy Prime Minister, 1990 to 1993. Fifth President of Singapore, 1993 to 1999.
08 Juliana Lim Administrative intermediary in the founding process. No formal Substation post identified.
Position, field or public reach beyond The Substation
Deputy Director, Cultural Services, Ministry of Community Development, 1985 to 1990. Developed arts assistance schemes including the Arts Housing Scheme and was involved in planning the proposed Singapore Performing Arts Centre.
09 Tisa Ho Board member, 1993 to 2004.
Position, field or public reach beyond The Substation
Assistant Director in the Ministry of Community Development’s cultural affairs division during the development of the Arts Housing Scheme and other arts assistance programmes. Artistic Coordinator, Singapore Arts Festival, 1988 to 1990. General Manager, Singapore Symphony Orchestra, 1991 to 1999.
10 Tay Kheng Soon Founding Chairman, Board of Directors. Worked with Kuo Pao Kun on the building’s conceptual conversion into an arts centre.
Position, field or public reach beyond The Substation
Architect and urbanist. Former Chairman of the Singapore Planning and Urban Research Group. President of the Singapore Institute of Architects, 1991 to 1993. Taught at the NUS School of Architecture.
11 Tan Beng Luan Founding General Manager. Joined PPACL in 1989 to oversee the founding of The Substation.
Position, field or public reach beyond The Substation
Civil servant before leaving public service in 1989. Later Project Coordinator at the Oral History Centre and Second Deputy Director of the National Archives of Singapore. Subsequently Principal of Practice Performing Arts School and founder and Principal of Creative O Preschoolers’ Bay.
12 Wong Kan Seng No formal Substation post. Officially opened The Substation on 16 September 1990.
Position, field or public reach beyond The Substation
Minister for Community Development, 1987 to 1991, after serving as Acting Minister from February 1986. Second Minister for Foreign Affairs, 1987 to 1988. Minister for Foreign Affairs, 1988 to 1994, concurrently with Community Development when The Substation opened in September 1990. Later Minister for Home Affairs, 1994 to 2010, and Deputy Prime Minister, 2005 to 2011.
13 Tommy Koh Patron from 1990. Not a director.
Position, field or public reach beyond The Substation
Diplomat, international lawyer and academic. Singapore’s Permanent Representative to the United Nations, 1968 to 1971 and 1974 to 1984. Ambassador to the United States, 1984 to 1990. Former Dean of the NUS Faculty of Law.
14 Ong Pang Boon Member of the early Board of Directors.
Position, field or public reach beyond The Substation
Member of Singapore’s first Cabinet. Minister for Home Affairs, 1959 to 1963. Minister for Education, 1963 to 1970. Minister for Labour, 1971 to 1981. Minister for the Environment, 1981 to 1985.
15 Lam Pin Foo Member of the early Board of Directors.
Position, field or public reach beyond The Substation
Lawyer, management consultant and arts supporter. His legal and governance experience became important to The Substation’s early board and its negotiations with corporate sponsors. Later President of the Southeast Asian Ceramic Society, with a long involvement in cultural and arts organisations.
16 Li Lienfung Early board member. Also provided material support during financial difficulty.
Position, field or public reach beyond The Substation
Chemist, businesswoman, bilingual writer and arts patron. Chair of the Singapore Totalisator Board Arts Fund Committee, 1994 to 2002.
17 Leo Tan Board member. Joined in late 1991.
Position, field or public reach beyond The Substation
Marine biologist and science educator. Director of the Singapore Science Centre, 1981 to 1986. Founding Dean of Science at the National Institute of Education in 1991. Director of NIE from 1994.
18 Jennifer Lee Board member. Joined in late 1991.
Position, field or public reach beyond The Substation
Physician and healthcare administrator. Chief Executive Officer of KK Women’s and Children’s Hospital, 1991 to 2004. Later Nominated Member of Parliament, 1999 to 2004.
19 Joe Ng No formal post identified. Approached Kuo Pao Kun about using the garden for non-mainstream music in the early 1990s.
Position, field or public reach beyond The Substation
Musician, composer and producer. Frontman of The Padres, formed in 1991. Wrote for the independent music magazine BigO and helped organise alternative music gigs. Later worked extensively as a composer and sound designer for film, television, theatre and visual art while remaining active in Singapore’s independent music scene.
20 Nazir Husain No formal post identified. Approached Kuo Pao Kun with Joe Ng about using the garden for music.
Position, field or public reach beyond The Substation
Music producer, writer and independent arts organiser. Contributed to BigO and, with Joe Ng, helped initiate early alternative music gigs at The Substation Garden from 1990. Later worked in documentary film as a director and producer.
21 Kok Heng Leun Programme Executive, 1992 to 1993. Early participant in The Substation’s programme ecology.
Position, field or public reach beyond The Substation
Theatre director, playwright, dramaturg and educator. Co-founder of Drama Box in 1990 after a gathering in The Substation Garden, later its Artistic Director. Nominated Member of Parliament representing the arts sector, 2016 to 2018. Cultural Medallion recipient, 2022.
22 George Yeo No formal Substation post. Named in retrospective accounts of the Guinness sponsorship negotiations in 1991.
Position, field or public reach beyond The Substation
Brigadier-General and former Chief of Staff, Air Staff. Minister of State for Finance and Foreign Affairs, 1988 to 1990. Acting Minister for Information and the Arts, 1990 to 1991. Minister for Information and the Arts, 1991 to 1999. Concurrently Second Minister for Foreign Affairs, 1991 to 1994, Minister for Health, 1994 to 1997, and Second Minister for Trade and Industry, 1997 to 1999. Minister for Trade and Industry, 1999 to 2004. Minister for Foreign Affairs, 2004 to 2011. Patron of LASALLE College of the Arts since 1988. Currently Visiting Scholar at the Lee Kuan Yew School of Public Policy and Founding Patron of its Asia Competitiveness Institute.
23 Josef Ng No formal Substation post. Appears in the wider performance-art context of the essay.
Position, field or public reach beyond The Substation
Performance artist and later curator and gallerist. Performed Brother Cane at Artists’ General Assembly on 1 January 1994. Later held senior gallery roles including Director of Shanghai Gallery of Art and Curator and Managing Director, Asia, at Pearl Lam Galleries.
24 Iris Tan No formal Substation post. Appears in the wider performance-art context of the essay.
Position, field or public reach beyond The Substation
Manager of 5th Passage and event licence holder during Artists’ General Assembly, 1993 to 1994.
25 Yong Pung How No formal Substation role.
Position, field or public reach beyond The Substation
Chief Justice of Singapore, 1990 to 2006. Presided over the 1994 and 1995 High Court proceedings concerning Iris Tan arising from Artists’ General Assembly and the related licensing prosecution. Formerly a Supreme Court judge, Managing Director of the Government of Singapore Investment Corporation, and Chairman and Chief Executive Officer of OCBC.
26 Lee Wen No formal Substation post. Appears in the wider performance-art context of the essay.
Position, field or public reach beyond The Substation
Performance artist. Cultural Medallion recipient, 2005.
27 Ho Kwon Ping Second Chairman. In office by 1995.
Position, field or public reach beyond The Substation
Journalist and businessman. Detained under the Internal Security Act in 1977 while writing for the Far Eastern Economic Review, where he later became Economics Editor. Founder of Banyan Tree Hotels and Resorts in 1994. Later founding Chairman of the Singapore Management University Board of Trustees.
28 Arun Mahizhnan Board member. Joined in 1995.
Position, field or public reach beyond The Substation
Public affairs specialist, arts administrator and policy researcher. Public Affairs Manager at Mobil Oil Singapore, 1979 to 1987. Member of the Singapore Arts Festival Steering Committee, 1980 to 1990. Deputy Director of the Institute of Policy Studies from 1991.
29 Chew Kheng Chuan Board member. Joined in 1995.
Position, field or public reach beyond The Substation
Social sciences graduate. Detained under the Internal Security Act during Operation Spectrum in 1987. First Singaporean admitted to Harvard College. Later held senior advancement positions at the National University of Singapore and Nanyang Technological University and became a prominent figure in institutional philanthropy and fundraising.
30 T. Sasitharan Recommended as Kuo Pao Kun’s successor in 1995. Artistic Director, 1996 to 2000.
Position, field or public reach beyond The Substation
Philosophy lecturer at the National University of Singapore, 1983 to 1989. Arts editor and critic at The Straits Times, 1988 to 1996. Theatre practitioner. Co-founded the Theatre Training & Research Programme with Kuo Pao Kun in 2000, which became the Intercultural Theatre Institute in 2011. He is its Co-Founder and Director.
Formal titles and dates follow the sources cited in the endnotes and the institutional biographies used for the constellation. Where the historical record does not establish an exact term or date, the description remains deliberately approximate rather than supplying false precision.
45 ARMENIAN STREET
I. The Unwritten Manifesto
The Substation did not announce itself through a manifesto. That absence matters because twentieth-century theatre and dance were crowded with methods, schools, collectives and declarations that turned artistic convictions into organised practice. The relevance is contextual, not genealogical. Kuo Pao Kun and Goh Lay Kuan need not be placed inside a borrowed lineage. What matters is the recurring impulse to ask not only what art might mean, but how artists should work, train, gather and encounter the world.1
Before The Substation opened in September 1990, Pao Kun described the place he wanted as “a permanent place to do arts, see arts, talk arts and live the arts”. A year later, speaking about young practitioners, he said “it is the process that counts”. Neither statement prescribes a procedure, but together they establish two priorities. No single art form should own the building, and unfinished process should retain value before a result can be judged. Read against what followed, they begin to resemble an unwritten institutional ethic.2
The habit of turning conviction into structure predated The Substation. Lay Kuan returned to Singapore from Australia in 1964 after becoming principal dancer at Ballet Victoria, citing racism as one reason for coming home. Pao Kun returned the following year after studying at the National Institute of Dramatic Art in Sydney, describing the nationalist movement as drawing him back. On 1 July 1965 they married and founded the Singapore Performing Arts School. Singapore became independent five weeks later. Their motives were not identical, but institution-building entered their shared life early.3
The Singapore Performing Arts School joined training to a socially engaged practice. In 1966, it staged Brecht’s The Caucasian Chalk Circle. Brecht’s epic theatre disrupted theatrical illusion so audiences might examine the social conditions represented on stage. The school subsequently developed work attentive to labour and social life, and encountered censorship. Pao Kun’s The Struggle was prohibited in 1969, followed by The Sparks of Youth in 1970. In the early 1970s, students joined the Experience Life movement, spending time with farmers, fishermen and construction workers before carrying those encounters into theatre and dance. Renamed Practice Theatre School in 1973, it remained the training institution they had founded in 1965. The point was not immersion as virtue. Artistic practice was being placed in contact with lives beyond the rehearsal room.4
In March 1976, Pao Kun and Lay Kuan were detained under Singapore’s Internal Security Act. Government statements alleged underground communist involvement and described Practice Theatre School as a vehicle for leftist dance and drama. People connected with the school and with Selatan Arts Ensemble, a separate group that had grown from its student community, were also caught in the wider sweep. The allegations were made within preventive detention and were not tested through an ordinary criminal trial. Lay Kuan was released after several months and kept the school operating. Pao Kun remained detained for four years and seven months. His Singapore citizenship was revoked in 1977 and restored only in 1992. The institutional lineage continued after his release. Practice Theatre School became Practice Performing Arts School in 1984. Practice Theatre Ensemble was formed in 1986 as a separate performing company. In 1988, the broader organisation was registered as Practice Performing Arts Centre Ltd, with the school and ensemble as distinct arms. PPACL would later carry The Substation.5
The political history around culture was already marked by reversals. Jek Yeun Thong, the Culture Minister when Pao Kun and Lay Kuan were detained, had himself been detained in the 1950s for alleged subversion under an earlier security regime. The circumstances were very different, and Jek’s earlier detention does not imply that he had any role in, or responsibility for, the 1976 arrests. The juxtaposition matters because detention and public office could occupy different chapters of the same political life.6
Detention should not be made to explain everything that followed in Pao Kun’s work. His work before 1976 was already socially committed and formally restless. C. J. W.-L. Wee nevertheless identifies an important intellectual development during and after confinement. Pao Kun revisited the writing of Lu Xun, whose essays repeatedly examined the relation between literature, politics and social change, and later argued that art had to pursue truth without becoming subordinate to a political programme. His post-release theatre widened across languages, forms and cultural positions. Imprisonment did not produce openness, but the later work increasingly required an independence of judgement no political programme could supply.7
By the mid-1980s, that question of artistic judgement was beginning to seek institutional form. It is one thing for an artist to accept uncertainty in their own work, and another for an organisation to make room for it in the work of others. That requires time, space and resources before value or consequence can be known. The Substation’s first years make the method legible through decisions about who could enter, what could occupy a room, which risks could be carried, and when judgement might be withheld. A declaration can survive intact in an archive. A method survives only when circumstances change and someone decides, again, how to practise it.
II. Phenomenon
By the time Pao Kun proposed an arts centre at 45 Armenian Street, a public infrastructure for culture was already taking shape. Ong Teng Cheong, then Acting Minister for Culture, had launched the Singapore Cultural Foundation in 1978 to raise private money for cultural development and support local talent, followed a year later by the Cultural Medallion. The late-1984 election manifesto Singapore, City of Excellence set out a Cultural Vision for 1999. Juliana Lim later recalled that the vision mattered less as a detailed plan than as permission for administrators to argue for funding, buildings and new schemes, a latitude that became more consequential after the Ministry of Community Development was formed in January 1985.8
The Arts Housing Scheme emerged from a practical mismatch between arts groups without affordable premises and public buildings standing unused after their original functions had ended. Within the Ministry of Community Development’s cultural affairs division, Juliana and colleagues including Tisa Ho helped turn those two conditions into one policy response. At the former Telok Ayer Primary School on Cecil Street, in the heart of Singapore’s central business district, thirty-nine classrooms were let to arts groups for S$10 a room each month. Tenants paid utilities and conservancy charges and helped manage the premises themselves. For some of us who later rehearsed in those rooms, policy was encountered before it was understood as policy. What mattered then was simply that a room existed and could be afforded.9
This opening in cultural policy carried its contradictions. Third Stage, an English-language theatre collective known for locally written social commentary and satire, was among the early tenants at Telok Ayer. In May and June 1987, people associated with the group were detained during Operation Spectrum amid government allegations of a Marxist conspiracy. An international fact-finding mission convened by the International Commission of Jurists with partner human-rights organisations visited Singapore that July to investigate the detention under the Internal Security Act of twenty-two people. In examining the organisations implicated in the government’s allegations, its report recorded that Third Stage’s plays had been submitted to and approved by the Ministry of Community Development, that the group received government support, and that the minister had praised its contribution in April, only weeks before the arrests. Proximity to cultural administration had not placed the company beyond the reach of state security powers.10
This was the environment in which Pao Kun’s proposal for 45 Armenian Street was selected. Juliana recalled that its distinction lay in going beyond the needs of one group. It imagined a multicultural, multidisciplinary centre that other practitioners could enter. Tay Kheng Soon worked with Pao Kun on the building’s conceptual conversion and later became founding Chairman, while Juliana and Tisa carried aspects of the project through administration. The adjoining garden required the Land Office, capital had to be justified through the Ministry of Finance, and, by the time the project moved towards reconstruction, Practice Performing Arts Centre Ltd served as the legal and organisational body through which it was carried.11
What followed moved far beyond the modest S$10 rooms at Telok Ayer. The government committed S$1.07 million to reconstruct the former electrical substation, while PPACL contributed about S$480,000 for retrofitting. The centre received an exceptional ten-year lease and the adjoining garden was secured for its use.11 Founding General Manager Tan Beng Luan recalled that the Ministry of Community Development did not require programmes to be submitted for prior approval.14 Public property, capital and tenure were extended without routine prior programme approval. Reconstruction was completed in June 1990. On 16 September, Wong Kan Seng, then Minister for Community Development, officially opened The Substation at 45 Armenian Street.12
Placed beside one another, the dates resist a simple story of exclusion followed by rehabilitation. While Pao Kun’s citizenship remained unrestored, he received the Cultural Medallion in 1989, with a National Archives of Singapore photograph showing him with Wong at the presentation ceremony. In 1991, a year after The Substation opened, he became an adviser to the newly established National Arts Council. His citizenship was reinstated only in 1992. Recognition, unresolved civic status and institutional trust overlapped. They did not unfold in sequence.12
The Substation also drew together people whose influence came from different fields. Kheng Soon moved between architecture and governance. Tommy Koh, as Patron, brought diplomatic and public standing. The early board included former Cabinet minister Ong Pang Boon, lawyer Lam Pin Foo and Li Lienfung, whose business standing became material support during financial difficulty. Leo Tan and Jennifer Lee joined in late 1991. The surviving documentation does not establish a complete founding constitution or early board register, nor does the chronology reveal a tidy rotation through fixed board terms.13
What formed around Pao Kun was not a declared alliance. The pattern nevertheless amounts to more than coincidence. People carrying different forms of authority, access, capital and reputation repeatedly acted on the same proposition. They did not need to share his artistic philosophy, nor did donors and public figures need to become artistic decision-makers, for a practical alignment to take shape. Their differences remained intact while their capacities became usable in relation to one another. That latitude was assembled through extensions of other people’s power. Its force lies in what Pao Kun did with it.
III. Permission as Method
The Substation opened modestly, with a black-box theatre, gallery, dance studio, classrooms, meeting space and a garden. Its resources were limited, but the structure allowed artists at different stages to work in public without established standing. Beng Luan remembered affordable rentals alongside programming initiatives such as Dance Space, Word Space and Music Space, as well as the Raw Theatre festival. These were practical openings rather than grand schemes, recurring chances to try something, gather people and see what might develop.15
The centre could receive a practice before it had acquired confidence, vocabulary, market recognition or an institutional advocate, holding open the period in which quality and direction were still being worked out. Pao Kun did not equate openness with indiscriminate acceptance, nor inclusion with the suspension of judgement. His proposition was more exacting. Past achievement could not be the condition of access.
Joe Ng, then active in Singapore’s independent music scene, recalled approaching Pao Kun with music producer Nazir Husain to ask whether the garden could be used for punk, thrash metal and other music with limited institutional recognition, and receiving permission readily. Kok Heng Leun, who helped form Drama Box after a gathering in The Substation Garden in 1990, described the black box as a place where young practitioners could begin from zero while encountering artists working in other forms. Music Space placed xinyao, pantun, classical composition, folk, hardcore and experimental music within the same ecology. The point was contact between practices that otherwise belonged to different publics.15
In 1993, writing about the Guinness Raw Theatre festival, Pao Kun put the principle more directly when he wrote that “a worthy failure is more valuable than a mediocre success.” Conceived as a platform for experimental and developing work, the festival made room for practices that were not yet fully resolved. He was not praising failure or asking institutions to suspend judgement. He was naming a risk intrinsic to exploration. An experiment could fail because it attempted something for which the measure was not yet settled. Failure became a permissible consequence of inquiry, not a criterion of value.2
Heng Leun later recalled pressure for The Substation to acquire a clearer identity for marketing, a narrowing Pao Kun resisted. In his account, Pao Kun invoked The Substation’s own slogan, “A Home for the Arts,” to explain why it should accommodate traditional, contemporary, experimental and popular forms. The question was not whether the institution should have an identity, but where that identity should reside. It could be built through consistency of programme, or through the conditions the institution was prepared to sustain. He appears to have chosen the latter, allowing different practices to belong to the same place without being made to resemble one another.15
The Substation depended upon government property, public capital, private gifts, board networks and eventually corporate sponsorship. Autonomy did not mean freedom from dependency. It had to be practised within those relationships, through decisions about what support could enable, what those who provided it could reasonably ask in return, and where their influence had to stop.
Pao Kun’s title as Artistic Director understates the extent to which he was building the institution itself. This matters especially because his political history had not ceased to matter once his detention ended. More than a decade after his release, it could still surface as a question of trust, as Pin Foo’s account of the Guinness negotiations makes clear. Yet he was able to assemble people around The Substation whose authority came from government, diplomacy, business, administration and the arts, drawing some into the board, others into management, patronage or material support.
He was doing more than defending artistic freedom after the fact. He was building the spine that made such freedom possible. He helped determine who would carry the institution with him, where responsibility should sit, which relationships could be activated when the institution was vulnerable, and what terms those relationships would be allowed to impose. Beng Luan, as founding General Manager, carried the daily demands of administration and fundraising, but Pao Kun remained deeply involved in shaping the human and institutional architecture around her. The apparent looseness of The Substation’s artistic life was not formlessness. It rested on arrangements he had worked deliberately to assemble, and on boundaries he was prepared to enforce. He established the terms so that others could flourish within them.16
Passing permission onward moved part of the risk from practitioner to institution. Work might fail to cohere, audiences might be small, disciplines might meet without producing anything durable, and artists might leave without returning prestige to the place that received them. The institution had to distinguish between what required correction and what was simply unfinished. Some practices needed greater discipline. Others needed time before their direction could become legible. Making room for the latter meant accepting that space, money and attention might be committed before anyone could know what the work would become, or whether it would succeed. The Substation’s radical proposition lay partly in carrying that burden of proof and deciding when work not yet convincing could still deserve a room.
IV. What Permission Costs
The building had received substantial support, but the institution within it remained precarious. The government capital grant paid for reconstruction. Equipment, fittings, salaries and the recurring costs of keeping the place open still had to be met elsewhere. PPACL entered opening with substantial fundraising still ahead of it, while classes at Practice Performing Arts School helped cover salaries. A 1990 report in The Straits Times put The Substation’s first-year operating requirement at S$700,000. Beng Luan recalled difficulty meeting contractors’ bills and even an S$800 air-conditioning instalment. The proposition had acquired a building before it had acquired the means to sustain itself.17
Financial pressure brought other forms of commitment into view. Lienfung explored ways to generate revenue and provided assistance, while Pin Foo recalled directors pledging personal fixed deposits as collateral for an overdraft when reserves ran low. Before The Substation possessed the systems that might stabilise it, much of its infrastructure still existed in the willingness of individuals to place their own resources behind the institution.17
Then came the infamous Guinness episode, one of The Substation’s early legends from a time before arts sponsorship had acquired its later conventions and negotiated boundaries. Beng Luan recalled two Guinness representatives walking into a meeting and asking, simply, what the place was. At a time when corporate support had proved difficult to secure, the encounter opened unexpectedly into a much larger proposition. Their eventual offer took shape as a five-year sponsorship of about S$1 million in return for naming rights to the theatre, with the final gift reported at S$1.1 million. For an institution struggling to meet its operating costs, the offer could secure years it did not yet know how to finance.18
The question was what such money might entitle a sponsor to ask. When Guinness’s United Kingdom office sought reassurance that The Substation would not expose the company to reputational risk, the negotiation turned on wording that would have placed programmes under advance scrutiny. Pao Kun refused it. Beng Luan recalled worrying about what the loss of so substantial a sponsorship might mean, and Pao Kun responding that they would begin again and look elsewhere. The wording was softened, and the sponsorship proceeded without conceding advance scrutiny.18
Pin Foo’s retrospective account places Pao Kun’s political history inside the negotiation. In Pin Foo’s recollection, Guinness became uneasy about the earlier detention under the Internal Security Act, drawing Tommy Koh, Ong Pang Boon and George Yeo into efforts to reassure the company. His testimony is the source for these private interventions. What the account reveals is nonetheless significant. Authority was moving among the board, public office and corporate capital at the very moment Pao Kun was determining what corporate support could and could not purchase. Money could be accepted. Naming rights could be granted. Advance artistic control could not.18
Beyond The Substation, conditions governing live music were tightening. After a September 1992 Rollins Band concert at the Singapore Labour Foundation, The New Paper, then a daily tabloid, cast slam-dancing and body-surfing in sensational terms. By 1993, organisers faced stricter conditions, including restrictions on such behaviour and a S$2,000 security deposit forfeitable for breaches. Joe recalled barriers between performers and audiences, as well as costs disproportionate to the few dollars some small gigs charged at the door. The concert took place elsewhere, but the regulatory response travelled with the scene and shaped what could be staged at places such as The Substation.19
As 1993 turned into 1994, Artists’ General Assembly at Parkway Parade made the fragility of such permission harder to ignore. Only a small audience had seen Josef Ng’s Brother Cane before The New Paper once again turned its closing moments into a front-page story.20 The National Arts Council then publicly condemned the performance, police charged Josef, and the controversy widened.21 Josef was eventually fined for an obscene act, while the related prosecution of 5th Passage manager Iris Tan reached the High Court before Chief Justice Yong Pung How.22 A joint government statement warned that unscripted performance art and forum theatre could threaten public order, security and decency and be used for subversion.23 Public funding for performance art was subsequently withheld until September 2003,24 two years before Lee Wen received the Cultural Medallion.25 Yeo later described the episode as an occasion to plant a new “OB marker” around the arts.26 For practitioners already carrying the memory of Pao Kun’s detention and the 1987 arrests around Third Stage, the circumstances were different, but the distance between artistic experiment and official scrutiny could feel suddenly very short.27
These episodes resist any clean opposition between The Substation’s openness and state constraint. Within the same years, public authorities could subsidise arts spaces and honour Pao Kun while regulating gigs and enforcing licensing conditions on artistic activity. The Substation was not a protected exception to that landscape. Its openness existed within it and depended upon judgement renewed as those limits shifted.
Nothing about this disposition was self-sustaining. It had to be remade as circumstances changed and as different people assumed responsibility for the institution. Succession would test whether it could survive beyond Pao Kun, not as an inherited style, but as an organisational willingness to continue making room for uncertainty.
V. What Can Be Transferred
By 1995, The Substation’s board had become a record of the different worlds converging around the institution. Ho Kwon Ping, its second Chairman, had been detained under the Internal Security Act in 1977. Tisa, who had earlier worked on Arts Housing inside government, joined the board in 1993. Arun Mahizhnan, then a policy researcher with a long involvement in arts management and cultural sponsorship, joined in 1995, as did Chew Kheng Chuan, who would later become prominent in philanthropy and fundraising. Kheng Chuan had also been detained during the 1987 Operation Spectrum arrests. These histories do not make the board a political fellowship, but they place around one table people whose earlier relations to state authority had been markedly different.28
At the same time, continuity was becoming a question of leadership. As Pao Kun prepared to leave, he recommended T. Sasitharan to the board. Sasitharan had taught philosophy at the National University of Singapore before becoming an arts editor at The Straits Times, and their artistic relationship went back to 1981, when Pao Kun invited him to co-write and perform No Parking on Odd Days after seeing his theatre work.29
When Pao Kun spoke of Sasitharan, he emphasised the intellectual and artistic challenge he could bring, rather than his ability to reproduce what was already there. Continuity did not require resemblance. After five years defending an institution that resisted becoming one recognisable thing, Pao Kun appears to have valued a successor who might unsettle its habits rather than inherit them intact.29
On 2 June 1995, The Straits Times reported Pao Kun’s departure as Artistic Director. He returned to the principle that exploration mattered more than safe success and said that he wanted to devote more time to writing and directing. By then, the question of what might survive his departure was no longer hypothetical.30
By then, being before proof had begun to describe more than emerging practice. Across this history, judgement had shifted around people and forms once treated as suspect, marginal or unproven. Later recognition did not cancel what came before. It revealed how provisional those judgements could be.
In September, that transition acquired a legal counterpart. On 26 September 1995, The Substation Ltd was incorporated as a public company limited by guarantee. Until then, PPACL had carried the arts centre legally and organisationally. Incorporation gave The Substation a legal identity of its own and a structure through which it could continue beyond Pao Kun’s tenure.31
Incorporation secured a structure for continuity, but not the judgement on which the founding proposition depended. No document could determine when unfinished practice deserved time, how much uncertainty an institution should carry, or when someone without established standing should still be received. The proposition had no equivalent form of registration. It would survive only if, under different pressures, someone arriving before proof could still be given a room.
ENDNOTES
1. The comparison with manifestos and methods is contextual, not a claim of direct influence. Twentieth-century theatre and dance frequently organised artistic convictions through named methods, schools, collectives and manifestos. Nothing in the sources cited here suggests that Kuo Pao Kun or Goh Lay Kuan adhered to any single imported methodology. The relevant local evidence is their repeated effort to turn artistic conviction into organised practice, including the Singapore Performing Arts School and the later Experience Life movement. ↩
2. Hannah Pandian, ‘Will the show go on?’, The Straits Times, 14 September 1990, p. 5, records Kuo Pao Kun describing his ambition for The Substation as “a permanent place to do arts, see arts, talk arts and live the arts”. Hannah Pandian, ‘Crucible or stewpot?’, The Straits Times, 13 September 1991, p. 2, records Kuo Pao Kun saying that “it is the process that counts” while discussing the centre’s support for developing artists and his relative lack of interest in judging only the finished product. The formulation “a worthy failure is more valuable than a mediocre success” appears in Kuo Pao Kun, ‘The Guinness Raw Theatre’, Arts on Campus 3.1 (1993), pp. 8 to 9. ↩1 ↩2
3. Goh Lay Kuan’s profile in the Singapore Women’s Hall of Fame records that she graduated with honours, became principal dancer at Ballet Victoria and decided to return to Singapore in 1964 after encounters with racism. A Lee Kuan Yew School of Public Policy article records Kuo Pao Kun later saying that the nationalist movement of the 1960s drew him back from Sydney. The Theatre Practice and Esplanade histories place their marriage and the founding of the Singapore Performing Arts School on 1 July 1965. Singapore became independent on 9 August 1965. The sources support different motives for Goh Lay Kuan and Kuo Pao Kun, so the essay does not collapse them into one explanation. ↩
4. The Theatre Practice’s institutional history dates its Mandarin staging of Bertolt Brecht’s The Caucasian Chalk Circle to 1966 and records the prohibition of The Struggle in 1969 and The Sparks of Youth in 1970, the Experience Life movement in 1972, and the 1973 renaming of Singapore Performing Arts School as Practice Theatre School. Esplanade’s Kuo Pao Kun chronology corroborates the 1966 production and the later socially engaged work. The brief description of epic theatre in the body identifies a broad Brechtian principle rather than claiming that this production embodied every aspect of Bertolt Brecht’s theory. ↩
5. Kuo Pao Kun and Goh Lay Kuan were detained under the Internal Security Act on 17 March 1976. C. J. W.-L. Wee’s scholarship and institutional biographies establish the broad sequence. Contemporary government statements alleged underground communist involvement and described Practice Theatre School as propagating leftist dance and drama. The detentions were preventive and the allegations were not tested through an ordinary criminal trial. Goh Lay Kuan was released after several months. Kuo Pao Kun remained detained for four years and seven months, was released on 1 October 1980 and had his Singapore citizenship revoked in 1977. Esplanade and C. J. W.-L. Wee record that his citizenship was restored in 1992. Scholarship also records that other people connected with Practice Theatre School and Selatan Arts Ensemble were among the wider 1976 arrests. The Theatre Practice’s institutional history records Practice Theatre School becoming Practice Performing Arts School in 1984, the formation of Practice Theatre Ensemble in 1986 and the transition to Practice Performing Arts Centre in 1988. Public registration records date Practice Performing Arts Centre Ltd, UEN 198801755D, to 1 June 1988. The Theatre Practice describes the centre as comprising distinct school and theatre-company arms. These dates matter because PPACL did not yet exist as that legal entity when Kuo Pao Kun first proposed the Armenian Street centre in 1985. ↩
6. National Museum and National Archives material records Jek Yeun Thong as one of the Sin Pao executives detained for alleged subversion after the paper was banned in December 1956, with his release in April 1958. National Archives material records Jek Yeun Thong as Minister for Culture from 1968 and still holding the culture portfolio in 1976. Singapore in the 1950s was still a British colony. The juxtaposition is historical context only and does not imply that Jek Yeun Thong ordered, directed or bore responsibility for the 1976 detentions. ↩
7. C. J. W.-L. Wee, ‘Introduction: art, culture, capitalist development and Kuo Pao Kun’, Inter-Asia Cultural Studies 21.2 (2020), discusses Kuo Pao Kun’s detention, citizenship history and post-release artistic transformation. C. J. W.-L. Wee records Kuo Pao Kun’s engagement in detention with Lu Xun’s ‘The Divergent Ways of Art and Politics’ and reads the later work as moving beyond realist orthodoxy toward multilingual and experimental forms. Lu Xun, 1881 to 1936, was a major writer and critic of modern Chinese literature whose essays repeatedly addressed literature, politics and social transformation. The essay uses this scholarship to illuminate an intellectual development, not to claim a simple causal line from detention to The Substation. ↩
8. Ong Teng Cheong, then Acting Minister for Culture, launched the Singapore Cultural Foundation on 11 December 1978. National Library material describes the Foundation as supporting the arts, while Ong Teng Cheong’s March 1979 speech described it as playing a catalytic role in creating conditions in which cultural activity and local talent could develop. The Cultural Medallion was instituted in 1979. Juliana Lim’s retrospective account identifies Cultural Vision 1999 as part of the PAP’s late-1984 election manifesto Singapore, City of Excellence: A Vision for Singapore by 1999 and remembers it as giving arts administrators greater room to argue for funding, buildings and new schemes. The Ministry of Community Development was formed in January 1985. ↩
9. Juliana Lim’s recollections, National Gallery Singapore’s oral-history material and the Centre for Liveable Cities study A City of Culture describe Arts Housing as an administrative response to disused public buildings and arts groups without stable premises. The former Telok Ayer Primary School on Cecil Street became an early experiment. Thirty-nine classrooms were reportedly rented at S$10 a room each month, while tenants bore utilities and conservancy charges and collectively managed the premises. Esplanade’s profile identifies Tisa Ho as Assistant Director, Cultural Services Division, Ministry of Culture. BiblioAsia places her, by the period relevant to Arts Housing, as assistant director in the Ministry of Community Development’s cultural affairs division after the 1985 reorganisation. The first-person sentence about rehearsing there is the author’s own recollection and is not offered as archival evidence. ↩
10. The Report of the International Mission of Jurists to Singapore, July 1987, was produced by a mission involving the International Commission of Jurists, the International Federation of Human Rights and the Asian Human Rights Commission. The mission visited Singapore from 5 to 9 July 1987 to investigate the detention under the Internal Security Act of twenty-two people accused by the government of participating in a Marxist conspiracy. In examining the organisations named in those allegations, the report records Third Stage as a tenant at Telok Ayer, notes that its plays were submitted to and approved by the Ministry of Community Development, states that the group received government financial support and records ministerial praise shortly before Operation Spectrum. The essay attributes the conspiracy allegation to the government and does not adjudicate the contested claims. ↩
11. Clarissa Oon, ‘In Their Own Words: The Early Years of The Substation’, BiblioAsia, 1 January 2022, brings together recollections by Juliana Lim, Tisa Ho, Tan Beng Luan, Kok Heng Leun and others. Juliana Lim recalls that Kuo Pao Kun’s proposal was selected because it exceeded one group’s need and proposed a multicultural, multidisciplinary centre. The same account records a S$1.07 million government capital grant, an exceptional ten-year lease and the inclusion of the adjoining garden. The Centre for Liveable Cities records about S$480,000 in further retrofitting expenditure by PPACL. BiblioAsia identifies Tay Kheng Soon as founding Chairman. The essay describes Tay Kheng Soon’s architectural role as work with Kuo Pao Kun on the building’s conceptual conversion rather than attributing the entire refurbishment design or supervision to him. The Theatre Practice’s institutional history and public registration records place the formal registration of Practice Performing Arts Centre Ltd in 1988. The body therefore does not describe PPACL as Kuo Pao Kun’s pre-existing legal base at the time of the 1985 proposal. By the reconstruction and opening phase, PPACL was the legal and organisational body through which the centre was carried. ↩1 ↩2
12. The National Arts Council lists Kuo Pao Kun as a 1989 Cultural Medallion recipient. National Heritage Board material reproduces a National Archives of Singapore photograph of Kuo Pao Kun with Wong Kan Seng at the 1989 presentation. BiblioAsia records Wong Kan Seng, then Minister for Community Development, officiating at The Substation’s opening on 16 September 1990. Esplanade records Kuo Pao Kun as adviser to the National Arts Council from 1991 to 2002 and his Singapore citizenship as reinstated in 1992. The National Arts Council records its formation on 15 October 1991 from the Singapore Cultural Foundation, the Cultural Division of the Ministry of Community Development, the Festival of Arts Secretariat and the National Theatre Trust. The sources establish revocation and restoration of Kuo Pao Kun’s citizenship but do not establish another nationality during the intervening years, so the essay does not describe him as stateless. ↩1 ↩2
13. BiblioAsia and Lam Pin Foo’s retrospective account establish Tay Kheng Soon as founding Chairman, Ong Pang Boon and Lam Pin Foo as early directors, Li Lienfung as an early board member, and Tommy Koh as Patron rather than director. Lam Pin Foo remembers Leo Tan and Jennifer Lee joining in late 1991. National Institute of Education and National University of Singapore biographies identify Leo Tan as a marine biologist and science educator. The Singapore Women’s Hall of Fame identifies Jennifer Lee as a physician and hospital administrator and records her appointment as chief executive of KK Women’s and Children’s Hospital in 1991. Tisa Ho’s Esplanade profile dates her board service from 1993 to 2004. Later sources identify Ho Kwon Ping as the second Chairman. The available sources establish an accretive early board but do not supply a complete founding roster, constitution or fixed-term chronology. The body therefore describes the pattern visible in the record without inferring formal board rules. ↩
14. BiblioAsia identifies Tan Beng Luan as leaving the civil service in 1989 to join PPACL and oversee the founding of The Substation, becoming its founding General Manager. Tan Beng Luan recalled that the Ministry of Community Development gave Kuo Pao Kun freedom to set the centre’s artistic direction and that programmes did not have to be submitted for prior approval. The essay identifies this as retrospective testimony rather than presenting it as a surviving written ministry policy. ↩
15. BiblioAsia records Dance Space, Word Space, Music Space and Raw Theatre among The Substation’s early programme initiatives. National Library bibliographic material identifies the first Guinness RAW Theatre Festival in December 1991. Joe Ng recalls approaching Kuo Pao Kun with Nazir Husain about using the garden for punk, thrash metal and other non-mainstream music and receiving immediate permission. The same BiblioAsia account records that Kok Heng Leun was among the group that decided to form Drama Box in The Substation Garden in 1990 and worked as a programme executive at the centre from 1992 to 1993. Kok Heng Leun describes the black box as a place where a young group could begin from “zero” and recalls Kuo Pao Kun resisting pressure for a clearer marketing identity by insisting that a home for the arts should accommodate traditional, contemporary, experimental and popular forms. A 1991 National Archives of Singapore photograph reproduced in BiblioAsia shows the slogan “A Home for the Arts” on The Substation’s front door. The Substation’s later Music Space retrospective and archive material record a mix of classical, popular, xinyao, pantun, folk, hardcore and experimental music. These examples are illustrative rather than a complete programme history. ↩1 ↩2 ↩3
16. BiblioAsia’s early-years interviews support treating the formal title Artistic Director as a wider field of institution-building without turning Kuo Pao Kun into a conventional manager. Tan Beng Luan identifies herself as founding General Manager responsible for fundraising and operations, while recalling Kuo Pao Kun deciding on use of space, sponsor naming rights and the limits of corporate influence. Kok Heng Leun remembers Kuo Pao Kun defending programming decisions when questioned by the public and even by the board of directors. Contemporary reporting gives the distinction additional weight. Hannah Pandian, ‘Crucible or stewpot?’, The Straits Times, 13 September 1991, p. 2, records Kuo Pao Kun acknowledging that he was not an administrator but an artist while defending the flexibility with which he ran the centre. Phan Ming Yen, ‘Kuo Pao Kun quits as The Substation’s artistic director’, The Straits Times, 2 June 1995, p. 3, reports that the board had agreed as early as 1993 to ease his “management responsibilities” and quotes him describing his departure as a withdrawal from “active management”. The body therefore distinguishes institution-building and boundary-setting from conventional day-to-day management and does not assign Kuo Pao Kun a formal chief-executive title he did not hold. ↩
17. Hannah Pandian, ‘Will the show go on?’, The Straits Times, 14 September 1990, p. 5, published two days before the opening, records the S$1.07 million government-approved restoration, outstanding debts, equipment and fittings bought on credit, and continuing operating needs. BiblioAsia also records severe operating pressure before and after the opening, including a separate 1990 report in The Straits Times that The Substation needed to raise S$700,000 for its first year of operations. Tan Beng Luan recalled difficulty paying contractors and an S$800 air-conditioning instalment, and said income from Practice Performing Arts School classes helped cover salaries. Lam Pin Foo remembered board members pledging personal fixed deposits as collateral for an overdraft. Li Lienfung’s support also appears in retrospective accounts. The latter details derive from participant recollection and are identified as such in the body. ↩1 ↩2
18. The Guinness episode is documented through contemporary reporting and later recollection. Hannah Pandian, ‘Crucible or stewpot?’, The Straits Times, 13 September 1991, p. 2, records that The Substation had received a S$1.1 million grant from Guinness Breweries, divided into five annual instalments, and says the company had approached the centre uninvited, asking principally to name three spaces in The Substation and be mentioned in theatre programmes. The Straits Times also carried the report ‘Substation $1.1m gift from Guinness’ on 14 June 1991. Tan Beng Luan’s BiblioAsia account describes the earlier approach as unexpected, recalls a proposed five-year sponsorship of about S$1 million, concern from the company’s United Kingdom office about reputational risk, and Kuo Pao Kun’s refusal to accept wording that would permit advance scrutiny of artistic activity. Lam Pin Foo is the source for the recollection that concern about Kuo Pao Kun’s Internal Security Act history drew Tommy Koh, Ong Pang Boon and George Yeo into efforts to reassure the company. Lam Pin Foo recalled George Yeo under a different ministerial title. The essay uses George Yeo’s verified 1991 portfolio and treats the private interventions as retrospective testimony. ↩1 ↩2 ↩3
19. On 29 September 1992, Rollins Band played at the Singapore Labour Foundation with Stompin’ Ground opening. At the time, The New Paper was a daily tabloid. Accounts of the period describe slam-dancing and body-surfing, followed by a 1 October report in The New Paper that portrayed the crowd behaviour as violent or dangerous. Kai Khiun Liew and J. Patrick Williams, ‘Looking Beyond Music: Curating and Narrating Punk Subculture in Singapore’, in Trans-Global Punk Scenes: The Punk Reader Vol. 2 (2020), describe a 1993 supplementary Public Entertainment Licensing Unit regulation requiring a S$2,000 security deposit for public-performance applications, forfeitable for breaches including slam-dancing or stage-diving. Joe Ng’s later Esplanade oral-history interview remembers the barriers, restrictions on performer-audience interaction and the disproportionate costs imposed on small Substation gigs, but gives varying remembered figures for the deposit or guarantee. The essay therefore uses S$2,000 for the documented supplementary condition rather than treating Joe Ng’s recollection as an exact amount. ↩
20. The New Paper, 3 January 1994, front page, ‘PUB(L)IC PROTEST’, placed Josef Ng’s performance at Artists’ General Assembly on its front page two days after Brother Cane was performed in the early hours of 1 January. The accompanying text described Ng cutting his pubic hair during the performance and directed readers to further coverage inside. Wei Hao Goh, ‘Performing Protest in Singapore: Performance Tactics in Brother Cane and Don’t Give Money to the Arts’, Konsthistorisk tidskrift/Journal of Art History 92.1 (2023), records an audience of about thirty people, including a reporter from The New Paper. National Gallery Singapore, ‘Shifting Grounds’, Siapa Nama Kamu? Art in Singapore Since the 19th Century, likewise dates Artists’ General Assembly from 26 December 1993 to 1 January 1994 and records the subsequent front-page coverage. ↩
21. Wei Hao Goh, ‘Performing Protest in Singapore’, records that the National Arts Council issued a statement on 4 January 1994 condemning the performance as vulgar and distasteful and rejecting its status as art, and that Josef Ng was charged on 12 January. National Gallery Singapore’s ‘Shifting Grounds’ corroborates the National Arts Council’s condemnation and the widening controversy that followed the front-page report. ↩
22. National Gallery Singapore’s ‘Shifting Grounds’ records that Josef Ng was fined S$1,000. Public Prosecutor v Tan Khee Wan Iris [1994] SGHC 202, decided by Chief Justice Yong Pung How on 2 August 1994, concerns the prosecution arising from Iris Tan’s role as the event’s licence holder. Tan Khee Wan Iris v Public Prosecutor [1995] SGHC 94, also before Chief Justice Yong Pung How, records the subsequent appeal decided on 7 April 1995. The cases are cited here to establish the legal trajectory around 5th Passage rather than to collapse Iris Tan’s prosecution into Josef Ng’s own charge. ↩
23. The Straits Times, 22 January 1994, reported a joint statement by the Ministry of Home Affairs and the Ministry of Information and the Arts expressing concern that performance art and forum theatre, because they lacked fixed scripts and encouraged spontaneous audience participation, could pose dangers to public order, security and decency and could be used for agitation, deviant propagation or subversion. The body paraphrases the statement rather than reproducing its full wording. ↩
24. National Gallery Singapore, ‘Shifting Grounds’, describes the withdrawal of National Arts Council funding from performance art after the 1994 controversy as a ten-year freeze. Ministry of Information, Communications and the Arts, press release, 8 September 2003, announced that the National Arts Council would henceforth consider funding for performance art and forum theatre, subject to synopsis vetting and prevailing funding guidelines. The same announcement stated that there was no ban on the forms themselves and removed the mandatory S$10,000 security deposit, while retaining performance-licensing requirements. ↩
25. National Arts Council, ‘About the Cultural Medallion’, lists Lee Wen among the 2005 Cultural Medallion recipients. The juxtaposition in the body is chronological rather than causal. The resumption of eligibility for performance-art funding in September 2003 preceded Lee Wen’s national recognition by two years. ↩
26. The Straits Times, ‘Where one should draw the line in art’, 16 March 1994, p. 23, records George Yeo, then Minister for Information and the Arts, reflecting on the 5th Passage controversy. Referring to the need to define artistic boundaries, he said that “this is a very good spot to plant a new OB marker”. The essay condenses the longer remarks to register how the episode became an occasion for articulating a boundary around artistic activity. ↩
27. For Kuo Pao Kun’s 1976 detention and the 1987 arrests around Third Stage, see notes 5 and 10. The circumstances are not treated as equivalent to the Brother Cane controversy. The final sentence registers the accumulation of those histories within the artistic field and is informed by the author’s lived recollection rather than offered as evidence of a uniform response among practitioners. ↩
28. Tisa Ho’s Esplanade profile records her as a Substation board member from 1993 to 2004. Esplanade’s TributeSG profile of Arun Mahizhnan records his work at the Institute of Policy Studies from 1991 and his earlier involvement in arts management and cultural sponsorship, including the Singapore Arts Festival steering and marketing committees and Mobil’s festival sponsorship. Chew Kheng Chuan told TODAY that Ho Kwon Ping was Chairman when Ho Kwon Ping and Arun Mahizhnan invited him to join the board in 1995, and noted that he and Kuo Pao Kun shared the experience of Internal Security Act detention. In the same interview, Chew Kheng Chuan described his academic field as the social sciences and recalled being the first Singaporean admitted to Harvard College. The Harvard Club of Singapore later described Chew Kheng Chuan as an independent consultant in philanthropy and fundraising after senior advancement roles at the National University of Singapore and Nanyang Technological University. Those later roles are used only to identify the field in which Chew Kheng Chuan subsequently became prominent, not to imply that he held them when he joined The Substation board. These facts are relevant to the board’s changing constellation and are not used to imply shared political ideology. ↩
29. National Library Board’s biography of T. Sasitharan records that Kuo Pao Kun approached him in 1981 to co-write and perform No Parking on Odd Days, that T. Sasitharan taught philosophy at the National University of Singapore from 1983 to 1989, and that T. Sasitharan then became an arts editor and critic at The Straits Times from 1988 to 1996. Lam Pin Foo’s retrospective account states that, before leaving, Kuo Pao Kun recommended T. Sasitharan to the board as his successor and that the board subsequently appointed him. The National Library Board biography dates T. Sasitharan’s formal Artistic Directorship of The Substation from 1996 to 2000. The essay therefore describes the 1995 succession process without collapsing Kuo Pao Kun’s departure date into T. Sasitharan’s later formal title date. ↩1 ↩2
30. Phan Ming Yen, ‘Kuo Pao Kun quits as The Substation’s artistic director’, The Straits Times, 2 June 1995, p. 3, records Kuo Pao Kun’s resignation after five years as Artistic Director and his intention to spend more time writing and directing plays. Asked about his greatest contribution, he spoke of persuading people inside and outside The Substation that “a worthy failure is often more important than a mediocre success” and that “exploring new grounds is absolutely necessary”. The same article reports that the board had agreed as early as 1993 to ease his management responsibilities and quotes Kuo Pao Kun describing himself as “withdrawing from active management”. It also reports the planned separation of The Substation from Practice Performing Arts Centre and its re-registration as an independent non-profit company. These details are used to distinguish the breadth of his institutional role from conventional day-to-day management. ↩
31. Public registration records date the incorporation of The Substation Ltd to 26 September 1995, UEN 199506857R, as a Public Company Limited by Guarantee. Current ACRA guidance explains that this form has members rather than shareholders and no share capital, and is commonly used for non-profit organisations. The registration establishes a legal identity for The Substation distinct from the Practice structure that had carried it through the founding years. The essay limits itself to the corporate form and date established by the registration. ↩