top of page
-----------
Year 3 Top Essays
AY14/15:
The Spectacularization of Chinatown
by NG Hui Lin Felicia
The architectural spectacle of ethnic quarter, Chinatown, is designed in close alignment with Singapore’s economic development and ideological narratives of nationbuilding vis-à-vis forging collective social memories (Chia, Lee, Naidu & Kwok 38). As a “representational system” of Chinese culture that “[reconstructs]…an elemental physical world” (Wigley 156) through the intensive abbreviation of iconic images, Chinatown has become “both the meaning and the agenda of our…socio-economic formation” (Debord 3; original emphasis). I will contend that this overarching function leads to the suppression of alternative imaginings, for insofar as Chinatown is a narrative expression of Singapore’s visionary ideals, it is a preserved representation that offers excessively prescribed interpretations. As a site of visual mimesis attempting to authenticate its own construction of a past spatial-temporal realm, I demonstrate how Chinatown has at best, only presented the city-state with a realistic illusion of our own heritage by examining (i) how its role as a palimpsest of cultural history is constructed out of notions of excess and surplus (ii) the tensions that surface in its straddling of the quantitative and qualitative – between the old and the new, tradition and modernity (iii) how the architectural environment engineers a sanitized sentiment of nationality through the spectacle of calculated nostalgia...
Read Full
bottom of page