In the autumn of 2008, in the heart of downtown Singapore, artists Richard Streitmatter-Tran (Vietnam), Chaw Ei Thein (Myanmar), Aung Ko (Myanmar) and Tung Mai (Vietnam), and a team of collaborators, labour outside in the sweltering heat to construct September Sweetness in preparation for the second Singapore Biennale. They use five and a half tons of sugar, mixed with water and rice starch, to construct a composite-style temple inspired by those near the ancient city of Bagan, Myanmar.Footnote 2 The artists, with the help of about ten volunteers each day (about fifty in total), have been working morning to evening for more than two weeks to construct the 2.6 × 2.1 metre temple. In previous months, the artists made successful models from clay and styrofoam in Chaw Ei Thein and Streitmatter-Tran's studio space in Ho Chi Minh City, Vietnam. But now, as they melt and pour the sugary mixture into casts, they are unsure if it will withstand the hot Singapore sun and hold together for the opening of the biennale, let alone last beyond the first few days. Will the candied temple survive the tropical downpours? Will it crumble under its own weight? The sugar is sticky, glistening and melting in the heat. Streitmatter-Tran later joked that it attracted droves of ants and bees ‘from the entire Malaysian archipelago’.Footnote 3
When I first talked with Chaw Ei Thein and Streitmatter-Tran about September Sweetness a few months after the biennale in early 2009, I was intrigued by the project's imaginative qualities and meaningful, timely politics. The work was created to mark and honour the one-year anniversary of a series of pro-democracy uprisings in Myanmar – commonly referred to as the ‘Saffron Revolution’ due to the high-profile involvement of thousands of robed Buddhist monks – which took place between August and October 2007. The protests, ostensibly triggered by a rapid rise in fuel prices after the military junta's removal of subsidies, began peacefully but descended into violence when the army cracked down on demonstrators. The exact number of people killed is unknown, but it included monks and civilians, and hundreds of others were injured and arrested. The protests and the government's use of force gained worldwide attention and many countries voiced condemnation of the violence.
Along with September Sweetness's political dimensions, I was also struck by the number of chance occurrences that the work unexpectedly engendered. September Sweetness took place a number of years ago now, but the intentionally ephemeral nature of the art object itself – a sugar temple that gradually melted away – as well as its social reception, multiple meanings, and collaborative construction process, make the performative acts that radiated through this project feel important to recount. In particular, I am interested in how building the temple helped mobilize a temporary community in Singapore, and how the media coverage and narrative remembrance of this small and fleeting intervention coalesced into a more lasting memory of the work.
Additionally, now that time has passed and a political liberalization process is under way in Myanmar, it is less likely that discussing these events will have a negative impact on those who were involved. At the time, this was a real and consequential worry. Before, during and directly after the making of September Sweetness, Chaw Ei Thein and Aung Ko, the main Burmese artists associated with the project, felt vulnerable and potentially in danger should they return home, due to the political meanings of this and other works they had created or with which they had been affiliated. As Chaw Ei Thein recounts,
[an] artist-friend from Burma came to help us in Singapore and when he went back to Burma the airport officials stopped him and kept him for two hours to question him about the project. They called him shameless; speaking about his own country in bad ways . . . he told them it wasn't his project and so they released him. He called me later that night and said ‘it's not safe for you to come back’.Footnote 4
After September Sweetness, Chaw Ei Thein did not attempt to return home. In fact she had been living in exile since earlier in 2007 due to the political nature of her work and her association with other artists from Myanmar whose work was also deemed critical of the government. In 2010 she moved to New York City for a residency, and has lived there ever since. It was only in 2015, after living abroad for nearly eight years, that Chaw Ei Thein felt safe returning to Myanmar for a visit.
The situation in Myanmar today is much different than it was in 2008, after the uprisings were brutally crushed, and during the time of September Sweetness. In recent years the country has undergone a number of important political changes, including transitioning from rule by military junta to a ‘nominally civilian’ government.Footnote 5 Starting in 2010 with the release from house arrest of Nobel laureate and opposition leader Aung San Suu Kyi, the government held the first multi-party elections in over twenty years, began reforming its laws (including those related to censorship), and has now released over a thousand political prisoners from jail. However, despite these apparent steps forward, it is unclear just how much long-term progress has been made.Footnote 6 Today, the military still has control over the parliament, enabling the Generals to veto political reforms with which they disagree. Understandably, due to the military's strong hold on the country and Myanmar's history of oppressive governance, many people still feel vulnerable and unsafe about expressing views that could be deemed politically sensitive or critical. Despite increased freedoms of speech and expression, some journalists and editors are still being charged on counts of ‘libel’ and ‘defamation’ and activists have been jailed for protesting against land reforms.Footnote 7 Ethnic Rohingya Muslims, in the state of Rakhine and elsewhere, continue to be persecuted and violence against them – instigated and perpetrated by Buddhist fundamentalists – has been on the rise during the reform era.Footnote 8 However, for many people in Myanmar, the military and government's impact on daily life now is less oppressive than it was in years past.
The 2007 uprisings were the most serious protests since those that took place in 1988, triggering a major military clampdown, and yet there is no clear evidence indicating that they helped push forward political reforms.Footnote 9 Although many thousands of monks protested – some say around 100,000 – the civilian population was and continues to be mostly apolitical, with widening income disparity leading people to focus increasingly on subsistence rather than regime change.Footnote 10 Lee Jones cites an opposition leader stating, ‘The 2007 Saffron Revolution ended in failure. They [the regime] can control the whole country . . . they have won everything in Myanmar’.Footnote 11 Many people, including Chaw Ei Thein and Streitmatter-Tran, who had hoped for more during the 2007 uprising, felt crushed. Regarding recent reforms, what most scholars seem to agree on is that the military remains powerful despite seceding some domains of control and granting more rights. Roger Lee Huang echoes a widespread view when he writes that ‘current reforms were introduced as a strategy for the military to ensure its continued survival as the primary political actor in Myanmar’.Footnote 12
With these past and present political contexts in mind, I wish to engage with September Sweetness, or perhaps more accurately the memories and stories of the people, processes and actions circulating through and in relation to this work, as a small and fleeting performative intervention and critical commemoration. In this exploration, I am responding to Kathleen Stewart's notion of ‘atmospheric attunements’ by attempting to sense and trace some momentary yet vital relations between constellating events, and attempting to ‘write theory through stories’.Footnote 13 Stewart is concerned with the proliferation of ‘little worlds of all kinds’,Footnote 14 the ‘charged atmospheres of everyday life’, and how ‘circulating forces are generated as atmospheres . . . how they spawn worlds, animate forms of attachment and detachment, and become the live background for living in and living through things’.Footnote 15 Similarly, in remembering September Sweetness, I am drawn to the everyday-life performances refracted in and through the project, how this installation intersected with and generated its own political currents, and the work's overall performative effusiveness, be it intended or unintended.
In recalling September Sweetness, its atmospheres and lasting residues, I engage a performance-oriented methodology: one that considers the performative dynamics of the social networks and contexts at the time of the work's construction, and subsequently the place of the work in memory as seen through its performative traces. To do this I draw on a variety of sources, including interviews (my own and others’) conducted at various times after the event, different forms of media coverage, written correspondence with the artists, blogs and Internet forums, as well as academic theory. Together, these compose the ‘memory’ of the piece. I begin with the story of how September Sweetness came into being, particularly from the artists’ perspective, and the ways in which it became an important touchstone for Burmese people living in Singapore and possibly beyond.
Performing wonder
Chaw Ei Thein and Streitmatter-Tran first conceived of September Sweetness early in 2008 after one of the curators for the 2008 Singapore Biennale met them in Vietnam, and suggested that they submit a proposal. September Sweetness became the artists’ way of responding, on the one hand, to the 2007 Burmese uprisings, and, on the other, to the 2008 Singapore Biennale theme of ‘Wonder’. Reflecting on the project a couple of years after its completion, Chaw Ei Thein explains how the timing of the biennale and its theme inspired their work:
We thought about a project that had to do with Burma. The exhibition was to be held in September. September–Wonder–Saffron Revolution . . . At the time, we saw [online] a Burmese temple in Bagan painted white . . . When we saw those white temples we thought ‘Oh, they look like they are made of sugar cubes’. We thought to use the temple because it represented home, and we wanted to use an unusual material to make the temple. We chose sugar because it easily decays. It's a piece about erosions of hope. Day by day our hope is disappearing dramatically.Footnote 16
Drawing on a number of architectural styles from different time periods, and in consultation with Burmese monks, the artists proposed to construct a temple made of sugar that would gradually dissolve and disappear over the course of the biennale (Figs. 1 and 2). The crumbling temple would embody a number of things. It would highlight the centrality of Buddhism in Burmese history and culture as well as its progressive political legacies, including the colonial-era resistance movement against the British and the 1988 pro-democracy uprisings.Footnote 17 The installation would commemoratively link this history with the 2007 protests while also serving as a memorial to those who perished. It would express, in the artists’ words, the ‘erosion of hope’, and the difficulty of sustaining opposition against the powerful military junta. Additionally, the temple's disintegration would call attention to the poverty as well as the mismanagement of resources in Myanmar.
Initial sketch of the planned sugar temple for September Sweetness. Image courtesy of the artists.
Chaw Ei Thein prepares a small-scale studio model of September Sweetness. Photo courtesy of the artists.
As Chaw Ei Thein and Streitmatter-Tran explained, at the time of creating September Sweetness the Bagan temples and stupas – along with many other historic sites across the country – were eroding and were often inadequately repaired due to lack of funding and government provision for proper preservation. During that time, those assigned to preserve temples often worked under forced-labour conditions, had no conservation expertise and carried out repairs with whatever materials were available, such as soda cans, dirt and lime. While these makeshift techniques show ingenuity and resourcefulness, this situation nevertheless speaks to the immense impoverishment and difficulty of life under military rule. In the span of a few decades, beginning in the 1960s, Ne Win's ‘Burmese way to socialism’ led the country on a downward spiral from its position as the wealthiest South East Asian country to being among the poorest countries worldwide.Footnote 18 In 2008, the deterioration of the Bagan temples was emblematic of the way in which the whole country seemed to be under erosion.
The installation, and the use of sugar, Chaw Ei Thein says, are ‘a message, about Burma's situation’.Footnote 19 Sugar, she explains, is a ubiquitous everyday material in most places, which ‘people just use in their coffee’ without much thought.Footnote 20 For Streitmatter-Tran, ‘seeing something very ordinary in a new way, in a different scale, or in a different light’, creates ‘wonder’, which was the theme of the 2008 exhibition.Footnote 21 This transfiguration of the commonplace (to use Arthur Danto's phrase) seemed a fitting way to commemorate the 2007 uprisings, where walking in the street had taken on heightened significance and cost people their lives. Imbued with new meanings of governmental opposition within the politically charged atmosphere, walking en masse became an extraordinary act performed by monks and civilians, and periodically applauded by bystanders. But the uprising — with its participants exhibiting breathtaking courage only to encounter deadly gunfire — points toward the darker sides of wonder and sweetness. As Streitmatter-Tran explained, sugar, and the work's seemingly discordant reference to the September uprisings and sweetness, raise the question, ‘what is so sweet about this’?Footnote 22 There is nothing sweet about it, except perhaps the bitter-sweetness of remembering the swell of hope-in-action before violence was unleashed.
‘Sweet architectures are always hiding something rotten’, says Streitmatter-Tran, like in the story of Hansel and Gretel.Footnote 23 We associate ‘sweetness and artificiality’, and ‘saccharine as something disingenuous’.Footnote 24 So while the sugar temple evokes an everyday banality transformed into wonderment, it simultaneously conjures awareness of the rottenness, falseness and insidiousness nature of the military junta as well as the politics of silence and complicity among other countries’ governments in response to the Myanmar state's brutal actions. The issue of complicity leads to the most politically sensitive aspect of staging September Sweetness in Singapore, and why the installation was almost denied permission to be part of the biennale.
September Sweetness was both time- and place-specific. It was crucial to the artists that the installation take place in Singapore, around the first anniversary of the 2007 protests. At the time of the political unrest in Myanmar, Singapore was the acting chair of the Association of Southeast Asian Nations (ASEAN), the region's cross-national political and economic diplomatic body. During the uprisings the organization decided not to suspend Myanmar's membership or impose sanctions or other forms of political-economic pressure. Many countries, organizations and activists criticized ASEAN's lack of response. Even in Singapore, a place not known for public displays of grass-roots political action, there were peaceful protests against the junta and ASEAN's complacency, as well as memorial gatherings for those killed and wounded in the protests. Most notable were a vigil, from 30 September to 6 October 2007, outside the Embassy of Myanmar, and a march along the main shopping street of Orchard Road to an ASEAN summit at the Shangri-La Hotel on 20 November.
At the Singapore protests, police and undercover law-enforcement officials took photographs and compiled lists of the protestors' names. Public protest and political gathering in Singapore is highly restricted and essentially illegal without a police license.Footnote 25 At first, nothing happened. The protests were not forcibly stopped and people were issued warnings but were not arrested. Subsequently, however, at least five protestors, all members of the Overseas Burmese Patriots (a political organization whose members helped organize the protests) had their applications to renew work permits and residence passes rejected. This led to speculation that the delayed, bureaucratic reaction enabled the Singaporean government to avoid bad publicity at the time international media attention was most focused on the issue.Footnote 26 This and other related events fuelled the artists’ desire to mount September Sweetness in Singapore. As Chaw Ei Thein and Streitmatter-Tran put it in their statement about the project, ‘September Sweetness, for us, serves simply as a reminder of the complex interrelationships in Southeast Asia and in turn Southeast Asia's relationship to the larger global community. It is a work that will hopefully reflect optimism even as the structure itself falls apart’.Footnote 27 But, they wondered, would audiences be prompted to think about the political significance of the artwork or would they simply marvel at the sight of an immense sugar temple?
The press, including art world critics, played a key role in the publicity, interpretation and geopolitical afterlife of September Sweetness. After the temple was unveiled, news stories in the Straits Times, Singapore's English-language newspaper of record, claimed, ‘Visitors to the sugar sculpture at the biennale are struck more by the ants than by the work's political meaning’.Footnote 28 Some found the insects and the smell of the fermenting sugar distasteful and said that the ‘political significance of the work is lost on them’.Footnote 29 Others thought differently, with one viewer stating, ‘The smell and the insects show that it isn't just an art object, but actually an ongoing process. I can relate to the message almost immediately’.Footnote 30
Professional art critics were also captivated by September Sweetness's ingenuity, politics and abundance of insects (Fig. 3). Ben Slater, author of the Singapore Biennale guidebook and catalogue, noted that the work's political dimensions were ‘far from straightforward’ and wondered about the unanticipated metaphorical impact of the gorging bees and other insects. Slater writes,
A newspaper letter-writer had complained earlier about the sculpture, indicating that without proper warning her son might have either eaten the thing (which had quickly turned unappealingly yellow with a fetid aroma), or been consumed by the bees and flies that orgiastically feasted on it during the opening . . . Not long after the letter, at least one nearby bees-nest was removed; then a sign was put up, warning about the bees. They needn't have bothered. By the time I returned all the insects were dead and mysteriously, no more had come to join them. The sculpture had mostly collapsed because of rain, and the narrative of the bees and the sugar, was clearly over. Had the metaphor been mutated, disrupted or accurately enacted?Footnote 31
Bees and other insects feast on the sugar temple. Photo courtesy of the artists.
Similarly, Jo-Anne Birnie Danzker found September Sweetness to be among the most compelling artworks at the biennale and also commented on the insects. Danzker recounts,
The installation September Sweetness . . . is, as the Biennale's Guide tells us, a metaphor ‘for the slow loss of a systemic structure [in Burmese life] that has been in place for centuries’. Only days after the official opening of the Biennale, the pagoda had begun to crack and fall to the ground; ants had begun to dismantle the edifice while swarms of bees hovered above. A sign near the pagoda read: ‘Please note the presence of bees at this site. They are considered to be part of the artwork. Please be mindful of their presence’.Footnote 32
As the examples above suggest, while press coverage of September Sweetness was predominantly complimentary, it was also somewhat equivocal regarding the piece's meanings. This is a point Jane DeBevoise of the Asia Art Archive also addressed in conversation with Chaw Ei Thein:
when I first saw the piece, I didn't really focus on the fact that it was related to the anniversary of the Saffron Revolution, or uprising – I responded to the ephemeral nature of the piece. There are different ways you can take it. It doesn't necessarily have to be politicized. I mean, it is easily identifiable as a religious edifice, but the ephemeral nature, whether it has to do with spirit or time passing or death or transience or something else . . . you can take it in different ways.Footnote 33
Chaw Ei Thein agreed, a point she later reiterated during our correspondence, saying that for her the work also had to do with Buddhist understandings of impermanence – ‘One day we will have to leave everything and things will be gone’.Footnote 34
Along with producing a variety of commentaries, September Sweetness's high degree of media visibility had another powerful and unanticipated effect for those directly involved with the project. Unbeknownst to nearly all biennale organizers, attendees, reporters and critics, the most dramatic incident for the artists occurred because of a photograph of September Sweetness that was printed in the Straits Times. A couple of days before the official start of the biennale, Chaw Ei Thein and Streitmatter-Tran awoke to find a photo of September Sweetness on the newspaper's front page. The headline read, ‘The Sweet Taste of Art’, with a brief story describing the work as a tribute to the Saffron Revolution. Pictured beside the sugar temple was a Singapore-based Burmese monk, with his name included in the photo caption. Chaw Ei Thein and Streitmatter-Tran were shocked. They had no idea the newspaper would publish a photo with the monk, who just happened to be visiting the site at the same time as the reporter, and had no connection to the artwork.
The monk contacted the artists, suspecting his image may have been used for personal promotion and political game playing. Being pictured beside the installation, the monk worried, associated him with the work and its politics. This put the monk, his family, the monastery and others in potential danger with the Myanmar government. It could also possibly jeopardize the monk's and his monastery colleagues’ ability to reside in Singapore or safely return to Myanmar. The artists and the monks knew that the Straits Times is available in Myanmar and news of the photo would travel quickly. Chaw Ei Thein recounts that the ‘monk called me the next day and was angry, saying that I used him. I was so worried and upset, and I told him I didn't know this was going to happen at all and I didn't mean to hurt him’.Footnote 35 They had hoped the monks would view September Sweetness as a respectful tribute to those who participated and died in the 2007 unrest. As a result of the photo, the artists spent several tense days meeting with the monk, and others at the monastery, to assure them the publicity had not been intentional and that they would do whatever they could to lessen the photo's potentially damaging effects. ‘Sometimes artists need media coverage to have their art made known’, explained Chaw Ei Thein, but other times, she said, it only brings difficulty.Footnote 36
In contrast, a central aspect of the project that received very little publicity may have been the most meaningful and fulfilling for the artists. Perhaps the least-known but most compelling aspect of September Sweetness has to do with how it was built, or rather who built it. Within Singapore's tightly controlled political milieu, and due to the logistics of working with such large quantities of sugar, the artists felt there was a high risk of failure. That the work did not fail was largely due to the unexpected, dedicated help of nearly fifty volunteers. Some volunteers were Singaporean students from local art schools, but the majority were manual labourers from Myanmar residing in Singapore (Figs. 4 and 5).
Constructing September Sweetness. Photo courtesy of the artists.
Melting and moulding the sugar for September Sweetness. Photo courtesy of the artists.
The workers who helped construct September Sweetness came early in the morning, late at night, and on rare days off, negotiating around their already lengthy work hours to dedicate time, energy and skill to constructing the temple. Chaw Ei Thein explains that she tried to hire people, ‘but when they heard about the project, they don't want the money. They say “we will come anyway.”’Footnote 37 They came ‘because they wanted to participate’, they ‘felt ownership in the project’, and, as Streitmatter-Tran explains, ‘everybody knew it had to do with the uprising . . . this was the first time that Burma was being represented in the Biennale’ and working on the temple showed ‘a sense of pride in the community’, where people, perhaps especially the workers from Myanmar, felt ‘they had a voice’.Footnote 38 Some workers told Chaw Ei Thein and Streitmatter-Tran that participating in the project was a way to help raise awareness about Myanmar's struggles and the junta's brutality within the region and, perhaps, even globally.
When we first spoke about the project in early 2009, the artists emphasized that without the volunteers September Sweetness could not have been built. Their labour and innovation were instrumental in making the endeavour, as Streitmatter-Tran describes, a truly ‘process-driven’ work, and moreover ‘a real community event’.Footnote 39 During the building of September Sweetness everyone would meet for coffee at night after working on the site each day, to discuss how to solve construction issues that inevitably arose. In one instance, a volunteer trained as an engineer came up with the solution to a particularly difficult structural problem that could have caused part of the temple to collapse before it was finished. Chaw Ei Thein explains that
constructing the work was very much like Burma, hard work . . . always having to find a way to make something happen without ample time and under a lot of pressure. It was like Burma; the man power [sic], the people, the intermingling of process, reality and unity, or the lack there of [sic] . . .Footnote 40
At the time, Myanmar was eroding, hope was eroding, but the project was undertaken in the belief that there are small ways ‘to make something happen’, to make the unexpected, the wondrous, the unlikely – the creation of a 2.6 × 2.1 metre temple out of sugar – happen.
Biennales and political art
How should we think about what this project is, or was? Constructed in three weeks, with nearly fifty volunteers working twelve or more hours a day, the installation can be seen as an intensely collaborative commemorative performance. By commemoration, I am thinking of the practice (building the temple) and the material form (the temple itself). As a memorial site, September Sweetness was deliberately temporary, emphasizing the bitter-sweet recognition that everything is ultimately transient, including human lives and the power held by those who abuse it. However, while the artists wished to highlight the ‘erosion of hope’ in Myanmar, the process of building the installation created space for the possible continuation or regeneration of optimism, as Chaw Ei Thein and Streitmatter-Tran also acknowledge.Footnote 41 The artists and collaborators performed this optimism, and the regeneration of hope, through shared remembrance of anti-authoritarian struggles and the collective labour of making something wondrous happen (Fig. 6).
Chaw Ei Thein (second from left) and Streitmatter-Tran (second from right), with collaborating artists Tung Mai (bottom left) and Aung Ko (middle, third from right) and fellow volunteers in front of September Sweetness. Photo courtesy of the artists.
The September Sweetness project provided an opportunity for the revitalization of disavowed memory in and through the activity of constructing the sugar temple as well as through the shared meals and socializing that accompanied the artists and collaborators’ labour. The work both relied on and helped (re-)create what Nikos Papastergiadis describes as the possibility for collectively produced art to generate ‘cultural circuit[s]’ that connect horizontally, cutting across national, generational, socio-economic and other borders of difference.Footnote 42 By facilitating the exchange and creation of shared memory and knowledge, again to borrow Papastergiadis's reading of some socially engaged artwork, September Sweetness may have helped ‘redistribute agency in the production of social meaning’.Footnote 43 The intensely collaborative, process-based aspects of the project and its commemorative linkages to Myanmar's social and political struggles of the past, present and future are, for me, where September Sweetness enacted its subtle, small-scale but important performance-centred interventionist politics.
The project's focus on small-scale collaborations resonates with Charles Esche's ‘modest proposals’, where he postulates that critical possibility within contemporary art today lies in the potential for artists to enable ‘productive situations’ where the creation of friendships, community and culture is of equal or more importance than profits.Footnote 44 In this regard, September Sweetness can be seen as part of the ‘collaborative turn’ in contemporary art.Footnote 45 Drawing together broad-based international discussions that have emerged since Nicolas Bourriaud popularized the idea of ‘relational aesthetics’, Papastergiadis calls ‘collaborative art’ potentially the ‘first truly global movement in art’, marking a widespread shift from the ‘artist as producer to the artist as collaborator’.Footnote 46 However, the collaborative nature of September Sweetness may also be drawing on more local, long-standing traditions of Buddhist participatory practices and networks of cross-regional trade and exchange. Artists and art scholars including Nora Taylor note that the work of transnational Thai artist Rirkrit Tiravanija first inspired the notion of ‘relational aesthetics’ and that regional exchanges, collaboration and connection to community are a driving and perhaps defining force in artistic practices within and across South East Asia.Footnote 47September Sweetness is part of these regional and global traditions and trends of collaboration, as well as the spontaneous, fortuitous and unanticipated enactments that emerge from these synergistic endeavours.
A sceptic might say, however, that by participating in the commercialized, state-sponsored biennale, September Sweetness was, despite its other messages and actions, inadvertently supporting hegemonic institutions and regimes of power of the kind it wished to critique. Biennales, art fairs and other forms of highly institutionalized arts events are often known more for their alliances with state and corporate power than as platforms for transgressive action. As scholars and critics explain, biennales have become trendy, and are a sign of a country or city's desire for cultural capital and global cachet.Footnote 48 True to this claim, the first Singapore Biennale in 2006 was intentionally paired with the country's hosting of the annual international meetings of the World Bank and International Monetary Fund as part of the city state's larger Singapore 2006: Global City, World of Opportunities campaign.Footnote 49 One critic went so far as to describe the 2006 biennale as ‘official window dressing’ for the global financial meetings.Footnote 50
As noted earlier, the Singapore state maintains tight control on many facets of society, including the creative-arts and culture industries. Thus it is not surprising that Singapore and its biennale are not known for their tolerance or promotion of provocative or critical artworks. The Singapore Art Museum's censoring of Simon Fujiwara's installation Welcome to the Hotel Munber in 2011 due to its inclusion of explicit homoerotic material and the strategic relocation of Nguyen Thi Hoai Tho's The Loofah Trellis in 2013 due to its ‘provocative’ use of plastic gourds resembling the shape of women's breasts are just two recent examples of curtailed expression at the Singapore Biennale.Footnote 51 Within this tightly policed milieu, and due to the geography- and ethnicity-fetishizing tendencies of biennales, one could argue that September Sweetness was, with the rest of the Singapore Biennale, used by the state for its larger project of creating fashionable entertainment for global self-promotion.Footnote 52
However, to view September Sweetness and biennales in general solely in this light ignores particularities, diminishes generative possibilities and overlooks the often small but important political actions that are taking place. Despite the event's corporate overtones and Singapore's high level of social control, some critical acts inevitably – for whatever known or unknown reasons – slip through the cracks of censorship. In the case of September Sweetness, it helped that criticisms were not overtly directed at Singapore and that political meanings were coded enough as not to invite elimination during the biennale's initial selection process, nor after the installation was built. Addressing the politics of biennales, Jean Fisher observes that while they ‘privilege the institutionally “acceptable”, they also provide sites that the “unacceptable” can sometimes take advantage of – they enable scheduled but – also unscheduled encounters as the exchange of ideas and experiences not always under the control of the institution’.Footnote 53
Conclusion: remembering September Sweetness
As art critic Lee Weng Choy suggests, writing in the context of Asian biennales, it is important to look ‘slowly’ and more closely in order to notice and better understand the ‘dense and reflective historico-geographies’ being expressed by artists and their works.Footnote 54September Sweetness found ways of remembering the legacy of disavowed pasts and acts of resistance in Myanmar within the institutional framework of the biennale and in the politically restrictive environment of Singapore. The project achieved this not by being overtly radical, which would likely have triggered swift foreclosure, but through more subtle alternative pathways of collaboratively creating, organizing, remembering and commemorating.Footnote 55 Somewhat paradoxically, as a less prohibitive environment than Myanmar, Singapore became the location where September Sweetness could in fact take place in a fully public setting. The displacement of September Sweetness from the country of its primary critique enabled the work to exist and provided it with a wider international audience.
Works like September Sweetness show how the mobilization of oblique meanings and small collaborative acts can be, and sometimes unexpectedly becomes, a meaningful form of critical–creative practice for those involved, and hopefully beyond. In contexts where speech and expression are heavily curtailed, a common survival strategy for artists (and others) is to use a coded symbolic vocabulary so that when necessary one can say ‘look, it is just a sugar temple’, but for other audiences familiar with the particular contexts, histories and symbols, deeper and more provocative ideas are communicated. In part, this is why slow, detailed, historically and contextually aware engagement is needed in order to better understand art and other creative practices coming from highly restrictive or politically oppressed milieus. The practice of obfuscating meanings may also help explain why socially and politically engaged works from such locations can easily be misread, overlooked or disregarded.
Perhaps the unassuming nature of September Sweetness as an installation – rather than as a theatrical event or performance-art piece, which would have called more attention to itself as spectacle – was the most effective and appropriate form of ‘protest’ at that particular moment in time. September Sweetness employed performance and theatrical elements, but in small measure and through modest means. Regarding September Sweetness, I understand the location and processes of performance as present in (1) the sugar temple itself as exhibited/‘staged’ artwork; (2) the creative and collaborative process of the work's construction; (3) the histories of violence and performative resistance the installation commemorates and recalls; (4) the politicized contexts, currents and atmospheres of reception that took September Sweetness and its artists on unexpected (often mediatized) journeys; and (5) the ways in which the work, despite (or maybe because of) its evanescent qualities and founding intentions, lives on in and as dispersed fragments of memory that continue to circulate.
At first glance, September Sweetness may not have appeared all that political or controversial. However, the work did intentionally, and sometimes unintentionally, become entangled within histories of radical resistance to violent oppression in Myanmar, and to a lesser degree with the ‘soft authoritarian’ limits on speech and expression in Singapore. As discussed, September Sweetness was conceived as an intensely site- and time-specific project. In fact, when they were later asked to remake September Sweetness or to include documentation of it in another exhibition, Chaw Ei Thein and Streitmatter-Tran declined, saying of the latter opportunity, ‘September Sweetness had its place and moment and . . . documentation as a display was not in our interest, even for recording the work historically. We refused to include the work although it was a very important piece politically both for us, Burma at that moment, and for Singapore’.Footnote 56September Sweetness was not meant to last, and yet this modest intervention disproportionately captured the attention of many biennale viewers and critics. It arguably generated its own time- and site-specific commemorative community in Singapore, its symbolic meanings travelled across national borders, and the memory of the piece continues to circulate and resonate with past and present politics in Myanmar.
Much has changed in Myanmar since September Sweetness, and since the 2007 uprisings. But it is also true that political conditions remain problematic, and that daily life has yet to improve markedly for many people in the country. It is uncertain what impact the 2007 protests made on those in power and on the reform process. What is more clear is that the actions of the Buddhist monks and others who risked and gave their lives during that time were meaningful and important to others, within and outside Myanmar, who desire more equitable and humane conditions for all people in the country. In commemorating the 2007 uprisings, September Sweetness was not attempting to deny Buddhism's problematic histories. Certainly, as Buddhist fundamentalist aggression towards the Muslim Rohingya people currently shows, Buddhism is not exempt from having fanatical religious factions who seek to oppress or harm others not like them.
Retrospectively, one could choose to read the current Rohingya crisis into September Sweetness, potentially through the trope of diminishing hopes, remembering unjust violence, and the erosion and/or misappropriation of Buddhist tenets. However, the intended meanings of September Sweetness are pinned to a specific moment in time. The project was intentionally ephemeral, perhaps because the artists – despite their crumbled hopes in the aftermath of the bloodily crushed uprising – needed to find some remaining grains of optimism inside themselves, and a way to renew their belief that the power of those who abuse it will someday disintegrate too, not unlike a sugar temple in the hot tropical sun. In Myanmar, it seems that despite changes, a real dissolution or transfer of power has yet to happen. And so acts of remembrance and forms of collaborative, performative intervention must continue.
In planned and unplanned ways September Sweetness re-enlivened and sustained vital memories of resistance for the artists, and perhaps also for some who built and viewed the work. The project re-performed memory of the September 2007 protests not through appropriation (taking and turning struggle into an aestheticized monument for personal promotion), but as a form of collaborative continuation or commemoration (collectively remembering the past into a materialized charge within the present). Akin to what Rebecca Schneider calls ‘performative remains’, which imbue the present with the living politics of pasts that are not gone, September Sweetness is a small performative continuation of the protests, from 2007 and before, and – in all of its dispersed yet enduring traces and memories – is part of their enduring afterlife (Fig. 7). ‘This project was much bigger than itself’, Streitmatter-Tran reflects. ‘It had so many other events that happened because of it, for better or worse – [for] better for sure’.Footnote 57
September Sweetness. Photo courtesy of the artists.
