INTRODUCTION
‘Privilege’ has been described as ‘an elusive and fugitive subject’ (McIntosh Reference McIntosh1989:2) which, in this article, is explored from a semiotic-material approach of temporalized landscapes. My focus is on the performance of chronotopes of racialFootnote 1-cultural privilege, intersecting with social class, on advertising hoardings for a condominium complex in multiracial Singapore. The study unpicks Singapore's fundamental ideology of multiracialism and racial harmony, and highlights the chronotopic peculiarity in the way ‘Chinese’ privilege gets exercised in Singapore.
Since its independence in 1965, Singapore was declared a ‘multiracial’ nation, comprising four distinct racial categories: Chinese (74.2%), Malays (13.7%), Indians (8.9%), and ‘Others’ (3.2%) (Department of Statistics Singapore 2021). A British colonial legacy, the ‘CMIO’ categorisation formed the bedrock of the nation-state's official policy of multiracialism. This policy was instituted not simply as a consequence of the demographic reality at the time, but as a conscious ideological construction and governance of the postcolonial nation-state (Chua Reference Chua2009).
Singapore's ‘state multiracialism’ has carried several implications. As explained by Chua (Reference Chua2009), first, as ‘a discursive act’, the racial categorisation sought to maintain largely compartmentalised racialized communities, as well as flatten differences within ethnic communities into simplified and homogenised ‘races’. Second, multiracialism formed the basis of a slew of public policies, including the deeply ideological ‘mother-tongue’ language policy which inscribed every citizen with a ‘racial-cultural’ identity, and instituted race-culture equality to all communities. Ang (Reference Ang2022:763) elaborates that Singaporean Chinese, particularly, have never been allowed to forget their ‘Chineseness’, with reinforcement of this racialized identity through cultural policies such as the Speak Mandarin Campaign, to instil a sense of belonging to the Chinese ‘race’, whose ancestral homeland is China. Third, although the ‘equality of races’ administratively relegates the numerical majority population to one of four racial groups, its significant numerical majority status has been preserved institutionally at all times, compounded by the social reality that Chinese Singaporeans occupy most top positions of power and influence in the country (Chua Reference Chua2009; Ang Reference Ang2022). Fourth, the racialisation of citizens, in turn, has filtered down to commercial and quotidian life, where racial difference continues to be visibly produced and manifests itself in a multitude of ways (Velayutham Reference Velayutham2017).
In spite of official claims of racial equality, a majoritarian race-culture privilege has been highlighted by racial minorities in Singapore. In this study, I explore privilege as exceptional visibility accorded to Chineseness (language, history, cultural traditions and values), rendered semiotically and materially in multiracial public spaces, episodically and periodically, without acknowledgement or risk of being publicly called out as ‘racial privilege’—a phenomenon I refer to as the semiotic-material immunity of privilege. The immunity of privilege is underwritten by the notion of ‘racial harmony’, which supports Singapore's multiracial ideology. ‘Racial harmony’ is a double-edged sword: on the one hand, peaceful racial co-existence is upheld as a source of national pride; yet, on the other hand, it serves as a repressive political mechanism for muzzling open discussion of racial issues in Singapore. Viewed as a threat to racial harmony, public voicing of grievances within a discourse of race is rendered politically sensitive, unspeakable (Chua Reference Chua2009; Ang Reference Ang2022), and generally unhearable.
In this article, I explore the performance of semiotic-material immunity of privilege in a case study of advertisement hoardings for ‘Jadescape’, a condominium development that hyper-visibilised class-inflected Chineseness in a multi-racial neighbourhood from 2018 until 2021. While an appeal to aspirations for class-based exclusivity in advertisements for a private condominium is not unexpected, the embedding of class within Sinophonic representations makes the aspiration itself partial to an exclusive racial group. In Jadescape advertising, the semiotic representation of a particular raced-class personhood arises out of a complex fusion of timespaces, or a ‘chronotopic bricolage’. Located proximally to the real estate development before/while it is materially built, the advertising hoardings construct Jadescape, ideologically, as a particular kind of raced-class place for passers-by and potential buyers in multi-racial Singapore.
In the following sections, contentiousness in recognising Chinese privilege in Singapore is first discussed, followed by an outline of the approach of the study and key conceptual terms. A description of the Jadescape development is then provided, after which a fine-grained multimodal analysis of the hoardings is presented. The article concludes with a discussion of key findings.
CONFRONTING PRIVILEGE IN SINGAPORE
In an influential and much debated essay, McIntosh (Reference McIntosh1989) discussed the systemic nature of white (and male) privilege in US society. She described ‘white privilege’ as ‘an invisible package of unearned assets that I can count on cashing in each day, but about which I was “meant” to remain oblivious’ (1989:1). In Singapore, similar claims of ‘Chinese privilege’ have met with resistance, even though a ‘majoritarian advantage’ (Sa'at, cited in Sai Reference Sai2021) or ‘special privileges’ enjoyed by Chinese co-nationals (Velayutham Reference Velayutham2017) have resonated acutely with racial minorities.
On a panel discussion about ‘Chinese privilege’, organised by the Institute of Policy Studies, Ambassador-at-large Chan Heng Chee reportedly described the use of the term as “not appropriate in the local context” (Daud Reference Daud2021). Months later, in the Mandarin segment of his 2021 National Day Rally Speech, Prime Minister Lee Hsien Loong dismissed ‘Chinese privilege’ in Singapore as “entirely baseless” (Ong Reference Ong2021). From the official point of view, rejection of the term is needed to secure the government's principle of racial equality as well as ‘the myth of meritocracy’ (McIntosh Reference McIntosh1989). Refuting the term ‘Chinese privilege’, two historical reasons were advanced from the point of view of Chinese Singaporeans. First, Lee explained that during post-independence, Chinese Singaporeans had complied with the government's adoption of English as the common language, instead of insisting that Chinese be made the national language. Second, Lee highlighted the disadvantage faced by monolingual Chinese Singaporeans, as a consequence of this language policy; Chan, similarly, mentioned that the closure of ‘Nantah’, a Chinese-medium university, was “painful” for the Chinese-educated community. That a segment of Chinese Singaporeans suffered disadvantage is instructive for an intersectionalised understanding of privilege; in that vein, McIntosh's suggestion for a more ‘finely differentiated taxonomy of privilege’ is important to bear in mind. At the same time, this experience of some Chinese Singaporeans should also be viewed, holistically, within a multiracial/multilingual environment, notably, (i) in relation to the elevation of English-Mandarin bilingualism above other bilingualisms (Sai Reference Sai2021), (ii) marginality affecting the other vernacular languages and reduced job opportunities of non-Chinese minorities, and (iii) the development of a Chinese elite, since 1979, through government-supported Special-Assistance Plan (SAP) schools to promote the Chinese language and culture exclusively. Within this context, and acknowledging racial minorities’ perspectives from their lived experiences, sweeping denials of Chinese privilege only preserve the racialised privilege of the dominant group ‘from being fully acknowledged, lessened or ended’ (McIntosh Reference McIntosh1989:1).
Contenders of Chinese privilege, although disavowing its existence, do not dispute racial discrimination suffered by racial minorities. Chan acknowledged that “[m]inorities feel that it's Chinese privilege, because they encounter racism and prejudice in Singapore, and institutional racism”. Lee conceded that “some Chinese Singaporeans may be unaware of how our ethnic minorities feel” and cited examples of “concerns and difficulties” ethnic minorities faced when renting from Chinese home owners and securing jobs with Chinese employers. Differential racial experiences in relation to employment and renting of homes, in fact, are among a list of privilege indicators illustrated by McIntosh (Reference McIntosh1989), that is, while these situations pose disadvantage regularly for racial minorities, they hardly ever are experienced by privileged dominant groups.
The inability (or refusal) to reconcile the social inequality of ‘others’ with ‘our’ own privilege is a failure to recognise the systemic and relational quality of patterns of privilege—patterns ‘built in paths of least resistance’ (Johnson Reference Johnson2018). These paths of least resistance upon which privilege operates are unconsciously learnt and perpetuated. McIntosh (Reference McIntosh1989:1) reflects thus: ‘I had been taught about racism as something that puts others at a disadvantage, but had been taught not to see one of its corollary aspects, white privilege, which puts me at an advantage’. The lack of self-awareness secures unacknowledged and unchecked privilege, and perpetuates disadvantage under the shield of ignorance. Chan's disregard for ethnic minorities’ naming of ‘Chinese privilege’ as underlying their experience of institutional racism (see also Velayutham Reference Velayutham2017) and Lee's dismissiveness of the term while speaking in Mandarin to a Chinese majority audience are staggering exemplars of unacknowledged Chinese privilege performed at the highest institutional levels of government.
While the privilege concept is pertinent in Singapore, it is imperative that the complexion of racialized majoritarian privilege is properly understood within the distinctive sociopolitical and historical context of the city-state (Goh & Chong Reference Goh and Chong2022). One difference between White and local Chinese privilege is tied to Singapore's style of governance. As a Singaporean historian notes, ‘Consciously or otherwise, Singapore's political authoritarianism has benefited heteronormative Chinese men and their outlook disproportionately. … Singapore's authoritarianism gives privilege a qualitative force quite unlike the diffused power of unconscious White privilege’ (Sai Reference Sai2021). Another difference, Sai (Reference Sai2021) notes, is that whereas White privilege is said to be enjoyed by ‘non-coloured’ people, in the context of Singapore's CMIO model, the Chinese are visibly racialized. As the majoritarian race, discourses on Chineseness are ‘hyper-visible’, and they are required to consciously work to ‘preserve’ or ‘defend’ their Chineseness. The hyper-visibility of Chineseness, therefore, co-exists alongside the invisibility of Chinese privilege in Singapore (Sai Reference Sai2021).
One way the hypervisibility of Chineseness in relation to the invisibility of Chinese privilege gets played out, I suggest, is in the latitude of access to common public spaces granted exceptionally, yet episodically, for the semiotic-material display of Chineseness, and shielded from criticism by racial minorities through recourse to racial harmony—a phenomenon I describe as the semiotic-material immunity of privilege. The idea of immunity of privilege involves a representational dimension of Chineseness as well as a temporal-spatial dimension of periodic spatial visibility—‘timing and placing’, as Crang (Reference Crang2012) reminds us, evidence issues of social inequality, and, I add, privilege. Several examples in the domain of media and communication practices by government and commercial actors include the periodic promotion of the community-level Speak Mandarin Campaign at a national level (Borkhorst-Heng Reference Borkhorst-Heng, Harris and Rampton2003); exclusively playing festive Mandarin songs, for instance, in supermarkets island-wide during the Lunar New Year period (but not other ethnic songs during festive periods of other races), as well as playing nationalistic songs only in Mandarin (and English) in shopping malls in the period of Singapore's National Day celebrations; broadcasting of shows only in Mandarin (and English) on television screens on public transportation; and subtitling of movies, in Mandarin, for a general audience in cinemas. The present study of commercial advertising by Jadescape presents another example.Footnote 2
THEORETICAL AND ANALYTICAL APPROACHES OF THE STUDY
This study is situated within the semiotic landscape of ‘commercial discourses’ (Scollon & Scollon Reference Scollon and Scollon2003), and is part of a scholarship that engages explicitly with temporal-spatialities, drawing particularly on Bakhtin's (Reference Bakhtin, Holquist, Emerson and Holquist1981) concept of chronotopes (e.g. Pietikainen Reference Pietikainen2014; Guissemo Reference Guissemo, Peck, Stroud and Williams2019; Lyons & Karimzad Reference Lyons and Karimzad2019; Dong Reference Dong2021). The present study explores what I term chronotopes of privilege.
In his study of literary genres, Bakhtin (Reference Bakhtin, Holquist, Emerson and Holquist1981) conceptualised the inseparability of time and space. He wrote,
In the literary artistic chronotope, spatial and temporal indicators are fused into one carefully thought-out, concrete whole. Time, as it were, thickens, takes on flesh, becomes artistically visible; likewise, space becomes charged and responsive to the movements of time, plot and history. The interaction of axes and fusion of indicators characterises the artistic chronotope. (Bakhtin Reference Bakhtin, Holquist, Emerson and Holquist1981:84).
Chronotopes may be multiple, layered, and their interactions highly complex: ‘Chronotopes are mutually inclusive, they co-exist, they may be interwoven with… or find themselves in evermore complex interrelationships’ (Bakhtin Reference Bakhtin, Holquist, Emerson and Holquist1981:252). Also, human subjects are ‘always intrinsically chronotopic’ (Bakhtin Reference Bakhtin, Holquist, Emerson and Holquist1981:85), in that as immersed participants, they both inhabit and are formed through ‘temporalized spaces/places’ (Crang Reference Crang, May and Thrift2001). Referring to semiotic artefacts broadly, Agha (Reference Agha2007) highlights that chronotopes resonate differently with different participants, entailing social consequences. Chronotopes, he explained, create ‘chronotopic displacements and cross-chronotope alignments between persons here-and-now and persons altogether elsewhere’, with consequences for ‘how social actors in the public sphere are mobilised to think, feel and act’ (Agha Reference Agha2007:324).
By chronotopes of privilege, I refer to two dimensions of temporal landscapes in the present study that participate in the character of privilege exercised in Jadescape. The first dimension—the study's primary analytical focus—pertains to plural representations of temporal-spatialities etched in the artwork of the hoardings. Blending of two overarching chronotopes is evident: a ‘traditional racial-cultural chronotope’ that animates a ‘Chineseness’ signified by an ensemble of historical pasts and spaces in China, and a ‘modern cosmopolitan chronotope’ that signifies contemporariness and transnationalism. These two chronotopes fuse together cultural-class elements, and in turn, also embed further multiplicities and complexities of time, which altogether create a ‘neo-traditional’ aesthetic of modern Chineseness. I use the term chronotopic bricolage to encapsulate the assemblage of interwoven complex relationships appertaining to timespaces depicted on the hoardings. Developed from Levi-Strauss’ (Reference Levi-Strauss1966) ideas, bricolage refers to ‘the process of the formation of a “new” cultural object on the basis of the appropriation and combination of different cultural elements’, where the mixing of elements into new formations brings about a change in new meanings (cited in Tomlinson Reference Tomlinson2010:53). In the case of Jadescape advertising, chronotopic bricolage represents commoditisation of temporal-spatialities to achieve a desired aesthetic effect.
The second dimension of chronotopes of privilege pertains to the temporariness of the semiotic-materiality of the advertising hoardings for the duration of completing the building of the condominium complex. Along the perimeter of the development site is a boundary wall erected for public safely; the outer surface of which is utilised as an ‘exhibit-display space’ (Scollon & Scollon Reference Scollon and Scollon2003) for marketing the condominium as it is being built. Upon completion, the boundary wall and the hoardings on it are dismantled, making the material presence of the artwork representations transient. Yet, the representations due to their visible appearance for a duration of time (approximately three years) achieved ‘publicness’. As explained by Arendt (Reference Arendt1998:50, cited in de Backer Reference de Backer2019), ‘everything that appears in public can be seen and heard by everybody and has the widest possible publicity. … [A]ppearance—something that is being seen and heard by others as well as by ourselves—constitutes reality’. The temporal appearance and disappearance, I argue, is needed for securing the immunity of privilege.
Theoretically, the study belongs, broadly, within ‘critical semiotic landscape studies’ (cf. Barni & Bagna Reference Barni and Bagna2015), at the intersection of semiotic landscape studies and critical discourse studies (CDS). The motivation and explanatory purchase of the study are fundamentally sociopolitical. Methodologically, the study is based on a partial ethnography of making visits to the development site, photographing the advertising hoardings, interviewing property agents at Jadescape's showroom, and researching Jadescape's official website and advertorials. More centrally, the study undertakes a fine-grained analysis of the Jadescape hoardings using a multimodal social semiotic (MSS) framework, closely allied with CDS.
The MSS framework, inspired by Michael Halliday's theory of social semiotics, regards all signs in all modes, and their interrelations, as meaningful. Kress (Reference Kress2010:54, original emphases) outlines the fundamental assumptions of MSS as follow:
Signs are always newly made in social interaction; signs are motivated, not arbitrary relations of meaning and form; the motivated relation of a form and a meaning is based on and arises out of the [socially shaped] interest of makers of signs; the forms/signifiers which are used in the making of signs are made in social interaction and become part of the semiotic resources of a culture.
From a critical perspective, the following questions are instructive:
Whose interest and agency is at work here in the making of meaning?’, ‘What meaning is being made here?’, ‘How is meaning being made?’, ‘With what resources, in what social environment?’, and ‘What are the meaning potentials of the resources that have been used? (Kress Reference Kress2010:57, original emphases)
The Jadescape hoardings constitute a ‘sign-complex’ (an ensemble of signs), in which the visual mode (images, postures, layout) is most salient and carries the major ‘functional load’ (Kress Reference Kress2010:55); language, though minimal, is also meaningfully present. Kress & van Leeuwen's (Reference Kress and van Leeuwen2021) framework for ‘reading images’ is employed for the analysis of the visual signs and the relationship between modes on the hoardings. Noteworthy in Jadescape's sign-complex is the abundance of iconographic symbolisms, which require some theoretical elaboration. ‘Iconographic symbolisms’ in texts refer to certain objects, animals, people, or even postures and gestures that represent particular cultural values, concepts, or ideas (Machin Reference Machin2007), and require knowledge of that cultural context for interpretation. For this purpose, I rely on reference materials on Chinese cultural symbolisms (e.g. Eberhard Reference Eberhard1988; Cirlot Reference Cirlot1995; Hagenbjörk Reference Hagenbjörk2011; Williams Reference Williams2012). In Kress & van Leeuwen's framework (2021:76), symbolic processes (which ‘define’ participants visually in terms of who or what they are or what they mean) belong within ‘conceptual’ visual structures that represent generalised states. For the MSS analysis, I also coin the term semiotic tie, extended from Halliday & Hasan's (Reference Halliday and Hasan1976) concept of cohesive ties which refer to occurrences of ‘a pair of cohesively related items’ in a text. I use the term semiotic tie to indicate a relationship of cohesion based on similarity between two signs within a sign-complex.
The MSS framework is useful for operationalising the concept of chronotopes in critical semiotic landscape studies; notably, time which is invisible, ‘thickens, takes on flesh, becomes… visible’ (Bakhtin Reference Bakhtin, Holquist, Emerson and Holquist1981:84) in sign-complexes. Explicit mention of time or space, it should be noted, is not a necessary quality of chronotopes; Bakhtin referenced gothic castles, for example, as conveying a certain sense of timespace. This sense of ‘chronotopic energy’ (Ladin Reference Ladin and Emerson1999) is especially pertinent for the analysis of iconographic symbolisms in this article.
JADESCAPE: THE CONDOMINIUM
Jadescape is a private residential condominium located at Shunfu Road, in an upper middle-class neigbourhood between Bishan and Upper Thomson. Built on a land area of 408,927 square feet, the development comprises 1,206 residential units, six retail shops, and over a hundred shared condominium facilities, distributed over seven blocks, each comprising twenty-one or twenty-three storeys.Footnote 3 The condominium complex is built by Qingjian Realty (South Pacific) Pte Ltd., a Hong Kong listed developer with thirty years of experience buying and developing on government land (as opposed to private land) in Singapore, of which Shunfu is a prime example (fieldwork interview, 16 January 2021). Jadescape was the highest selling new launch in 2018, with an expected occupancy date in 2023 (Jadescape website, see n. 3).
On its official website, the name Jadescape is explained as follows:
As a valuable material in itself, ‘Jade’ in the name positions the property as one of luxury and prestige. Also well known for its green varieties, Jade represents the varied lush greenery of the condominium and hints at the elegant grandeur found within its borders. ‘Scape’ describes the overall setting and nature-inspired offerings of the property. Used in combination and akin to the word ‘landscape’, Jadescape denotes the extensiveness of greenery in the development and reflects the property's richness in concept, value and nature.
While foregrounding some class and spatial elements, the brief description can be further elaborated, also to highlight the imbrication of racial-cultural and temporal dimensions that constitute the Jadescape sign-complex. Left implicit in the official description is the association of jade distinctly with temporalized Chineseness in Singapore. The jade-stone is traditionally the most valued gem by the Chinese population (Williams Reference Williams2012) for various reasons. Part of Chinese civilisation since ancient times, jade was used as a material for practical and ornamental purposes (Shan Reference Shan2018). Apart from its aesthetic quality (‘beautiful stones’; Shan Reference Shan2018), jade historically symbolised particular sociocultural virtues. In Li Ji ‘Book of rites’, Confucius associated the gemstone with eleven virtues of benevolence, justice, propriety, truth, credibility, music, loyalty, heaven, earth, morality, and intelligence (Shan Reference Shan2018). In terms of price, the Chinese rank jade as the most precious of stones, which can be as expensive as a diamond of equal weight (Williams Reference Williams2012). A symbol of prosperity and status, it is referenced in descriptions of Jadescape in terms of ‘wealth and luxury’ (Jadescape website, see n. 3). Green jade is the most popular kind of jade in Chinese culture (Shan Reference Shan2018)—the colour indexed in the website's description of the development's ‘extensiveness of greenery’ and its ‘nature-inspired’ locale.
The spatial semiotics of the development also requires some elaboration. A Jadescape advertorial describes the property as an ‘an extension of nature’, by which it refers to the relationship between the built environment and its physical proximity to two parks: Bishan-Ang Mo Kio Park and the vast MacRitchie Reservoir Park. The latter, in particular, is attributed for its direct inspiration upon the design of the condominium complex in providing ‘an Asian garden topography’, with its residential towers resembling ‘a majestic mountain range that encompasses the outline of MacRitchie Reservoir’ (Channel News Asia 2021). As explained by the concept architect, ‘We wanted the facades of the Jadescape towers to be oriented toward the MacRitchie Reservoir, creating a connection between them and maximising the view towards the reservoir from each building’ (Channel News Asia 2021). Underlying the spatial conceptualisation of the development is fengshui (literally, ‘wind’ and ‘water’; fieldwork interview, 16 January 2021)—temporally, a traditional Chinese geomancy system by which the propitious orientation of sites are determined, so as to harmonize with the local cosmic currents of the yin and yang (the latter refer to the complementary dualism of negative and positive forces upon which Chinese cosmology is based; Williams Reference Williams2012).
The indoor design of the residential units is standard-modern. According to its promotional material, the condominium units feature ‘luxurious and premium interior fittings’. Listed among its unique selling points are Jadescape's ‘futuristic and technologically advanced smart homes’, which include safety, community and eco-friendly features (Jadescape website, see n. 3).
MSS ANALYSIS OF THE RACIAL-CLASS CHRONOTOPIC BRICOLAGE IN THE JADESCAPE HOARDINGS
Altogether, the hoardings display artwork comprising four sets of representations, each set comprising a paired panel. The four sets recur consecutively around the perimeter of the construction site, which are identified by the words imprinted on each of them: Serenity, Playtime, Tranquility, and Wonder (see the appendix for the advertisements). In what follows, the analysis of the racial-class chronotopic bricolage of Jadescape is broken down into three thematic foci, or ‘minor chronotopes’ (Bakhtin Reference Bakhtin, Holquist, Emerson and Holquist1981:252)—chronotopes of the ‘garden home’, ‘imagined personhood’, and ‘signing’.
Garden home chronotope
The left-panel images of the four sets feature outdoor garden sceneries, in keeping with the marketing of the condominium as ‘Jadescape: Garden homes at Shunfu’. Although garden-themed condominium names are popular in Singapore, the Jadescape garden is presented as a culturally ‘temporalized place’Footnote 4 (Crang Reference Crang, May and Thrift2001:5). The spatial lexicon ‘garden’ is visually specified on the hoardings as a historically traditional Chinese garden, thus consciously place-making the development in Chinese racial-traditional cultural terms. Topographical features associated with the design of traditional Chinese gardens are evident in all four sets of representation: rock formations and undulating terrain (in Serenity and Playtime), water bodies (in Serenity and Tranquility), and plants (in all four sets). Represented in the artwork are plants traditionally found in Chinese gardens. In Serenity, lucky bamboos are featured, which are one of the most popular plants for fengshui purposes, and symbolise good fortune, health, prosperity as well as love and marriage (Cho Reference Cho2021). Lotuses, in Tranquility, have almost unique importance in traditional Chinese folklore and symbolism, representing values of spiritual purity and immortality (Eberhard Reference Eberhard1988). In Tranquility and Wonder, willows are seen at the top of the frame, signifying good omen to the family (Williams Reference Williams2012) as well as sexual desire (Eberhard Reference Eberhard1988). In Serenity, Playtime and Wonder, Chinese evergreen plants with auspicious symbolic meanings of good fortune, luck, and prosperity abound.
Apart from traditionally Chinese-signified flora, the left panels also depict images of fauna with Sinophonic chronotopic energy. In Playtime, hares—symbolising longevity which is culturally valued—are depicted; hares are fabled to reside in the moon, and employed in pounding the elements which compose the ‘elixir of life’ (Williams Reference Williams2012). Hares also used to be an auspicious emblem of Chinese emperors, historically, signifying the yin force in the life of the monarch (Cirlot Reference Cirlot1995). Goldfish, represented both as a screen image and as alive leaping from the fish bowl in Serenity, symbolise wealth. The Chinese word for ‘fish’ (yu) is phonetically identical with the word meaning ‘abundance, affluence’ (yu), and the Chinese word meaning ‘goldfish’ is phonetically identical with the two words meaning ‘gold in abundance’ (Eberhard Reference Eberhard1988:155). Goldfish in a bowl, moreover, carry an auspicious meaning—‘May gold and jewels fill your house to overflowing’ (Eberhard Reference Eberhard1988:125). More generally, as fish are extremely plentiful in Chinese waters, they are also symbols of temporal regeneration, connubial bliss, and harmony (Williams Reference Williams2012)—the latter, visually connoted through the circular motion of the fish depicted on the screen divider. Butterflies, in Wonder, are emblematic of joy, particularly, conjugal felicity, and are regarded as the Chinese cupid (Williams Reference Williams2012). Although birds have different meanings depending on their variety, their long-shot representation in Serenity makes their identification indistinguishable. Their significance in relation to historical Chinese ‘bird-cage culture’, however, is discussed later.
The presence of water, in the form of streams, lakes, and ponds, is a characteristic feature of traditional Chinese gardens. Water, which constitutes a salient element in fengshui, signifies auspiciousness; a fancy name for water, interestingly, is ‘essence of jade’ (Williams Reference Williams2012:397). Two sets of images (Serenity and Tranquility) represent prominently the element of water. The left panel of Serenity, depicting a customary Chinese garden landscape, features a lake on its right. Represented long-distance, the water body and its framing greenery create a sense of depth and vastness of the garden. The image of the lake on the left panel connects cohesively with a panoramic shot of MacRitchie reservoir, which occupies the right panel. The photographic image of MacRicthie is a wide-lens shot, with a pavilion and forested hills captured at a distance, conveying a sense of magnificence. The chosen image of the reservoir has a strong Sinophonic resonance, for literally translated, the Chinese word for ‘landscape’ traditionally means ‘mountains and water’ (Eberhard Reference Eberhard1988:189). The visual salience of the hills and water is construed by the hills’ reflection on the water's still surface, accentuating the magnificence and serenity of the landscape. From a geomancy perspective, the image highlights MacRitchie as one of three ‘heavenly lakes’ in Singapore, symbolising wealth. The presence of the pavilion in the scenery is reflective of the dualistic symbolism of ‘life within nature’ in traditional Chinese culture (Hagenbjörk Reference Hagenbjörk2011). The soft brown hue and unmodulated colours that envelop this photograph contribute to a reduced modality, suggesting a timeless dreamlike quality of an actually present timespace. While the juxtaposing of the reservoir and the Jadescape garden images could likely index physical proximity of the reservoir and the development's locale, the symbolic meanings of wealth and timeless grandeur derived from the reservoir shot are simultaneously transposed onto Jadescape.
The Tranquility pair also references water in the garden-home concept of Jadescape. The water in the fish bowl on the left panel serves as a visual semiotic tie to a larger water feature on the right panel. The close shot of the pond as well as the naturalism of the image (note the visibility of the sun's rays shining through the trees, and the contrast between its illumination and shadows) give the impression of the viewer standing here-and-now ‘within the scene’. Yet, this scene, far from materially present at the time, was an impressionistic sketch of futurity by an artist for marketing purposes.
As a temporalized space, all of the cultural garden scenes featured on the hoardings represent places for recreation and solitude: ‘temporary halts in the city, breathing occasions, moments of silence and encounter’ (Wunderlich Reference Wunderlich2010:45). The descriptors ‘serenity’ and ‘tranquility’, in particular, with their right-panel images of still or lightly rippled water bodies index a certain ‘place-temporality’ (Wunderlich Reference Wunderlich2010) that accompanies this modern urban-living experience, achieved through merging of past-present-timelessness (MacRitchie) and past-contemporary-future (the artist's impression of the pond). The chronotopic experience of ‘temporal halts’ (to adapt Wunderlich's phrase) creates an affect of desire where such culturally imbued serenity and tranquillity are attainable in the fast-paced city life of Singapore on the grounds of one's own home. The actualisation of the desire, however, is contingent upon social class factors. ‘Garden homes’ not only index affluence and exclusivity in land-scarce Singapore, but also in China, where only the wealthy could model ponds after lakes; in fact, in ancient times, gardens with lakes were reserved for royalty.
With an emphasis on the garden aspect of the property, indoor residential spaces are not depicted on the hoardings. As mentioned in Jadescape's promotional material elsewhere, the indoor features highlight modern ‘premium’ fittings, and ‘futuristic’ smart technology, which are expected and unremarkable in modern condo living. A hint of the expected modern living aesthetic is implied by the contemporary timber-floor decking, the deck chair, and the sleek hanging light-bulbs—all of which are modern inventions—in the left-panel image of Tranquility.
CHRONOTOPES OF IMAGINED PERSONHOOD
In this section, the chronotopic form of personhood (Agha Reference Agha2007) that occupies Jadescape is discussed. The ‘imagined personhood’ embodies a neo-traditional aesthetic of upper-middle class modern Chineseness, as indexed by the ‘represented participants’ (Kress & van Leeuwen Reference Kress and van Leeuwen2021) on the hoardings. Although the visual analysis highlights the particular types of attire worn by the represented participants and their depicted leisure activities, these are not to be ‘read’ at face-value, but as indexical of an idealised sociocultural and psychical personhood.
In terms of physical embodiment cues, the imagined personhood in the artwork is distinctly Chinese. Notably, all of the young racially Chinese figures in the images are represented with a ‘demand’ gaze towards interactive participants (Kress & van Leeuwen Reference Kress and van Leeuwen2021), inviting identification with target Chinese ‘yuppies’ (with children).
In terms of ‘symbolic attributes’ (Kress & van Leeuwen Reference Kress and van Leeuwen2021) of attire, hairstyles, and accessories, the chronotopic subjects display a curious blend of traditionalism and modernism, as ‘carriers’ of a neo-traditional aesthetic. The men in the Serenity and Playtime panels are clad in Tang suits (buttoned-down Mandarin-collar inner shirts, long-sleeved loose jackets, and loose trousers)—a type of attire traditionally worn by the men of Qing dynasty, regarded as one of the greatest periods in Chinese history. Tang suits are hardly worn by Singaporean men today, and especially not by the younger generation, which make the represented figures appear ‘out-of-place’, unless they are viewed as emblematic of a type of upper-middle class modernised-Chineseness. An infusion of cosmopolitan elements supports this reading. The man in Serenity wears modern ‘boating’ shoes, originally worn by US sailors in the 1930s, and which became trendy internationally among younger men since the 1980s. The shoes are popular among younger Singaporean men and worn on semi-casual occasions. The hair-style of the two men in the advertisement is modern and chic. The women's apparel in the advertisement is also a chinois-inspired symbolic attribute—especially the woman in the Tranquility panel, who is seen wearing a Mandarin-collar inner blouse and long flowy outer garments. Unlike silk robes traditionally worn by wealthy Chinese women (Williams Reference Williams2012), the organza fabric of the outer garments of the woman in Tranquility (and the woman's flowy scarf in Wonder) connotes contemporary glamour. So, too, the high-heeled boots worn by the woman in Serenity. The hair-styles of the two women, however, index a traditional aesthetic, with hair twisted up and towards the back of the head. Hair-grooming of this sort is a symbolic attribute connoting married status, since traditionally unmarried women in China would wear their hair hanging down in long plaits (Williams Reference Williams2012). The hair-style of the woman in the Wonder panel, further, resembles the invention of SunShou, the wife of a powerful minister in the Han dynasty, and this is indexical of class also.
Unlike the adult figures, the young girl's clothing and shoes in Playtime are strikingly modern. Positioned alongside the man in the same panel, her wardrobe choice stands as a contrastive image of modernity vis-à-vis his manifest traditionalism. Her hair tied up in two small buns on top of the head, however, have traditional cultural resonance and is a contrasting reversal of the man's modern haircut. The girl's confident comportment and bespectacled appearance (similar as the man's) index a sense of scholarly elitism.
In terms of accessories, jade jewellery is worn by two of the represented participants: a jade thumb-ring worn by the man in the Serenity panel, and a jade bangle by the woman in the Wonder panel. Jade jewellery are typical traditional Chinese accessories worn to this day in Singapore, and symbolize wealth, longevity, and good luck—all culturally valued. The ring (like the bangle) is a continuous circle, and so symbolises eternity. Other symbolisms of the ring for the Chinese (as in other cultures) include betrothal and of love. The Chinese word for ‘ring’ (huan) is phonetically identical with the word for ‘to return’ (Eberhard Reference Eberhard1988:311) which, coincidentally, creates a semiotic tie with the English word ‘Return’ printed on the hoardings. The embodiment of jade jewellery also serves as a semiotic tie to the name of the development and the latter's symbolic infusions of the imagined personhood.
All of the represented participants in the Jadescape artwork are shown posing with items from nature as a prop in a symbolic attributive structure (Kress & van Leeuwen Reference Kress and van Leeuwen2021), while holding the gaze of the interactive participants. These props function as extensions of their imagined personhood, and (again) are not to be ‘read’ literally as pastime activities of contemporary subjects. In Serenity, the man holds up the base of a bird cage containing a bird, which indexes a traditional Chinese ‘bird cage culture’. In ancient China, keeping birds in portable wooden cages, in the type of design depicted in the advertisement, was a practice amongst the royalty, who missed their hometown birds when they travelled to Beijing (Williams Reference Williams2012). A few decades ago, congregating socially in public spaces with their birds in bird cages was a fairly common pastime, sans class markers, amongst elderly Chinese men in Singapore. This is not at all a typical pastime of younger generation Chinese Singaporeans, however. Its depiction on the hoardings, therefore, is indexical not of Singapore's own more recent place-history of a lived social pastime of an older generation, but rather of a distant place-history of mainland Chinese royalty. Historical indexicality, in this case, is less about evoking nostalgia of a lived cultural past, than it is to mark social status and a wealthy lifestyle. Similarly, the bonsai plant held by the woman in Wonder is also emblematic of social status and exclusivity. The art of cultivating bonsai since 700 AD required special techniques, and made luxurious gifts afforded only by the wealthy elite in China.
The Playtime scene presents a curious bricolage of modernity and traditionalism. On the one hand, the man and the child in the scene are identically holding up a magician's hat with a rabbit/hare popping out, offering a modern-Western depiction of magical entertainment. On the other hand, magical elixirs indexing traditional Chinese folklore about the moon goddess Chang'e are positioned on the table close to the girl. Reference to hares in the legendary concoction of elixirs for immortality (Williams Reference Williams2012) is visually evident everywhere in the garden scene. Notably, one sits opposite the elixir jars on the table, with the colour white serving as a semiotic tie between the hare(s) and the elixir jars.
The scene of the woman holding the fish bowl in Tranquility projects a traditional cultural yin yang sensibility of harmony, playing on contrastive temporal-spatial notions of motion and stillness. The painted screen image of the fish in following a circular trajectory suggests motion, on the one hand, and stillness by virtue of it captured as a static imprint, on the other. The dynamic of stillness and movement symbolises eternal harmony. The emergence of the live fish from the woman's water bowl (and the splattering of water droplets) simulates motion where the fish joins the circular vector charted by the path of the other painted fish. The here-and-now, in other words, merges with the quality of timelessness. The woman herself is depicted in a posture of semi-stillness in her upper body as she holds up the fish bowl, while her lower body is in semi-motion, represented by the flowing direction of her clothes and her feet in movement.
CHRONOTOPES OF SIGNING
The final section of the analysis focuses on the spatialisation of time implicated in the choice of linguistic codes and in the semiotic economy between the paired panels on the hoardings. Each image panel is bordered by a half-white half-brown column on either side, which serves as functional framelines upon which imprinted linguistic codes integrate the panels.
Language is employed sparingly on the Jadescape hoardings, of which two linguistic codes, Chinese and English, appear in different sections of the advertisement. Chinese characters (福顺轩) appear on the top left-hand column preceding each paired set, arranged in a traditional vertical format. Translated, the message reads ‘going into a place of good fortune’: literally, 福 (fu) means ‘good fortune’ or ‘luck’; 顺 (shun) means ‘(to go) along (successfully)’; and 轩 (xuan) means ‘pavilion’ or a contained exclusive space. An English imperative clause is printed on the right. The verb ‘Return’ appears in the image space of the left panels, whereas one of four prepositional phrases (‘to serenity’, ‘to playtime’, ‘to tranquility’, and ‘to wonder’) connects downwards into the adjacent column between the paired images. These four locative phrases anchor and distill the respective pairs of images to particular shared place-temporalities of affect. The glyph ‘R’ in ‘Return’ is creatively printed with a reverse facing, consonant with the semantics of the word. Although in the context of the left-panel visual images, ‘return’ harkens to a past time, the innovativeness of the typographical design lends a fresh modern vibe.
In terms of the language choices, bilingual (and multilingual) signages in themselves are not uncommon in Singapore's multi-racial public spaces. Where other ‘race-languages’ (Chua Reference Chua2009) co-exist with English in public spaces (e.g. on government billboards, street signs, and public transportation), the assumption is that these languages connect with less proficient speakers of English (Baas Reference Baas2018). This is clearly not the case in the Jadescape advertising, where the two languages communicate different sets of meaning, instead of the same meaning made intelligible for different audiences based on their linguistic proficiency. Also, while English on the hoardings would be accessible to a multi-racial audience, the use of the Chinese script presupposes an exclusively Chinese-knowing audience. The economy of the linguistic codes represented on the Jadescape hoardings, therefore, assumes a target Chinese bilingual (and bicultural) demographic conversant in both languages. Further, the top-left positioning of the Chinese characters and the center-to-bottom right placement of the English words might be read, following Kress & van Leeuwen's (Reference Kress and van Leeuwen2021) terminology, as grounding Chineseness as the ‘given-ideal’ identity, combined with an English-associated cosmopolitan identity as the ‘new-real’ for the target audience. The two sets of identities exist in a complementary relationship. Although the Chinese characters rendered in brown against the white column background, and the English locative phrases are in reverse white against a brown background are visually contrastive, the mutual exchange of colours, along with the fact that the word ‘Return’ also in brown like the Chinese characters suggests, semiotically, that the traditional-cultural and the contemporary-cosmopolitan identities are not oppositional and separate, but complementary and harmonious for the target Chinese modern.
Turning attention now to the composition of the dual panel sets, the relationship between the images which constitute a pair is elaborated below. The interstitially placed English locative phrases bridge the images on the two panels into an integrated thematic whole. The affectual quality of ‘serenity’ applies to the scene of the man with the bird cage, whose slightly oblique posture draws the eye towards the lake in the panel which, in turn, is semiotically contiguous with the adjacent image of the still reservoir. ‘Tranquility’ is construed in the calm image of the woman holding the fish bowl, her robes flowing in the direction of the adjacent panel where a large undisturbed pond is represented. The experience of ‘wonder’ is constructed by the woman standing behind a trellis carrying a bonsai plant, her scarf floating directionally towards the impressive spacious condominium entrance imagined in the adjoining panel. The trellis in the first panel and the condo's future entrance in the second, combined with the synchronous hues between the woman's clothing and the built entrance features serve as connectivity elements between the two panels. Finally, the word ‘playtime’ links the pair of images temporally via ‘when time’ (Adam Reference Adam and Ingold2002:510), that is, an appropriate time to engage in particular kinds of activity, which in this instance is the time for play. The culturally imbued enchantment of play depicted by the father-and-child duo in the first panel relates to the image of present-day schoolchildren presumably running home after school time to enjoy playtime in their captivating garden home. The depiction of children in the two images serves as a semiotic tie between the panels. Implied also are markers of the children's affluence: in the first panel, as mentioned, by the girl's appearance and posture; in the second panel, by the Randoseru school-bags prominently displayed in the back shot of the children. These expensive backpacks, popularised in Japan, can cost between $60 and $1200 (Singapore dollars).
Combining Kress & van Leeuwen's (Reference Kress and van Leeuwen2021) compositional framework with Chinese spatial design, the difference between ‘left’ and ‘right’, like yin and yang, can be understood as relative rather than absolute (Eberhard Reference Eberhard1988). At first glance, it would appear that the ‘given’ information value on the left panels focuses on an imagined cultural traditionalism, whereas the ‘new’ information value on the right panels represents the contemporary. To an extent, that is so. However, as discussed about the symbolic attributes of the represented participants’ appearances, modern elements permeate the traditional. Likewise, the analysis of the water bodies on the right-hand panels of Serenity and Tranquility showed that images purportedly of the material present were represented ‘extratemporally’ (Bakhtin Reference Bakhtin, Holquist, Emerson and Holquist1981:91; the MacRitchie reservoir) or were an artist's impression of futurity (the feature pond). Similarly, the right-panel image of Wonder, representing the expansive entrance into the property, is a futurescape yet to exist (at the time). In the case of Playtime, the right-hand image of the running children is a contemporary illustrative image, presumably from an image bank of a different placetime (likely Japan). The arrangement of the English linguistic signs on the hoardings further complicates the reading of what is ‘given’ and what is ‘new’ information value in the advertisement. With the verb ‘Return’ inscribed on the left image panel (and the glyph ‘R’ facing left as well), while the rest of the imperative clause remains sandwiched between the two panels, an intersemiotic implication emerges whereby racial-class chronotopic meanings from representations on the left bleed onto the right panel images. This means that the ‘given’ also becomes the new ‘new’ information value, disrupting a linear, sequential reading of left-right structures. Compositionally (and not only representationally), contemporary and future scapes are entangled with the past.
DISCUSSION AND CONCLUSION
In this article, I explored the study of racial-cultural privilege through a chronotopic lens. I argued for a semiotic-material immunity of privilege, in the Singapore context, in reconciling the concomitant visibility of Chineseness with the invisibility of Chinese privilege, and discussed this in relation to semiotic-representational and material dimensions of episodic presence of Chineseness in multiracial public spaces. In the case of the Jadescape advertisement, chronotopes of privilege were two-fold—found both in the semioticisation of the hoardings as well as in their material transience.
On the hoardings, representationally, a chronotopic bricolage was evident in the imbrication of a traditional racial-cultural chronotope and a modern cosmopolitan chronotope, and the folding in of a kaleidoscope of multiple temporalities and their permeabilities (of past, present, future, and senses of ‘time’ and ‘timelessness’) as well as various time-geographies of proximity (Singapore, China, Japan, and the global West). Bricolagic chronotopicity complicates Chinese traditionalism found in the representations. The cultural tradition depicted by Jadescape was a selective mishmash of historicity, preferring to draw upon disparate periods in China's ancient history (e.g. the Tang suit from the Qing dynasty, hairstyle from the Han dynasty), rather than from Singapore's own evolving history (e.g. the bird cage culture). That standards of ‘authentic’ Chineseness for Chinese Singaporeans lie ‘elsewhere’ (Sai Reference Sai2021) is consonant with the government's cultural efforts like the Speak Mandarin Campaign, which insist on the preservation of a Chinese cultural heritage from a distant timeplace. Yet, through chronotopic bricolage, the notion of historical pasts as ‘faraway’ gets scrambled, placing history in the present, and reconceptualising spatial relations in terms of historical and geographical proximity (Probyn Reference Probyn, May and Thrift2001). Through the semiotic practice of chronotopic bricolage,Footnote 5 a neo-traditional aesthetic of ‘Chinese moderns’ is constructed to appeal to young, affluent Singaporean Chinese, imagined to be modern and cosmopolitan in outlook, yet ‘Chinese’ at heart. Inflected by social class, the commoditisedFootnote 6 chronotopic bricolage glamourises Chineseness.
This study on class-inflected racial privilege, it is hoped, advances on-going discussion about Chinese privilege in Singapore; notably, in thinking through the government-imposed homogeneity and visibility of the racial-cultural category ‘Chinese’ in the CMIO model, in relation to a ‘taxonomy of privilege’ (McIntosh Reference McIntosh1989) that arises from the intersectionalised heterogeneity encompassed by that categorisation. In this regard, although meanings of gender and sexuality were less foregrounded in the depictions, it is worth noting that heteronormalisation was evident, nonetheless, reinforcing interlocking systems of privilege in Singapore, especially concerning heteronormativity and Chineseness (Sai Reference Sai2021). In conceptualising the Jadescape home, the willow, lucky bamboo, fish, and butterflies are Sinophonic symbols of heterosexual desire and conjugality, and the women's hairstyles are indexical of marital status. While the left-panel Playtime image implying a father-daughter dyad might seem unusual (compared to conventional expectations of mothers pictured with children), the depicted image is consonant with contemporary discourses of fatherhood in Singapore, which invariably show ‘modern’ fathers in playtime scenes (Lazar Reference Lazar2000). The intersectionality lens, I suggest, sharpens the ‘type’ of Chineseness at play at any given time and space, without vacating Chinese racial-cultural privilege as an overarching concept.
Finally, besides chronotopic representations on the Jadescape hoardings, the spatial temporariness of visibilising Chineseness, I have argued, is a necessary requirement for the immunity of racialized privilege in the public sphere. The Jadescape hoardings, upon which the hyper-visible representations were inscribed, are durational and impermanent. As the construction of the condominium neared completion in 2022, the hoardings were removed, leaving behind its racial-class traces only in the name of the development and in the names of selected facilities on the condominium grounds. Read alongside wider media and communication visibility and publicness accorded exceptionally to Chineseness in multiracial Singapore, the periodicity of material appearances and disappearances of semioticisations of Chineseness in various times and spaces in the city-state maintains the elusiveness of racialized privilege, while the cumulative effect (to quote Velayutham Reference Velayutham2017:465) renders the ‘normalisation of Chinese privilege’.
Appendix: Jadescape hoardings (photos by author)
