Performing Protest in Singapore: Performance Tactics in Brother Cane and Don’t Give Money to the Arts

Abstract

In the early hours of 1 January 1994, Josef Ng concluded his 25-minute performance artwork Brother Cane (1994) by snipping his pubic hair. The performance created a public furore, resulting in the cessation of public funding towards performance artworks for ten years. Undeterred by the backlash, Tang Da Wu created and performed Don’t Give Money to the Arts (1995) to protest the no-funding rule: during the opening of a state-sponsored exhibition, the artist approached the president of Singapore while wearing a jacket embroidered with the words “Don’t Give Money to the Arts”. Although it was as explicit in its criticism of the government and its policies, Tang was not penalised for his performance. In this paper, I conduct a comparative analysis of these two works to examine how protest art–with a focus on the performance art form–navigates the cultural hegemony in Singapore by comparing the tactics used in both performances by analysing how and why Tang managed to escape punishment for his scathing performance while Ng did not. Specifically, I look at how the performances navigated the “out-of-bound markers” and concealed their dissent, and how the artists controlled the documentations produced. The answers to this question provide us with important insights into how protest art continues to adapt to and resist the mutating systems of control within authoritarian states.