The Smallness in Bigness
Making sense of the Other Singapore
through Tan Pin Pin’s Singapore Gaga
2017
It is managed by a regime that has excluded accident and random-ness: even its nature is entirely remade. It is pure intention: if there is chaos, it is authored chaos: if it is ugly, it is designed ugliness; if it is absurd, it is willed absurdity.
Rem Koolhaas in Singapore Songlines
The Other Singapore: Finding Smallness in Bigness
In Singapore Songlines, Rem Koolhaas famously declared that “In spite of its colossal substance, Singapore is doomed to remain a Potemkin metropolis” (Koolhaas, 1997). The city-state, home to over 5 million people, has long prided itself on being one of the world’s most livable cities. Yet this image—of a clean, green, hyper-efficient urban paradise—has often been dismissed as overly curated or even artificial. Koolhaas described it as a meticulously controlled landscape, planned down to the tiniest detail, leaving little room for spontaneity, individuality, or surprise.
Coming from a small town on the outskirts of Kuala Lumpur, I’ve always found myself both captivated and slightly overwhelmed by Singapore’s striking skyline. Towering skyscrapers rise alongside lush gardens and thoughtfully placed public spaces—it’s beautiful, no doubt. But as an architecture student, I began to understand the immense planning and design decisions behind this urban choreography.
I still remember one of our early classroom discussions about Singapore’s city planning. It was the first time I heard local perspectives describing their own city as overly manicured—too neat, too organized. It made me wonder: Is it possible for a city to be both well-planned and expressive? Can Singapore’s meticulously regulated spaces also make room for self-expression, for messiness, for life in its rawer forms?
That’s where Singapore Gaga by Tan Pin Pin offers a refreshing counterpoint to Koolhaas’ vision. If Singapore Songlines captures the monumental and the macro, Singapore Gaga tunes us into the micro—the overlooked, the everyday, the wonderfully odd.
In the film, we meet a cast of real-life characters: the harmonica-playing, clog-wearing uncle who proudly calls himself a “national treasure”; the “Hello One Dollar” auntie selling tissues outside MRT stations; and the elderly DJs who read news in dialects to a dwindling radio audience (Tan, 2005). These are the city’s unsung voices, its aural landscape. They are often brushed aside in our rush from one air-conditioned destination to the next, yet they are undeniably part of the fabric of Singapore.
What Singapore Gaga reveals is a quieter truth: even within a tightly controlled environment, expressions of individuality slip through. These everyday performances—of music, of language, of culture—find their stage in the city’s small, unregulated cracks. It turns out, there is room for self-expression here. You just have to listen closely.
In this review, I’ll continue meandering through Singapore Gaga, exploring the urban spaces it uncovers and the stories they tell. I’m curious about this “Other” Singapore—the one not on the postcards. Can it grow in the shadow of order? Can the Other be planned, or must it emerge organically?
Ultimately, this is a search for reconciliation: between planning and unpredictability, between bigness and smallness. Between the Singapore we see and the one we tend to overlook.
Making Sense of Tan's Cinematic Experience
LIGHTS CAMERA ACTION
In Singapore Gaga, filmmaker Tan Pin Pin stitches together a mosaic of moments that quietly redefines how we see the city. Using a mix of filming techniques, Tan transforms the 55-minute documentary into a captivating montage of Singapore’s many spaces—not the shiny, polished surfaces often associated with the "clean and green" cosmopolitan narrative, but the gritty, human, often overlooked corners of everyday life.
Her lens doesn’t linger on the iconic skyline. Instead, it finds poetry in the mundane. She documents people and spaces that challenge the usual narrative, stirring up memories and nostalgia. The result is a cinematic experience that reshapes our understanding of the city through how its spaces are filmed and framed (Chee, 2015).
Take, for example, the scene featuring the well-known “Hello One Dollar” auntie. Tan uses a clever mix of close-up shots and long-range frames taken from a corner of the corridor. This juxtaposition zooms in on the subject while also revealing the bustling walkway she inhabits—a liminal urban space we often pass through without pause. Yet in this corner, we encounter a woman singing her self-composed jingles, selling tissue paper, claiming space in a city that rarely slows down to notice her (Tan, 2005).
While montage is a familiar tool in filmmaking, Tan uses it in Singapore Gaga to do something different. By stringing together fragmented narratives and deliberately inserting pauses and silences between them, she invites us to dwell in the in-between. These gaps become just as important as the scenes themselves. They call attention to the variegated nature of Singapore’s urban fabric—the shifting, layered, and lived-in reality that often gets flattened by top-down planning (Chee, 2015).
Through this montage of micro-moments, Tan opens up a quiet resistance. She exposes forgotten people and spaces, giving them presence in the otherwise dominant landscape of state-sanctioned urban development. In doing so, she challenges what Chee (2015) refers to as the “static conception of urban space embedded in state planning agencies’ psyche.”
Singapore Gaga doesn't just document the city—it reimagines how we can see it. And maybe, through this fragmented, patchwork storytelling, it also suggests that our cities are most alive in the margins, the silences, the overlooked.
Thoughts about the 'Other' in Singapore
NEXT!
Dressed in a singlet and shorts, an elderly man clogs through the bustling crowd at Raffles Place MRT station. He juggles, plays the harmonica, and dances to a beat only he can hear. This curious, almost surreal image opens Singapore Gaga (Tan, 2005). Just a few minutes later, we are transported to a very different scene: internationally acclaimed musician Margaret Leng Tan performs John Cage’s 4’33’’ on a toy piano—in absolute silence—at a void deck.
These two moments, so different yet so intentional, set the tone for the documentary. They anchor it as a portrait of Singapore’s often overlooked sonic landscape—a montage of the unsanctioned, the ordinary, and the wonderfully odd. But when placed side by side, they also raise an important question about cultural value: Why is a Western-educated musician’s silent performance celebrated as avant-garde, while a local uncle’s harmonica act is dismissed as noise?
Over the past two decades, Singapore has made impressive strides in developing its arts and music scene. The Renaissance City Plan, launched in 2000, sought to transform Singapore from what was once described as “a barren wasteland” into a vibrant cultural hub (Arts and Heritage Development Division, 2008). The result? Grand institutions like Esplanade – Theatres on the Bay and the National Gallery Singapore—formal urban spaces that anchor the city’s cultural ambitions. Major events like the Singapore Biennale were created to foster international artistic exchanges and raise Singapore’s profile as a creative capital.
But behind the polished stages and curated galleries lies another truth: Singapore’s cultural scene is heavily planned, tightly regulated, and often viewed through the lens of economic growth and national branding. In this top-down model, art and music become not just expressions of identity, but also tools of nation-building—and commodities for global consumption.
This leaves little room for informal, grassroots expressions of creativity. Spontaneous, people-led acts of art and performance often fall through the cracks—or worse, are criminalized. In 2012, local artist Samantha Lo, dubbed the “Sticker Lady,” made headlines for placing monochrome stickers with cheeky slogans like “Press Once Can Already Lah” and “My Grandfather Road” on traffic buttons and signs (MacKinnon, 2012). Instead of being celebrated as public art, her work was labeled as vandalism.
The intolerance isn’t just institutional—it’s social. In Singapore Gaga, the harmonica uncle’s performance is largely ignored by the sea of white-collar workers rushing past him. Some glance disapprovingly; most don’t even look. While he calls himself a “national treasure,” others see a public nuisance. His art—raw, personal, unpolished—is neither recognized nor respected in the same way as state-approved performances at the Esplanade.
And yet, these quiet acts of self-expression persist.
Perhaps what’s most remarkable is not that these expressions exist, but that they continue to appear despite the odds. They bloom in the gaps of the city’s planning logic. They’re not framed on gallery walls, but found in void decks, corridors, stairwells, and sidewalks. Consider the uncle in Woodlands who, for years, has created festive displays at his own cost—stringing up decorations that bring joy to neighbors. Or the man in Yishun who built a whimsical tower of knick-knacks in his void deck, a quirky installation born from personal passion rather than public approval (Zaccheus, 2017). While these efforts may not win government grants, they reveal a deeper kind of cultural heartbeat—one that is spontaneous, emotional, and profoundly human.
Even when these acts are removed or regulated (as the Yishun display eventually was), they leave a mark. They remind us that under Singapore’s sleek surfaces and efficient planning, people are quietly reclaiming space—sometimes just a corner—for their voices, their stories, their art.
In the end, Singapore Gaga doesn’t just spotlight forgotten people or sounds—it dares us to reimagine what constitutes cultural value. And it leaves us with this: In a big city, it’s the small things that often make the loudest noise—if only we slow down enough to listen.
WOODLANDS LIGHT UP
Uncle fork out own money to do CNY Decorations
One scene in Singapore Gaga that lingered with me was the nightly broadcast of news in Chinese dialects—Teochew, Hokkien, Cantonese, and more. These three-minute radio segments, now fading into obscurity, are still faithfully tuned in by a shrinking audience: taxi drivers on their late-night shifts, uncles at the coffeeshop, and grandmothers at home (Tan, 2005).
But even as these voices persist, their very existence feels precarious. The Singaporean state’s long-standing effort to promote Mandarin as the official “mother tongue” of the Chinese community has slowly eroded the space for dialects. In that sense, these broadcasts are more than nostalgic—they’re quietly defiant. They expose a wider tension in how difference is managed in Singapore: a state-led tendency to streamline diversity into neat categories.
This tendency extends far beyond language. Sweeping, bureaucratic classifications shape everything from educational outcomes to social status. A simple ethnic label on an ID card—Chinese, Malay, Indian, or “Other”—carries implications. I still remember a friend from primary school, a Punjabi boy who migrated from the Philippines. Despite Tagalog being his actual mother tongue, he was classified as “Indian” and required to take Tamil in school. It wasn’t just a mismatch; it was a barrier. He struggled, failed, and fell through the cracks of a system that preferred neatness over nuance.
These experiences suggest that Singapore’s multiculturalism, while widely promoted, has often been a carefully managed project—one that sometimes prioritizes control over authentic representation. Instead of blurring boundaries, the political system seems to reinforce them, shaping identity through rigid categories rather than celebrating complexity.
And yet, there’s been a quiet shift.
In recent years, the official narrative has softened. Diversity is being embraced more visibly, even if incrementally. Where Singlish was once discouraged, it's now celebrated as part of Singapore’s unique charm. National TV dramas now feature fluid code-switching between languages. Sitcoms in dialects have made it onto screens. Hokkien-language programs, though not on mainstream channels, are available on platforms like Singtel’s MioTV.
These may seem like small concessions, but they matter. They show that state agencies are beginning to acknowledge alternative cultural expressions, and that some forms of "smallness" can, in fact, be planned—or at least permitted. With a little space and silent approval, alternative voices still find ways to grow, echoing through airwaves, void decks, and living rooms.
So perhaps the story isn’t about choosing between big, top-down planning and grassroots spontaneity. Maybe the real question is how we can build a city that holds space for both. A place where the harmonica-playing uncle, the dialect-speaking DJ, and the multilingual schoolkid can all find their rhythm.
Secret Void Deck
Residents taking ownership of public void deck for expressions
Small, little spaces and where to find them
The magical spots of Singapore
So, where do we see these small acts of self-expression happening? Does the urban fabric of Singapore have space for these manifestations? At a glance, they’re rarely found in the city centre but are thriving in the heartlands. They emerge in informal spaces—places often overlooked or forgotten. These acts unfold in unexpected spots: under bridges (like the piano beneath Esplanade Bridge), in underpasses (such as the uncle performing at Raffles MRT station), and especially within HDB estates (as shown above). Slowly, people are reclaiming space for self-expression. These gestures go beyond art or music—some tend a small grass patch for gardening, create corners of respite, or scrawl “Merry Christmas” on lift walls. Often appearing in less regulated, unplanned spaces, these acts humanize the city, fostering a sense of ownership and, over time, a deeper sense of belonging.
Conclusion
The Smallness in Bigness
All in all, contrary to Rem Koolhaas’ Singapore Songlines, smallness has managed to creep into the vast, efficiently planned landscape of Singapore. The city’s urban fabric has shown an ability to tolerate and accommodate individual expressions, allowing space for the self-actualization of diverse identities. Whether through art, music, or cultural practices—in both formal and informal spaces—these small acts of self-expression contribute to the city’s vibrancy. They go beyond planning, often emerging organically through human interactions and relationships. As we try to make sense of the other Singapore, it’s heartening to see these expressions not only in Tan Pin Pin’s Singapore Gaga but also unfolding quietly in the heartlands. So, while Singapore may be a big city, it remains a little red dot full of diverse, individual, and shared expressions.
References
Who I quoted
Arts and Heritage Development Division. (2008). Singapore Renaissance City Plan 3. Singapore: Ministry of Information, Communication and the Arts.
Chee, L. (2015). Chasing Inuka: Rambling around Singapore through Tan Pin Pin's Films. In In Asian CInema and the Use of Space: Interdisciplinary Perspectives (pp. 59 - 76). Singapore: Routledge.
Koolhaas, R. (1997). SIngapore Songlines: Portrait of a Potemkin Metropolis... or Thirty Years of Tabula Rasa. In R. Koolhaas, SMLXL (pp. 1008 - 1089). New York: Monacelli Press.
Lim, Y. H. (2017, January 27). In Pictures: Chinese New Year decorations at HDB estates. Retrieved from The Straits Times: http://www.straitstimes.com/multimedia/photos/in-pictures-chinese-new-year-decorations-at-hdb-estates
MacKinnon, I. (2012, June 11). 'Sticker Lady' street lady arrested. Retrieved from The Telegraph: http://www.telegraph.co.uk/news/worldnews/asia/singapore/9324437/Sticker-Lady-street-artist-arrested.html
Tan, P. P. (Director). (2005). Singapore Gaga [Motion Picture].
Zaccheus, M. (2017, March 2). 'Artistic' tower of items at HDB void deck trashed. Retrieved from The Straits TImes: http://www.straitstimes.com/singapore/artistic-tower-of-items-at-hdb-void-deck-trashed