Circumventing the Archive: The Art of Charlie Chan Hock Chye

and To Singapore, with Love

Joanne Leow

Verge: Studies in Global Asias, Volume 6, Issue 1, Spring 2020, pp. 58-67
(Article)

Published by University of Minnesota Press

DOI: https://doi.org/10.5749/vergstudglobasia.6.1.0058

For additional information about this article

https://muse.jhu.edu/article/807289/summary

For content related to this article

https://muse.jhu.edu/related_content?type=article&id=807289
Stoler, Ann Laura. 2002. “Colonial Archives and the Art of Governance.”
Archival Science 2: 87–­109.
Troeung, Y-­Dang. 2013. “Witnessing Cambodia’s Disappeared.” University
of Toronto Quarterly 82, no. 2: 150–­67.
Walia, Harsha. 2013. Undoing Border Imperialism. Edinburgh: AK Press.

Circumventing the Archive: The Art of Charlie

Chan Hock Chye and To Singapore, with Love
Joanne Leow

What art can and must be made in a state where access to the archives
is fraught? How does a (post)colonial state like Singapore address its
seemingly seamless transition to an independent yet deeply authoritar-
ian government? The contemporary acts of artistic circumvention that I
will examine in this brief essay are deeply engaged with the contested
histories of Singapore’s transition to independence and their ongoing
legacies in the postindependence period. Contemporary texts like Sonny
Liew’s graphic novel The Art of Charlie Chan Hock Chye and Tan Pin Pin’s
documentary film To Singapore, with Love are works of art that produce
alternate archives and subjectivities that seek to question the status of
human rights movements in Singapore in the period after the Second
World War.1 Their circuitous and self-­reflexive methods are a reflection,
a media/tion of the closed access to the official archives of this period
and the political status of dissidents in the country.
Growing up in Singapore during the 1980s and 1990s meant read-
ing history textbooks and attending state-­sanctioned National Educa-
tion programs that were invested in producing a dominant narrative of
Singaporean history. This narrative begins with the city-­state’s colonial
founding in 1819 and in the postindependence period, proceeded apace
along the principles of free trade, multiracial and multireligious equal-
ity, and meritocracy under the uninterrupted rule of the People’s Action
Party (PAP). Yet, there were strange lacunae in the high school history
curriculum regarding the time after the Japanese occupation of Singapore
(post-­1945). This tumultuous period—­which includes the Malayan Emer-
gency or the Anti-­British National Liberation War, a colonial war against
communist guerillas (1948–­60); decolonization (1963); a failed merger with
present-­day Malaysia (1963–­65); a declaration of independence through
separation (1965); and the consolidation of the ruling party’s power—­was
glossed over in our history textbooks.

58 Field Trip
 In many ways, this was a strategic amnesia and state-­sanctioned for-
getting that served a young nation-­state eager to bolster dominant narra-
tives of nation building. Only in recent years have more concerted efforts
been made to understand and reflect upon the violence in this period of
decolonization and its intimate connections to political repression in the
1970s and 1980s. The latter decade saw the ruling PAP use colonial-­era
Emergency legislation to suppress its political opponents, often by accus-
ing them of being Communists, and commit its political enemies to mass
detentions without trial. As legal scholar Jothie Rajah has elucidated, the
laws that were used to justify these repressive actions were direct legacies
of colonial laws now used in the service of power consolidation in this
single-­party state (see Rajah 2012).
Unhampered access to the state archives of this period regarding
these events is critical, yet impossible. All historians, scholars, and art-
ists have are the testimony of witnesses and former political detainees
themselves—­if at all available.2 In recent years, activist historians have
filled in some of these gaps by combing the archives in and out of Singa-
pore. The urgency of this project has increased due to the aging and deaths
of many witnesses and dissidents. In tandem with this historiographical
and historical approach has been the production of a range of nonfictional
and fictional texts, such as podcasts, plays, musicals, documentaries,
eyewitness accounts, graphic novels, and literary fiction. Indeed, twenty-­
first-­century Singapore is seeing a renaissance of political and historical
writing about this period. The Singaporean playwright Tan Tarn How
has called this the “scar literature” of Singapore, a term originally used
for dealing with works about China’s Cultural Revolution but which Tan
has deemed relevant to cultural texts that “deal directly or indirectly
with . . . the time up till the late 1980s, during which the government
locked up without trial politicians, social activists, and playwrights, jour-
nalists and other intellectuals” (Tan 2017). As Tan points out, the govern-
ment has admitted that between 1959 and 1990, 2,460 people were de-
tained without trial, albeit not all for political reasons.3 Thus scar literature
retells these histories from nondominant (nonstate) perspectives and is
a form of justice that corrects the profound belatedness and nonrecogni-
tion of detentions that preceded independence and continued long after.
In the context of a hidden and inaccessible archive and a shadow
body of literary and artistic texts, I suggest that the act of circumvention
might provide a new theoretical lens through which to consider how art
functions in the face of repressive historical and political practices of
the state. The Oxford English Dictionary defines circumvention as “the act
of overreaching, outwitting, cheating, ‘getting round,’ ‘taking in’” or the

Field Trip 59
act of “evading or finding a way around, going round, making the circuit
of.” These acts of overreaching, outwitting, and making the circuit, or
finding a way around, provide us with metaphorical and literal ways to
consider some of the most significant and successful texts in this new
body of dissident artistic production in Singapore: the work of Sonny
Liew and Tan Pin Pin.
Liew’s best-­selling graphic novel The Art of Charlie Chan Hock Chye and
Tan’s documentary film To Singapore, with Love rely on tactics of circum-
vention. Going around and “reaching over” the official, state-­mediated
archive in his fictional biography of a political cartoonist, Liew implicates
the artist and writer in the process of historiography and storytelling,
deconstructing the visual impact of the political elite and imagining vari-
ous alternate histories. Tan’s documentary is filmed almost exclusively
outside Singapore and features a series of interviews with exiled political
dissidents. To Singapore, with Love produces heteroglossic counterhistories
as it circles the island’s maritime borders to produce a lived experience of
exile outside Singapore. Indeed, the film seems to suggest that the bodies
of the men and women banned from entering Singapore are themselves
living, forgotten archives of a complex moment in the nation’s history.
Instead of attempting to produce artistic creations and narratives from
hitherto closed or unavailable archives, Liew and Tan rely on the complexi-
ties and nuances of the forms of the graphic novel and the documentary
film to challenge the orderly, teleological production of Singapore as a
successful postcolony, a global city. The state has attempted to suppress
these artistic accounts on the grounds that they undermine national
security and the government’s legitimacy; Liew’s graphic novel had its
funding withdrawn by the Singapore National Arts Council (NAC), and the
Media Development Authority of Singapore banned Tan’s documentary
film. In an ironic testimony to the effectiveness of their circumventions,
these setbacks only led to increased critical attention and the popular
success of these texts (since perhaps audiences and readers themselves
practice the art of circumvention). Liew’s novel has won numerous awards
in and out of Singapore, including the Singapore Literature Prize and four
Eisner Awards. The novel is being translated into multiple languages,
and numerous print runs of its English version have sold out. Tan’s film
galvanized the overseas and diasporic Singaporean community in an un-
precedented show of support, with film screenings organized by ordinary
citizens in Europe, the United States, Canada, and other parts of Asia.
In September 2014, Singaporeans unable to watch the film in Singapore
queued to take buses to neighboring Malaysia for film screenings (see
New Paper 2014).

60 Field Trip
6 To Singapore, with Love
Tan’s film, with its transnational circling of Singapore, tracing the trajec-
tories of exiles in Thailand, the United Kingdom, and Malaysia, mirrors
her subjects’ inability to return. Tan, unable to access historical docu-
ments to do with the exiles’ fraught departures in the official archives,
relies on their emotional testimony as a means of narrative. Her would-­be
Singaporean audience, in an echo of the acts of evasion and circling that
the film and its subjects perform, have no choice but to venture outside
Singapore’s borders to view the documentary. Clearly, on multiple levels,
the significance of these acts of figurative and literal evasion and circling
cannot be disputed in Singapore’s contemporary political moment. The
enthusiastic overseas reception of Tan’s film, in particular, seems fitting
for a work that was filmed entirely outside of Singapore. Perspectives
from a community of political exiles in London, Malaysia, and Thailand
provided a seldom seen view of the island state. My analysis of the film will
focus on three aspects of its circumvention of the inaccessible archives of
Singapore’s anticolonial, pro-­democracy movements of the 1960s, 1970s,
and 1980s. The film’s geographical circling of the island acts as a kind of
metonymic structure for its attempts at retrieving exiled narratives and
records. Furthermore, the film’s attention to the corporeal politics of
sensation in documenting the everyday lives of exiles enables it to bypass
the state’s literal refusal to admit them within its borders. This focus on
the affective and corporeal is also apparent with the film’s recuperation of
fragments of Singaporean political protest music—­a tradition that has no
extant archive in Singapore because of political suppression. Ultimately,
this is an act of archive building that centers the bodies of the exiled.
Tan’s circuitous film structure switches between a series of Singapor-
ean exiles whose time away began in a series of expulsions and escapes
thirty to fifty years ago. Her style is what Bill Nichols (2001, 103) might
classify as “poetic documentary,” which, in nonlinear ways, opens up
“the possibility of alternative forms of knowledge to the straightfor-
ward transfer of information.” The film begins with Ho Juan Thai, who
left Singapore to escape detention without trial in 1977, and eschews a
linear chronology of these exiles, instead moving rapidly back and forth
from Ho to Ang Swee Chai; her deceased husband, Francis Khoo; Bari-
san Socialis members in Thailand; Tan Wah Piow; Said Zahari; and Tan
Jing Quee. The film’s free associative structure reveals the unexplored
connections between the exiles and narrates fragmentary tales of loss,
separation, and longing. The documenter’s desire for the human aspects
of this history are apparent from the film’s meandering structure and its
long sequences of road travel through Malaysia and Thailand. The work’s

Field Trip 61
preoccupation with spatial journeying and movement is in direct contrast
to the fixed position of a physical archive, suggesting that different forms
of Singaporean nationalism have been and are being cultivated outside
the country’s borders, in motion. This motion, however, is ultimately
circular, or more precisely, centripetal. As the film’s title—­To Singapore,
with Love—­suggests a postcard from abroad, so do the exiles’ interviews
continually return to the object of their longing. Ang Swee Chai makes
a devastating observation that she spent thirty-­five years away and was
only allowed back for a single visit to bring her husband’s ashes home. We
hear from the elderly men and women who attempt to keep up with the
political news from the country, hoping one day to return. This centripetal
force brings us, at the end of the film, to the unremarkable environs of
coastal Johore Bahru, the Malaysian city across the straits from Singapore
where Ho “attends” his mother’s birthday via a Skype connection. One
of the film’s final scenes lingers on these views of the country from just
outside its borders, focusing on the distant public housing towers and
construction sites.
Intimate domestic and interior scenes persistently interrupt these
sequences of motion or of the contemplation of landscapes. These are
seemingly banal sequences: a close-­up of a wok of char kway teow or fried
rice noodles (a Singaporean dish that evokes the gustatory and corporeal
pleasures of a home unavailable to the exiles), small children wandering
around a cramped London house, the peeling of a mangosteen, a shed
full of dusty memorabilia, or the everyday work of a noodle factory. To
understand these seemingly quotidian scenes, it is useful to turn to Davide
Panagia’s (2009) theory of the politics of sensation.4 Panagia argues that
“moments of sensation punctuate our everyday existence, and in doing
so, they puncture our received wisdoms and common modes of sensing”
(2). In effect, by focusing on the commonplace textures of exiled life, Tan’s
film enables its audience to perceive exile in a way that transcends the
limitations of written texts or histories. Sensation, what Panagia defines
as entering “a world of contours, resonances, vibrations, attunements,
syntonizations, hapticities, and impulses” (9), interrupts our conventional
ways of understanding the world and, in doing so, becomes a political
act. Tan’s film, through its exploration of the combinations of the sen-
sory realities of being outside of Singapore, enables us to reconfigure our
understanding of the costs of exile. The aging bodies of the exiles and
dissidents that she films, as she often lingers on shots of them stooped
and shuffling away, suggests that these bodies and their stories are living
archives that have been discarded by the state. The dissident filmmakers,
then, as Tan points out in a conversation with another colleague, Martyn

62 Field Trip
See, become “archivists in the best sense of the word” (Loh 2010, 282),
eschewing neutrality to balance the views of state-­commissioned politi-
cal documentaries.
Adding to this combination of traveling sequences, interior scenes, and
a series of affecting interviews, the film’s only use of nondiegetic music
provides a hitherto unavailable aural archive of protest movements in
Singapore. Tan uses two rare tracks of protest music by the late Francis
Khoo, a lawyer who died in political exile. The first, “15th of February,” is
an account of his escape from arrest in Singapore, and the second, “Anak
Pulau Singapura,” or “Child of Singapore Island,” is an English and Ma-
lay song of exile. These songs must be understood in the context of the
Singapore state’s long history of propagandistic songs. Commissioned
since the 1980s, the songs often resembled advertising jingles at first
(the first few songs were written by a Canadian jazz pianist who worked
for the firm McCann-­Erickson), but their goal is to instill patriotism and
to produce an affective response in its citizenry. These state songs, sung
in the weeks leading up to the country’s national day celebrations, are
designed to “inculcate a civil religion that directs favour and fervour to-
wards the nation” (Kong 1995, 447). They stress such themes as “love,
belonging, pride, attaining excellence, unity, commitment to Singapore,
productivity, hard work, and team work” (Ortmann 2009, 33). That this
was the creation of a timely, ideological archive of music is in no doubt,
especially given that it coincides with a period of heightened repression,
detentions without trial, and a consolidation of power. Studying cultural
texts like the official Sing Singapore songbook, Lily Kong (1995, 451) notes
how “the ultimate concern is to develop in Singaporeans a love for their
country, a sense of patriotism and a willingness to support the ruling elite
who have led the country through the short years since independence.”
Khoo’s songs provide a wholly distinctive and direct perspective on
“loving” Singapore through music. The poignant last lines of “The 15th
of February” are addressed to the country’s people. Khoo sings, “O my
people, / my homeland, / the ones that I love, / I will never / see you
again, / till the storm clouds gather / at break of the dawn / and bunga
raya / shall bloom / in the rain.” In Tan’s film, this part of the song plays
over a shot of a motorcycle headlight and an ensuing lens flare in the dim
tropical twilight of a Malaysian country road, an artistic gesture recalling
Khoo’s own hasty departure from Singapore. More hauntingly, the film’s
credits end with Khoo singing “so as a child of my island / I know the ink
is not dry / our story’s still yet unwritten / today I’ll join my people’s cry.”
These are lyrics that suggest that the power of circumventing the official
archive may lie in writing one’s own history.5

Field Trip 63
6 The Art of Charlie Chan Hock Chye
Like protest music, political comics and caricatures were deemed too con-
troversial and, crucially, accessible for the authoritarian Singapore govern-
ment. The development of this artistic form was stymied by both overt
and self-­censorship. Lim Cheng Tju (1997, 144) calls political cartooning
in Singapore a “consensus-­shaping tradition,” unlike its more widespread
use for satire and political critique. This historical and contemporary
context is what makes Sonny Liew’s award-­winning 2015 graphic novel
The Art of Charlie Chan Hock Chye such an important text. The graphic
novel is presented as a personal archive of published and unpublished
comics, portraits, newspaper clippings, satirical poster art, artifacts, and
photographs telling the fictional story of “Singapore’s greatest comics
artist,” Charlie Chan Hock Chye. The text also features an additional layer
of commentary by the comic version of the author Sonny Liew, who is
“presenting” this archive that begins in 1948 and ends in 2014.
Deeply concerned with the intertextual possibilities between history
and fiction, The Art of Charlie Chan Hock Chye is extensively supplemented
with historical material. Yet, instead of relying on these sources, Liew’s
novel reworks the very genre of these histories. The text interprets and
explores the contested political history of postcolonial Singapore through
diverse forms, such as war comics, parodies, children’s comics with an-
thropomorphized animals, superhero comics, science fiction epics, and
Disneyesque capers. Through each form, familiar political figures, such
as Lee Kuan Yew and Lim Chin Siong, shape-­shift from science fiction
heroes and villains to, among other iterations, cunning mousedeer, su-
perheroes, and unreasonable bosses of printing presses. At one turning
point in Charlie’s unconventional career, as he is creating science fiction
epics in the midst of tumultuous 1950s Singapore, Charlie Chan remarks
that those days were so “electrifying,” “it seemed to us that during such
times, no fiction could be stranger, or more exciting, than the truth”
(Liew 2015, 117, 118).
This oscillation between truth and fiction holds Chan’s archive of “his-
torical” comic strips in a mesmerizing equivalence with the records of
actual historical events. For instance, the part of the text that provides
excerpts of Charlie Chan’s comic “Invasion” superimposes boxes with
Charlie’s voice over sepia-­tinted panels of the imagined comic. Charlie,
drawn wearing a costume from the comic, points out that the stories
are based on the actual political landscape of the time and a critique of
the British and their allies. In this complex and shifting way, the text
provides multiple layers and perspectives in viewing this historical mo-
ment. It circles an inaccessible archive and chooses to bypass it altogether.

64 Field Trip
Instead of providing a static document or a single interpretation of this
fraught political moment prior to Singapore’s independence, the text of-
fers us multiple readings of each historical incident. So colonialism and
authoritarian regimes are depicted as dystopian cities, alien invasions,
pulpy superhero narratives, and alternative futures where there are still
possibilities of redress for political detainees. Detentions without trial
are depicted as office politics that culminate in petty punishments in the
janitor’s closet—­referencing the solitary confinement of the detainees.
The use of pointed, satirical humor is also effective: with the 1987 Marxist
Conspiracy that led to the detentions of social workers transformed into
the Richard Marx Conspiracy. In other cases, the text makes these com-
parisons explicit in a way that mimics a textbook or museum exhibition,
placing comic strips on a page as if they were taped into a scrapbook and
following each strip with historical commentary explicating its relevance
and meaning.
The Art of Charlie Chan Hock Chye is a historiographic metafiction, but
one that Philip Holden (2016, 522) has argued where the artist himself
“does not stand outside history, but is woven into its fabric.” Holden posits
that the text understands that alternative histories “are provisional” and
that the “awareness of the pleasures of historical telling and retelling, of
identification with and of separation from larger found narratives,” offers
“genuine possibilities of agency for social change” (522). The text, among
the other genres it performs, is also a Kunstlerroman—­one that sees its
artist protagonist move through the history of comics from the 1950s to
the present day—­asserting that “drawing is in fact a kind of studying,
to draw is to see and discover” (Liew 2015, 19). The final, metafictional
images embed that act of art making within history making—­depicting
the tools of the cartoonist and the onomatopoeia of the act of knocking
off the excess ink from a brush. This gesture echoes Francis Khoo’s songs
of resistance, pointing out that when it comes to Singapore’s histories
and futures, the ink is not yet dry—­that the responsibility of artists in
authoritarian regimes is not only to circumvent the archive but to pro-
duce alternative ones.

Joanne Leow is assistant professor in the Department of English at the

University of Saskatchewan. She is currently completing a book manu-
script on authoritarianism, space, and contemporary Singapore cultural
production.

Field Trip 65
6 Notes
1. The film can be viewed at https://vimeo.com/ondemand/tosinga
porewithlove/132325466.
2. This is a significant development for a country that has no Freedom
of Information Act or an equivalent of a declassification rule. Garth Cur-
less (2014) notes that “material relating to foreign affairs, defence, and
internal security is generally unavailable, while other records require
permission from the relevant ministry and may be subject to strict con-
ditions of use, such as no transcription or citation.” Scholars have found
this frustrating when authorities deny even requests for the most banal
of subjects, such as trade, work, and housing, and have turned to oral
histories, records outside Singapore in American, Chinese, Japanese,
and British colonial archives. These attempts to use foreign archives or
rely on oral histories have their limitations: the historian Loh Kah Seng
(2010, 17–­18) points out that “as the ‘moving wall’ of historical research
progresses into Singapore’s more recent postcolonial period,” foreign
diplomats and analysts had less access to the inner workings of the Sin-
gapore government. Oral histories, on the other hand, are subject to
the vagaries of official historiographic methods, the continued fear of
consequences and reprisals by informants, and the internalization of the
state’s perspectives (Loh 2010, 20–­21).
3. It is worth noting that Chia Thye Poh, who was detained the longest,
was detained for thirty-­two years (nine of which were under house arrest).
4. For this connection, I am indebted to Victor Li, who first mentioned
Panagia’s work in relation to Tan’s film at a post–­film screening panel at
the University of Toronto.
5. When I screened the film to a full house in Toronto, Tan’s only ex-
plicit instruction was not to switch on the houselights until the end of
the credits to enable the audience to finish listening to this song.

6 Works Cited
Curless, Garth. 2014. “Archival Research in Singapore.” Imperial and
Global History Network, June 23. http://imperialandglobal.exeter
.ac.uk/2014/06/archival-research-in-singapore/.
Holden, Philip. 2016. “‘Is It Manipulative? Sure. But That’s How You Tell
Stories’: The Graphic Novel, Metahistory and the Artist in The Art
of Charlie Chan Hock Chye.” Journal of Postcolonial Writing 52, no. 4:
510–­23.
Kong, Lily. 1995. “Music and Cultural Politics: Ideology and Resistance in
Singapore.” Transactions of the Institute of British Geographers 20, no. 4:
447–­59. http://www.jstor.org/stable/622975.

66 Field Trip
Liew, Sonny. 2015. The Art of Charlie Chan Hock Chye. Singapore: Epigram
Books.
Lim Cheng Tju. 1997. “Singapore Political Cartooning.” Southeast Asian
Journal of Social Science 25, no. 1: 125–­50.
Loh, Kah Seng. 2010. “Encounters at the Gates.” In The Makers and Keep-
ers of Singapore History, edited by Loh Kah Seng and Liew Kai Khiun,
3–­27. Singapore: Ethosbooks and Singapore Heritage Society.
New Paper. 2014. “To Johor Bahru with Love: 350 S’poreans Watch MDA-­
Banned Film across Causeway.” September 21. http://www.tnp.sg
/news/johor-bahru-love-350-sporeans-watch-mda-banned-film-across
-causeway.
Nichols, Bill. 2001. Introduction to Documentary. Bloomington: Indiana
University Press.
Ortmann, Stephan. 2009. “Singapore: The Politics of Inventing National
Identity.” Journal of Current Southeast Asian Affairs 28: 23–­46.
Panagia, Davide. 2009. The Political Life of Sensation. Durham, N.C.: Duke
University Press.
Rajah, Jothie. 2012. Authoritarian Rule of Law: Legislation, Discourse, and
Legitimacy in Singapore. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.
Tan, Tarn How. 2017. “Death of a Perm Sec—­Worth a Read: 1987’s Scar
Literature and Scar Art.” Tan Tarn How Too (blog). http://tantarnhow
.wordpress.com/.

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