After more than a month of back-and-forth emails, I’m finally starting my residency with the Peranakan Association of Singapore (TPAS) as a creative person. I was in touch with Colin Chee, the President of TPAS and Linda Chee, his wife, who is the head editor of the TPAS magazine, they have been nothing but nice and welcoming to me. I immediately learned a lot about the association and it actually has a long-standing history in Singapore. Like many other communities, the Peranakans formed their own associations to advance the welfare of their community. In 1900, several key leaders of the Straits-born Chinese community, namely Tan Jiak Kim, Seah Liang Seah, Lim Boon Keng, and Song Ong Siang, came together to form the Straits Chinese British Association (SCBA). The SCBA is today known as the Peranakan Association.
The association today has 2,101 members and is fully run by volunteers. It has its own magazine under the same name and is published twice a year. They even have a 22 person choir called the Peranakan Voice. Their objective is to be the beacon of Peranakan culture in Singapore, keeping the culture alive, and celebrating the diversity and culture through diverse partnership and programs.
These are the objectives that I want to achieve from my residency with TPAS:
- To participate in keeping the Peranakan culture alive as a contributing member to the Peranakan Association Singapore (TPAS)
- To explore what I, as a designer, can do to help and sustain the Peranakan culture in Singapore.
- To create a design that is able to help uncover the potential and the significance of Peranakan legacies, by making it relatable in today’s digital world.
- To collaborate with others and widen our interactions for broader benefit.
It is very impressive and I feel very honored to be able to work with them now. I will be in charge of helping out with the magazine, designing the layout and making illustrations to accompany articles, making it more appealing, and also helping out with the two big events they have this year in terms of design and marketing. During the first week, I mostly spent my time talking to Uncle Colin and Aunty Linda (the name they insist for me to call them), getting to know them and the associations, I also spent a lot of time looking into their archives. I learned that they have put out a lot of interesting articles about the culture, and such a shame that the magazine is not more well-known publicly.
TPAS is holding two big events this year, the Annual Peranakan Dinner and the Annual Baba Nyonya International Convention, as they were not able to do any last year due to the pandemic. Later on, I attended a marketing strategy meeting and learned that their objectives are pretty much aligned with my project. Generally, they want to reach a younger audience, but they also have to reach the older audience which makes up more than 50% of their membership base, and this audience is also digitally challenged, hence, the magazine they publish is still very relevant to reach these older audiences.
Because of the Covid-19 restrictions, for the first time ever they had to adapt to doing events digitally. For the two events coming up they are actually doing a hybrid event, half-digital half-in-person. It's great to see that the association is trying to adapt. I created concepts and designs for the two events. Below is the main poster for the Baba Nyonya Convention that I did.
They also mentioned that they are not trying to preserve the old traditional culture that our grandparents live under because we are no longer in the same environment, there have been rapid economic changes that change how we practice or not practice our culture. So they are trying their best to present what is relevant to the culture.
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