Pagoda Columbarium
"The Pagoda Columbarium is an embodiment of 'ersatz culture.'" "
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In addition, the introduction of the bright red fire hose reels to provide fire safety is also incongruous in a Chinese landscape of death when we note that red is considered an auspicious colour to the Chinese, and the presence of this colour in any death-related event or institution would be taboo, even offensive, to most traditional Chinese. All in all, the twisting of the pagoda's original Buddhist purpose, the presence of communal containers for burning sacrifices to the dead, the exhumation of graves for cremation and then storage in the columbarium, and the fact that bright red fire hose reels are present in a Chinese landscape of death, all reveal the fact that the Pagoda Columbarium is an embodiment of "ersatz culture" that "borrows themes" from the Chinese tradition before "discarding" the soul of it, thus making it a "kitsch" structure.
Keeping this in mind, the Pagoda Columbarium can also be seen to be representative of Singapore's attempts to "straddle East and West" (Ang 179) in its search for a national identity. The government has always felt that Singapore's lack of a pre-colonial past because it was a "Western colonial construct" (Ang 183), coupled with its relentless pursuit of economic progress and modernization, made it vulnerable to "decadent, selfish" (Ang 179) and "inauthentic" (Ang 187) Western influences, which were deemed to be closely linked to "progress" and "modernization." To counter this, the government has always chosen to build upon the idea of Singapore's "Asian-ness" by methods such as the policy of bilingualism (Ang 187). In fact, former Prime Minister Lee Kuan Yew promoted traditional "Confucianist values" as the "Asian recipe against Western decline" (Ang 180). The Pagoda Columbarium's attempts to incorporate Chinese and vernacular elements into the modernist (and "Western") columbarium would indeed reflect this effort to preserve Singapore's Asian-ness in the face of "Western influences." However, the end product, as we have seen, is kitschiness and artificiality in the structure. The Asian-ness promoted in Singapore is "both flexible and particularist"; it is "flexible in that it can accommodate the consequences of modernization and modernity" (Ang 190). However, the Pagoda Columbarium would suggest that this "flexibility" erodes the authenticity of "Asian-ness" and leads to its emptiness.
Notes
1 Architectural Postmodernism, as a movement, integrates vernacular and allusive elements into the functionality of modernist structures in a bid to accept and respond to the locality of the structures involved. Back
2 "Kitsch" is often used to describe pretentious imitations of genuine artistic creations designed to appeal to popular and undiscriminating tastes. Greenberg further describes it as "ersatz culture" designed for those who are "insensible to the values of genuine culture" (543). Back
Works Cited
Ang, Ien and Stratton, Jon. "Straddling East and West: Singapore's Paradoxical Search for a National Identity." Asian & Pacific Inscriptions. Melbourne: Meridian Books, 1995. 179-192.
"Chinese Pagoda." Wikipedia, the Free Online Encyclopedia. Cited 27 Oct 2005.
Goh, Robbie B.H. "Things to a Void: Utopian Discourse, Communality and Constructed Interstices in Singapore Public Housing." Theorizing the Southeast Asian City as Text. Singapore: World Scientific Publishing, 2003. 51-75.
Greenberg, Clement. "Avant-Garde and Kitsch." Art in Theory 1900-2000: An Anthology of Changing Ideas. Malden: Blackwell Publishing, 1992. 539-549.
Kong, Lily, and Brenda S.A. Yeoh. The Politics of Landscapes in Singapore: Constructions of "Nation." Syracuse, NY: Syracuse University Press, 2003.
Lee Siong Aun, Eugene. "The Columbarium Landscape: Public Housing for the Dead in Singapore." Diss. National University of Singapore, 2004.
"Pagoda." Wikipedia, the Free Online Encyclopedia. Cited 27 Oct 2005.
About the Writer: Kwok Dao Yang Jonathan, a student in the Faculty of Arts and Social Sciences, is majoring in Economics. He wrote this paper for Andrew Leng's module Questioning Evolution and Progress.
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