A Singaporean Food Mural

by Amanda Siow

Photographed below is an art mural painted on a wall by the side of a building in the Tiong Bahru neighborhood of Singapore. The mural itself includes the text “Tiong Bahru”, which suggests that this mural is intended to be a recreation of a scene or place that exists or existed in this same neighborhood.

An art mural on a wall in the Tiong Bahru neighborhood. Mural and photography by Yip Yee Cheong, 2016.

The artwork is flat while its texture is grainy, with fine details of shading and highlights characteristic of work by a paint and paintbrush. The mural appears to be life-sized, given that it spans across almost the entire height of the wall. Furthermore, three-dimensional objects are occasionally placed in front of the mural to allow viewers to interact with it more directly. The picture below shows a man sitting on a stool in front of a depiction of two men eating around a table. Based on the picture, the man photographed matches the size of the two illustrated men, while the real stool matches the size of the painted tables and chairs as well. This interactive aspect further suggests that the mural may be intended to simulate a real scene or place.

Yip Yee Cheong sitting on a stool before the art mural. Photograph by Yip Yee Cheong, 2016.

The illustration depicts some form of street-side food establishment or activity. The mural itself is painted on a wall beside a road, and extends the look of the same rough, grayish floor into the wall through the painting. On the right half of the mural, a blue wooden counter table sits under an extended canvas functioning as a roof, appearing to be a rudimentary form of food stall. This is further supported by the various food items and equipment laid out on and around the table, including a plate of dumplings, a two-tiered transparent display case with various food items within it, stacks of bowls, a built-in countertop pot and stove holding an orange liquid and ladle, another larger pot further behind containing the same orange liquid boiling over some form of outdoor stove, bottles and cups, two cooked chickens and two heads of Chinese cabbage hung up on hooks from the faux ceiling, and various buckets, tins, and cartons of vegetables on the floor. To the right of the stall, a collapsible table is laid out alongside two stools, on which two human figures are sitting and eating. The food items on the table seem to correspond with the food on the counter of the stall — there are two bowls with the same orange liquid and some dumpling-like items laid out on a brown sheet. Cutlery is present as well, with a tin full of chopsticks and miscellaneous sauce bottles. Altogether, the mural illustrates a streetside food stall that serves as a kitchen and dining area in one.

This form of streetside food stall is reminiscent of, and almost an exact recreation of, how the Tiong Bahru Market looked like in 1980s Singapore. As written on the mural, this food establishment is called “Pasar Tiong Bahru”; “pasar” is the Malay word for market. This suggests that the mural was intended to recreate or preserve a slice of history, specifically with regards to Singapore’s food culture.

The specific foods in the painting still exist in modern day, however, and are easily identifiable with the support of the text in the mural. Hanging from the faux ceiling of the stall is a board with Chinese characters and the romanized English translations of them. In the middle, the words “Seng Kee” may be understood as the name of the stall, as it is a common Chinese name. Many Singaporean food stalls in the past and in modern-day are named after the last or full names of their original owners. On both sides of “Seng Kee” are the words “laksa” and “curry mee”, which are two common Singaporean dishes. Both dishes are noodle soup dishes that use a curry broth, which is presumably the orange liquid in the pots and bowls. They also include slices of steamed chicken, the whole of which is hung on the faux ceiling. The Chinese influences in the food stall illustrations are very strong; not only are foods labeled primarily in Chinese — though the primary food stall has English translations, note that there is a smaller stall further back with its own sign hanging from the ceiling that only has Chinese characters —, the people serving and consuming the food from the stall are Chinese, identifiable by their yellowish skin tone (and the local context of the main racial groups in Singapore). Furthermore, the food being served has a heavy and distinct Chinese influence; the preparation of the steamed chicken, for example, was a technique introduced by immigrants from Hainan, a province in China.

In contrast, the left side of the mural depicts other food activities and ethnicities. For one, two of the illustrated figures have much darker brown skin tones and are wearing distinctly different clothing from the figures at the food stall. One of them is wearing a clothing set cut from the same flowy, patterned, deep red fabric, which includes a short-sleeved top, a floor-length skirt, and a piece of scarf-like fabric draped over one shoulder. This is identifiable as a sari, a traditional Indian women’s clothing, implying that the figure is an Indian female. Similarly, the other figure is wearing a long textured blue skirt reaching all the way down to the floor, which resembles a lungi, a traditional Indian men’s skirt tied around the waist. The Indian ethnic group is also represented on this side of the mural by the Tamil words (a common spoken language in India) on the rattan shutters above the Indian male. The Indian male, standing right behind a parked bicycle with baskets full of food items in it, appears to be a street peddler selling food. While it is unclear exactly what he is selling, he appears to be wrapping food items in banana leaves, which is a characteristic Indian food tradition. The two women flanking him are carrying woven baskets, presumably used to carry any food items they buy; the female figure on the left most side has some leafy vegetables sticking out of her basket. Both the use of bicycles to peddle food on the streets as well as the woven baskets as shopping bags are characteristic of 1980s Singapore as well.

In summary, the mural illustrates a Singaporean streetside food market from the 1980s and in doing so, represents several ethnicities and their food cultures. The location of the mural in an outdoor alleyway in the same neighborhood may be a deliberate act to recreate a realistic sense of what Singapore’s food establishments looked like in the past. The mural is also a direct reflection of Singapore’s multi-ethnic society; Singapore’s own population is composed of four main racial groups: Chinese, Malay, Indian, and others, and all these races are reflected in the languages used in the text of the mural, the races of the human figures drawn, and the cultures involved in the food served and consumed.

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This mural condenses a lot of key ideas together: several different races interact communally and harmoniously with each other around food-related activities specifically. The implication here is perhaps that food is a rallying point for Singapore’s multicultural society, and is the key medium through which racial harmony and national unity is fostered. There is also a very strong nostalgic element present in this mural, for it illustrates how the food market looked like in the past and seems to intentionally simulate the experience of actually being there. The catch here is that these streetside food establishments are still very much present in modern-day Singapore. The Tiong Bahru market still exists, albeit in a renovated, expanded, and much more organized form. One would not see street peddlers selling food on bicycles, or rudimentary food stalls made out of canvas roofs anymore. However, the current Tiong Bahru market is still an open-air two-storeyed building (i.e. not an airconditioned mall), with many food stalls operating within it and a common eating area with free communal seating. The key elements of Singapore’s streetside food culture still remain. This raises some interesting questions: what drives this sense of nostalgia or desire to recreate and preserve the past? What is the artist even harkening back to in the first place? Does this specific vision of Singapore’s food heritage represent a unique sense of belonging that doesn’t exist anymore for the artist and its viewers? And if so, why is that sense of belonging absent from the present day when Singapore’s food culture has not changed very significantly? Furthermore, the desire to preserve this food heritage implies that Singapore’s cuisine is of extreme cultural, or at the very least, emotional, significance. Why is that so? How has Singapore’s food become a symbol of the nation’s character? What role does food actually play in actively promoting unity and racial harmony in the nation? And how, or why, have Singaporeans formed such strong personal attachments to their food, such that they actively seek it out or recreate iterations of it in other non-tangible (and non-edible) forms like art murals?