Arts Education in Singapore Moves to Center Stage

“There’s the conception that art isn’t profitable, and this being Singapore, I thought I should be a good son and get a job to support the family,” said Mr. Lee, 32.

Now, however, his sentiments have changed, and he has gone back to school to study art.

Mr. Lee does so as the art market is beginning to boom in a city-state traditionally known as a buttoned-up financial center, not a hub for creativity.

Governments across Asia are pouring resources into cultural centers, museums, art schools and festivals. Singapore is no exception.

The Art Stage Singapore fair, started in 2011, now draws about 120 galleries; the government has spent about 10 million Singapore dollars, or about $8 million, on an art cluster; and the National Art Gallery is scheduled to open in 2015 with one of the world’s largest collections of Southeast Asian art.

Interest in arts education in Singapore has also grown, from both foreign and domestic institutions.

Last September, the Glasgow School of Art opened its first overseas campus, in partnership with the Singapore Institute of Technology.

Not all international projects have gone smoothly, however. The Glasgow school opening came a few months before the Tisch School of the Arts, part of New York University, announced last November that it would shut its Singapore campus for financial reasons, after operating since 2007.

Still, local schools have been pushing ahead in recent years. The School of Art, Design and Media at Nanyang Technological University opened in 2005. It joined more established institutions like the LaSalle College of the Arts, which opened in 1984, and the
Nanyang Academy of Fine Arts
, founded in 1938, where Mr. Lee is now a third-year student in its diploma of fine art program.

NAFA has long had difficulty in drawing students to its fine art courses. The school accepts more than 700 students a year to study in areas like music and fashion design, but only 60 of them are in the fine art diploma program.

“Realistically, a diploma in fine art is not something that is easily monetized upon graduation,” said Samuel Lee, the school’s academic dean. But he noted that “times have changed and it’s quite heartening to see that we have now support from parents and students.”

Cultural education is also starting earlier. The state-funded School Of The Arts opened in 2008 as one of the few arts high schools in Asia. It started with 80 students a year and now admits 200.

“If you go to online forums, you’ll see parents asking if they need to send their kids to arts enrichment lessons to get in,” said Lim Geok Cheng, the principal.

Students at the School of the Arts are spared the local examination system and take the International Baccalaureate instead. “We don’t have to be so exam-obsessed, so it’s a more fertile environment for the arts,” Ms. Lim said.

There is also a greater concentration of specialized faculty.

“The idea of the practitioner is central to our philosophy,” said Kelly Tang, the dean for arts and a recipient of the Cultural Medallion, Singapore’s highest arts prize. “We have people who are very prominent artists teaching, so students interact with living artists all the time and see the process of creating art.”

Schools are also putting a greater effort into producing graduates with marketable skills. At Nanyang Academy, an illustrator might also learn digital animation, while students are encouraged to take on internships that provide work experience. The school also teaches accounting, event management and how to write business proposals.

“When I came to NAFA, I thought teaching was the only path afterwards,” said Crystal Fong, a 21-year-old student. “But after two years, I realized you could do a lot of other things.”

To promote its students, Nanyang Academy works with a company that connects alumni with corporations that want to commission artwork. The school also sells students’ sculptures and paintings in the campus store.

Nanyang Academy and LaSalle have produced artists like Ming Wong and Vincent Leow who have shown work in major overseas shows like the Venice Biennale. But for now, few local art school graduates have reached the leadership echelons of Singapore’s cultural institutions.

Art Stage Singapore is headed by Lorenzo Rudolf, the Swiss native who founded it. Eugene Tan, who started work this month as the new director of the planned National Art Gallery, is Singaporean, but was educated in Britain.

Singaporeans are also beginning to realize that art courses can benefit even those students who might not end up in a creative field.

“Singapore’s education system is very exam-based,” said Henry Lee, the chemical engineer-turned-art student. “But when we do art history and theory at NAFA, we are challenged to understand what is going on rather just on just memorizing events. They want us to process the facts and make it our own.”

“Our art teachers sit alongside and have regular discussions about the curriculum with teachers from other disciplines,” said Mr. Tang, the School of the Arts dean. “So when students look at the concept of space in art, there’s a link to the concept of density or height in physics. Through things like proportion ratios and how that works in music and dance, students are able to use art as a portal to learn.”

Mr. Tang said that the School of the Arts would be content so long as its students graduated with a well-rounded education.

“We’re more than just about filling symphony seats or galleries,” he said. “It’s about sending people that have flair and a sense of imagination to other aspects of society. To be relevant, an art school has to go beyond the concert hall and permeate a much larger sphere.”

Arts Education in Singapore Moves to Center Stage