Hawkers of Interwar Singapore Through Chang Yang's Drawings and Texts | TOYLC26 Highlights
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About the Programme
There have been descriptions of food and hawking in Singapore through the ages, but visual depictions of hawkers are uncommon prior to World War II. Between 1987 and 1988, Mr. Teo Hwee Guat (or Chang Yang, his pseudonym) published a series of 128 drawings in a series known as Vanished Street Hawkers of Singapore in the evening daily Lianhe Wanbao. The drawings, accompanied by short text descriptions, inform us about the types of food peddled on the streets during the interwar period, some of which have disappeared by the mid-1980s.
Importantly, they also delineate the conditions under which hawkers operated: from working through different weather conditions, to the implements required to set up a temporary stall, and to the different forms of mobility travelling on foot or with carts or vehicles. Teo's texts complement the drawings by recounting histories of food sources, changes in sale methods, as well as menus of larger operations. This talk presents Teo's visual work and attempts to recollect those interwar hawker landscapes in Singapore.
About the Speaker
Lai Chee Kien is an architectural and urban historian and a registered architect in Singapore. His researches on the histories of art, architecture, settlements, and landscapes in Southeast Asia. His publications include Building Memories: People, Architecture, Independence (2016, awarded Book of the Year in 2017), The Singapore Chronicles: Architecture (2019), Early Hawkers of Singapore: 1920s and 1930s (2020), and Ambrosia for the People: Hawker Centre Food (2021).
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Location
Central Library at the National Library Building - Programme Room 2 (Basement 1)
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