A ROOM OF HIS OWN

Ten years after his brush with the law, Sam Lo has come into his own as a visual artist with an evolving practice built around social commentary and observations on the idiosyncrasies of Singaporean culture and all this while finding his own identity

- Hashirin Nurin Hashimi

From being the art director of this year’s Chingay, the country’s largest multicultural street performance and float parade, and meeting outgoing Singapore president Halimah Yacob at the Istana to completing a new commissioned artwork currently showcased at the refreshed Peranakan Museum, you could say that Sam Lo has had a pretty swell 2023 so far.

But what makes this year especially poignant for Lo is that it is 10 years since he was formally charged with mischief after pasting stickers on public property and spray‑painting public roads. Colloquial, tongue‑in‑cheek expressions such as “Press Until Shiok”, “Press Some More” and “No Need to Press So Many Times”, in reference to the national habit of pressing traffic light buttons repeatedly in a misguided belief that doing so makes the lights change faster, appeared at various pedestrian crossings around the city in late 2011. Lo also spray‑stencilled the words “My Grandfather Road”—a Singlish phrase used to tell people off when they are blocking other people’s way— along roads in the central business district.

For him, that was “a way of taking back [public] spaces to show how there’s some soul or character here [in Singapore]. I wanted to draw people to something that we can all relate to—and that’s our culture. One of the things that’s unique about [Singapore] is Singlish, as well as our quirks and mannerisms,” says Lo when we catch up with him in his home. He adds: “With these inside jokes, the whole point was to make people smile, or feel a bit happier, when they saw them.”