Liew KAI Khiun

• PhD University College London
• Professor (Assistant) at Hong Kong Metropolitan University

This chapter explores the role of social media in globally projecting the presence of a once geo-culturally peripheral genre of contemporary Korean popular music (K-pop). Boosting digital streaming metrics, publishing user-generated content (UGC) and mobilizing support for broader socio-political causes through multiple social media platforms, fan...

This paper examines the role of Singapore’s “national television” in engendering and contemporarizing a more autonomously hyphenated “Singaporean-Chinese” cultural identity through the local Chinese language popular music of Xinyao (新謠) from the early 1980s. As the genre is increasingly considered officially to be part of the republic’s intangible...

The worldwide popularity of South Korean popular music has generated global consumer demand for variations of its grueling training regimen offered by talent recruitment agencies and dance studios. Using the case study of the South Korean popular music boot camps offered by the Australia-based agency, The Academy, this article seeks to frame these...

This chapter describes five curatorial and performative events developed and staged by Singaporean punks and associated artists between 2012 and 2017. Mirroring the participatory trends common in non-institutionalized new or post-museums, these initiatives are not limited to exclusive, insider-only music gigs or events, but involve practices that s...

With Singapore serving as the subject of exploration, the volume explores the purview of imaginative representations of the city. Alongside the physical structures and associated practices that make up our lived environment, and the conceptualised space engineered into material form by bureaucrats, experts and commercial interests, a perceptual lay...

With Singapore serving as the subject of exploration, The Hard State, Soft City of Singapore explores the purview of imaginative representations of the city. Alongside the physical structures and associated practices that make up our lived environment, and conceptualized space engineered into material form by bureaucrats, experts and commercial int...

Using the 2000-2010 South Korean historical medical dramas Heo Jun (The Way of Medicine), Dae Jang Geum (Jewel in the Palace), and Jejoongwon (The Hospital) as case studies, this article examines televisual reimaginations of Korean medical modernity as (re)interpretative popular culture texts. Particularly in the areas of the anatomical sciences an...

In the opening episode of the South Korean TV drama, Reply 1988 (응답하라 1988) (2015), alongside the macro historical narratives of hosting the Olympics and scenes of public demonstration against the then authoritarian government, were micro memories of popular fashion and entertainment in the innocently portrayed “Age of Analog.” Concluding the intro...

Review of: Celluloid Singapore: Cinema, Performance and the National , Edna Lim (2018) Edinburgh: Edinburgh University Press, 201 pp., ISBN 978-1-47440-289-7, PDF, £70

This paper explores episodes of provocative online articulations and the accompanying angry public reactions as part of the cultural politics of juvenile online resistance in contemporary Singapore. Rather than viewing such delinquency as ‘youth deficits’, this paper seeks a literary-culturalist standpoint in exploring the uninhibited audacity of t...

This article will revisit the beginnings of the spread of Korean popular entertainment in China in the mid-1990s to early 2000s by examining the contents of previously untapped Chinese language popular entertainment magazines and public recollections on internet forums. Considered here as critical archival resources, the authors argue that these ma...

Through the ethnographic survey of the ownership, use, and display of television-related devices of forty households in Singapore, this article frames the concept of Skeuomorphic Domestic Television. This term describes the continued centrality of the traditional “living room television” amid digital media’s portability. Results from the stocktakin...

The sketch comedies Ra Ra Show (1993–1994) and the character of Liang Ximei of Comedy Night (1993–2000), performed by cross-dressing male entertainers, were prominent on Singapore television during the 1990s. However, the former was cancelled following complaints about its sexual innuendos and non-standard colloquial English or Singlis. The latter,...

Drawing on two beauty contests Ratu Suria (2012) and Miss Vasantham (2004–present) from the minority Malay and Tamil television stations in Singapore as case studies, this article seeks to map out the contours of ethnocultural scripting of gender and femininity. Rather than finding idealized beauties, these contests have brought to the surface anxi...

Using social media to create an interactive backchannel for video viewing earns a growing number of social audiences for traditional TVs and new TV-like services. This study conducted a national web survey to investigate 600 active social media users with prior experiences of engaging in online video discussions. The social TV research model examin...

The soft-authoritarian and severe image of contemporary Singapore has often been associated with the imposing and paternalistic presence of Lee Kuan Yew who has overseen the city-state as prime minister and subsequently, senior statesman since 1959. Unlike the statues and street-names dedicated to other founding leaders in newly decolonized countri...

Southeast Asia. Popular culture co-productions and collaborations in East and Southeast Asia Edited by Nissim Otmazgin and Eyal Ben-AriSingapore: NUS Press; Kyoto: Kyoto University Press, 2013. Pp. 276. Bibliography. - Volume 46 Issue 1 - Liew Kai Khiun

This paper argues that the move towards a neoliberal vision of the city-state in the postindustrial era in Singapore has not gone unchallenged. With alternative resources of collective memory, the innovations of the social media and openings within the state dominated press, the authors seek to illustrate the process of counter-mapping of Singapore...

The Keretapi Tanah Melayu (KTM) Berhad railway line was a crucial mode of transport for goods and passengers moving between Singapore and its neighbouring country Malaysia. Tanjong Pagar railway station – the terminus of the KTM railway line in Singapore – ceased operation from 1 July 2011, and KTM railway tracks in Singapore were slated for remova...

Posted mostly by consumers rather than industry players, music videos on video-sharing websites like YouTube have been instrumental in expanding the circulation of audio-visual materials in cyberspace. In transnational Chinese pop music, with shared memories engendered by viewers' nostalgic comments on clips, particularly the older ones, uploads pr...

In recent years there has been growing interest in the discipline of computing in relation to cultural heritage, parallel with developments in greater user participation in archives and advances in documentation work. These trends are reflected in the case of a documentation project of an old Chinese cemetery in Singapore, Bukit Brown Cemetery. Thi...

In a biotechnological utopia, with the DNA of the entire humanity mapped and sequenced, scientists and pharmaceutical companies can finally work together to provide highly customized diagnoses and cures for diseases and genetic defects. While corporations, universities, and governments rushed into this sector in recent decades, the genomics industr...

This paper seeks to discuss the ecology of memories in contemporary Singapore as reflective of emerging tensions between the state and civil society in remembering the development of the nation-state for close to about five decades of independence. At the core of the tension are competing efforts to curate public memories through traditional and ne...

This article seeks to demonstrate the significance of new media in reconfiguring and expanding the politics of conservation in the rapidly urbanizing postcolonial city state of Singapore. The critical role of new media is examined, in providing new access and connectivity to the efforts of non-governmental organizations, particularly heritage group...

As part of its modernization project, the postcolonial Singapore state has systematically marginalized the vernacular cultures of the country’s colonial-era immigrant society. Nevertheless, Hokkien popular music has persisted not only in the street festivals that were so characteristic of the colonial port city but also in local movies. A combinati...

Singapore. The AWARE saga: Civil society and public morality in Singapore. Edited by ChongTerence. Singapore: National University of Singapore Press, 2011. Pp. 181. Bibliography, Index. - Volume 43 Issue 3 - Kai Khiun Liew

Since the early 1980s, Hong Kong cinema has been serving as a critical platform in articulating the deep seated cultural uncertainties arising from the formalization of the timeline for the handover of the British colonial outpost to the People's Republic of China. Although not being able to hold off the inevitability of transfer between empires, H...

This paper argues that the move towards a neoliberal vision of the city-state in the postindustrial era in Singapore has not gone unchallenged. With alternative resources of collective memory, the innovations of the social media and openings within the state dominated press, the authors seek to illustrate the process of counter-mapping of Singapore...

Liberalizing, Feminizing and Popularizing Health Communications in Asia provides insights into the manner in which biomedical discourses are communicated and portrayed in Asia in light of the rapidly evolving socio-cultural, technological and epidemiological undercurrents. Highlighting the more pluralized and interactive dynamics in the appropriati...

The St John's Ambulance Brigade established itself in British Malaya in the 1930s, as part of efforts to mobilise and train the colony's subjects for civil defence as the geo-strategic climate in the Pacific deteriorated. This article demonstrates how the provision of emergency medical care was a gendered and racialised undertaking in the colonial...

Between 2003 and 2007, three versions of the Japanese novel, Shiroi Kyotou (The Great White Tower) were screened as television drama serials in Japan (2003), Taiwan (2006) and South Korea (2007). The phenomenon of White Tower reflects the vibrant multiculturality and transnationality of East Asian television dramas. Accordingly, this article seeks...

With a sample of post-war Japanese films, this article explores the cinematic treatment of violence, trauma and memory experienced by Japan during the Pacific War. Avoiding the cardboard villains of Hollywood and Asian cinema, Japanese film-makers have sought to legitimize Japanese people as victims of not just the mechanized violence of the twenti...

With the emphasis on the health of plantation workers, this article explores the contestations between planters and the state over the demarcation of public health responsibilities in rubber estates. Arguments over the provision of hospital beds and medical staff were complicated by new understanding of the epidemiology of malaria, which raised que...

The print and broadcast media are traditionally vital vehicles for both the transmission of information and framing of discussion on health, medicine, and diseases. However, their roles have been largely peripheral in medical historiography. In this respect, this paper explores the position of English language newspapers in colonial Malaya in ident...

This article explores the treatment of the issues of disability and healing in the films of Hong Kong's independent filmmaker, Fruit Chan, between the years 1997 and 2004. These films include: Made in Hong Kong, Little Cheung, Longest Summer, Hollywood Hong-Kong, Durian Durian, Public Toilet and Dumplings. Distinguished by his efforts to forefront...

This dissertation explores the roles of interest groups in the provision of medical facilities and the shaping of public policies in colonial Malaya. Business associations, medical missionaries, temperance movements and international health organisations were instrumental in financing and establishing medical facilities, as well as promoting public...

The influenza epidemic swept through our midst in September and October, unhappily with fatal consequences to a number of friends in the Tamil community. We are glad to say that though terribly severe while it lasted, its duration was mercifully short. On the other hand, the great news that the armistice has been signed filled us with unaccustomed...

For close on half a century, the British naval dockyard in Singapore was a prominent employer in the colony. The huge facility attracted migrant workers from the region, and entire settlements and communities were established around the premises of the dockyard as well. This article seeks to place the legacy of Singapore's naval-base workers within...

The evolution of moral panics is dependent on the particular social context and the ability of certain issues to trigger concern within society. In this paper, the authors have employed a cross-comparative study of the heavy metal music subcultures in Singapore and Malaysia to understand the differences in the issues that generate such panics based...

Nature in the Global South: Environmental Projects in South and Southeast Asia. Edited by PAUL GREENOUGH and ANNA LOWENHAUPT TSING. New Delhi: Orient Longman, 2003 Civilising Natures: Race, Resources and Modernity in Colonial South India. By KAVITA PHILIP. New Delhi: Orient Longman, 2003 - - Volume 39 Issue 3 - LIEW KAI KHIUN

Southeast Asia Transparency and authoritarian rule in Southeast Asia: Singapore and Malaysia. By GARRY RODAN. London and New York: Routledge, 2004. xvii, 265 pp. - - Volume 36 Issue 1 - LIEW KAI KHIUN

Jamit Singh's legacy as a charismatic trade unionist and political activist on Singapore's waterfront coincided with its changing political developments. He was instrumental in bringing about this change by transforming the dock workers into an effective political force. His subsequent banishment by the People's Action Party government brought an e...

Singapore. New culture in a new world: The May Fourth Movement and the Chinese diaspora in Singapore, 1919–1932. By DAVID KENLEY. London, New York: Routledge, 2003. Pp. 231. Illustrations. - - Volume 35 Issue 2 - LIEW KAI KHIUN

This article explores the interactions and tensions arising from a vibrant Canto-pop industry exported from Hong Kong to an interventionist nation-state of Singapore bent on discouraging the use of dialects by its ethnic Chinese population. Aside from highlighting the roles of technological and commercial factors behind the regional music networks,...