The Good Review Circle (GRC)
September 2019 to March 2020

"Based on its very definitions, a public space, to me, represents a potential for open conversations, for thinking beyond the surface within the public domain, and a definition for democratising our built environment that allows inclusivity and celebrating the pluralisms within our society." —Alfonse Chiu, GRC Writer

The Good Review Circle is a critical art writing initiative. Over the course of 6 months, our five writers will post monthly reviews in response to exhibitions, art spaces, performances, film, and interviews, through the interrogative lens of The Substation’s 2019/2020 programme season, A Public Square.

Find out more about our five illustrious writers, their thoughts on public space (in Singapore and beyond), and how they’ll address these issues during their time with GRC.

About the Writers

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Akanksha Raja

Akanksha Raja often enjoys writing about art primarily because she believes in its potential to connect, provoke and transform. She grew up in Singapore and graduated from LASALLE College of the Arts in 2014, where she wrote a dissertation exploring the practice of forum theatre in Singapore. She was formerly assistant editor at ArtsEquator.com since its launch in 2016, and is an alumna of the Points of View Performance Writing workshop organised by the Asian Dramaturgs Network in 2018.

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Alfonse Chiu

Alfonse Chiu is the creative director and editor-at-large of independent film editorial platform and collective, SINdie, and an independent culture journalist and researcher. His writings have appeared in publications such as Kinema: a journal for film and audiovisual media, published by the University of Waterloo, the National Museum of Singapore’s Cinematheque Quarterly, and Hyperallergic. He is the lead resident of SINdie for the Objectifs Creatives Residency, where he will be spearheading the platform's first durational research project investigating independent cinematic spaces within Southeast Asia and their potentials as sites of social memories, cultural literacy, and alternative discourse.

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Ng Yi-Sheng

Ng Yi-Sheng is a Singaporean poet, playwright, fictionist, critic, journalist and LGBT+ activist. His books include the poetry collections “last boy” (winner of the Singapore Literature Prize 2008), “Loud Poems for a Very Obliging Audience” and “A Book of Hims”, as well as the film novelisation “Eating Air” and the best-selling non-fiction work “SQ21: Singapore Queers in the 21st Century”. Additionally, he translated Wong Yoon Wah’s Chinese poetry collection “The New Village” and has co-edited national and regional anthologies such as “GASPP: a Gay Anthology of Singaporean Poetry and Prose”, “Eastern Heathens: Asian Folklore Subverted”, and “Heat”. He was the winner of the first Singapore Poetry Slam in 2003, and served as a founding member of the spoken word collective the Party Action People. He is currently a PhD student at NTU, and will soon be publishing his short story collection “Lion City”. He tweets and Instagrams at @yishkabob.

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Reena Devi

Reena Devi is a Singaporean journalist and cultural critic writing about art and society in the 21st century. Reena holds a Msc. Renaissance to Enlightenment from the University of Edinburgh and worked at the Singapore Art Museum and National Heritage Board from 2012 to 2016. She became a senior reporter at TODAY newspaper (SG) in 2016, fronting the shift to a news oriented coverage of the local arts scene. Reena broke over 15 stories in the span of a year, exploring issues such as cultural leadership, diversity in terms of race and censorship. Subsequently, she moved to Yahoo Singapore where she wrote in-depth features and broke stories on arts, lifestyle and entertainment, before leaving in 2018 to write independently for international media such as ArtAsiaPacifc (HK) and Artsy (NY). Reena has become known for for writing critical, fact-finding analysis about developments in Singapore and SEA art world. She also edits and writes content about art, technology and 21st century society.

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Sharaad Kuttan

Sharaad Kuttan is a journalist who has worked in print and broadcast, and is perhaps best known for his work as anchor on BFM89.9, the Malaysian capital’s premier English-language talk radio station. While pursuing a postgrad degree in Sociology from the National University of Singapore, he was co-editor of the NUS Society’s journal Commentary. One issue was published as a collection of essays on cultural politics in Singapore titled “Looking at Culture”. He is a member of the Singapore branch of the International Association of Art Critics. In 2006 he was awarded the Nippon Foundation’s Asian Public Intellectual fellowship. Apart from Art and Culture, he is a regular commentator on local politics and contributed a chapter to “Elections and Democracy in Malaysia”, a scholarly study of the Malaysian electoral system.