Dream of a Third Place

This artwork is a tribute to the spirit of Hainanese kopitiams that populated Joo Chiat in the early 20th century. Joshua Goh writes that these spaces were more than stops for consumption (MuseSG 10:1, 2017). By the 1960s, kopitiams provided a lively environment for people of all walks and races to create community. Khairudin Aljunied expands further on this sentiment, on the kopitiam as a rich site of political imagination, neighbourhood organisation, and publicly informed selfhood (Oxford University Press, 2013).

The mural depicts a portal view into an anachronistic, fictional kopitiam with multiracial characters playing music, chatting, minding children and reading the newspaper. Done in a sunset sepia duotone palette, the image is suffused with a romantic warm light that both emulates golden hour and emphasises surreality.

Aljunied disagreed that kopitiams succeeded at being a 'Third Place': somewhere that is neither home nor work. A site in land-scarce Singapore that does not justify its existence by bare necessity or profit. But the nature of a dream is that it can move both backwards and forwards: a dream of a lost past, or a dream of a future to strive for.