Our Birthday Wish
It's our 7th birthday and while we wish to celebrate with a huge bang and continue to paint murals in our city, reality bites and Social Creatives
is now faced with several challenges. Such challenges include a $700,000 loss in potential revenue due to red-tape and the situation of bigger organisations taking over several proposals that were initially started by us and executing them on their own.
We are hoping to raise funds to bring 50 expatriates and 50 migrant workers to paint a workers' domitory, doing a "makeover" and turning the place into a more cheery and colourful one. However, due to our financial limitations, we are currently unable to do
so. Your support will greatly aid us and bring this project to fruition. Let's do our part to show our utmost appreciation to these foreign workers who have sacrificed so much to shape our city landscape!
Our Work
At times, society has progressed so much that there may be many walls between us, both emotionally and visually. Social Creatives hopes to paint these walls by promoting inclusivity in society and promoting the first form of art which were cave-drawings! Cave-drawings
have impacted history greatly, so why should we not do the same through our murals?
We do:
- Murals @ One-room flats; We paint the homes of residents, getting them involved in beautifying their homes
- Void Deck Galleries (VDG); We transform our HDB alleyways into art galleries
- Murals @ Welfare Organizations; We create artworks to impact lives by painting at various welfare organisations such as one that supports women's rights, a mental health institute and homes for the aged
- Public Murals; We help to facilitate mural painting sessions for corporate social bonding events and other community art initiatives, adding more flavour to the Singapore street arts scene while fostering better bonds between co-workers
The Impact
Take the story of Mr Chandra Kumar, who was formerly a drug addict and was diagnosed with diabetes resulting in the amputation of his legs. Despite all this, he would be watching us from a distance with a smile whenever we were at one of our VDGs. He explained
that he stayed alone in his one-room flat but the a
The art gallery gave him comfort and hope especially when visitors painted at his neighbourhood.
Once, we noticed that a senior cried after we painted in her home. Be rest assured that we did not paint her home black or like a rainbow. She cried tears of joy because now she had something to look forward to when she returned home every day.
A similar story was when a resident asked one of the artists to paint five birds on her wall. She shared that the five birds represented her five children who had all grown up and left the nest. Her children actually disowned her and hardly visited her. However,
the mural brought back fond memories of happier times when the family was still together.
Red Tape Kills Creativity
Social Creatives has great initiatives in the pipeline but is faced with challenges at sector and policy levels that are beyond our capacity. Since
our birth, one challenge has been that organisations such as statutory boards have initiated projects too similar to Social Creatives’ and have taken over our proposals. We have tried our best to ask for assistance and to bring these issues up to the proper
channels. This has resulted in a loss of over $300,000 worth of projects that we initiated but which they executed on their own. Consequently, they created “kiddish” artworks that some other artists thought were made by Social Creatives, affecting our
branding. Over $400,000 worth of potential assistance through grants was also rejected. One of our earliest projects was to paint 20 murals with only S$2000. Unfortunately, we were not allowed to even sign off our artworks for some projects. We have tried
to go through proper channels only to end up being squeezed, getting personal attacks and being faulted with.
Silver Linings
While Social Creatives hopes to address the gaps of society, we too fall within these gaps. While we may have internal challenges along the way, we recognise that sector problems and certain policies affect our growth
too. There are many times when our bank account may hit below $5000. Nonetheless, Social Creatives continues to remain optimistic and to take these challenges to our stride and do the best we can.
Upcoming Activities
We will be focusing strongly on Mural VolunTourism by painting murals for a cause. Catalysing this effort is our project in London which will be part of our SG50 celebration project during the SEA ArtsFest 2015. If all goes well,
we hope to see ourselves reaching out overseas by painting in every country in the ASEAN region, as well as take on countries and cities such as Australia and New York in 2016.
We aim to be an Artistic Portal, the Singapore 'Legal Banksy' or (.. dreaming far) be amongst one of the Nobel Peace prize receipients in the near future (because in Social Creatives we either go big or go home). This will help
our dream of hosting the Global Mural Fest Asia in Singapore/Asia in the future.
While the people here in Social Creatives dream big, we always fall back onto our main principle - to continually bring hope, life and happier feelings to our environment here in Singapore. We hope to dispel any "terror", social
and societal misgivings through our art.
"For my part I know nothing with any certainty, but the sight of the stars makes me dream." - Vincent van Gogh
