Published weekly 2014 – 2020 and monthly 2022 onwards, Tuesday in the Tropics are short illustrated reports on what Tony Godfrey saw in South-east Asia and its art world. All, or nearly all, Tuesday in the Tropics will eventually be placed on this website – with an index. See No. 1 for why I write them.

28th April 2015

Dear friends and colleagues,

It’s the last picture show.

Gary Ross Pastrana

This will the last exhibition at Equator Art Projects, Singapore where I am curator. The gallery will close at end of May. However, we will carry on in Jogja making...

21st April 2015

Dear friends and colleagues

Void deck funerals and crooked paths.

It may often be described as boring but in reality Singapore is a strange and interesting place. As one expert on utopias said to me, ‘how could one not be interested in Singapore?’ If an intelligently planned environment, economy and society are the quintessence of...

14th April 2015

Dear friends and colleagues

It was nice to hear from your responses to my rhetorical question, “when did you last read a poem?” how many committed poetry readers I have on my mailing list! As always, I welcome all comments and questions.

I have known the painter Ian Woo since I first came to Singapore in 2008. As there are very...

7th April 2015

Dear friends and colleagues

When did you last read a poem?

I have always been interested in visual art, an interest encouraged by an older brother who was an artist and later an art historian, but I studied literature at University and have always seen myself as first and foremost a writer. I gave up writing poetry in my early...

31st March 2015

I went to my bank last Wednesday to use the ATM and noticed on both sides of the bank there were long snaking queues of people waiting in the sun. You can see in my photo that the queue carries on along the other side of the river. People were dutifully waiting in their thousands for up to ten hours to file past the coffin of Lee Kuan Yew.

Fernando Botero. Bird. 1990. Between UOB bank and...

24th March 2015

This morning when I got up, turned my laptop on and, as I normally do, began my day at BBC News I learned that Lee Kuan Yew had died a few hours earlier.

He was very old and had been ill for some time, so this was no great shock though it will lead to much eulogising and reflection in Singapore, the city-state he effectively...

17th March 2015

Dear friends and colleagues

I spent much of last Tuesday with Sunaryo in Wot Batu.

So, you may ask, who is Sunaryo and what is Wot Batu?

Sunrayo who has now turned 71 is a sculptor trained at ITB – the art school first set up by the Dutch in Bandung and which originally had a...

10th March 2015

Dear friends and colleagues

What is this image “shape shifting cancelled”? Is it some post-conceptual work? An artist working with photographs? Or someone working in a way influenced by John Baldessari perhaps? No, it is an image from the Economist I bought in KL airport on the way back from Malaysia late last Tuesday. As Malaysia has become more hard line in its imposition of...

3rd March 2015

Dear friends and colleagues

In 1963 the poet W.H.Auden wrote a preface for a book of English translations of Hungarian poems. ‘I have had to listen in my life to many discussions of the role of the artist in society and very boring and fruitless they all were. Every writer has, of course, certain social and political duties and responsibilities as a citizen like other citizens: what these...

24th February 2015

Dear friends and colleagues

This was the third time I have been to Jai’s studio: I am curating a show of his opening 20th March so it is getting near the deadline!

I always enjoy going to his studio. It is like the traditional sort of painter’s studio you used to see more often – i.e. a bit messy. Maybe I like this because I’m...