Location: Singapore
Impact statement: Shaking up Singaporean poetry with an uncompromising attitude and a no holds barred approach
Poet Marylyn Tan is breaking down all sorts of barriers in Singapore’s literary scene. The first woman to win the Singapore Literature Prize for English poetry in its 28 year history, she is known for her iconoclastic, witty, outspoken take on subjects including gender politics, and consistently shows a willingness to take on taboo subjects, many of them sexual and religious. A former stand-up comic, she is also the founder of arts collective Dis/Content.
Photo: Jessica Chou for Tatler Hong Kong
Ron Wan & Mildred Cheng
“Tell them about your rugs,” Wan teases as he gives Cheng a playful nudge in the arm during a recent visit to Sheung Wan co-working space The Hive. It seems Cheng, who moonlights as a painter, has just purchased a tufting gun so she can turn her trippy artworks, some of them bordering on the erotic, into rugs.
“A lot of my personal work is based on psychedelic experiences,” says Cheng, a 27-year-old vegetarian who goes by the alias “I Ride Dolphin” on Instagram. She is simultaneously head-in-the-clouds and sharp-as-a-tack, and received her bachelor’s from the Savannah College of Art and Design (SCAD)’s former campus in Hong Kong in 2017. Despite being relatively new to the field, she has already been commissioned by Zheng Mahler, the Hong Kong-based artist-and-anthropologist duo of Royce Ng and Daisy Bisenieks, to design their book,
Asia s Most Influential: The Culture List 2020 asiatatler.com - get the latest breaking news, showbiz & celebrity photos, sport news & rumours, viral videos and top stories from asiatatler.com Daily Mail and Mail on Sunday newspapers.
MANILA, PHILIPPINES - MAY 16: A worker is seen wearing a face mask and face shield at a restaurant inside a mall on May 16, 2020 in Quezon city, Metro Manila, Philippines. The Philippine government began easing quarantine measures in many areas of the country, but has extended the lockdowns in Manila and a few other cities until May 31. Manilas lockdown, one of the worlds strictest, will extend to 80 days longer than the 76-day lockdown of Wuhan, the Chinese city that was the early epicenter of COVID-19. T
Rick Santos, CEO of Santos Knight Frank, is optimistic that with the continuous partnership of the private sector and the government, the economy would be revitalised. Though badly hit, the tourism, leisure and hospitality industries are seeing an increase in volumes of deals, according to Santos.
Having grown up in a kampong in the 1950s, Sim knows these dangers first-hand. “We didn’t have a toilet in the house, but a bucket system in the outhouse; there were a lot of incidents of typhoid fever, cholera and intestinal worms.”
Around one billion people still face the indignity of defecating in the open today, and diarrhoeal diseases a direct consequence of poor sanitation kill more children every year than Aids, malaria and measles combined.
Through WTO’s advocacy work, revolutions in sanitation have begun taking place all over the world over the past two decades. In 2013, the organisation was granted consultative status with the United Nations Economic and Social Council, and achieved another milestone for the global sanitation movement that year when 122 countries co-sponsored a United Nations (UN) resolution tabled by the Singapore government to designate World Toilet Day, a WTO initiative held annually on 19 November, as an official UN day.