In the performance "North East Monsoon" (1990). Tang Da Wu - dressed all in white like a PAP cadre - cut the lawn in front of the National Museum using home-made grass-cutting knives, which were bound on his back like golf clubs. He then asked the audience to help him collect the cut grass, which he distilled in a liquidiser. As he offered the juice to his audience, he said. "This is the North East Monsoon". Da Wu's performance referred to a government plan to turn one of the few remaining nature reserve and forest areas in Singapore into an exclusive golf course, even as it was promoting a national 'save water' campaign. (Golf courses, as you know, require lots of water for their maintenance.)

Tang Da Wu is one of Singapore's most renowned artists. And for good reason: he has been instrumental in expanding the scope and methodology of contemporary visual arts practice in Singapore, and has been a key player in several collaborative art initiatives in the late 80s and early 90s. notably The Artists' Village. Many of his art works and performances, such as "Tiger's Whip" (1991) and "Sorry Whale, I Didn't Know That You Were in My Camera" (1994), are public interventions which focus on ecological issues. While his recent works continue with these concerns, what is arguably different is that the newer works are more directly focused on the issues of social memory and the local construction of meaning. These recent works involve both excavating existing folk histories and fostering new narratives that are based on historically significant Southeast Asian products like tapioca, rubber, tin and the banana tree. But unlike some of his earlier interventions into the public spaces of Singapore - "Tiger's Whip". for instance, took place on the streets of Chinatown-many of these projects are collaborations with children in the school classroom.

On 15 Feb 1995. the 53rd anniversary of Singapore's surrender to the Japanese. Da Wu began his "Tapioca Friendship" project. One of the hopes of the project was to help reconcile old wounds from World War II. Da Wu visited schools in Japan and Singapore and told the story of the tapioca root, an indigenous tuber with little nutritional value, but which was a crucial, survival food during the Japanese occupation of the region. Today, tapioca still symbolises a people's ability to survive occupation but at the same time it suggests a lingering mistrust of Japan's post-war economic dominance in the region.

Da Wu's tapioca workshops consisted of improvising new uses of the plant together with recounting its painful history as well as improvising new stories about it. Half the tapioca for the workshop was put into a pot and cooked-'essentialised' in the same way as the grass outside the National Museum - and then offered to the school children to eat. The students then used the rest of the tapioca to carve out their own personal stamps, which were used to make prints. While the students surely would not have thought about it unless otherwise told, their stamping actions had a distant resonance with the check points and marking of identity papers of war time occupation.

Under the auspices of the Osaka International Peace Foundation. Da Wu also conducted tapioca workshops in schools in Japan. The Japanese children seemed very receptive, but some of the older generation were sceptical. At first, the workshops brought to surface tensions betweenSingaporeans and Japanese. However, as they progressed the workshops went beyond digging up old wounds. The first prints that the children made were full of recriminations on the Singaporean side, but later, the prints expressed personal messages to and from Japanese and Singaporean children, and not a few expressed hopes for the future.

Da Wu's "Rubber Road No U-turn" (1996) again marked anniversaries, this time the 120th year anniversary of rubber's initiation as an industrial cash crop, and the 100 year anniversary of its use in Southeast Asia. Da Wu's workshops with school children began by recounting a colonial history of rubber production (from the origin of the species in Brazil to Southeast Asia's rise as the rubber producing centre of the world) and by looking at colonial divisions of labour and cultural difference. For Da Wu. rubber had become a metaphor for the urbanisation of Singapore: roads through rubber plantations on which rubber tyres rolled, which gave way to roads to New Towns. new aspirations and new rubber folklore. Da Wu recalls:

"In 1988 when I was living at the Artists' Village. there were many abandoned rubber plantations. I collected some latex from those trees, I rolled it into a ball, I kneaded it and flattened it. The feel and smell of it brought back memories of people I knew who worked in the rubber plantations. I have recollections of rubber tappers rising before dawn and working on the trees. The image of the white later dripping into the cup to be collected in the late afternoon is very vivid. We were evicted from [The Artists' Village] in March 1990 because the governments wanted the land for development. Some of the old roads were excavated and I imagined all the layers of tarmac mixed with the dust of thousands of tyres being replaced and forgotten. The roads symbolised to me the hard work and labour of the people who worked in the rubber plantations. The tyres and tarmac say to me that we must remember these people and their history, and the fact that latex has been replaced by synthetic rubber and the plantations have been cut down in many parts of Malaysia."

Da Wu's uncle worked in a rubber factory in Singapore, and used to have to carry huge stacks of rubber mats (which have since been replaced by various synthetic materials). Small local rubber flip- flop slipper factories in Java face similar closure now that various multi-national shoe companies have moved there to take advantage of cheap labour. But it is important to underline that Da Wu's project is not that of a nostalgic luddite opposed to further technological invention, mechanisation or urbanisation. Da Wu's rubber road stretches beyond a cautionary tale of environmental destruction or a post-colonial diatribe against global capitalism. Rubber for him is also a metaphor for various forms of new and old oppressions and aspirations which shape the daily lives of people throughout the region.

The rubber workshops with the school children consisted of playing with different rubber objects, cutting apart rubber inner tubes, making various humorous forms out of tubes and tyres and telling different rubber stories. One of Da Wu's own contributions to the workshop was a black rubber lion made from cut-up tyres. The lion, the authoritative guardian at the front of Chinese buildings, was unable to stand without metal supports and being strung up by strings from the ceiling. There was also a similarly uncoordinated rubber union jack. Da Wu says about these objects. "They cannot hold themselves together and yet they want to protect us".

Another natural product through which Da Wu has attempted to excavate social meanings and play with historic authority is tin. Once again, the starting point has to do with food. In his "Life in a Tin" workshops Da Wu told many stories: of how the tin can was invented as a method for preserving food in the early 19th century: about the rise and fall of the tin industry; about Malaysian mining towns such as Ipoh, and how the indigenous Orang Asli peoples were evicted from their forest homes to make space for tin mines.

After visits to tin mines in the South of England, and research into the social history of mining in South America, Da Wu broadened the horizons of the project. Tapioca may have been enough for surviving WWII. but for something as devastating as the nuclear conflagration that threatens the world today, whatever that survival food is, it will probably be found in tin. Containment, contamination and consumption-these became major themes in the "Life in a Tin" project. The point-as in all his workshops with school children - was not to build beautiful sculptures out of tin, but through playing with the raw material itself, to engage in the process of giving new social meanings to tin and at the same time remembering tin's social past. The workshops involved making music, putting together a tin fashion show, and, in an satiric play on the visions of grandeur of Southeast Asian leaders, Da Wu initiated mock school competitions to build the largest tin cities and the tallest tin can towers.

"Jantung Pisang: heart of a tree, heart of a people" is Da Wu's most recent excavation - cultivation project, where he aims to collect and create a number of folk histories relating to the banana  to create a new banana mythology. His collections of stories include: hiding behind banana leaves and 'turning invisible' when Japanese soldiers were in pursuit; male circumcision ceremonies under banana trees; the much feared local Pontianak ghosts which lived in them; and putting a pin with red thread through the Jantung Pisang in hope that the bedroom spirit would come. Da Wu's stories generally have more to do with the tree than the fruit; the bark and leaf stems have been carved, pleated and used in offerings throughout Southeast Asia. He also hopes to open this latest project up to other banana stories from around the developing world. 'Banana battles' are currently a big issue in global trade agreements between the European Union and the US. The battle is over which banana-producing spheres of the developing-world to subsidise. The European Union banana debate centres around what is and what is not a standard banana. The Southeast Asian miniature species seems unable to make an impression in these banana wars, and is mostly regarded as a delicacy rather than a cash crop.

The exhibition at The Substation Gallery (29-31 May) showcases the works of the numerous school children who have participated in Da Wu's many workshops: on display are their banana tree offerings as well as thousands of their postcards which read "under the banana leaf",

Tang Da Wu's tapioca, rubber, tin and banana projects are not only attempts to remember and celebrate what are undoubtedly heavy symbolic building blocks of Southeast Asian social history. Like "North East Monsoon". "Tapioca Friendship" suggests a parallel attempt to break down and digest any easy essentialisms and nationalism. Da Wu counters both official history and essentialist symbolism by cultivating a space for play and the creation of new folklore, histories and practises. His art collaborations contrast against recent efforts by the Singapore government to inculcate a sense of history in the younger generations. The Singapore Story project (1998), for instance, consisted, among other things, of a compulsory visit for all school children to a high-tech multi-media exhibition, where audiences were herded onto a revolving turntable, equipped with 3D goggles and subject to an all-encompassing, sound-light-and-action official version of the struggles against communism, involuntary independence from the Malaysian federation, social unrest and race riots. The Singapore Story was an exemplar of history writ as spectacle. In a rigorously, structured and competitive education system such as Singapore's, where knowledge is largely instilled rather than discovered. Da Wu's workshops-with their focus on hands-on play-give children a chance to become actors in the reclaiming and remaking of public memory.



Lucy Davis is an artist and is currently doing post-graduate research in communication and development studies in Copenhagen.

Lee Weng Choy is an art critic.