“We have to go here. This is a place you simply must see. It’s hilarious!”
Gingerly clicking on the link my
colleague had sent me, I wasn’t so sure.
Even as we approached the main gate
several weeks later, I still wasn’t so sure. But I was certainly curious enough
to give it a look, and the rest of my colleagues were game. Happily, entrance is
free - so with plenty of time to kill, we’d nothing to lose …
It turns out he was right. It is so
bizarre you really do have to see it to believe it. Initial impressions weren’t
great, I have to admit. The prospect of seeing a run-down park filled with
oddly artless concrete sculptures wasn’t an altogether edifying one. But seeing
is believing, and you really do have
to see this place to believe it.
Built in 1937 Haw Par Villa in Singapore was
once the family estate of the Aw brothers. Their father, Aw Chu Kin, was the
creator of the famous ‘cure-all’ ointment known as Tiger Balm. It’s a kind of
cross between Deep Heat and Vicks Vaporub, mildly anaesthetic with a comforting
sort of eucalyptus scent (it’s very good for easing muscle aches). Originally
the brothers, Boon Haw and Boon Par, after whom the Villa was named, used the
fortune they made from Tiger Balm to set up a zoo in the Villa’s grounds (the
park was originally one of three set up to promote Tiger Balm, the other two
being in Hong Kong [now closed] and Fujian in China). A later change in the
licensing laws of the colony compelled the brothers to replace the animals with
a bizarre menagerie of statues instead, many of which are arranged in static-theatrical
tableaux which range widely across a spectrum spanning the deeply moralistic to
the outright surreal. Many of the
set-pieces illustrate episodes from Chinese folklore and Taoist mythology, such
as the titanic battle of the Eight Immortals. A very dilapidated little hall
made up to resemble a winding cave-like tunnel passing through a small cement-rendered
mountain houses the ‘Ten Courts of Hell,’ where amateurish dioramas illustrate
extremely gory scenes of wicked prostitutes being drowned in the “filthy blood
pool”, or where ‘tax dodgers and late rent payers’ are pounded with mallets – it’s
not quite Hieronymus Bosch, think rather of the ‘London Dungeon’ meets
‘Bekonscott Model Village.’
It’s disturbingly naff. Hence at
this point I still wasn’t sufficiently impressed enough to take any snaps, but
emerging into the daylight again things began to alter and shift as we
progressed up the hill.
The dioramas began to grow in size, and whilst some
were in distinctly neglected crumbling states with peeling paint (it was hard
not to think of a forlorn forgotten seaside town, or some other such ruined dystopia, the
original for Banksy’s Dismaland perhaps),
others had been or were in the process of being patched and tarted up again with
fresh licks of paint.
Some of these concrete creations were truly stunning and
discombobulating in equal measure. A couple of scenes had me roaring out loud with
laughter and that was it – the odd magic of the park had set in. I now had the
giggles.
It was like wandering around in our own half-deserted version of Miyazaki’s
Spirited Away, a tropical Margate
gone hideously wrong … My colleague
was right, it was curiously hilarious.
I got my camera out and began
snapping ...
