志异 Draft by Drama box July 2014 (english) | Page 39

Japanese were captured in cartoon
form in Chop Suey, a book drawn
by Liu Kang, one of Singapore’s
postwar pioneer artists. Chop Suey
was published in 1946, almost
immediately after the war.
The Japanese Occupation of
Singapore between 1942 and
1945 changed the mindset of the
Chinese in Singapore in various
ways. They realised that they could
not depend on the British colonial
rulers of Singapore to defend them.
Secondly, they were politically
riled by the Japanese Occupation
and saw the need to be involved
in the politics in Singapore and
not just what was happening in
China. Thirdly, Asia and Africa were
swept by a wave of anti-colonial
sentiments after the war and
Singapore was not left out.
Cartoons were part of the arsenal
against colonial rule in Singapore
and there was the reemergence
of local concerns and topics in
cartoons. Cartoonists and artists
became part of the independence
movement, raising the people’s
awareness about social and
political conditions. It was agit-pop
at work.

It is from this milieu that Koeh Sia
Yong came forth as an artist and
cartoonist. Born in 1938, he did
not have much memory of the
Japanese Occupation as he was
still a child then. But growing up in
a poor family in the 1940s (Koeh
did not attend secondary school)
meant he had to grow up faster,
to be financially independent at
a young age. He attended a few
years of art classes at the Nanyang
Academy of Fine Arts in the early
1950s and went on to work in
the advertising field, as well as
freelance commercial work.
But he was not a bystander of
the tumultuous changes going on
around him. He joined the Equator
Art Society, a social realist art group
that advocated art for society’s
sake, and not just art for art’s
sake. They believed that art and
artists had a social responsibility to
provoke change and improve the
society and that meant fighting for
a socialist cause and against the
British colonial rule. Koeh would be
part of the drawing team that drew
posters and banners in support
of the early People’s Action Party
(PAP, the ruling political party
of Singapore since 1959). When

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