beauty pageant

Being the sole male presence in my team, I was left with no choice but to compete in the beauty pageant held during my office’s Christmas lunch this afternoon. The idea was for each of seven groups to pick one guy who will wear (and model) items such as women’s shoes, earrings, purses, Christmas décor (!), 5-cent coins (!), plastic flowers and shopping bags, among other things. The prettiest cross-dressing model would then be declared “The Prettiest Cross-dressing Model” in this year’s Christmas party.

Under normal circumstances I’d vehemently refuse to participate in such an activity, especially considering my unresolved self-esteem issues. But Big Boss was one of my teammates, and, in true over-achieving Singaporean fashion, she won't let personal issues hinder her from victory. When my other teammate laughed about how everyone was going wild and was taking the game perhaps too seriously, Big Boss replied, with a determined look on her face, “Well we have to be serious about this thing if we want to win. We have to be serious.” She said that while adjusting my makeshift earrings (ornaments she plucked from the office Christmas tree).

“You might find this hard to believe,” I told my teammates as they were trying to pick a nice color for my lips, “but I don’t really like what’s going on here. This doesn’t do anything for me. See, I don’t do beauty pageants. In fact…”

“I think that’s too light. It doesn’t stand out. You should try this shade,” my boss told me while applying lipstick on my hand. My two other teammates, meanwhile, were busy preparing fake breasts for me.

In the end, I lost to Kumar, the new copywriter, even though I was the most color-coordinated among all contestants (pink shoes, pink stripes on my shirt, pink purse, pink umbrella…and a red giant poinsettia firmly attached to one side of my head). The game was a load of laughs, yes, but there’s a part of me that wishes everybody would forget about it later when the effects of all that ingested alcohol wears off.

(Photo: stolen photo of a chocolate version of Chappie from the Groovisions [a Japanese design team] exhibit at the NMS.)

utter rubbish

Here are scenes from the Utterrubbish exhibition, one of the many events from this year’s Singapore Design Festival.


Outside the old Supreme Court building where the exhibition is held. Behind us is a giant cube bearing the design festival’s theme “Open Minds”. Copies of this promotional box are prominently displayed in other museums and SDF venues.


Design firm Asylum puts those promo leaflets to good use by turning them into cover art for hardbound journals. People can get the notebooks for free if they donate any amount to a certain environment preservation organization.


From the Design&Disasters exhibit. Makeshift cardboard toilet, anyone? Designed by a Japanese, naturally.


With Jo and Yvonne, surrounded by stuffed toys made up of retaso.

installation art

At the National Museum, Yvonne directed my attention to what appeared to be a huge amount of white paint splattered onto the lobby floor.

And then we saw people casually standing on or walking over the spill, which, we found out, was actually a dry surface.

Apparently it’s an installation art piece by a Singaporean sculptor whose "research interest is on the ambiguous relation between object and space in the practice of contemporary visual art." (Source: NMS website)