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The French connection: Curator Khai Hori and conductor Darrell Ang

PARIS — The three-month long Singapore Festival in France has only just started, but two Singaporeans have been carrying the republic’s flag over there long before the festival even began.

PARIS — The three-month long Singapore Festival in France has only just started, but two Singaporeans have been carrying the republic’s flag over there long before the festival even began.

For the past five months, curator-artist Khairuddin Hori has been keeping busy in Paris with the biggest gig of his life: As deputy programming director of Palais de Tokyo, the biggest contemporary arts space in Europe. Meanwhile, in the north-western region of France, conductor-composer Darrell Ang has been spearheading the Orchestre Symphonique de Bretagne as its music director since 2012. It has been quite a ride for both, who are the only Singaporeans — in fact, the only Asians — in their respective teams.

“Quite a number of South-east Asian artists and curators — and even people from China and Japan — have told me they are really proud there’s an Asian who is helping head the institution,” said Khairuddin, 41, who previously held curatorial positions at the Singapore Art Museum and the National Heritage Board. He described his current job as being “second in command for all artistic decisions” to the art centre’s president, Jean de Loisy. This means he has a whole slew of tasks, dealing with shows, events and the centre’s magazine, for instance. It’s a pretty tough job, considering he only has four curators under his care to work on exhibitions across a 22,000 sq m space.

The current South-east Asian survey show Secret Archipelago is the latest that he’s curating and there are more in store, including a performance festival titled Do Disturb, a performance festival in collaboration with the likes of MoMA PS1, Tate Modern and Matadero Madrid in April; and a French/South-east Asian exhibition at LASALLE College of the Arts’ Institute of Contemporary Arts Singapore in November. In-between, he is curating shows on artists from China, Australia, Mexico and Korea. “I’m looking forward to curating French artists and next year, I’ll work more with Europeans and Americans,” he said.

To think that Paris — much less Europe — was never in his plans. “I came from nowhere,” he laughed. “I’ve never been based in Europe. I studied in Singapore and worked in Singapore.”

When Khairuddin met de Loisy a couple of times in the past, he didn’t take the latter’s invitation to join the institution seriously — until last year, when de Loisy formally tabled the invitation. “He told me, ‘Khai, this is serious, we are not joking’,” he recounted. They were so serious that they even created a new position for Khairuddin — and the arts centre had to get permission from France’s culture and labour ministries to approve the appointment.

Palais de Tokyo’s growing interest in this part of the world would have undoubtedly played a part in the presence of an Asian in the team — but to think that’s the only reason would be an injustice to both the arts centre and the young curator. De Loisy, who first met Khairuddin four years ago, said he was keen to bring him onboard because “we needed poetry and he’s bringing this to us”. “He’s also an artist and brings a non-institutional way of thinking,” he added, comparing the Singaporean to a young Hans-Ulrich Obrist, the internationally-acclaimed Swiss curator who handles London’s Serpentine Gallery. “He has got a fresh eye and is the most important curator I’ve met in the last few years.”

Khairuddin good-naturedly shrugged off the compliment. “Whenever he says that, I just laugh,” he said. “I think I represent possibilities, not just for Singapore or South-east Asia but for anyone. But I just do the best that I can and I hope I make people proud. So far, the feedback has been good.”

While Khairuddin is just beginning his journey, conductor Ang is at the tail-end of his three-and-a-half year stint with the Brittany orchestra. Prior to moving to France, he admitted to hearing horror stories from fellow musicians about working in French orchestras. “They said, ‘oh my god, the orchestras will eat you up’,” Ang recalled, when we caught up with him prior to a concert they performed at Philharmonie de Paris, which also featured Singapore Chinese Orchestra’s pipa principal player Yu Jia.

The 35-year-old shared how he immediately set about sharpening the orchestra’s vision of serving the people of Brittany. Ang considers it a plus point being the sole Singaporean in his workplace. “The French are very welcoming to foreigners. The more exotic you are, the more welcome you are in France — and that’s a good thing,” he said, adding that he considers the country as one of the best places for artists to work. “The French are one of the most perfect, artistically, to work with. They are artistically inclined.”

As for flying the flag overseas, Ang is confident about the efforts of the Singapore Festival in France. While Singapore Airlines and the late Lee Kuan Yew automatically ring a bell to those overseas, there hasn’t been much buzz artistically, he reckoned. “But if we do this more often, and with careful programming, then it will start to build,” he said.

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