A well-oiled engine: Towards a critical petro-aesthetics of Singapore

Abstract

While Singapore is not an oil-producing nation, it occupies an important role as one of the largest refinery hubs and the world’s busiest bunkering port for tankers and container ships. However, existing scholarship on petroculture has largely bypassed Singapore in its focus on direct representations of oil centred on upstream producers such as the United States, Canada and countries in the Middle East. This article traces the emergence and eventual disappearance of oil in Singapore’s visual culture through two moving images made separately in the late 1950s and the early 2000s. Comparing L. Krishnan’s film Orang Minyak (), which headlined a series of local films that featured the urban legend of the orang minyak (‘oily man’), with Tan Pin Pin’s documentary video 80km/h () allows us to consider the sudden eruption and eventual disappearance of oil in Singapore’s visual culture, set against the historical developments of Singapore’s oil industry. Of interest here is an attention towards both direct and indirect representations of oil. The article ends with a formal analysis of Tan’s 80km/h, through which I argue for a critical petro-aesthetics particular to Singapore itself, in thinking through its role as an important middleman in the global supply chain of petroleum and petrochemicals.