The Visual Culture of Sinophone Modernism: Aw Boon Haw’s Cultural Entrepreneurialism and Early-Twentieth Century’s Architectural Eclecticism

Abstract

Through the eclectic architecture of the three houses commissioned by the wealthy Singapore-based businessman Aw Boon Haw in Singapore and Hong Kong during the 1920s and 1930s, this article explores architecture as a part of the multimedia visual culture that was deployed by Aw to promote himself, and advertise and sell products on a vast scale for his transnational pharmaceutical and media empires to multiethnic and multicultural audiences that spanned across Southeast and East Asia in the pre-World-War-II-era. Using cultural entrepreneurship as a framework to analyse Aw’s business empires and philanthropic work, this article shows how Aw strategically mobilised artists, designers and architects like Kwan Wai Nung, Tchang Ju Chi and Ho Kwong Yew to shape the emerging modern visual field and help him accumulate social, cultural and economic capital. The article also proposes that we go beyond our preoccupation with the Anglophone world to look at the cultural influences of the Sinophone world of East and Southeast Asia in the early twentieth century in order to understand how modern art and design tendencies might have circulated and translated transnationally to Singapore.