At Home with the Artists of Chipbee Gardens

In the Straits Times Issue of Feb 6, 2002, Minister Mentor Lee Kuan Yew associated Holland Village as a “Little Bohemia”. For a few years prior, the area had started becoming a melting pot of an assortment of people from different backgrounds and countries. Perhaps there is some sort of collective magic to the slight slope that the houses are sitting on, or maybe it is the porous density of the estate, where trees, frogs, birds and butterflies seem as much at home as the motley crew of inhabitants; Grandmothers, Painters, Nurses, Dancers, Corporate Office workers, Housewives, Writers, Mothers, Mahjong fanatics, Indonesian & Filipino maids……

The quiet, tree lined streets of Chipbee are used as walking routes for Dog Owners, jogging tracks for the fit, skate boarding (for my neighbour), and have literally become corridors of neighbourly interaction. It is no exaggeration to say that a small social phenomenon has been created in this heady overlap of private and public; local and international.

In this Rainbow Garden that is Chipbee, all the above ingredients combined with the encouraging bedding of a changing Singapore have acted as impetus for interactive creative expression. And thus has sprouted an Artists Collaborative called MICHI.