Promoting Singapore's Cultural and Creative Assets

Mdm Speaker, MCCY works with MFA and our overseas missions to promote our cultural assets abroad. Such cultural diplomacy will help Singapore broaden our bilateral relations and position Singapore as a vibrant cultural capital. Currently, we have good cultural ties with many countries, and also bilateral agreements to facilitate cultural exchanges. A case in point is the Singapore-France Cultural Agreement. Under this agreement, we will be organising a Singapour Festivarts in Paris next year, which will feature many of Singapore's arts and cultural talents.

At the same time, profiling our artistic and creative talents overseas provides them the exposure to grow and scale new heights. Hence, NAC provides grants to enable artists and arts groups to present at international platforms, such as arts festivals, fairs and artists residences. Over the past five years, some 850 artists and arts groups have benefited from such support. In addition, the NAC supports Singapore's presence in established platforms, such as the London Book Fair and the Venice Biennale.

Our cultural diplomacy efforts also extend to other creative fields like media and design. For example, MDA provides support for media practitioners and filmmakers to participate in international festivals and trade fairs. The Design Singapore Council's Overseas Promotion Partnership Programme provides co-funding for participation in prestigious design fairs, enabling our designers to access business opportunities overseas and to establish a global presence. To date, we have supported the participation of more than 300 design companies in over 60 international platforms.

MCCY will continue to work with relevant partners as well as our missions abroad to strengthen our cultural diplomacy efforts.

Madam, just two quick supplementary questions for the Acting Minister. The first is: is the Minister able to give an estimated spending each year on promoting and profiling our arts and cultural assets overseas? And secondly, how exactly are we working with MFA to extend Singapore's soft power without a cultural attaché in our embassies? Is there room to consider establishing a cultural secretariat in certain key cultural capitals like Tokyo, New York, Shanghai and London, for instance?

Madam, on the first question, I do not have a single figure because, as I mentioned earlier, we have many efforts to promote our

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cultural assets and creative assets and it extends across different agencies. We do not have a central fund to do so but the efforts are multi-pronged and so I do not have a particular figure that tracks this. As I mentioned, if you look at all the different schemes under NAC and MDA, you would have a sense where our efforts are.

On the second point about how we work with MFA and whether or not there is a way to improve our efforts in cultural diplomacy, I would say that we are already discussing very closely with our missions and whenever we have artists who are going overseas whom we are supporting – filmmakers or designers – we make an effort to touch base with the missions that are based there with the ambassador in that particular country. We will work with the ambassador and the mission overseas to think about how they can best utilise or make use of the opportunity of having Singaporean artists showcase their works in that country, how the ambassador and his team can then make use of that opportunity to also project Singapore and to make use of that opportunity to extend our cultural diplomacy efforts. So, that working relationship is already being formed between MCCY, NAC and all our overseas missions.