101: Introduction to the Wet Market Project
The Drying Wet Market is a multimedia journalistic project initiated by a group of Nanyang Technological University students from the school of Art, Design and Media. The project aims to extract and preserve the dying wet markets phenomenon in Singapore. Three distinctive and historic wet markets were visited, mainly the Chinatown Market, Tekka Market and Geylang Serai Market, in the effort to capture most out of the deteriorating wet market scenes in Singapore.
The website introduces individual and unique personas working in the wet markets through the dynamic video content coupled with static narrative photographs. The audio clips embedded within the web pages have the intention to create an immersive and engulfing web experiences for the users. With that said, please feel free to navigate around the website to uncover more hidden facts and personal stories of the dying wet market trends in Singapore.
201: The People
The Singapore wet markets which used to be ubiquitous and a common place where people and friends congregate in the past, have been a vanishing trade in the recent decade. Their disappearances are results of the domineering larger commercialized supermarkets, which have introduced cleaner and more comfortable shopping experiences in favour of the modern-day buyers. Gone were the days where sellers and buyers mingled and shared their daily musings in the bustling wet markets. Instead, what is left is the cold and sterile experiences of shopping for groceries and daily necessities.
A conversation with a MP
The dazzle of urban goings-on is an uncompromising force that spirals people out of their wills, weaving individuals inextricably into the urban fabric.
In our journey through the Chinatown market during the early hours of a Saturday morning, we met an uncle. Well into his age, he asked no favour, but had come to the wet market, trolley in hand, in favour of another. It turns out that this elderly, primly-dressed and soft-spoken man had been a Member of Parliament (MP), and a contributing founder of the NTUC Fairprice supermarket chain –a domineering presence as far as everyday necessities are concerned.
Asked why he had not chosen the air-conditioned comfort of well-kept supermarkets over the damp pungency of the wet market bustle, when both offered similar fresh food products, he cited his friendship with the latter’s stallholders. The bonds that had been forged over the years could not be easily replaced by the sterility of a solitary shopping experience with the sole aim of fulfilling the shopping list.
On behalf of his aged neighbour who lives alone and is unfit to travel, he purchases her share of fresh food, then delivers it to her doorstep. He does so on account of their friendship and adose of goodwill, so do the vendors at the Chinatown market, who unhesitatingly reserve his regular buys for him at a convenient phone request.
Through their candid yet cordial exchanges, the path across time and space diminished. In a society markedly in favour of modernity, such humanly ties are often forced to the periphery of contemporary living. As the elderly uncle picked and chose with his bare hands the fish that had been casually laden among crushed ice, the momentary return to an unforgotten past may have seemed a justified reason for his drive across half the island to the familiarity of his younger days.
Never mind the hassle, for this welcoming, fishy backdrop is at most temporal.
