Remarks by President Tharman Shanmugaratnam at the Opening of the Singapore Clay Festival 2025 at the Singapore Chinese Cultural Centre on 6 November 2025

Thank you very much, Eck Kheng and the team you're working with for making this possible, this fifth edition of the Clay Festival. Thank you, Cikgu Iskandar Jalil, for your life's work. Thank you to everyone who is here and has contributed to the festival. Thank you, Ambassador Ishikawa for joining us as well.

This is a special type of cultural event in many ways. It’s a community event. Just look around – a whole community. It involves people of all ages. It involves everyone from the hobbyist to the master potter. It involves a community that's not just Singaporean, but international, that we are happy to have with us here in Singapore.

It's also special because clay work, like some other forms of art is an expression of how our culture borrows from many cultures. Not in the sense of simply copying other cultures; not just a jumble of other cultures, or campur campur. But it's a culture that evolves by deriving influences and inspiration from other cultures. And it becomes a culture of our own.

There's no more powerful expression of that than in Dr Iskandar Jalil's work. First, so creatively combining Southeast Asian influences, including Jawi calligraphy, with a Japanese aesthetic. And then, later, when you visited Bendigo and the Blue Mountains in Australia, you took new inspirations and your work became more colourful. You went to Scandinavia and looked at the blueness of the sea and skies – and we got “Iskandar Blue”, which is such a distinctive part of Iskandar’s work.

I think it’s also a special type of cultural event because of how it's open to people who never considered themselves experts or even artists. Even among those who are now master artists or masterclass trainers, like the couple Loh Lik Kian and Debbie Ng for instance, they were not originally trained in pottery. Loh Lik Kian was trained in graphic design. You stumbled upon a Japanese teapot that caught your interest in a Melbourne shop, and you and Debbie subsequently started learning pottery. In your case, you went to LASALLE. And both of you went to Sam Mui Kuang to learn from the veterans. You are now masterclass trainers.

So, pottery is open to everyone to participate in it as a hobby, sometimes even becoming masters of the craft. It’s a very open discipline. We have another expression of that openness, many persons with disabilities whose work is being displayed in this festival. And I want to thank all the organisations that have made that possible - for persons with disability to take up clay work, and have their work displayed here in this festival. A wonderful expression of community.

And finally, one of the reasons why many of us are lovers of pottery is because it is an aesthetic that involves serendipity. The serendipity that comes from the fact that it's not just the artist, but the artist and nature that makes each piece of pottery. The clay, the hands of the artist, the firing that creates unpredictability, and what many call the beauty of imperfection.

That’s also a useful way to think about culture. It’s not a search for perfection. It is about borrowing influences from each other, evolving our own culture, but never defining exactly what the destination is.

So, thank you, all of you, for keeping this going and growing the festival. It is not just a clay festival, but an expression of community, of inclusion, and of how our culture itself evolves. Thank you very much.