Sacred Flowscapes: Negotiating and Imagining the Spaces of Chinese Religion in Singapore

The religious landscape of Singapore is one that is textured through politics, regulation, strategic compromise and individual agency – and none more so than that of Chinese Religion practitioners, defined here as a syncretic mixture of folk religion, Taoism and Buddhism. In this talk, I map out the making of Chinese Religion sacred spaces, showing how such spaces are a product of what I call a “spiritual imagination”, a material and embodied process through which individuals and groups find ways to co-exist with state policy and urban planning. I will draw from three case studies made over a period of 15 years of visual ethnographic fieldwork. The first examines the enchantment of mundane urban spaces during the Hungry Ghost Festival – a use of roadside offerings that perform heterogeneous ethnic identities. The second looks at embodied sacredness in the form of Tang-ki, or Chinese spirit mediums, and how their everyday practices demonstrate temporal enchantments of any domestic or public space into a liminal sacred realm. Finally, I consider what happens when the spiritual imagination’s material and embodied practices come together into an ebb and flow of actors, actions and artefacts – creating “sacred flowscapes” that move over, under and alongside physical and political restrictions.