State of the Arts

Arts nominated member of parliament Usha Chandradas discusses growing the creative economy by focusing on both supply and demand

- Hashirin Nurin Hashimi

While some may consider going to the theatre, galleries or museums as a few of the more interesting activities to do after work, Usha Chandradas would go one step further. Instead of simply being a consumer of the arts, she would take short courses, from Asian art histories to fashion illustration, at the Lasalle College of the Arts.

“I didn’t know about art history, or what it was, which is looking at society and the world through the lens of artists in the community, and trying to understand society through art made during a certain period,” she says. “It was appealing to me because I like history.” She was still in legal practice, first as a tax lawyer with the Inland Revenue Authority of Singapore and later in private practice.

When it came time to think about the next step in her 12-year career, Chandradas decided that she enjoyed studying and enrolled into the Master of Arts in Asian Art Histories programme at Lasalle, first on a part-time basis, before leaving her job to focus on her independent research on Balinese arts and art collective Sanggar Dewata Indonesia. “It was a lot more work than I had initially thought, but it was really fulfilling,” she says.

At Lasalle, she met fellow students Pauline Gan and Luke Chua. “We didn’t come from professional art backgrounds. The master’s programme was our main entry point into the art world. People we knew would ask, ‘What are you doing?’ We’d tell them about the shows that we were going for, or the art fairs we were travelling to around the region,” she shares.