1961–present
Desmond Sim
The Singaporean Desmond Sim has written about thirty plays, almost all of them staged in professional theatres in Singapore, Malaysia and the United States. His poetry collection “Places Where I’ve Been” won a Merit Prize in the 1993 Singapore Literature Prize. He later became known as a self-taught painter of figurative scenes in the Peranakan style.
Biography
In 1993 the poetry collection “Places Where I’ve Been” was entered for the Singapore Literature Prize, and the judges gave it a Merit Prize. The book was published in 1994 by EPB Publishers. By then its author was already writing for the theatre.
Desmond Sim (full name Desmond Sim Kim Jin) was born in 1961 in Singapore. Nothing has survived about his childhood and education, so one has to begin with the books. In 1990 Landmark Books published “Mistress and Other Creative Takeoffs”, which he wrote together with Ovidia Yu and Kwuan Loh.
Theatre took up most of his working life. The list of his plays opens with “Blood and Snow” (1992); in 1993 came “Sammy Won’t Go to School” and “Elizabeth by Night”, and in 1994 “Drunken Prawns and Other Edible Delights” and “A Singapore Carol”. Then followed “Corporate Animals” and “Teochew Porridge” (1995), “Who’s Afraid of Chow Yuen Fatt?” (1996), “Drift” (1998), “Shrimps in Space” (1999), “The Swimming Instructor” (1999 and 2000), “Autumn Tomyum” (2001), “MRT” (2002), “Hubbies4hire” (2004), “Fairy Godfather” (2006), “Postcards from Rosa” (2007), “Wife #11” (2009) and “Perfecting Pratas” (2010). The titles show that he draws his material from everyday Singapore: food, the metro, the office, school. He was the first playwright-in-residence at the theatre company TheatreWorks. Since April 2004 he has been associate artistic director of ACTION Theatre, where he runs Singapore Theatre Oasis, a kind of incubator for new and established Singaporean playwrights. He took part in the Shanghai Literary Festival and was awarded a Fulbright fellowship. As a screenwriter he worked on two films: “Beautiful Boxer” (2003) and “The Wedding Game” (2009). He also teaches playwriting, branding, marketing and communications at the School of Design at Temasek Polytechnic and at LASALLE College of the Arts.
In 2013 Epigram Books published two collections of his plays: “Student Plays” (containing “Drunken Prawns”, “MRT”, “Perfecting Pratas”, “The Chair”, “Shrimps in Space”, “Teochew Porridge” and “The Durian Man and His Daughters”) and “Six Plays” (among them “Autumn Tomyam”, “Elizabeth by Night”, “Fairy Godfather”, “Postcards from Rosa”, “Wife #11” and “The Swimming Instructor”).
In Peranakan art, that is, the art of the descendants of Chinese settlers in the Straits of Malacca and Singapore, for which he is now best known, Sim is entirely self-taught. His pictures show the influence of Modigliani, Rousseau, Tamara de Lempicka and Art Deco. He has held more than a dozen exhibitions on figurative themes from Peranakan culture.
Profile notes