The yearning for an alternative narrative is often a feeling of; nostalgia, if related to the past; wishful, if related to a present; and hopeful, if related to an optimistic future. The Happy Times was created in 2013 largely as an exercise in imagination, and as a speculative response to a Gallup poll that ranked Singapore to be amongst the unhappiest nations in 2012. In an oxymoron way, the content and concept of The Happy Times is a collection of a series of 10 completely fictional newspaper articles that told one rather undesirable future by interlacing various narratives. Since the work was by no means trying to provide an anecdotal solution to a “happier society”, it instead, temporarily transports the viewer to (not a futurity) a speculative space of imagination upon reading the texts. By illustrating an undesirable concocted future, The Happy Times simultaneously signals an equally undesirable present.

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