New Village is an interactive artwork and walking simulator game reimagining the New Village in 1950s Malaya. As a Singaporean artist with a Malaysian-born father, the New Village is a site of curiosity and personal significance. During a period of illness, my father was obsessed with sketching the New Village from memory and had described it as a beautiful rural site of his carefree childhood memories, that he wanted to capture somehow in order to share with my daughter who had never seen or visited it.
But rather than a carefree, rural countryside existence, his “New Village'' was actually one of 400+ internment camps for ethnic Chinese set up by British colonialists in Peninsular Malaysia during the Malayan Emergency to eliminate underground support for the Malayan Communist Party. Originally named as “Resettlement Camps”, the euphemism “New Village” was coined in 1952 to distance it from the traumatising camps that the Japanese had established during WWII – which had only ended in 1945, less than a decade prior. Malayan Communist guerilla leader Chin Peng’s home was just down the road from my father’s childhood home. Life in the New Village was marked by extreme surveillance, curfews, vigilante patrols, and a very simple and often hard existence.
Can I “unforget” a place that I have not visited? Not a return to one’s motherland, but a voyage to new dimensions? The artwork reimagines the village buildings as dislocated remnants from the Cold War but also emotional-architectural containers, where tiny altar houses within the rural houses become magical portals to parallel villages. "New Village" operates as a digital hauntological space, where the multiple villages are sites of memory that preserve cultural identities while suggesting alternate futures.
In March 2024, an idea raised by Malaysian politician Nga Kor Ming to nominate the Chinese new villages in Malaysia as a Unesco World Heritage site stimulated debates in the Malaysian media. Opinions articulated by historians and politicians ranged from whether the New Villages were considered culturally significant from Chinese settlements in other countries, whether a historical site specifically representing Chinese experiences in Malaysia should be allowed to represent the “national identity” of Malaysia, and whether the New Villages instead presented an unpleasant reminder of the dark history of the New Villages or might even “incite racial feelings”. This immediately prompted the local Selangor government to put out a statement that there were no plans to obtain heritage site status for any villages in the state.
The New Village is a place of personal significance to me. A decade ago, I accompanied my Malaysian-born Singaporean father on his first trip back to visit his “New Village” in Sitiawan, Perak – where he had been born and spent his most memorable childhood years before migrating to Singapore in the 1960s. It was on this visit to the New Village that I found out that rather than the carefree countryside existence that I had imagined from his oral history accounts of cherished childhood memories, the reality was that my father’s “New Village” had been one of 631 internment camps set up by British colonialists in Peninsular Malaysia during the Malayan Emergency between 1948 to 1960 in order to eliminate the underground support for the Malayan Communist Party. Originally named as “Resettlement Camps”, the euphemism “New Village” was coined in 1952 to distance it from the traumatising camps that the Japanese had established during WWII – which had only ended in 1945, less than a decade prior. Malayan communist guerilla leader Chin Peng’s home was just down the road from my father’s childhood home, and life in the New Village had been a period of extreme surveillance, curfews, vigilante patrols, and a simple and hard existence.
Debbie Ding is an artist working across the intersection of artistic research, technology and game studies, exploring psychogeography in virtual worlds. Her work was shortlisted for the President’s Young Talents 2018 and Impart Art Awards 2020 and is collected by the Australian War Memorial and Singapore Art Museum. Notable exhibitions include Ars Electronica, “Radical Gaming” at HeK Basel, “Worldbuilding” at Julia Stoschek Foundation Dusseldorf, “Wikicliki” at Singapore Art Museum, “Radio Malaya” at NUS Museum, Kochi Biennale, and the Singapore Biennale.
See all works at https://dbbd.sg