What does happiness mean to Singaporeans in 2024?

Just what does happiness look like to Singaporeans? Do the traditional and idiosyncratically Singaporean markers of success – the 5 Cs comprising Cash, Condo, Credit Card, Car, and Country Club – still equate to happiness?

A new art book titled Happy Hows!? may have some answers. Said publication is a stylish compilation of over 1,000 responses answering that question, gleaned from attendees who visited Happy House – a thought-provoking exhibition held at Singapore Art Week 2022 by curator Tulika Ahuja and Eileen Chan, the late DJ Cats On Crack and legendary nightlife promoter.

For those who are unfamiliar with the exhibition, Happy House invited people to explore and reflect on what happiness means to them. Two years on, the data from the exhibition has been sorted into the publication Happy Hows!?

Within the 108-page tome designed by Van Lim and Ween, you’ll find all 1,802 answers translated into tactile and hyper-visual artworks by over 40 Singapore artists, making the data a lot more playful and digestible.

Below, Ahuja shares more on Happy Hows!?:

You received 1,802 responses to this project. What were some memorable anecdotes from these responses?

“… There were many colourful responses related to cats, for instance ‘cats (specifically mine and i hope they live forever)’ and ‘Cat u can pet pet @ the HDB void deck’. We manually went through these to standardise entries and arrive at some conclusions. Shoutout to Ashley, Eileen, Gaetan and Nabs for digitising, scrubbing and reading the data! It was a two year process of sorting and studying the data – painful but fun and memorable. Sometimes we just couldn’t figure out the respondent’s handwriting.”

What are some of the new 5Cs Singaporean prioritise now?

“We received answers from 38 nationalities, out of which 65 per cent were Singaporean. Cash is still the number one priority! And coffee made it to the top 10 Cs. The other most popular C-related answers are all non-material things however – ideas of care, community and creativity are expressed in many forms.”

How would you say Singaporeans’ relationship with happiness has grown or developed over the years since the 1990s – the decade which birthed the original 5 Cs?

“The narrative we hear from the ’90s – specifically the original 5 Cs – likened success to happiness. Exploring the evolution of the narrative was the general hypothesis of our research – do condos and country clubs still feed our souls? While our project captures only a fraction of Singapore’s voice, and in a specific setting, there seems to be less inclination towards materialism as a marker of happiness in general.”

The book is a pretty extensive project involving over 40 artists – why go to such efforts?

“Happy Hows!? seeks to give authentic voice to a Singaporean audience without measures of control or censorship. The publication marks the conclusion of our project, Happy House, which was planned as a series of art encounters where one output would inform the next – our inaugural Happy House exhibition was informed by Singaporeans sharing their happy memories on social media in exchange for one dollar After the sad passing of my co-founder, Eileen Chan, print felt like the only appropriate medium to honour her vision.”

What did you yourself take away from doing this project?

“Happy Hows!? has become a time capsule of various slices of joy recorded in a period of semi-emergence from the pandemic in Singapore. Print felt like an appropriate medium to capture the various perspectives and open up the possibility that the data can live on even longer than us. It’s an archive of our time.”

Happy Hows!? is priced at $48 and available at Basheer Graphic Books or online at Mama Magnet.

This article was originally published in Female.