So where were we again? Oh right, the Simon Fujiwara thing. As much as I’m rooting for SAM’s efforts of pushing for contemporary art, I just have to say this (rather belatedly). Major Fail. If, like me, you were out of the country last week and missed out on all the Hotel Munber action (and the rest of the non-SB stuff ), you can read an interview with Fujiwara here. The actual censorship is the biggest boo-boo of course. But there’s also a subtler side-effect of this rather disappointing act. The whole incident and the issue of censorship has effectively overshadowed the rest of the works at SB2011. This morning, I had a quick FB chat with one of the Biennale artists who bemoaned that now everyone’s been asking him about the Hotel Munber issue. I’m pretty sure the buzz over the censored work is not the kind of buzz organisers (not to mention the artists of the other works) would’ve wanted for the biennale. *** Anyway, the second part of this post is to introduce something that’s long overdue. As SB2011’s partner for the Young Art Writers Programme, we’ve been publishing some writings by students who participated in a series of art writing workshops a couple of weeks ago. Every week, you’ll see a couple of them in TODAY. (For those who've missed previous articles, you can check them out here, here, here, and here. I’ll be posting some of the works produced from the “creative writing” side of the workshops in the coming posts – some poems, short journal-type entries, etc – and we’ll continue posting the nicer ones as and when they come in. I’m still hoping that we get more entries that deal with works by Singaporean artists because we haven’t gotten any. Sigh. That's not to say the contributions aren't good. Do have a read. Now if only some brave student would actually submit something on Fujiwara's work...