What is art? The art historian Robert Rosenblum exclaimed that "the idea of defining art is so remote that [he doesn't think] anyone would dare to do it". But before I can proceed, there is a need for me to grasp clearly the meaning of art.

First, I believe that art must be a conscious act. For example, a glorious sunrise is not art. A sunrise is simply a part of nature.^{Footprint: Elephant Kimba's footprint} Why do people confuse art with nature? Because people tend to confuse art with what is aesthetically pleasing, and since a sunrise is aesthetically pleasing, we confuse it to be art. Some may argue that something created by accident can be considered an art, for example the footprint of an elephant. So suppose an elephant creates a footprint and someone decided to preserve that footprint (via clay or whatever methods), can that be considered art? My feeling is yes, it is an art, but it is also a conscious act, not on the part of the elephant, but on the part of the person who decided to preserve the footprint.

Must art be aesthetically pleasing? Well, this is obviously not true when we look at the many examples of conventionally accepted works or art that are not only not aesthetically pleasing, but are in fact hideous or disturbing.

Art, I believe, is a conscious creation of the artist in his attempt to express some meaning. Dewey, in "School and Society", wrote that

"all art involves physical organs, the eye and hand, the ear and voice; and yet it is something more than the mere technical skill required by the organs of expression. It involves an idea, a thought, a spiritual rendering of things; and yet it is other than any number of ideas by themselves. It is a living union of thought and the instrument of expression."

Art allows a range of experiences that exercise our senses which other disciplines are unable to. While we have to exercise the sense of sight in other disciplines, we don't see as intensely as we do when practising art. The same goes for the sense of touch. In my opinion, "seeing" words and symbols is not really seeing. When we look at a human from the perspective of science we inevitable fall into various theories and preconceptions. But when we look at a human as a process of practising art, our perspective will tend to be more humanistic and richer. You don't just look to see whether the litmus paper is pink or blue, you look at the whole picture before you in whatever range of shapes and sizes and colour. The human life offers a great variety of experience for the different senses and it is a peculiar fact that our education system does not cater to such a wide range of possible experience.

Art, from a cognitive point of view, allows the senses to interact and actively construct meaning in a way that other disciplines are unable to. However, we should also look at art from a perspective other than cognitive. This is expressed in the quote above when Dewey talks about art as an instrument for expression. This is why I have insisted on thinking about what art exactly is. Because I believe that art must be a conscious act to convey meaning. It is often said that art is able to connect the subconscious to the conscious. The artist and photographer, Ben Shanh, had this curious observation:

"The subconscious may greatly shape one's art; undoubtedly it does so. But the subconscious cannot create art. The very act of making a painting is an intending one; thus to intend and at the same time to relinquish intention is a hopeless contradiction albeit one that is exhibited on every hand."

I am a social painter or photographer. . . . I find difficulty in making distinctions between photography and painting. Both are pictures. Ben Shahn

As an instrument of expression, how does art differ from language and music? In my opinion, art has less restrictions. While it is easy for any child to pick up a crayon and begin his own masterpiece, it is not the same for language. For language comes with it many rules and regulations and social consensus on its usage. It is easy to fall into a cliche usage of language when expressing an idea, but this is not true for art. For example, the manner in which the idea "thank you" can be expressed in language is easily enumerated, but with art the limit is boundless! That is not to say that language cannot be creative - my point is merely that a high level of skills and life experience is necessary for a person's usage of language to be creative.

The same can be said of music. In fact, in my opinion, music education is highly corrupted in our modern society. Many children pick up music and end up being very good at playing an instrument, without making much meaning with their music. As a member of an orchestra, I had personally found that not many of my musical peers were able to actually talk about music in a personal way. Music, to many Singaporeans, has become much like Mathematics. Through practice and drill many are able to perform well, but not many are able to construct personal meaning with it.

Certainly art can become just as restrictive, if teachers concentrate on the skills of painting rather than letting children explore on their own. But it is so much more difficult to control art than music or language. With music a slight error in tone or tempo is very obvious and learners are forced to conform quickly. On the other hand, even if you demonstrate how to draw a frog to a child and insist on him doing the same, the result will never be the same!

But what I would really like to emphasise in this section is the emotional aspect of creativity and meaning construction. It might appear that my approach has been very cognitive and social oriented. However, I'd like to point out that it is inevitable for emotion to get into any process of meaning construction. What I'm trying to say is that in meaning, the cognitive and emotional aspect come together, not separately.

This brings me to the point I am trying to make here: that art education is a very important aspect of education because it is an experience in which the subconscious emotions can be made manifest by a conscious act of art creation. People like to think of this as some therapy for children who have been through some traumatic^Balloon experience. This sort of view makes light of the human condition. To be human means to be able to feel. At every moment we think and feel at the same time. Yet our schools function as if emotions is an alien concept. There is, in my opinion, a great need for our children to express themselves in whatever ways the human experience allows. And as I've explained above, art allows the richest means by which humans can express ourselves. We keep talking about a holistic education but inevitably everything gets sidelined to make way for academic results. Woo Yen Yen succintly expressed this in the following paragraph of the article "Paved with Good intentions":

Looking into the Prism, the principal announced that while she was concerned about the various aspects of development - Intellectual, Aesthetic, Moral, and Physical - “This year, our school will focus on the Intellectual.” By this, she meant that as teachers, we should all ensure that we stretched the potential of the students so that they performed “better than expected” at the ‘O’ levels. I noticed in the subsequent years that we never decided to focus on any other aspect of development. There was never an Aesthetic, Moral or Physical year.

Singapore has been talking about becoming a renaissance city. I strongly believe that in order to do so we must place more emphasis in art education. A renaissance city is one that has a rich meaning. A city that has plenty of night-spots and entertainment is but a hollow shell. To create meaning, to develop a rich sense of human existence, to think, to feel, to create - all these can be realised through proper emphasis in art education.