SINGAPORE – A rare printing block for hell money. A box of hand-carved logos for stamp-making from the 1990s. A 1967 mould of Chinese-language newspaper Sin Chew Jit Poh, and 17 tabletop printing presses.
These are just some of the artefacts reflecting Singapore’s printing history in the 20th century, whose fates are now up in the air. A 30 per cent rent hike at Geylang East Industrial Estate has endangered the only local traditional letterpress studio of its kind that focuses on documenting Singapore’s printing heritage.
Run solely by its founder Sun Yao Yu, 40, Typesettingsg has conducted more than 500 workshops and tours for the public since its inception in 2014.
The privately run studio, in the absence of a printing museum in Singapore, has been a key advocate for the preservation and promotion of over 200 years of Singapore’s traditional letterpress heritage.
Formerly located at Golden Mile Complex, it had to move to its current premises after the building’s en-bloc sale in 2022. Mr Sun says running the studio has been financially challenging, as public interest in printing heritage remains niche, and income from workshops had only been sufficient to pay for the rent.
After 10 years, Mr Sun – who is also a freelance graphic designer – is finally calling it quits in June 2024. He is making an appeal to interested individuals, organisations, schools, studios or museums to buy over his studio, with the hope that public tours, workshops and exhibitions can still be conducted by its new owner.
Mr Sun tells The Straits Times: “People entrust all these to me and I buy them from the old printing shops. It’s just not possible to discard all these and sell them as scrap. This is Singapore’s heritage – if this is gone, where else can we find it?”
He notes that Singapore is home to one of the earliest printing industries in Asia, with Christian missionaries setting up the Mission Press in 1823. Singapore-based missionary Samuel Dyer is also considered a pioneer of developing Chinese metallic types that were aesthetically pleasing.
Singapore’s multilingual print industry is also unique, although Mr Sun says a “golden opportunity” to preserve the local letterpress heritage had been missed in the 1990s.
He cites how there are no existing Jawi or Tamil metal types which are known to have survived, as they would likely have been sold for scrap metal following the transition to modern offset printing in the 1970s and 1980s.
With the rent hike in Geylang East Industrial Estate, Mr Sun is seeing his neighbours – several of whom are old printing businesses – fold up one by one. Without interested buyers or collectors of printing heritage, many of them sell their equipment as scrap and Mr Sun’s dream of a Singapore printing museum slips further away.
Typesettingsg is a founding member of the International Association of Printing Museums, which includes institutions such as the Printing Museum in Japan, Cheongju Early Printing Museum in South Korea and the Gutenberg-Museum in Germany.
He says: “My main objective is to find someone who has the interest and capability to continue the legacy. Rather than sell it to just some random person, I would rather put it into storage and when I have the financial ability, I’ll come back.”
