SINGAPORE – The muted brown walls of the 47-year-old Peace Centre mall were filled with a myriad of colours for its final weekend open to the public on Jan 27 and 28.

Throngs of people with cameras in hand flocked to the mall to catch a last glimpse of it, as most tenants held their final hurrahs on Jan 27 before handing the building back to its owners on Jan 29.

Social movement PlayPan took over the historic mall in October 2023 after its developers agreed to postpone till 2024 original plans to demolish it in August 2023, so that the building can be used for community-building activities.

Founded by good friends Gary Hong, 51, and Yvonne Siow, 50, PlayPan guided Peace Centre in organically evolving into a vibrant creative hub filled with eclectic thrift stores, art galleries, a photography studio and even a bespoke barber shop.

All of Peace Centre’s original tenants had moved out before the new ones moved in, except for two eateries.

Other than covering some utilities and the building’s maintainence, PlayPan did not pay rent to Peace Centre’s developers, allowing Mr Hong and Ms Siow to offer units to tenants for free or at heavily discounted rents.

Mr Hong, who founded car-vending machine Ten Square, and Ms Siow, the head of OneSight EssilorLuxottica Foundation, said they felt they succeeded in creating a positive impact on the local creative community, and that bidding farewell to Peace Centre will be bittersweet.

Associate Professor Ijlal Naqvi of Singapore Management University’s (SMU) School of Social Sciences said the “exuberant, messy vitality of the community at Peace Centre convened by PlayPan... encouraged a spirit of play, a DIY attitude, and fostered an atmosphere of generosity and mutual support among everyone there”.

The closing weekend’s line-up includes a performance art piece on the theme of demolition, art exhibitions and a mall-wide music festival featuring live performances and DJ sets.

Make-up artist Joie Leong, 46, said she used to go to Peace Centre when she was younger but has not returned for many years as the mall gained a seedy reputation before PlayPan moved in. The mall in recent years was known for its printing shops and karaoke lounges.

Visiting the mall on Jan 27 for the first time since PlayPan took over, she said: “It’s quite sad to see it torn down, because it’s a part of Singapore’s history. It’s been great seeing people do something to bring some life to the end of Peace Centre.”

Boxing instructor Dominic Neo, 57, said he used to frequent Peace Centre when he was in primary school and often visited his friend’s beauty salon there in the late 1970s.

Asked what he thought about the current Peace Centre and its demolition, he said: “The old has to go, the new has to come.” 

Many tenants and businesses at Peace Centre did not have a physical shop presence before joining PlayPan, and some of them do not intend to move to another physical space after they leave Peace Centre.

Crowd favourite Resurrack, a thrift store selling curated retro and vintage items, was founded around June 2023 and opened its first bricks-and-mortar shop at Peace Centre in October that year. It had previously been running its business at pop-up events.

Owner Isaac Loh, a 19-year-old student at Temasek Polytechnic, said Resurrack will be taking a hiatus of about six months as he will be heading to Vietnam in February to serve an internship.

After the internship, he plans to dive into working on events instead of running a physical store, using the break as a time to plan and recruit more vendors both locally and internationally.

Of his time at Peace Centre, Mr Loh said: “One of my biggest achievements here was gaining the experience of running a business at this age.”

He had long had an interest in business, and the opportunity at PlayPan was a “huge boost” in his personal and entrepreneurial development.

He added: “This place really means a lot to me. The people, the community, the businesses that I’ve met here are all super awesome. It’s sad to part ways with Peace Centre and the people here.”

Recent School of the Arts (Sota) graduate Robyjnn Lui founded art gallery Blueprint Arthouse with friend Natasha Ng after her mother opened a vintage thrift store at Peace Centre and pushed her to start her own business in a neighbouring unit.

The gallery represents nine artists, who are all Sota students or alumni, and was such a hit – chalking up 125 sales on its opening day – that PlayPan offered it a second unit within its first month.

Ms Lui, 19, said: “The experience has taught me to just have faith. I was actually really reluctant to start this because I didn’t think it was possible, and wondered if people would even buy our art, but now I see there is a chance to do art in Singapore.”

Blueprint Arthouse’s art pieces range in price from $60 to $3,500, but it also offers more affordable merchandise, such as prints and stickers, which cost $2 to $15.

Ms Lui, who plans to study fine art in university, has no foreseeable plans to open another gallery, but said she would do so if a suitable space became available.

While many of PlayPan’s tenants are young people with little memory of the original Peace Centre, there are also older folk who remember the fading mall’s heyday.

One such tenant is locksmith James Ho, 75, who grew up in Selegie Road and started his business at the mall about 40 years ago.

After PlayPan’s takeover, he moved his business to Parklane Shopping Mall next door, but used his original unit at Peace Centre as an inventory space and also helped new tenants duplicate their units’ keys.

Speaking to The Straits Times as he packed up the last of his inventory, he said: “I can’t bear to let go. It’s hard to find another place like this.”

Another tenant is LocalThriftSG owner Rosli Lasa, who moved into Peace Centre only during the PlayPan era but said he has a special attachment to the space as it was built around the time he was born.

The 52-year-old said: “I’m really sad to see this place go. I used to always go to the coffee shop on the second floor with my friends in the 1980s.”

LocalThriftSG has another outlet in Haji Lane, and Mr Rosli said he is still searching for a second space after Peace Centre closes.

“There’s been a lot of change in Peace Centre since PlayPan took over, but it’s a lot of change for the good,” he said, adding that he has thoroughly enjoyed engaging with the younger crowd of creatives.

Documenting Peace Centre

Ms Ethel Pang in August 2023 started creative documentary project A Piece Of Peace Centre to capture the mall’s extended lease of life.

The 26-year-old, who works on the project full-time, said she was drawn to PlayPan’s idea of creating an incubation space for social enterprises and social impact projects.

“I just don’t really see many examples of that in Singapore, where there is a viable kind of business model that sustains the ability to be involved in social impact work or in supporting social impact work,” she said.

In November 2023, she decided to take up tenancy at Peace Centre to observe the day-to-day life of the new community in the mall, which is largely closed to the public on weekdays.

She also opened her project for other creatives to work on their own projects related to Peace Centre, tasking them to produce alternative forms of documentation. It now has five projects under it, ranging from performance art pieces to interactive installations to public workshops.

Asked what she has learnt through the project, she said: “My takeaway is that things take time to develop, but this is also a very complicated thing to grapple with.

“Things like building a community and a village take time. In terms of conflict management, building a culture, you cannot do that within three to four months.”

One of the most eye-catching aspects of the revived mall has been the graffiti and murals covering its walls, but Ms Pang said these have also caused tension among PlayPan’s different stakeholders.

While the art was originally commissioned for specific locations by PlayPan, other artists and members of the public also gradually began leaving their mark on the walls.

Some felt that graffiti art had turned into vandalism when mall-goers started spray-painting profanities on the walls and even defaced commissioned artworks.

Said Ms Siow: “It takes a whole village to build up something so wonderful for everyone’s enjoyment and appreciation. Time, effort and energy are spent to curate all these wonderful art and installations. It just takes one minute to mindlessly destroy all these efforts.”

She added that there were many times when the building’s security, which is employed by Peace Centre’s owners, wanted to call the police over the vandalism.

But PlayPan’s founders convinced them not to do so, as they did not want the vandals’ academic or career records affected, preferring to use mentoring instead to resolve the issue.

“Nobody said this was going to be easy. Old building, lack of resources, vandalism, short timeframe, difficulty onboarding partners, demanding people – the list is long, but we took that much-needed leap of faith,” Ms Siow noted, adding that the community that has been forged in recent months is “nothing short of a miracle”.

Ms Pang said her time at Peace Centre has been fruitful, and that she is thankful for the community forged as it is something she can take away even if the physical building is gone.

“It’ll be different for sure, but relationships can keep on building,” she said.

PlayPan 2.0

On Jan 28, PlayPan will host a three-hour jam session led by composer Clement Chow and share more about its next steps. Dubbed PlayPan 2.0, the movement’s next phase will transition into the digital and academic world.

Peace Centre’s lights will go out for the last time at 5pm on Jan 29, but its legacy lives on in its community’s hearts and stories.

The Institute of Technical Education and gaming firm The Sandbox will partner up to produce a digital twin of PlayPan’s Peace Centre – a three-dimensional representation of the building that will be hosted on a website, complete with the community’s different artworks and contributions to the space.

Mr Hong said: “PlayPan 2.0 is our leap into the future, where community-building transcends physical boundaries.

“This new phase will harness the power of digital platforms to foster creative collaborations and social engagement on a global scale.”

Researchers from SMU’s School of Social Sciences and the Lien Centre for Social Innovation will also be documenting the PlayPan experiment as a case study.

Lien Centre for Social Innovation associate director Ho Han Peng said: “The overall vibrant, creative and engaging network of tenants, participants, documenters, partners and visitors at Peace Centre in the last few weeks fuels a sense of coming-togetherness for joy, sharing and inspiration.”

Editor’s note: This article has been edited for accuracy.