Use Metric or Die!

2012

Presented as print as part of a group show called Campaign City 2012​ in the Central National Library, curated by Alan Oei.

When I arrived in Singapore in early 1981, posters from the 1979 Use Metric campaign could still be seen around town. Among the many surprising things that made my first year in Singapore an on-going process of discovery, this was one of the clearest signs that I had stepped into a truly foreign culture. Coming from the country that had if not quite invented but at least defined and implemented the metric system, I found it really strange to see that there was a need for such a campaign to change people’s way of making measurements.
 
While people are often aware of the French origin of the metric system, few know what it actually meant at the time of its creation in 1795. France was then still going through the last phase of the Terror that had seen tens of thousand of people guillotined. The country was in a “Year Zero” frame of mind, inventing a revolutionary society in which everything had to be new, including systems of measurements. Hence the Metric System, conceived as a universal system, which in the words of the philosopher Condorcet was to be “for all people for all time”. The idea of making a visual link between these two events across time became the basis of my contribution. 

Exhibited Artwork

使用公制, 可免一死!

100g:      一百克
125g:      一百二十五克
250g:      两百二十五克
500g:      五百克
1kg:        一公斤
5kg:        五公斤
10kg:      十公斤

But if these are meant to go on placards that supermarkets use to display prices, then the numerals should remain as they are with only the weights being translated.  Hence:

100克
125克
250克
500克
1公斤
5公斤
10公斤
 
克       (ke)
公斤   (gong jin)