In 1844-45, the French custom officer Jules Itier travelled around Asia as a member of the Lagrené Mission, the first French diplomatic mission to China. Itier travelled with a daguerreotype camera to number of countries in the region and produced around a hundred plates that have been preserved. This research started in 2011established among other things that the earliest extant photograph of Asia is the daguerreotype of the Tian Hock Keng temple in Chinatown, Singapore, taken by Itier on the 6 July 1844.
Singapore celebrated 50 years of independence in 2015. The nation state has been repeatedly criticized as “a cultural desert” by scholars due to the cosmopolitan nature of the society. However, animated short films from Singapore are increasingly engaging national identity and culture as their premise.