EVERY season offers a reason to excel at what you do best.
As more people enter their silver years, they bring with them a wealth of experience into the next phase of their lives. But unless they’re well connected and have friends in high places, they are unlikely to get to use their talent. When you hit the wall, you run the risk of fading out.
There is a group of silvers who are still very much plugged into the system. They have taken advantage of their newfound freedom to chase their interests more aggressively. In their silver years, Dana Lam and Chong Huai Seng are embarking on new areas of endeavour.
Dana has just written a book, The Art of Being A Grandmother: An Incomplete Diary of Becoming and is immersing herself in her art.
After a long career in media and angel investing, Huai Seng has decided to focus on his passion to acquire art and support young artists.
What are the ingredients required when you start up a new career at an advanced age?
Join the WED WEB CHAT — The Golden Runway, on 1 February from 12:45-1:30pm (SGT) via this link: https://zurl.co/uu48
Dana Lam has always appreciated the arts.
She started off as a journalist at The Straits Times before turning her attention to writing books. She also worked in theatre — TheatreWorks Singapore and Checkpoint Theatre — wrote plays, acted, and she also shared time with her art.
Along the way she became the President of women’s rights and gender equality group, AWARE — twice.
Her recent high point is the launch of her book, The Art of Being a Grandmother: An Incomplete Diary of Becoming, a charming book created during the pandemic.
During the circuit breaker, Dana kept her mind oiled by working on small drawings on a daily basis since she couldn’t go in to her studio to work on her big projects. These small drawings of delightful domestic moments with her grandchildren and family, together with her observations of life as it drifted by, soon became a 200-page book rich in anecdotes and alive with Dana’s drawings.
Chong Huai Seng is a Colombo Plan scholar who worked for the Economic Development Board promoting US investments into Singapore.
He then joined the financial services industry where he held senior positions as CEO in two foreign owned stockbroking and fund management companies for over 10 years. This led to him jumping into the media space, becoming the major shareholder and executive director of two SGX-listed companies involved in textbook and magazine publishing.
He left the media industry in 2003 and became an active angel investor in start-up companies in Singapore and China.
Chong first started collecting western art in the early 1980s. Since then, he has expanded his wide interest to also include Chinese contemporary ink, Southeast Asia and Street Art.
Like investing in start-ups, Chong is partial to supporting young emerging artists from Singapore and the region.
With his daughter Ning Chong, he is the co-founder of The Culture Story and Family Office for Art.
Join the WED WEB CHAT — The Golden Runway, on 1 February from 12:45-1:30pm (SGT) via this link: https://zurl.co/uu48
