Dear NIC Members and friends,

NUS MEDICINE INTERNATIONAL COUNCIL ART FOR KIDS WITH CANCER CHARITY DONATION & RAFFLE DRIVE

Thank you for your interest and generous regard for our effort to improve childhood cancer cure rates of kids in Asia.

Cancer is one of the top causes of death for children around the world. Here in Asia, cure rates are especially poor. Fifty per cent of the world’s burden of childhood cancer resides in Asia and only 20 per cent are cured. There is urgent need to improve the cure rates of children with cancer in Asia.

The NUS Yong Loo Lin School of Medicine (NUS Medicine) is well positioned to help. In just 25 years, we have turned around a situation where families of children with cancer often had to seek very expensive treatment outside of Singapore. Today, about 8 in every 10 Singaporean children diagnosed with cancer seek help in Singapore and are cured.

Perhaps you recall newspaper reports of 5-year-old Oscar Saxelby-Lee, a British boy who came to Singapore to seek help from NUS Medicine’s Professor Dario Campana and Associate Professor Allen Yeoh last November? Prof Campana and Prof Yeoh’s ground-breaking work made a profound difference for Oscar who had exhausted all treatment options in the United Kingdom.

The NUS Medicine International Council (NIC) of the Dean’s Office of NUS Medicine, is launching an “Art for Kids with Cancer Charity Donation Drive” initiative to raise funds for paediatric oncology research and education at the School, to continue to improve the cure rates for children with cancer in Singapore and beyond.

Please get in touch with NIC Administrator, Ms. Ng Hwee Koon at mednhk@nus.edu.sg if you are keen to contribute.

We would like to take the opportunity to thank our NIC Council member, Dr. Assaad Razzouk, who has kindly donated a painting of the late Steve Jobs, whose name is synonymous with innovation, to be given as prize for our charity raffle. We will also be holding a charity exhibition at the Fullerton Hotel – East Garden Gallery, space courtesy of the Fullerton Hotel, to showcase the whole series of captivating portraits on transformational innovators of the world created by celebrated artist Raouf Rifai, whose main subject is on humanity.

Please watch this space for more updates of the exhibition event that is currently scheduled to resume after Covid-19 circuit breaker restrictions are lifted.

The above is proudly brought to you by,

The NIC Team

About Raouf Rifai

Born in Lebanon, 1954, Dr. Raouf Rifai lives and works in Beirut. He holds a Ph.D, in Urban Planning from the Sorbonne-Paris I, and teaches art at the Lebanese University.

Rifai has taken part in numerous exhibitions throughout Europe, the United States, Middle East and Japan. His “Carnival of Darwiches” body of work was also exhibited in Singapore in 2013 and 2015, presented then by Sana Gallery and the NUS Middle East Institute. He has produced a vibrant, compelling and expressive body of work that is widely collected and successfully auctioned at Christie’s Dubai.

The “The Disruptors” collection

“The Disruptors” is a limited collection of ten paintings by the doyen of Lebanese artists, Raouf Rifai, presented by Sana Gallery. The featured “disruptors” are Steve Jobs, Bill Gates, Elon Musk, Jack Ma, Jeff Bezos, Mark Zuckerberg, Pony Ma, Satoshi Nakamoto, Sergei Brin and Yayoi Kusama.

Each painting is inspired by the “Darwich,” a recurrent presence in Rifai’s art. Rifai’s dedication to the Darwich resembles that of Paul Klee and his angels. Like Klee’s angels, Rifai’s Darwiches are many and varied. They share some common characteristics, foremost the fact that they are all rooted in human existence: they have weaknesses and flaws, a myriad of expressions, attitudes and emotions. They are the simple common man and the Sufi mystic; they are secular and spiritual; they are brilliant and less so; they are simple yet at the same time wiser than everyone around them; they are full of worries or playful; they cry yet derive humour from everyday tasks. In short, we recognise ourselves in them, they are us. “The Disruptors” paintings play on all these double meanings, adding humour, irony, exaggeration, and ridicule, to paint a wide canvas of the world’s social and political conundrums.

“My art’s main subject is Humanity,” says Rifai. “It is nourished by the history of our civilisation and our heritage.”