Nanyin is a genre with a contested history in Singapore. Primarily practised today by musicians playing in the 78-year-old guild of the Siong Leng Musical Association, the form was re-adapted during the 1970s by founder Teng Mah Seng, whose revisions and shortening of classic texts to reflect a “Singaporean” perspective has stirred up controversy. In recent years, Siong Leng has brought its specific practice out of Singapore to various cities around the world. The different approaches reflect Siong Leng’s changing positionalities in the worlds of presumed “traditional” Chinese heritage vis-à-vis cosmopolitan “artistic” practice. International tours to Paris and New York were staged to elite crowds on behalf of national agenda as exhibitions of soft power, even as they were designed as multisensorial experiences invoking invented rituals of handwashing and meditation. Visits to Asia—particularly Quanzhou—exist for different purposes of capacity building. One the one hand, deployment of the proverbial “East vs West” cultural model might seem applicable to the curation of Singaporean nanyin in Europe and the United States. On the other hand, one can also see how multi-layered aesthetics presented in these shows intersect in variously scaled playing fields, where notions of audience “knowingness,” class, imagined Chinese authenticity, Singaporean trans/nationalism, and presumed “universal” standards of artistic professionalism come into unequal interplay.