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A break in sunny Singapore
Singapore has always been particular about how it presents itself. Whatever impression or narrative it wants to convey comes clear and straightforward. Often, the first mental image I get is of a lengthy refinement process, ideas hammered into shape by committees and countless reviews.

For a long time, then, a visit to the National Gallery — where rigorous curation is not just overt but unavoidable — didn’t seem urgent enough to squeeze into my calendar. Call it a misjudgment stemming from personal bias, haha. When it comes to art (or poetry, or music), I’ve always liked finding breakage: those instances of contradiction, of unexpected contrasts and variations, of surprising departures from established forms or themes.¹ But considering this country’s overriding interest in cohesion, wouldn’t its institutions be (too) well-practiced in sanding down precisely those instances?

Well, 2022 started with a rare block of free time, so I figured I might as well go and find out.

The National Gallery is free for Singaporean citizens and permanent residents, as well as local students and teachers. Let me digress a bit here: I’ve always found admission rules for museums and galleries fascinating, because they say a lot about the audiences these places would like to speak to, and what they might want to say.²
Not all places allow residents in for free, for example. So what does it say about Singapore that it would invest resources to make sure these groups always have access to the cultural narratives being woven in these institutions? (Students are a common category for these kinds of exemptions anywhere, but it’s also interesting to see which other groups enjoy similar privileges, and in which venues. The Louvre, for example, offers free admission to unemployed people; MoMA offers the same to active members of the US military.)

Starting off my visit, then, I was expecting displays chosen to convey a story of smooth, harmonious development.³ Except, nope: the exhibition my friend had picked was headlined with a question.

“Siapa nama kamu?” three galleries’ worth of Singaoporean artwork had apparently been assembled to ask. “What is your name?” When we approach identity as a question instead of a statement, doesn’t that create space for contrasting viewpoints and intriguing contradictions?

Unsurprisingly, a lot of the earliest “art” pieces are products of colonialism: sketches from European officials surveying the region and assessing its potential for production; observations from travelers venturing into “alien” territory and cataloguing its inhabitants like otherworldly specimens. All of it filters rich, vibrant realities through dehumanising perspectives — a violence that’s at once abstract and yet painfully visceral.

It’s jarring to see how casually this violence is recorded and perpetuated. Even more disconcerting, I guess, is seeing these pieces displayed as a prominent part of Singapore’s artistic lineage in the first place.

Doesn’t that raise interesting questions (and not just for Singapore)? How are we supposed to label and present artifacts crafted with the kind of sensibilities that we now identify as ignorant, domineering, harmful? Where do these pieces fit into a country’s artistic history, and how do we allocate a place for them without erasing or downplaying the massive colonial enterprise they’re part of?

On its own, this section of the exhibition seemed to drift close to glossing over that colonial baggage. But later sections seemed to offer a direct counterpoint in this lovely series of photos:
I love these because they reward slow looking. 🙂 As evidenced by the artwork above, colonial empires busied themselves with catalogues and records. How fitting, then, that these photos are processed to resemble old botanical diagrams — but upon closer inspection, you can just make out words running through the plants. It turns out that these are excerpts from colonial literature, grafted onto plants at historical sites in Singapore. These installations had then been left to rot, highlighting how reams of language can be produced to define a place, but the place itself grows over all these attempts at containment in the end.

This idea of boundaries and overgrowth often resurfaces when I think about Singapore. Linked to the notion of cohesion, this place thrives on order, limits, clearly defined lines. It’s rigid and efficient — to the point of suffocation, some might argue.

Looking at the next set of photos, it was easy to see why people might think that way. Wu Peng Seng is regarded as one of Singapore’s most influential photographers, and his focus on technical craft and careful composition seems to encapsulate the cold, studied rigidity that the country is sometimes criticised for.

I suppose these photos caught my attention because of the utter lack of breakage. Humans are messy in many ways, but here, Wu Peng Seng manages to fit them neatly into (the illusion of) an ordered whole. There’s a line in the National Gallery’s article about this collection that sums it up well:

“The human figures in his photographs were never meant to be individuals; they are simply part of the ‘pattern’ that he was creating, a point of interest in the composition.”
Charmaine Toh, “Notes on Photography: Wu Peng Seng”

These photos seem to be Singapore at its most self-assured. Even then, though, the human elements that have been rendered inert within them seem to ask: to achieve this, what needs to be left unsaid?

The “Tradition Unfettered” wing struck me as a counterpoint to that, too. Collecting pieces from the 1940s – 1980s, this section focuses on various Singaporean artists’ attempts to use traditional techniques and media to say something unexpected or different. As the National Gallery itself put it, “Tradition in art was a creative source but also a burden,” and the wing brought together attempts to grapple with that weight.

Looking through these pieces, the recurring questions seemed to be: “What have the bounds of tradition asked us to leave unsaid? Why? What can be achieved when we try to tackle those subjects and themes anyway?”
The bulk of the collection spotlights the use of established Chinese ink painting techniques to depict unconventional subjects or themes. Most of the pieces in the slideshow above, for example, skip typical subjects like landscapes, instead finding motion and dynamism in scenes like kite-flying and waterfront life. Established standards for, say, scale and depth are also challenged, as seen in the collapse of spatial delineations in the third photo in the slideshow.

Likewise, this piece caught my eye because it uses traditional batik methods to produce the boldness and emotional intensity of abstraction. Similar to Chinese ink, batik is a tradition with deep roots. Seeing both infused with modern sensibilities was intriguing and delightful.

In fact, I liked this wing’s preoccupation with depicting everyday life and interiority in general. From what I’ve seen so far, notions of bounds and cohesion are felt keenest in the realm of public expression here. To see artists communicate the intensity, texture, and value of a person’s inner life — the opposite of how people appear in Wu Peng Seng’s photos! — still feels a bit rare and surprising.

In a way, the exhibition’s final section amplifies that sense of probing past certain limits. “Art breaks free from the white cube,” the National Gallery says, as Singaporean artists from the 1980s onwards turn a critical eye to the question of what constitutes art in the first place. “Siapa nama kamu?” — and this wing, it seemed, delved further into that question by asking what that name could be applied to.

The creation of art, to me, is a dynamic process, in the sense that artwork is somehow made and remade with each viewing. What I mean to say is that I subscribe to those schools of thought that cast viewers as participants rather than mere observers, even if that role may not always be obvious (may, in fact, be deliberately obscured sometimes).

That said, I’ve typically found museums and galleries to be prime venues for reinforcing that contrary illusion of viewers as observers. From the exclusivity implied by curation to the rules that shape visitor behaviour, these spaces often strike me as adept enforcers of a palpable, if invisible, line between artwork and viewer at each turn. As with other movements that emerged from the 1970s onward elsewhere in the world, though, the period of Singaporean art showcased in this wing seemed to have sharpened its awareness of that line and sought stubbornly to demolish it.
Works like the one above, for example, deliberately highlight the viewer’s role as co-creator: there is no chair unless someone carefully takes steps to construct it within their field of vision.

Likewise, the huge aluminum installation at the rooftop gallery draws attention to how our view of the horizon changes as we walk within its spirals — a statement that acknowledges and requires viewers to act as participants. The horizon embodies the limits of our perception, but our appraisal of those limits shifts as we move through time and space, adjusting ourselves to whatever circumstances happen to wind themselves around us.

“What is your name?”

Emerging from the exhibition, what lingered wasn’t any particular answer. Identity is a tricky thing, always in flux and resistant to any simple cohesion because of it. If anything, what I appreciated most about my visit was the gallery’s willingness to acknowledge how much of a question it can be (even for self-assured Singapore!), and to create space for exploring the wide range of attempts various artists have made to define and then defy the bounds of that question over time.
2022-02-12
Cold hands, warm heart

Last year, when certain health conditions went from “mildly inconvenient” to “genuinely worrying,” I joined a friend in trying some traditional Chinese medicine. During the consultation, the doctor made a point of telling me that my limbs were cold, indicating poor circulation.

This wasn’t surprising. People have been declaring me cold my entire life.

“Cold” applies in different degrees, I’ve learned.

Some people mean it literally. My dad likes to check my hands when we’re on trips, often just to make a joke about how “chill” I am when we’re on vacation. My grandfather used to do the same.

Other people use it as a synonym for cruel. I will admit that I can be unforgiving when I want to be. “Like a harsh wind,” somebody said once, the kind that bites, sharp and raw, on a stormy day.

Some people use it to say “logical.” It’s kind of funny how many acquaintances have independently arrived at “robot” as a descriptor. And aren’t robots cool and dispassionate, calculating outcomes unhindered by sentiment? They mean it as a joke, but there’s always truth in those, anyway.

Whenever new people use the word “cold” with me, I always wonder which one they actually mean.

A friend who uses “cold” for “sensible” recently asked me: “Do you have any New Year’s resolutions?”

I suppose people expect SMART answers from me. (How does that acronym go? Specific, measurable — all these buzzwords that corporations love?)

The reality is that I don’t often set particular goals, just intentions. And the truth underpinning that reality is that there’s a particular type of person I keep trying to be,¹ so I haven’t had to set any new intentions in a long, long while.

Back in high school, one of my friends surprised me by calling me warm.

I had never been described that way until then. In fact, other people’s opinions before that had leaned towards the opposite: cold, closed-off, unreadable. I’d come to believe those opinions, and it never occurred to me that anybody could think otherwise.

Then my friend paused one day, regarded me with all the matter-of-fact certainty of a teenager deciding something true about the world, and said quite simply, “You’re actually a warm person, you know?”

Would it be exaggeration to say that some part of me has been thinking about that ever since? Probably not. I must’ve spent months trying to reconcile it with how I viewed myself at the time, and I’m still not sure how accurate that assessment might have been when it was made.

But I think what’s important is that I came to conclude that I wanted it to be accurate. I wanted to do my best to be a warm person — to espouse the kindness, care, and comfort that implied.

“Why would love be rooted in silence and scarcity?”
Strange, the ways questions like this find us sometimes.

There are terrifying risks attached to caring, or so anecdotes and pop culture tell me.

In particular, there seems to be a common aversion to being “the one who cares more.” It’s a setup for regret, or so I’m told²: Who wants to be the fool who put their heart in the hands of people who might not even spare a thought for protecting it?

But that kind of thinking has always been hard for me to accept because it paints love as a blind feeling, as well as something that calculates value in terms of returns.

Personally, I prefer to take a cue from people like bell hooks and think of love as a verb: a continuous choice that manifests in action; an effort to show up for people in whatever way (even as distance or absence, sometimes) they need, entailing both intention and responsibility.³ You think about it, and you choose — and doesn’t a big part of that choice include determining whom you trust enough to show up for in the first place?

As for reciprocation, well, I’m wary of that expectation because it cuts a bit too close to reducing interpersonal connections to something transactional, measured by function, utility, and exchange. There’s something to be said for allowing yourself to care without reservation, regardless of whether people give that care back in the same forms, or to the same degree. (On my most optimistic days, I like to believe that the love we send out always returns to us somehow. Perhaps from different people, or in different ways, but it comes back. Naive, maybe, and a little reckless — but I’ve always had a soft spot for beautiful ideas.)

I don’t know about anyone else, but I find some measure of reassurance in being able to affirm my ability to still trust people in that way: to identify enough good in them to come to care for them; and to identify enough good in myself to be able to try and offer them that care, in whatever way is suitable.

In the end, though, people aren’t static. Sometimes we change beyond our capacity to keep caring for each other.

Is it something to regret?

I don’t think there’s ever anything regrettable about loving people as much as we can. Regret only blooms, I think, when we refuse to let that love change as it needs to, and when we question the value of all its previous iterations once change inevitably comes.

“Everything you love will probably be lost, but in the end, love will return in another way.”
(a quote often attributed to franz kafka)

My grandmother’s death anniversary is coming up soon.

I still remember the day we watched her die. Whole families could still stand around a hospital bed then, unfettered by COVID restrictions or the fear of playing vector to any viruses.

My cousins were still on the way. My dad and sister had gone to meet them.

The monitors were beeping out plummeting oxygen levels, and the reactionary panic in my uncle’s eyes was quickly yielding to the realisation of impending loss. My mom gripped my grandmother’s hands tighter than she ever had, as if to keep her with us through sheer force of will. My aunt hardly dared to breathe, like maybe if we all held our breaths for as long as we could, my grandmother’s might not have to sound quite so strained.

In the end, when the monitor blanked out and lapsed into a last, unbearable screech, it was just us. The tears would come later, and the grief, and the tender accounting of what opportunities we did have to convey a love that no longer had anywhere to go. But in those first few minutes, there was just us, caught in a blooming silence, and I had to pull my mom away from that hospital bed with cold but steady hands.

Hearing myself called “cold” again these days, I wonder which meanings the word is meant to carry. To acknowledge change and decide accordingly — is that logical, or is it cruel? Or is it simply necessary?

At the start of every year, I ponder what it means to be warm.

Today, I think I am writing this as a reminder: We get a choice in whom to show up for, and the people we choose deserve love that is — to borrow from that tweet — abundant and obvious. In this context, then, warmth is a generosity of spirit; a cultivation of deep wellsprings of patience, trust, and respect; and a willingness to care as much as we mean, to follow through with our choices at every instance.

But that’s the crux of it too, isn’t it? At every instance is a choice, and at some point, I’m allowed to choose differently. Isn’t there room in the concept of warmth for that?

After all, the ways we give and accept love can differ, and they can change. Part of the process of choosing people is figuring out, again and again, what they need from us, what we need from them, and what we’re then able to provide and accept from each other.

And then it’s a matter of living out that understanding, steadily, warmly, for as long as we can bear to.

Life will break you. Nobody can protect you from that, and living alone won’t either, for solitude will also break you with its yearning. You have to love. You have to feel. It is the reason you are here on earth. You are here to risk your heart. You are here to be swallowed up. And when it happens that you are broken, or betrayed, or left, or hurt, or death brushes near, let yourself sit by an apple tree and listen to the apples falling all around you in heaps, wasting their sweetness. Tell yourself you tasted as many as you could.
From The Painted drum by Louise Erdrich

(Or here, maybe, for the rest of that final playlist.)

2022-01-03
On photos

Last year, in a bout of optimism, I bought myself an instant camera.

Film has always felt like permanence to me, the same way anything written with ink and paper has always carried more weight. There’s something about translating your impressions into something solid, something you can touch — something that could outlast you, even, if handled with care.¹ My mom was a photographer when she was younger, and that gave me years to appreciate how tangible images could be: the careful adjustment of dials; the heft of film canisters; the smell of developing chemicals; the distinct, rubbery thwap of a photo flapping in eager hands.

So, when it seemed like there might be opportunities to create memories worth saving again, the first thing in my cart was a film camera. (Instant film, as a concession to convenience and to my own lack of skill. It was the easiest to get and seemed the most forgiving to a beginner, haha.)

Maybe borders will open up in 2021, I thought (the fool). Maybe I can see the people I miss — and wouldn’t that be film-worthy?

It hasn’t quite turned out that way.

From a certain angle, my small, intermittent attempts at instant photography remain an exercise in optimism.

On sunny weekends, I take my camera to parks, to boardwalks and islands, to other people’s homes. The box on my bedside table fills with seemingly trivial snapshots. I sort through them and pick out the nicest ones when it’s time to send more letters home.

“Nicest” is doing a lot of work here. I’ve sealed envelopes containing photos that probably won’t make sense to most people. The pond at a nearby reservoir isn’t high art, nor is the McDonald’s from the park near my flat, but “nicest” in this sense has always been judged by how well each photo can convey the same message:

Here are the places that constitute my life now. Here are the spaces that I hope you can come to fill someday.

Maybe, if they can be less unfamiliar to you, our worlds won’t feel as strange and distant.

What is drifting apart, after all, if not people receding into strangers who seem utterly unknowable?

From a different angle, of course, you could say that my camera punctures that optimism with each photograph. A shot captures a particular moment, and in these pandemic days, don’t most moments always somehow speak of absence and isolation?

Cheeky would-be philosophers would tell you that it depends on how you look at it. Lately I haven’t been able to bear to look at all. Constant rain and too much change have kept my camera shelved. In the meantime, I send other things: cards, stickers, ink and paper. Different attempts to achieve the same imagined permanence, if only for a while.

2021-12-31
Collected quotes, 5 of n

This entry is part 5 of 6 in the series Quotes and Excerpts

We’ve been losing too many good people this year. Within a little more than a week of each other, bell hooks and Joan Didion both passed away — staggering losses in a time that’s already taken far too much.

Both of these writers have shaped so much of my perspective on the world, so I think I’ll spend some time here to highlight a few quotes. (There are too many good ones to put in a post, so I’ve just plucked a few from my Kindle’s records.)

Imagine how much easier it would be for us to learn how to love if we began with a shared definition. The word “love” is most often defined as a noun, yet all the more astute theorists of love acknowledge that we would all love better if we used it as a verb.
… “Love is as love does. Love is an act of will — namely, both an intention and an action. Will also implies choice. We do not have to love. We choose to love.” Since the choice must be made to nurture growth, this definition counters the more widely accepted assumption that we love instinctually.
From all about love: New visions by bell hooks

I’ve always preferred this perspective on love, framing it as a constant choice that’s then carried out through intentional actions. To describe any kind of love as a simple “feeling,” some happy but fleeting mix of chemicals in our brains, seems like a disservice to such a complex, powerful force in people’s lives.

At its best, love is a commitment to do right by oneself and by others. It takes effort and bravery to love, to do so in a way that’s right and kind and healthy, and to keep choosing to do so in a world that makes such choices difficult to carry out. The least we can do is to acknowledge that — the difficulty and depth of it all — and to consider our choices with clearer eyes.

To begin by always thinking of love as an action rather than a feeling is one way in which anyone using the word in this manner automatically assumes accountability and responsibility. We are often taught we have no control over our “feelings.” Yet most of us accept that we choose our actions, that intention and will inform what we do. We also accept that our actions have consequences.
To think of actions shaping feelings is one way we rid ourselves of conventionally accepted assumptions such as that parents love their children, or that one simply “falls” in love without exercising will or choice, that there are such things as “crimes of passion,” i.e. he killed her because he loved her so much. If we were constantly remembering that love is as love does, we would not use the word in a manner that devalues and degrades its meaning.
From all about love: New visions by bell hooks

Of course, accepting that definition of love as intentional — of love as verb — involves a responsibility to ensure that how we say we feel and how we act are always aligned. Do our actions convey the love we claim to have? If not, then aren’t we diluting the meaning of that word, by using it to describe something less than what love ought to be?

The Last Kiss (2006) dir. Tony Goldwyn
I haven’t watched this movie (and probably never will), but the quote is relevant regardless lol.

I want there to be a place in the world where people can engage in one another’s differences in a way that is redemptive, full of hope and possibility. Not this “In order to love you, I must make you something else.” That’s what domination is all about, that in order to be close to you, I must possess you, remake and recast you.
from Reel to Real: Race, Sex, and Class at the Movies by bell hooks

When I was writing my undergraduate thesis, one of the questions that nagged at me (and that eventually formed part of that thesis’ conceptual fabric lol) was about the nature of empathy. In so many accounts of witnessing conflict, why does empathy have to be founded on finding some kind of similarity with victims? Why does the observing self have to subsume the witnessed person(s) — “Ah, yes, I see this part of myself in you; I see this part of you in me” — to empathize with them? Does a lack of any kind of resemblance then preclude any chance at empathy and connection?

Eventually I found conceptual frameworks that allowed for what felt like a more equal mode of empathy: one that didn’t require reinterpreting people into something familiar or personally recognizable. Again, there’s a lot of idealism here, because this mode of relating to people is obviously much easier said than done, and I don’t think I’ve come even remotely close to it. But it’s still something to strive for, I think — that ability to reach out to somebody without plucking out only the aspects that you would like, or without forcing them into a particular image or concept that might not fit them but which is easier for you to grasp.

You have to pick the places you don’t walk away from.
from a book of common prayer by Joan Didion

I submit that we can go one step further and build places we won’t walk away from. I mean “place” on so many other levels beyond the physical, too. There are so many spaces we come to build between ourselves and other people: emotional spaces where we find the ease and freedom to feel as much (or as little) as we need; mental spaces of shared ideas, lively discussion, or even just the feeling of having the opportunity to say what you want, if and when you would like to; and so on, and so forth.

It’s important, I think, to recognize our part in building those spaces. Again, love is intentional, and so is the process of building the means to sustain it.

(There’s so much emphasis on romantic love in some of my circles these days, but I’d like to think that love can be so much richer than just romance. There are so many forms that love could take, so many avenues to find it, so many spaces to nourish it. To limit that to one form feels a bit self-defeating.)

We are imperfect mortal beings, aware of that mortality even as we push it away, failed by our very complication, so wired that when we mourn our losses we also mourn, for better or for worse, ourselves. As we were. As we are no longer. As we will one day not be at all.
From The year of magical thinking by Joan didion

Today I am thinking about the loss of two people who gave me a lot to think about, and whose words gave me guideposts as I started trying to make sense of my own life. It feels a bit like being unmoored and set adrift in the sea, this sense of no longer having some of my heroes to look to. But I feel a bit more confident in charting my own way forward thanks to what they’ve invited me to think about, and that’s as much as we can ask for from people who try to teach us something, right?

I’m not telling you to make the world better, because I don’t think that progress is necessarily part of the package. I’m just telling you to live in it. Not just to endure it, not just to suffer it, not just to pass through it, but to live in it. To look at it. To try to get the picture. To live recklessly. To take chances. To make your own work and take pride in it. To seize the moment.
And if you ask me why you should bother to do that, I could tell you that the grave’s a fine and private place, but none I think do there embrace. Nor do they sing there, or write, or argue, or see the tidal bore on the Amazon, or touch their children. And that’s what there is to do and get it while you can and good luck at it.
Joan Didion, in her commencement address to the UC riverside class of ’75

2021-12-26
Pandemic playlist, part two

This entry is part 5 of 8 in the series Annual Soundtracks

The second year of the pandemic has dissolved so many of the certainties and constants that structure everyday life. Hours and days bleed into each other; half the time, I’m hard-pressed to remember what month it is, let alone what the point of my various daily endeavors are.

In the middle of this boundless, inchoate mess, music has been a necessary anchor. That sounds like a grand statement, but it also works on the most mundane level: On far too many days, looping the same song on full blast turned out to be a key prerequisite to being a functional human being.

I’ve always liked this exercise because it creates a rich and often surprising sketch of the past year. Spotify Wrapped’s jazzed-up data is cool, yes, but there’s more texture to these annual playlists. Each song finds its way here because of the specific emotional logic of a certain moment. Or, put a different way: I needed these songs, at one point or another, and this compilation says more about how my year went than a programmed breakdown of my account data ever will.

2021-12-24
Collected quotes, 4 of n

This entry is part 4 of 6 in the series Quotes and Excerpts

He had so much to give—stories, reflection, engagement—that somehow none of us ever noticed just how much he was withholding. He could love everybody on the terms on which they needed to be loved, give everybody what they needed to receive; and so, in the end, none of us really knew him. I’ve come to realize that he didn’t quite know himself, either.
Danielle Allen on her cousin Michael Alexander Allen, in “The Life of a South Central Statistic”, published in The New Yorker

If there is a universal truth about beauty — some concise and elegant concept that encompasses every variety of charm and grace in existence — we do not yet understand enough about nature to articulate it. What we call beauty is not simply one thing or another, neither wholly purposeful nor entirely random, neither merely a property nor a feeling. Beauty is a dialogue between perceiver and perceived. Beauty is the world’s answer to the audacity of a flower. It is the way a bee spills across the lip of a yawning buttercup; it is the care with which a satin bowerbirdr selects a hibiscus bloom; it is the impulse to re-create water lilies with oil and canvas; it is the need to place roses on a grave.
From Ferris Jabr’s “Beauty of the Beasts,” first published in The New York Times Magazine and included in The Best American Science and Nature Writing 2020.

Reminds me a lot of Le Guin asking about the functions of galaxies. What is beauty there for, and why does the concept even exist for us? This wasn’t quite my favourite essay in the collection, but I appreciate how it tried to stretch its line of questioning beyond the immediate scientific implications of its subject matter.

We overlook too much when we hold science and the humanities apart.

“Photographs are precious. They preserve memories. […] They may be nothing more than scraps of paper, but they capture something profound. Light and wind and air, the tenderness or joy of the photographer, the bashfulness or pleasure of the subject. You have to guard these things forever in your heart. That’s why photographs are taken in the first place.

[…] Important things remain important things, no matter how much the world changes. Their essence doesn’t change. If you keep them, they’re bound to bring you something in return.”
From The Memory Police by Yoko Ogawa (1994).

i chase after that feeling.
which is to say:
i want to almost not exist.
almost is the closest i can get to the sky.
From “Gay Incantations” by Billy-Ray Belcourt

2021-07-21