CALENDAR UPDATES

It’s unbelievable what bad user interface can do to your progress. I have 3 drafts from 3 different periods sitting in here, but none of them have been completed or sent due to the interface of this platform. As mentioned previously, I’m also still trying to figure out what format works best for this newsletter. I realised though, that I want to write one best when I have a lot of emotional, non-work feelings, so here is one where I have ditched all sub-headings and am running with it.

The past few months have been hectic, from producing a show in Japan end-March, then coming straight to London in April (not forgetting 2 nights of hospitalization in Singapore between, right after my birthday). I also want to share this essay I wrote about my latest work, JPY50,000 (SGD414.94), which seems to deviate a bit from my recent practice but is something I enjoyed making a lot.

Yesterday, I hopped on an Uber that my friend booked. When I got off, I realised I had dropped my sweater. I’m usually very careful but I have been stressed and distracted lately. This sweater is literally the last piece of my mum’s clothing that I own, because she threw everything else away. She wore it when she was young. We tried our best to get it back but it hasn’t been very hopeful. London is unlike Singapore.

I started wondering what I would rather lose more.
My phone?
My hand-knitted sweater?
The typical, useless thoughts that flood one’s mind when panic takes over.

A few nights ago, I woke up finding myself on a couch. It was cold, but the duvet was warm. I stared at the ceiling, trying to remember where I was. Beside the couch was an antique woven rug, worn in spots, colours dulled. I was surrounded by large plants. I was in Tim’s house, in the Netherlands. His partner lay asleep on the bed at the far end of the open concept house. We lay just metres apart, linked only by an absence.

15 years ago, I woke up on a much smaller couch in Bedok. I was tangled up in a white fancy throw that often slid off the couch whenever we sat on it. A shaggy IKEA rug lay beside me; we would often find Tim’s loose change in the pile because he loved lying on it after getting home from work. I could hear his muffled snoring coming from the room beside. He was always a heavy sleeper and it took ages to drag him out of bed. It was a time when phones didn’t go into the bed with you and you didn’t wake up staring at e-mails or the like. I can hardly remember how that feels.

It’s strange and ironic that he laid silent now between his partner and myself. Maybe soundly sleeping. It was very windy that afternoon and his partner pulled out a jacket from Tim’s cupboard. A ‘special’ jacket, in shades of blue, Japanese-style, which Tim wore only for ‘special occasions’ besides his usual black garb. 15 years ago, I would pick my outfit for the next day from Tim and his roommate’s closets. On the occasion of a birthday dinner, I took one of his navy shirts and fashioned it into a skirt/pants. I remember he was so appalled (but I’m sure he was impressed) And 15 years later I am borrowing his clothes once again.

Yesterday, I was walking aimlessly after having lost my sweater. I found myself in Piccadilly Circus. 19 year old me once co-founded a ‘fashion label’ called “47 Piccadilly Circus” with someone special. I remember why we picked 47—it was a number that linked both of us. But I can’t remember why Piccadilly Circus. So I walked over to look at the space. It turns out to be a literal pedestrian crossing. Some moments like these feel so bizarre, like a scene out of Cloud Cuckoo Land. Am I receiving some sort of hint or signal from the past? I glanced around the crossing, but everything was almost painfully mundane.

I have an annoyingly long memory especially from my younger years. But, when the time comes and you realise you are the last person holding the memory, it becomes almost unbearably lonely.

WHAT I HAVE BEEN UP TO

Residency

I couldn’t believe it when I was told that I was shortlisted for the interview. I took the interview in Takamatsu, possibly in a loud panicky voice, in the TSUTAYA Share Lounge in the main JR station. I thought I had screwed up the interview, so imagine my surprise when I was told I had been picked from 1,200 applicants for the Delfina Foundation Residency.

It’s funny how you fight so hard to get somewhere, especially as an outsider of the art world; auditing yourself, your image, your work. In my case I saw it as an incredible learning journey. But you finally clamber up onto this glamorous platform, and you are told—that all the art world wants to see is someone who is trying not to be anything but themselves. BE YOURSELF. It’s funny how just being myself would get me nowhere even near the ladder to climb up to this place. I’m grateful to be here, but it is frankly disorientating. I look back at all the old versions of me; the kitsch, the flamboyant, the tongue-in-cheek—each one beaten down in Singapore, told that I’m too this or too that. I remember one ‘important person’, the head of the visual arts sector somewhere in Singapore, telling me I took too long to crochet lace, the wall looked ‘too empty’, and I should try and ‘buy readymade doilies to fill up the rest of the wall’.

In London, I met with a curator of a big gallery. She said, “I don’t like to tell people what to do, but I would suggest that if someone ever told you you ‘need’ to fill up the space in a gallery or you need to produce in more quantity, don’t listen to them.” She described to me what great exhibition design could do. How you could literally show just 1 small artwork and how that could be powerful.

I knew all of that, even when I was a student who had never travelled. I’d known so many of these things, instinctively, when I was free. But I was forced to unlearn it on my quest to climb up to that platform. And I won’t hide my self-indulgence. It makes me so sad. I feel like giving my old self a big hug. Because no one did. I was repeatedly told I was wrong, over the past 8 years. And that part of me can never come back. One of my older works was titled after a line from All The Light We Cannot See by Anthony Doerr. It was a line that caused me the most sadness in the entire book. It is,

“What You Could Be”

It is never knowing something that could have been that hurts the most, I think. It ends before it begins.

Being in London, aside from the amazing museum/gallery visits, meeting all sorts of people you only hear about online and having lunch with them, leading this ‘dream artist life’ in this almost fantastical residency… Every one of the 13 of us in this cycle used this residency in a different way. For me, I didn’t achieve very much. The biggest change I feel has been within me. Strangely, I had to go away, to go closer to myself. It’s as if a mirror doesn’t exist in your periphery. I saw the contrasts between London and Singapore, and more than ever, the great divide between Eastern and Western thinking. I have always felt the power of a Singaporean is sitting on this boundary, if you know how to access it rather than deny it. I love being between things.

One of the things I meant to explore here was the boundary between Craft and Art. It’s always intrigued me, but I realised it is still a touchy topic with many. It feels like a majority lean towards demolishing these boundaries created by old white men now in their graves. But that is part of my curiosity—can a boundary simply be demolished because we know that is the ‘right’ way to go? Or can it only be demolished by digging into its foundations to understand its materiality? Can it even be demolished, or do we simply acknowledge its presence and create a new or many new ways to cross over, under, through it?

My almost-obsession with this makes people think I am keen to uphold the biases and stigmas tacked to craft. For someone who has practised and respected craft since I was 7, how can that even be possible? I had always found it silly when people told me crochet could never be seen or sold as art. And that fuels my curiosity in the root of this mindset, how people see craft in a way different from how I do. The very things people judge craft on—focus on technique more than ‘ideology’, hand over mind, decorative—are the things I respect and I feel art can learn a lot from. Many might be surprised how much knowledge our body can hold, that cannot be put into words.

Why, especially post-COVID, is craft seen more as a ‘material’ in an artwork, than a technique? What I mean is, the inclusion of craft (largely ceramic and textile) is almost symbolic, carrying ideas of labour, time, ancient knowledge, etc., rather than the value of the crafted object itself, which is a result of skill, technique, and accumulated knowledge.

One of the things I am creating during my residency is a participatory survey to facilitate conversations about this (hope I can share some results in time). The most ironic thing is in the midst of making it, I am witnessing the fluid boundary in real time, and it sometimes throws me off.

Recently, I’ve also been ruminating on these ideas and their relationship to empowerment:

East-West
Collective-Individual
Freedom-Free Will
Agency-Autonomy

My practice has been focused on ideas of multiplicity, duality, and boundaries containing these entities into ‘vessels’. When we say ‘multiplicity’, we are agreeing that boundaries separating these many ‘identities’ exist. Multiplicity could suggest hundreds or thousands of possibilities, but it is still acknowledging that they are different, even if only slightly.

Being in London and surrounded by less Asians than I usually am, I have been quietly observing the nuances of ‘Collective thought’—which I associate with one considering community and society in decision making, and ‘Individual thought’—where one makes their own decisions for themselves and knows to bear the consequences (or receive rewards) themselves. Considering only oneself in decision making seems to constitute Free Will—where one does not feel coerced into any decisions. But is there a difference between Free Will—doing whatever one pleases— and Freedom—actually being free, namely, in control or empowered?

Consider the opposite; can one be free and empowered, even with collective decision making?

Thank you again for reading to this point, if you have, especially in a wordy piece with loose thoughts rather than focused information, and a lack of images. I appreciate your presence.