Tempo(rary) is a photography and poetry dialogue that was developed online over the course of a month with Burmese artist Maung Day. It first premiered in Jan 2020 in Yangon and has found a new lease of life at SEAFocus 2025 in Singapore. The exhibition is on until 26 Jan.
This was how the creative process worked: I sent Maung Day an image and he replied ekphrastically with a poem. Then he sent me an image and I replied with a poem of my own. We also had poem/poem and image/image pairs and even one pair where the text was overlaid onto the image. The aim was not to stick with one particular way of looking but to explore the inner tempo of each piece. The exhibition is accompanied by metronomes going off at a variety of tempos, based on the ‘speed’ of each paired piece.
Tempo(rary) was conceived as a dialogue between two very different cities. Yangon, for many years, has been under the aegis of a military junta, which kept the city (and the country) in something akin to a time warp. Whereas Singapore, since achieving independence in 1965, has been unrelenting in its pursuit of progress, almost as if it felt it was running out of time to prove itself.
The photographs generated from Singapore in Tempo(rary) are about states of motion. They involve roads and rivers and sit atop deeper uncertainties. In contrast, the Yangon images speak assuredly about the gaze, the melding of the inner self with an outward feature of the city.
There are few visual correlations that span both cities. Telephone cables, in abundance in Yangon, have long been buried underground in Singapore. Yangon is just one city in a sprawling country while Singapore is its own city-state, dense and with an absent hinterland. Even minorities are treated very differently in both countries. Yet, through it all, a sense of unease manifests itself in the artwork, juxtaposing the quotidian within these fragments of dissonance. I think the tone we were both going for was an ambient resistance.
The practice here is typical of my work across genres, where the subject matter in both the poems and images draws inspiration from the quotidian. Even the collaborative nature of the exhibition falls in line with my work with artists from other disciplines.
After looking at all of the images that had been submitted for the exhibition, Marie-Pierre Mol, my curator, noted that Maung Day had an image of the peacock, Myanmar’s national bird and a recognizable symbol of the country, while I did not have something that corresponded quite so strongly. She suggested that I try to take an image of something recognisably Singaporean. And so I landed on the Merlion.
In a foreword to a 2009 poetry anthology on the Merlion, one of the editors, Malay novelist Isa Kamari, noted, “The Merlion bears witness to the commerce and enterprise of both the indigenous people and the immigrants. Have they become one? What then is the impact of the iconic development and prosperity on them?” The Merlion was conceived in 1964 as a logo for Singapore’s Tourism Promotion Board, but transcended its status, with a series of statues being erected over the years. A fictionalized origin story was also developed for it. For over 20 years, a giant, 11-storey Merlion Tower stood on the island of Sentosa, blazing light out of its eyes at night. Academic Kelvin Tan has written extensively on the conceptualization of the Merlion as a focal point for the spectacularisation of Singapore, led by “the authoritarian state’s hegemonic exercise of constructing an official history to contextualise its own lead role in Singapore’s survival and success” (Tan, 74). This was seen through such concrete symbols like the Merlion. A lavish history was invented for it in order to attain “historical legitimacy and credibility in an attempt to inspire respect and acceptance for it” (Hayward, 116). This is fascinating from the perspective of literary production. The Merlion has sparked a range of artistic responses from poetry to installation and even animated characters. While the permission around the use of its image remains strict:
-The Merlion Symbol is to be used in good taste.
(From the 1963 Singapore National Tourism Act)
-The Merlion Symbol is to be reproduced in full.
-Wordings, graphics or objects are not to block or be superimposed
over the design of the Merlion Symbol [. . .].
The very circumstances surrounding its creation as a work of fiction seems to permit a range of ekphrastic responses to the Merlion statue as the physical embodiment of a fictional text. Eventually, after photographing the Merlion from multiple angles and focal lengths, I found a way to resist the cliché and offer the body of the Merlion, bereft of its tourist devotees, against the juxtaposition of a warning sign.
The warning sign is the focal point of the image, leaving the Merlion slightly defocused but still recognisable. Warning signs, a visible reflection of the varying degrees of permission afforded to citizens in the country, are in abundance everywhere. In the empty spaces known as void decks beneath thousands of public housing blocks are signs forbidding everything from smoking to sleeping to playing football. There is no outright forbidding in this sign, because I don’t think it is a crime to swim here, but, as the steps go down right to the water, it is very easy for someone to fall in. One might argue that it is a practical sign with a practical use, but when juxtaposed with the Merlion, its function changes and it becomes a warning about the Merlion, as a kind of portent that may prove to be more dangerous than kind, ill-omened than lucky.
Maung Day’s poetic response, in lines that seem to echo the arc of the spout of water, doesn’t respond to the image head-on, but references a speaker walking with unsettled eyes through a landscape. The last line conceivably swings between the speaker and the Merlion as an unvoiced subject, ‘I want to leave this place. It doesn’t understand my eyes.’ Could this be the Merlion asking for permission to leave? Maung Day’s writing, here and in the other poems, stems from a place of cryptic subjectivity. His speaker often feels dislocated within a dystopian state. There is a sense of unease, of things denied. His poems dig at the layers beneath the image, pushing against surface representations of typical city scenes.
