Category: Photography

Undulations: The Toronto Launch

After launching at Book Bar in November 2025 in conversation with my erstwhile editor and publisher Jeremy Fernando, I’m excited to formally launch Undulations in Toronto! In the depths of winter, no less. Come for an invigorating convesation with writer and musician Jacqueline Chia and listen as I read some of the poems and talk about my wider practice with photography and poetry.

RSVP: https://www.eventbrite.ca/e/book-launch-marc-nair-tickets-1977773508805

Meanwhile, here are some thoughts on the book and on this dialogic process between text and image that continues to fascinate.

Undulations began as a way of listening. 

Point Reyes, with its cliffs dissolving into fog and its estuaries breathing with the tide, offered not only vistas but conversations—whispers of wind through cypress, the long hush of the Pacific, the voices of people who once walked these paths and those who continue to live in relation to this place. 

To stand in such a landscape is to be reminded that the land itself is never still. It shifts, bends, recedes, advances—always undulating. The self is also undulating, a major life shift, a leap from Singapore to Canada. Maybe that’s why part of me resonated so much with Point Reyes. 

The undulating hills of California

*

Photography, for me, is the first act of attention. A photograph asks to stop and hold still what is in motion. It is a way of recognizing that something ephemeral—the way light drapes itself across a dune, the way tule elk pause against the horizon—can be gathered, if only briefly.

The meanings of photographs are never fixed, are not contained solely within the photographs themselves. They are read against a viewer’s own lived experience and rely on a combination of the viewer’s sensitivity, knowledge and understanding as well as the specific context in which the image is seen.

This is where poetry enters. Writing is a second listening, a return to the same moment but with a different ear. The poem asks what the image does not reveal: What does it mean to walk here, to dwell in a landscape layered with histories of ranching, migration, erasure, and resilience? How do we read geography not as a backdrop, but as an active partner in memory and imagination?

The dialogic practice of pairing poems with photographs became a way of inhabiting both silence and speech. Together, they produced a rhythm of call and response, each form extending what the other could not hold alone. But neither can be too complex, otherwise they will become too difficult to exist relationally and demand their own spaces. 

Roy’s Redwood Preserve from Undulations (2025)

Chinese Makars, a 2016 book by Robert Crawford of contemporary Scottish responses to Chinese poets paired with photographs by Norman McBeath contains a ‘Photopoetry Manifesto’ which identifies aspects of their shared practice: 

  1. Photopoetry is more interesting and engaging when the photograph is not a literal illustration of the poem; and vice versa 
  2. Both poem and photograph should be able to stand alone in their own right.
  3. The pairing of poem and photograph should bring more depth, so each gains something from the collocation.
  4. The pairing should allow for serendipity. This is partly to do with the process of choosing which pairings to make, and partly due to the power of the pairing to excite.
  5. Within a set of pairings there should be a range of connective strands: again like a relationship, where there are lots of different facets of attraction and at the same time a deep consistency.

This dialogic rhythm guided the structure of Undulations: not as a linear account of Point Reyes, but as a constellation of meditations—on the people encountered, the land observed, and the intimate negotiations between presence and absence.

In shaping the book, I came to see this dialogue as more than aesthetic—it was also philosophical. Landscape photography often risks objectifying place, turning it into scenic cliches. Poetry risks the opposite: dissolving place into metaphor, which isn’t bad in and of itself, but could end up becoming too insular. By allowing each form to question and counterbalance the other, I sought to honor Point Reyes as both material and mysterious, as a geography that resists simplification. The undulating coastlines became a metaphor not just for the land, but for the practice itself—an ongoing oscillation between seeing and saying, between external witness and internal reflection.

Weaving in and around this is also the life-sized undulations that Carolyn and I have experienced in the year or so since we moved from Singapore to Canada, a leap from one continent to another, a wrenching, a displacement.

Ultimately, Undulations is not just a portrait of Point Reyes but an invitation to think with it.
The photographs ask: what is here?
The poems ask: what remains after we see?
Together, they trace how the geography of a place becomes a geography of thought, reminding us that to encounter landscape is also to encounter ourselves—unfixed, shifting, and always in motion.

A Secret Chord

We (Carolyn, Graham Norton the kitty cat and I) recently spent a week in Montreal and the Eastern Townships.

We took the VIA rail from Union Station, which gave us a (too) slow, scenic experience. The train ride tacked on an extra two hours each way! Apparently, the tracks were too hot to travel at speeds greater than 50km/h. The train’s speed topped out at about 140km/h, but really only for brief stretches, and mostly in the shade. North America and trains…

Montreal introduced itself to us with wide boulevards, a pleasing mélange of architecture and sparsely populated restaurants amidst the thirsty edge of a heatwave.

Our hotel was close to Chinatown, all two blocks of it, a tidy agglomeration of East Asian cuisine.


Internet research threw up some choice neighbourhoods to explore, and so we took the metro


(very nice and comfortable, Toronto, are you taking notes?) to Mile End, which can best be described as hipster, when hipster was still a term being used. In essence, fashionably dated. We walked through residential streets to find donuts, ice cream, bagels and a cute Japanese paper shop.


Verdun was another hyped-up neighbourhood that we visited. Its largely known for its beach, which was more of a sad-eyed concrete promenade by the St Lawrence River that morphed into a narrow path dotted with abandoned tents for the unhoused.


Its main shopping street, pegged between La Salle and Verdun metro stations, felt vague, vacillating between overpriced restaurants, dollar stores and ambiguous attempts at street art. ‘Try too hard’ is the Singaporean phrase that springs to mind.


All this while, over the city, the visage of Leonard Cohen looms, his music suffusing streets with gravelly possibilities, shadows of melodies played but never fully known and maybe, Montreal is that apotheosis as a city; caught between the cosmopolitanism of Toronto and the French-forwardness of Quebec.


*

The drive out to the Eastern Townships was mostly on Highway 10, a winding highway that led us quickly out of the city limits into open, prairie-like farmland with various small mountains massing in the distance. After the dense brush and relatively flat terrain of Ontario, the undulation was most pleasing. Hiking up the hills was not on the cards, however, but we did get in a number of hikes and made our way through a few small towns that, to be honest, promised more than they delivered.

The cat was intrigued, but not overly impressed

Essentially, the Eastern Townships is cottage country for the Quebecois, who speak French strangely, aren’t that friendly and generally tolerate visitors insofar as they pump tourist dollars to the local businesses.

We stayed in a cute Airbnb in Orford, which is a central base for exploring the region. On our way there, we passed through Knowlton, which has a few historic buildings and the Knowlton Pub, where we inhaled a rather heavy serving of poutine and local stout. In fact, we made a point to drink from local microbreweries throughout the trip, and they did not disappoint! Quebec’s beer might even have the edge over Ontario in its complexity and stopping power.

Believe or not, this is poutine! Well, the Knowlton Pub version of it

We walked along the Cherry River, just a short stroll from our AirBnb, drove to Marais de la Rivière aux Cerises for a very germane hike and popped over to nearby Magog (what a throwback Biblical name!) for supplies from a well-stocked Metro.

Artwork along the Cherry River

It rained for a whole day, so we had to adjust our plans to spend more time in Magog. But when the skies cleared, we drove north to Sherbrooke, which is the largest town in the Eastern Townships. Its more sprawl than anything. The main streets seemed pretty rundown, although a bunch of spread-out murals, which tried to depict the history of the town, was a laudable attempt at encouraging footfall. Still, parts of the town felt pretty rundown and almost unsafe. That being said, we had a classic fast food lunch at Louis Luncheonette, a local chain with affordable prices and mountains of fries. Bois Beckett Park, on the north of Sherbrook town, was an absolutely lovely park to walk in and was well worth the drive.

On our last day, the sun came out and we drove to the Abbaye de Saint-Benoît-du-Lac, a Benedictine abbey established by a group of exiled monks from France in 1912. Overlooking Lake Memphremagog, the building, which is modern and quite beautiful, beckoned from a distance. But we couldn’t access the grounds and so we were mostly confined to a well-stocked gift shop that brimmed with local cider, jam and cheeses. I guess monks, too, have to make a living.

Other notable highlights worth a mention: slumming the opening of the Montreal Jazz Festival and catching up with friends over sangria with such eclectic conversation topics like making paint from rocks.

As we get older, it becomes less and less about the bucket list and more about filling smaller containers with these memories, that can be made only in particular seasons of our lives. Also, one can’t always haul around the bucket, but there’s always room on the shelf for one more glass jar.

Notes from the edge of the quotidian 

  • Today begins in a fog-curtained dawn, the road a long library of silent commuters. Headlights punch through aisles of unread houses, spines stiff from a freezing rain that has fallen steadily overnight. 

  • You are on a bicycle, wobbling over potholes and a street as poorly paved as a country road. The end of Brock Avenue is out of sight, yet the forecast is for a blazing sun later on, the promise of a clear day that sounds its arrival like a randy bullfrog, or a pageant of elderly white men in the changing room of the community centre, shedding their clothes for the pool, squirting lesser parts of themselves behind paper-thin doors; all sound, no fury. 
  • Younger men, buff from pulling and pushing weights, huff in small shorts around squares of sunlight that break through the concrete and the glazed windows; puddles of warmth for happy dogs to roll in. 
  • In the gymnasium the air is thick with paddle slaps and frustration, bad line calls and unwanted lobs; the wary partnership of temporary allies: pickleball as metaphor for war. Indoors, stray light confuses the eyes, leaves an afterimage of where you thought the ball was going, where you lunged in vain. 
  • Later on, the typewriter on your back wobbles in gusts of wind more suited to a mountain range, the bicycle threatening to spill itself at each intersection of traffic and storm.

  • Two little girls are leaning against the heavy door at the clubhouse in the narrow aisle where you set up your table and typewriter. Daughters of market vendors, they chatter on about ponies and possibilities, while you put up the sign for poetry on demand, begin the slow process of determining who might need a poem today. It is about looking for a stray heart-thread, one that needs pulling, to unravel and open into the possibilities of poem as offering, poem as oracle.
  • Today, two people do not return for their poems. One is an Indigeneous woman who said, stutteringly, that she went to Residential School. She says it like a badge of wounded pride, a challenge: Look! I’m here now, I have survived. Her name is Wren. She never sees her poem.

  • Another man wants a poem for a friend of his, a poem of encouragement. He, too, does not return. What does it mean?
  • Other poems that people ask for at the farmers’ market today are about home and spring;  home as a premise, a promise, spring as the wish they can almost see coming true. They ask for reassurances about parenting, take poetry as kindness, the soft memory of something to return home to. 

New Work, New Shows

Quite fittingly, for National Poetry Month, I’m showing some work in two different places, both in the west side of Toronto.

shades of blue

This is a solo photo-haiku exhibition at the Toronto Public Library in Albion. Different hues of blue elicit and evoke various emotions. The images were taken at different places around Toronto, on any day that promised blue skies.

The exhibition runs from 2 – 29 April 2025.
https://www.torontopubliclibrary.ca/detail.jsp?Entt=RDMEVT545654&R=EVT545654

Power of Words

Don’t discount the kitschy title. Arts Etobicoke has brought together a number of West-end poets for a pretty vivid and varied group exhibition of word-based exhibits. I’m pleased to have two works in there, one that blends photography with a poem and the other is one of my pyrography on found wood artworks. I’ll be showing the original artwork as well.

Thoughts on Tempo(rary)

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.
-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 [. . .].

(From the 1963 Singapore National Tourism Act)

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.  

Ang Mo Kio: A Love Letter

From the opening lines of my poem, Ang Mo Kio, written close to 20 years ago:

I live under a white man’s bridge;
between the heart and minds
of private estates, aching to escape
into my own language, born in
the mouth of strangers but redeemed,
through tea breaks of popiah and kopi


I grew up in Ang Mo Kio, or AMK, for short. It was my home for more than 30 years. After I moved to Tiong Bahru, I only return to visit my parents, who are still there. They came when AMK was still a fresh estate, in 1980. The MRT was still a pipe dream being laid from Yishun to Toa Payoh and AMK Central felt a lot more communal and compact.

I returned recently with my friend Daniel. Armed with our cameras, we spent an afternoon in the sun and rain, experiencing the seasons of AMK, as it were.


For decades, Ang Mo Kio was the gateway town to the north, with the MRT and a comprehensive bus interchange a focal point for travel towards Yishun and Woodlands or out east towards Hougang. Today, the Thomson-East Coast Line adds to commuting options with a station at Marymount and the upcoming Cross Island line promises a lightning-quick way to reach the far east without making an awkward traverse through town. 


Ang Mo Kio is aging into its own rebirth, but not everything has been torn down and reinvented. The town centre still holds fragments from its beginnings in the 1980s. 


I was never a void deck child. I preferred to hang out in libraries and read in my bedroom. Walking around with Daniel as we each find our own story angles, I see familiar businesses and buildings that have been here for forty years, or more.


And the mostly older people that populate these spaces fill me with an odd sense of longing. It isn’t quite nostalgia, because I was never sentimental about life here. It was always a little too functional, almost nondescript. And yet, a semblance of being is furrowed through those times of walking to buy a computer game on floppy disks from J Tech, or queuing up for the famous S11 fish and chips (still there, not so famous now). Or the line that snaked for a few blocks to watch Jurassic Park at New Town/New Crown cinema, which is now the site of Djitsun mall. 


We find the original sign for the estate, nearly denuded of colour, a fitting repose for the past. Across, a field that had always been empty is the site of a new BTO. But the library is where it always has been, so too the mosque and the greasy KFC beside it.


A sudden downpour turns the mood introspective, or maybe it’s the coffee we have at Brew & Co., across from Broadway Plaza. An artisanal coffee joint was unheard of in a heartland estate even a few years ago. Small seeds of change. A new temple has sprouted next to the polyclinic, a convenient site to pray for healing or relief. 

An estate grows, but it doesn’t always decay. 


All photos by Marc Nair and Daniel Tan.

The Earth in Our Bones

‘Nations are invisible lines that people assign meaning to.’

Geralt of Rivia in The Witcher, Season 3

This little nugget of truth dropped in the latest season of The Witcher. Geralt is nobody’s citizen. He waltzes across borders and kingdoms, holding fast to his creed and clan. His people. And where he allies in common cause, he will shed blood and sweat to defend or obtain what he deems as justice. Or what viewers deem as swashbuckling muscled heroics. It says something too that these seemingly reductive tropes of good and evil continue to persist, or even determine the shape of lives. And the geography of our politics does go a long way in encompassing how we think about our relationships with each other and with earth. 


During the pandemic, there was a lot more decisive engagement with nature. With everyone on lockdown, going out for a walk was both necessary and also a chance to engage in the relative solitude of nature. Some countries called the lockdown a ‘shelter-in-place.’ I really liked that, because it made me think about this idea of place and what it means to derive shelter from where we are. Shelter is so much more than having a roof over our heads. It is also safety and comfort. But this injunction, born out of necessity and fear, allowed grass to grow wild on sidewalks. Bushes went unpruned. Rewilding became the province of nature, not man. Hardly any cars were on the roads. The air grew fresher. The malls loomed empty like scenes of apocalyptic abandon. And then, a year on, when vaccines had kicked in, we inched our way back to the full-blown consumption that marked our lives before 2020.

But the pandemic had also, for a while, erased those lines that separated us from our neighbours. We were truly vulnerable together as a species. It’s tragic that it took a virus to bind us together. But collectively, we did, for a while, live a little more in sync with the earth, feeling its rhythms over and under the buzz of a silenced city. 


The Earth in Our Bones is not a book about being an eco-warrior or a climate change activist. It is a book that sees our essential selves as complicit with the ground beneath our feet, considering skin and sand and glass and concrete as part of the body. It is a book that sees the self, laid bare and offended, but also redeems the self under the aegis of the natural world. Not a call to arms, but a call to link arms, to observe, remind and acknowledge us, and the land we inhabit. 

Book launch: 29 July 2023, 5.30pm, Seng Poh Garden, Tiong Bahru.
RSVP

Everything is Grief

It is easier to see 
everything as grief,
as things soon broken
or sold with a warranty
limited by technology’s
invisible frontier, almost
always within reach

Like pencils with carbon 
cores compromised 
out of the box,
each act of sharpening 
a futile wish to define 
the point of being here

while somewhere, someone
is sending an email
with your name on it 
as a portent of trouble 
with missing attachments
couched in corporate joy 

To grieve is to be shrouded
and yet remain exposed,
bereft in a back alley,
waiting to be picked up
or recycled, like some 
brutal reincarnation

We who crave meaning,
who chide the sun and long 
to live forever, should embrace 
the dark side of the moon 
instead, from where
shuttles never return

Ghim Moh 65:24

Sometimes it’s necessary to change the way you look at things. Just because. It’s why people shoot in black and white, stripping the colour out of their viewfinder. There’s a simplicity to a monochromatic image. The focus is on composition, on contrast and the interplay between light and shadow.

These images were shot on the GFX50R in the 65:24 aspect ratio. It replicates a wide panoramic 65x24mm negative, which is similar to two standard 35mm frames side by side. I used the 50mm f3.5 lens for a 40mm full-frame equivalent field-of-view. The photos were surprisingly wide, nevertheless, but kept a street-style aesthetic because of the focal length.

Three Rooms

My new exhibition/installation, Three Rooms, has opened at Projector X: Riverside. The entire space is a durational (18 month) pop-up concept by the folks from the Projector. It’s been a fruitful few months conceptualising the exhibition, which was made possible by the largesse of Karen Tan, founder of the Projector and enabled by the rest of the Projector’s capable, cheerful and inventive team.

What is Three Rooms? 

First, another question. What was before Projector X? Two years ago, the X Entertainment Club, a night club that was heavy on Carlsberg, Chivas and dancing girls closed abruptly, literally overnight. Clothes were strewn everywhere. Work permits were left in unlocked drawers. Posters for a grand re-opening were rolled up on the floor. A ledger with a list of big-boy spenders lay open on the table.

Everything was locked up and left, as is, for almost two years. I was asked by artist Yen Phang and Karen to drop by when the team had just taken over the space to see if I had any ideas for it. Immediately, I offered to document the space as it was and as it would change over the coming months. The bar area would be painted over and the bars stools and high tables would be piled up to make room for regular tables and chairs. In another large, contained space that was formerly the dance floor, leather couches surrounded a high stage, dusty with memories and leftover streamers. Under the stage, a life-sized Santa slept on his side, forgotten from a long-ago Christmas. This space would become Neon, the new theatre for the Projector. The entire club was Pompeii-like in its abandoned glory and stasis, down to the huat kueh offering sitting innocuously on the bar counter.

And then there were the three rooms. The staff lounge, the office and the dressing room. These were gloriously abandoned, chock full of detail and a veritable trove of memories. Of course, it was also foolhardy to want to keep them intact, but… that’s what we did. So, in addition to photographing the interiors, I decided to write a short piece of fiction for each room, using details I found to offer a glimpse of interlocking narratives in the months before the club shut down.

Besides the stories, there’s also a plan to create more work, maybe even a book, from the rest of the photographs, so this won’t be the end of the project!

For a more detailed read on the ethos and thinking behind the entire space, check out Home Ground Asia’s article here. 

You can head to The Projector’s website to buy tickets for a movie, or visit the space at Riverside Point for a drink or two and check out the rooms.