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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
‘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
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
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.
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.
For a year in which I made just one trip overseas, there has, surprisingly, been no shortage of projects and collaborative opportunities. My fellow artists proved to be anything but horizontal and together, we devised an unending stream of ideas that was realised through a range of platforms and forms. Video was pretty foregrounded this year, but I also had the incredible privilege to put together and perform two live shows.
January
Together with Demond Kon, Kevin Martens Wong and Nuraliah Norasid, I was commissioned to write a long sonnet that functioned as one of several anchor pieces for the 2020 Light To Night Festival. A line from my poem was on an artwork that sprawled invitingly across the Padang. It felt like a good omen to a year that was already hearing ominous whispers of a wildfire virus straight outta Wuhan.
Note for Note: Stop, Look and Listen
This year’s edition of Note for Note further iterated on previous versions. Usually, the poets would perform their work but for this round, I curated a selection of poems based on the broad palette of the city and divided the performance into three segments, ‘Stop, Look and Listen,’ playing with the ideas of movement, changing spaces and listening to the city in all its varied postures of listening. The performance was superbly directed by Cherilyn Woo and introduced me to the graceful movements and voices of Victoria Chen, Tia Guttensohn, Krish Natarajan and Vignesh Singh. The accompanying soundscape was crafted by the incomparable Bani Haykal.
February
I was a participating artist in The Singapore Festival 2020, held in Lim Chin Tsong Palace in Yangon, Myanmar. As part of a larger collaborative exhibition called ‘A Matter of Time’, curated by my gallerist, Marie Pierre-Mol, I paired up with Maung Day, a cutting-edge poet and multidisciplinary artist and activist. We created a series of photograph-poem pairs that were accompanied by a series of metronomes ticking away at different tempos. It was also a lovely opportunity to reconnect with friends and collaborators like San Lin Tun and Nicola Anthony. The larger festival was a marketing attempt by STB to bring Singapore food, fashion and culture to Myanmar. It was a hit-and-run exhibition: setup, showcase, tear down and zip back to Singapore. If only I had known, I would have extended my stay for a few more days…
March
Uncanny Yishun
Part of the Buy SingLit Campaign, Uncanny Yishun was a unique walking tour around Khatib and Yishun. Each checkpoint was a site of uncanny news, often illustrated by a poem and performed by either one of our two able guides, Sharda Harrison and Lian Sutton. As the shadow of Covid-19 loomed ever larger, Crispin Rodrigues and I were given a choice: go ahead with the tour or postpone it to September. We pressed on and were rewarded with four fantastic rounds of the tour in early March.
Handbook of Daily Movement
This was certainly a show that I would have been heartbroken to have cancelled. It was probably one of my most collaborative shows. I worked with music, dance, costumes and we even had a fashion label sponsor the dancers.
Fortunately, The Arts House decided that the show must go on. It would be the last live show that I would do until December.
April/May
April to June was a period of reconfiguring, experimenting with the online space. I teamed up with music producer James Lye and a whole crew of talented singers and musicians to make Livin’ Covida Loca, a parody song that reflected the world in lockdown.
June
A poem that was originally written for The Straits Times found its way into an anthology of pandemic poems published by Penguin India. For the first time, I find myself featured alongside two other Nairs.
August
Originally scheduled to be held earlier in the year, the Alliance Francaise generously kept the exhibition space available for Tsen Waye and I and when they reopened, Sightlines was the first exhibition in the door. We were grateful to have a long run of two months in the space as well as the chance to reimagine some of our work in terms of size and text layout.
September
A soft start to my new residency with the Exactly Foundation. The topic is Offence and my stomping ground is the Bugis Precinct. The mode is street photography and I have been drawn to the liminal points of infraction between private and public space. These are often tacit, fleeting and contextual, but they do exist, even in such a manicured city.
October
Crossroads Vol. 3 was another music collaboration with James Lye. This time, James produced the show while I performed poetry to the emotive sounds of PandaMachine and the improvisational genius of Michael Spicer.
November
I had a very different role in the 2020 Singapore Writers Festival. Normally, I’m used to being on a panel or two, be on a reading or even moderate a conversation. But this time, I pitched Poetry Bites, a video series where I interviewed ten poets over video. I filmed them (mostly) in their homes reading a poem and then had a short conversation with them about the poem and their work in general. The festival theme being intimacy, I thought that this would be a closer glimpse into process through the screen. Plot twist: I even interviewed myself!
Vaudeville-in-Place
Another fun collaboration, writing and voicing a spoken word piece to a dance piece conceptualised and choreographed by Victoria Chen and Valerie Lim.
Joshua Wong Weng Yew’s Pandemic Time project was a fantastic idea in a year where time seems to shift and warp and become elastic and interminable. 24 poets responded to the 24 hours in a day. I was given 8am.
December
My last official poems for the year were a pair written in response to Sing Lit Station’s Digital Travel Bubble, cheekily offered up in lieu of the cancelled travel bubble between Singapore and Hong Kong. Poets from each country were paired together and each had to write a poem about their favourite place and one that responded to the other poet’s favourite place. I was with David McKirdy, who wrote a poem about Fei Ngo Shan, or Kowloon Peak, while I wrote about Bugis. If anything, it just made me even more wistful and sad about the impossibility of leisure travel for a long time to come.
The mrbrown show Live!
Commissioned by SIFA for their version 2.020 festival, The mrbrown show live! was written, rehearsed and performed in the span of two months. It was a little rushed and we wished that we had more time to build the show, but 2020 being what it is, we were grateful for the opportunity to play four shows to sold-out crowds and even have a multi-cam livestream. It was a humbling, enriching and exhausting experience. I will do it all over again.
You could say this show has been 15 years in the making. Or that we’ve waited 15 years to make this show. Either way, a stage show is never a light undertaking. When I first started writing the comedy podcasts with mrbrown, I was still a trainee teacher in NIE, bright-eyed and bushy-tailed. Over the years, we had a string of fellow collaborators, including my brother, Ivan. One by one, everyone left as their paths diverged. But I stuck on.
It was kind of addictive, showing up week after week at the studio to take apart the news and ‘find the funny’ as we liked to call it. It was always about getting at the premise of the story and looking for a way to subvert it, whether through a committee meeting, a movie trailer, a parody song and so on.
Eugene Soh, leader of the band
Our drummer, Han Quan
The smooth keys of Yida
The main man: Our producer/director, James Lye
Nobody sponsored us, nobody paid us, but people listened. And that was enough. Of course, we also did it for free, so paying for content was never a barrier. But we did it too because we believed in the show. We started in the days before YouTube took off, which is why the show existed as an audio podcast for many years, but from 2013, the transition to video slowly, but inevitably happened. It was accelerated by the accidental creation of Kim Huat as a character, but we also realised that audio didn’t play well with social media platforms.
So eventually, the sketches changed to become more visual. Video was another animal, though, so there are a multitude of considerations to think about when it comes to production. 2020, for us, has been the year of the green screen. It’s been challenging to learn the ropes and execute, but like everyone else around the world, working from home has taken on a new and critical meaning.
Green screen goodness!
Which brings me to the show. Ironically, without the pandemic, it would never have happened. One of us, or all of us, would likely have been traveling and it would have been possible to block the three months needed to put a show like this together. Of course, the downside is that it’s just 100 audience members per show, although we are live streaming our final performance.
Silliness during rehearsals
The show itself is difficult to define. It is theatre only in the broadest sense of the etymology of the word ‘theatre’; to behold, to gaze upon, to be presented with.
Behold, here we are, upon a stage of our own doing (and undoing), bringing to you a retrospective of songs, monologues, sketches, spoken word and even improvised comedy.
It is a microcosm of thousands of hours of podcasts and video clips. It weaves the personal with the social, the serious with the silly, Christmas with the kooky.
This is our gift to you in 2020, to say goodbye to this scarred year with a smile and look forward to a better world in 2021.
The mrbrownshow LIVE! is part of SIFA V2.020. There are four shows from 25-27 December 2020. The last show will also be live streamed.
