Category: Photography

I was invited to read at The National Gallery Singapore on 24 Feb together with a bunch of really cool poets – Momtaza Mehri, Charlene Shepherdson, Jennifer Champion and Tse Hao Guang. We were responding to Minimalism. Space. Light. Object. an ongoing exhibition at NGS, either to the individual exhibits or on themes of form/anti-form, light or space. I wrote two new pieces for the reading. The first was after Tatsuo Miyajima’s Mega Death, where I spotted a single number counting up against an entire room of descending numbers.

Stubborn 

From distance, 
a pulsing envelope of blue magic 
beckons in irregular heartbeats, 
a chorus for the clicking crowd 

Seen up close, 
one number counts upwards 
while the rest descend like a
herd reasoning down to zero

One number walks upslope
an improbable anomaly
a refugee refusing order 
a sheep swallowing the language of wolves

The other numbers blink furiously 
as they chase zero, starting over
at their own pace, making up 
the apparition of a faceless crowd, 
lights going on in a silent room. 

The lone number climbs
against the tide, against all logical proof; 
glitch in the system, broken integer. 

Like that one child in class who keeps 
raising a hand to ask question 
after question, dissatisfied, 
holding up the diminishing lesson, 
holding time itself with a clenched fist, 
wired for a different world. 

The other poem drew its inspiration from Jiro Takamatsu’s pair of 1971 artworks titled Oneness of Wood and Oneness of Concrete. I tried to embody the idea of words contained within words through a series of haiku, where the four successive haiku that followed the first one comprised of words drawn from the latter.

Containment

Here is the earth and 
here we find, body broken 
between unread lines

Here the line is broken
between 
body and earth 

Find the unread body 
broken earth 
here, and here 

Earth lines,
find the broken here, unread, 
between 

Here between the earth
and body, we unread 
lines

Vital Possessions is my ninth (ninth!!) book of poetry. The roots of this book came about through the Gardens by the Bay residency in 2015. I had the opportunity to spend hours walking and thinking in the grounds of GBTB. Initially, I wasn’t enamoured by how planned and fake the gardens seemed to be. I am more a fan of wide-open moors and natural forests. But gradually, I came to see the gardens as that perfect synthesis between nature and nurture. It is, in many ways, the epitome of our garden city. The Supertrees are like our skyscrapers, inhabited by a variety of human flora, and the grounds of the garden are much like our planned estates, neatly segmented while still keeping a semblance of nature and enough variety to keep us sane.

The poems in the book began to be shaped by this overarching theme and along the way, they expanded as I explored and visited other green spaces. I also considered the way we interacted with our environment. Along the way, the title of the book morphed from Naturebiotics to For Yours Is The Garden to Vital Possessions. It became a treatise on what we believe and hold dear to in an age of uncertainty, where our faith is frangible and our knowledge fractured.

The book reads like one long narrative and dips in and out of the following themes: our relationship with nature and natural spaces, how technology interfaces with our lives and the votive value of nature. Haiku accompanied by photographs intersperse the poems. They function as pauses, a breath of image; quirky and quiet reminders of the unnoticed quotidian.

Ethos Books, my publisher, has been very patient with the manuscript over many moons of editing and piecing together the book. The cover proved to be especially tricky, because with such a title, it was truly difficult to find an image that would evoke a similar state of feeling.

The book launch is at the Esplanade Concourse on 11 August, at 5pm. I will be doing something rather different, and invite all of you to come and join me as Vital Possessions finally emerges into the world.

SLOW
a photo poem from Ghim Moh estate

Time pauses in the gentle estate,

waits for a signal to move into evening

with its crevice of empty offices;

the playpen with one child; waiting

for a dinosaur to come to life

for neighbours to exercise patience

while birds mock each other; a cage

is only a perspective, bars make

a slow corridor,
a vanishing

Intersection is a project that has been three years in the making. Often, ideas are birthed from an offhanded remark in the heady rush after  a successful show or exhibition. But it takes a certain doggedness to nurture that idea, coax it to life and rally the relevant forces to keep it blooming until it finds its perfect space to breathe and bloom. This exhibition and book was the result of never letting go of that idea. Nicola and I had this grand plan to create an artistic map of three neighbourhoods in Singapore, London and Yangon. The ensuing poems are artwork would resonate across themes common to all three cities. And through this process of intersecting various threads, we would hopefully find some nexus of meaning.

As a result, we’ve created 24 poems and 33 artworks. The exhibition opens on 10 January at Intersections Gallery, 34 Kandahar Street, and runs from 11 January – 12 February and 22 February- 5 March 2017.

There will be an artist talk on 17 January and I will be running a photowriting/walking workshop at the gallery on 11 February.

The book is a 60-page, limited edition risograph print of images from Nicola’s art together with my poems. Here’s what the cover looks like!

Here’s a sneak peek of one of the poems, accompanied by Nicola’s art.

Crowned, Colony

We used to play at founding Singapore;
someone had to be the Temenggong, ceding
everything he could see, never pushing back.

The rest of us were British, asking obvious
questions about the trees; why gelam
bark was used for sails, why frangipani trees

always grew in the cemeteries. Not once did
we think these roads and schools and
rules encircled the kampung. We believed

in the glittering crown of the colony, so we
banished rogue tigers across the water,
stooped to serve an empire of khaki and tea.

I’ve been making a daily photohaiku on Instagram for the last month. It’s been quite the challenge, to find an image with enough ‘space’ to include a haiku, or to ensure the image isn’t compromised by the existence of text on it, as opposed to being a caption. This, I suppose, is an experiment to see how text becomes part of the image, and therefore part of the visual representation of what a haiku could be. Less ekphrasis, more espresso.

Here are a few of my favourites:

Always a camera on the table,
always memory carded in its side,

the lure to capture some unspoken
angle in ordered frames, as if these

dimensions can tell the whole story in
double exposures. Time blurs the sea;

what is beyond is never considered.
Slow down the blinking shutter

so everything illuminates in well-
composed lines, grid-eyed, pleasing.

The aperture ring opens to its full yawn,
the moment snaps, shutting out neutral

densities, displeasing shadows, higher
definitions pixelated against purpose.

That’s all it ever is, isn’t it – a room left
in light, dots on the page, a grain of truth.