2020: In Review
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.
The mrbrownshow LIVE!
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.
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.
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.
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.
Tickets available here: https://sifa.sg/programmes/the-mrbrown-show-live
Photographs by mrbrown
FROM THE ARCHIVES: The Milo Van
This poem was one of my first ever spoken word pieces, written years ago when I was in university and completely in love with the magic of the Milo Van, which was a staple fixture after enduring annual cross-country runs in secondary school and JC. The Milo Van also made occasional visits to my university campus and I would add extra time to my commute so that I could queue-up for multiple cups of ice cold goodness.
The Milo Van (for the addicts)
The Milo van comes to school whenever there’s a bazaar.
Bright-eyed students peddle costume jewellery,
yoghurt with fruit topping, secondhand CDs and tables
of yellow, mildewed books.but all that, even the
showroom cars they bring in, is merely the prelude
for the Milo van, waiting in the wings, the belle of the ball,
her cup runneth over and onto the lips of fawning Milo addicts.
And how can you tell they are addicts? By the Milo energy bars
they eat to keep up their nervous smiles while waiting,
by the Milo nougats they sneak onto buses and trains
to tide them over until their next hit, by the flecks
of Milo powder making a guilty moustache on their upper lip
when they’ve crammed whole mouthfuls from the tin at home.
In the school holidays, Milo addicts are forced to pay
for watered down, uneven, insipid, iced Milo
in variant coffeeshops; the Milo dinosaur,
the Milo godzilla, huge uncultured mountains
of raw powder scooped without class or finesse,
floating amid crude chunks of ice,
poorer cousins to the Milo from the Milo van
Milo addicts have no Zurich park of free Milo,
they have to shoot up on a low grade, even score
something on their own, laying out their apparatus:
a metal spoon, Milo powder, warmed up milk and hot water.
But the difference between this and the Milo van is like
stretching out to pray facing heaven and actually being in heaven.
The Milo van is the mecca of consumption,
the ecstasy of nirvana, the afterlife of sweet nothingness.
Oh, to return as a Milo lover of the Milo van,
nevermore to have to drink Milo out of a can!
The Milo man drives the Milo van everywhere around the campus.
but wherever he goes, arts, science or engineering, its always
the same group of junkies standing around in silent longing, quaffing
1,2,3,4…even 10 cups in succession, quiet with their thoughts
of Milo mayhem as the viscous vicious malt chocolate ice cold
ice head sugar spinning cocoa mind numbing high,
higher, highest oh the rush….
It’s marvellous what Milo can do for you.
Sightlines at Alliance Francaise
Sightlines has opened at Alliance Francaise! It’s the ultimate dream for a photobook to find a larger home in a gallery, where more nuanced curatorial decisions can be made. I’m so grateful that Alliance Francaise kept to their promise to host the exhibition despite the dampening effects of the pandemic. Marie-Pierre Mol of Intersections Gallery is also co-sponsoring the exhibition, and she has been my faithful gallerist over the course of my last four exhibitions.
Waye and I were able to play with size, blowing up Monument to wall-sized and got Anita Zee, a designer, to work with us to rework the layout of some of the poems to resonate even more with the images. And AVS Printers is making really lovely fine-art archival quality prints of the work.
The short clip below is an introduction to the gallery and if anybody wants a personal tour, just holler at me!
After The Night Clouds
Last night, we got drunk on Indiana Jones
racing through the underbelly of temples,
breaking gods and errant priests with his whip
then hurtling home afterwards
as a mist hung over the moon.
We fell asleep dreaming of adventure,
holding each other against the fear
of never being able to fly again.
In the morning, we are exhausted, soaked from
the summer sun trapped overnight in tarmac.
I am steeped in stillness,
pretending to be nothing more than river.
The blanket lifts the top of the current,
foghorns out at sea are lonelier than ever.
The fan spins as fast as it can without
tearing off and flying somewhere else.
We have nowhere to go;
it is too early to be full of frustration,
so we become tongues of cool water,
slip our skins through the window,
past the last of the night clouds.
Where do bodies end?
Do we return to god
or become, valleys we’ve yet to see?
I hold you like a dam holds back
the edge of an ocean, now we dance
against the silhouette of songbirds,
now we are dissolving into air.
Be my hummingbird, my long kiss,
be my electric way home.
Let me tell you the same story
with a different ending every single time.
Uncanny Yishun
Amidst this time of postponed or cancelled gigs, I’m really glad that some things are proceeding as planned. Uncanny Yishun started life as an open call for an online anthology of poems responding to Yishun as a place, a phenomenon and a state of mind. From the entries received, Crispin Rodrigues (my co-editor) and I selected a series of poems that formed the backbone for a literary walk around the environs of Yishun.
The poems are interwoven with news stories, transforming quotidian blocks and innocent, shaded lanes into moments of hilarity and humour. I’m sure every neighbourhood has its share of WTF moments, but Yishun seems to have them in proximate abundance.
The four tours on 8th March will be led by either Sharda Harrison or Lian Sutton, two experienced and funny actors. Here they are on our recce, coming to grips with the weird underbelly of what was a very pleasant morning walk.
Each 2-hour tour is only $15 and is limited to 15 pax. Each participant will receive a limited edition zine specially produced for the walk and early birds also get a $10 BSL voucher.
Get your tickets here! https://uncannyyishun.peatix.com
Tempo(rary) at the Singapore Festival 2020 (Yangon, Myanmar)
At the beginning of February, a handful of artists from Singapore and Myanmar (along with honorary Singaporean collaborator Nicola Anthony) came together under the curation of Marie Pierre-Mol of Intersections Gallery to showcase work around the idea of time. This was part of a larger event organised by the Singapore Tourist Board (STB) as part of their efforts to raise an awareness of various aspects of Singapore, from food, culture, and art to retail as well as to partner with local restaurants and artists as a way of forging bonds between Singapore and Myanmar.
The event was held at the Chin Tsong Palace, a sprawling complex that was built by Lim Chin Tsong, said to have been Myanmar’s richest man at one point. The building was finished but never occupied and in the 1960s it was commandeered by drug smugglers. The Palace had a network of tunnels and secret rooms under it, and one of the tunnels was said to have led to the river. Much history, many feels.
Tempo(rary) is a collaboration with Burmese artist Maung Day. It consists of a dialogue in poems and photographs. Over the course of a month, I sent a poem to Maung Day and he responded with a poem or a photo. And then he sent a photo to me, and I responded in kind. We created ten pairs of work from this exchange, each one accompanied by a metronome set to a different tempo.
The photograph is from Maung Day, the poem is from me. All the poems were translated to Burmese as well. Text layout by Nicole Soh.
Ticking at a range of tempos, the metronomes are a sonic reflection of the varying speeds of two very different cities.
Time in the city is a function of progress and growth. It is invisible; fleeting and always in scarcity.
We are always running out of time. Time is never on our hands. We need more time, we say, this commodity that can never be bought or bartered.
We are made by time, its invisible, inevitable ticking, keeping tempo to the rhythms and reasons of our lives. Time soothes and serenades, summons and silences.
The crowds weren’t what we were led to expect, partly due to the prohibitive ticket prices. The food was also probably priced beyond the reach of the average local. But hey, at least the art was free!
Following the exhibition, I received the incredible news that Tempo(rary) has been selected to be part of the 12th Yangon Photo Festival. The work will be exhibited at the Rosewood Hotel from 19 Feb to 21 March. Do check it out if you happen to be in Yangon!
2020: Performance Notes
2019 is winding down after the usual mix of publications, performances and an extremely unique residency in Panama. We’ll be taking some time to be spectators at Wonderfruit, a music and art festival outside of Pattaya.
Then it’s back to art-making next year with Note for Note on 10 January. This edition is rather different from the usual one poet + one musician pairing. This time, I selected 16 poems from various poets around the subject of the city and the theme of speed. The title of the show is ‘Stop, Look and Listen’ and will feature actors performing poems in three separate sets. The soundscape will be scored by Bani Haykal.
Light to Night Festival runs from 10-19 January 2020. Desmond Kon, Nuraliah Norasid and Kevin Martens Wong and I were commissioned to each pen a poem that would serve as the basis for the festival programming. Inspired by Ítalo Calvino’s Invisible Cities, my poem imagined the city as a canvas of stories both known and unknown
At the start of February, I’ll be headed to Yangon for a weekend as part of the Singapore Festival 2020. I’m doing an artistic dialogue with Burmese poet and artist Maung Day. The exhibition is called Tempo(rary) and uses a series of metronomes to map different speeds of our two cities (Singapore & Yangon) through a poems and images.
As part of Buysinglit 2020, Crispin Rodrigues and I will be doing something completely different on 8th March. We’ll be running Uncanny Yishun: A Literary Tour, melding poems, creative non-fiction pieces and torrid tales from Singapore’s most notorious neighbourhood into an entertaining two-hour walk. More details to come!
The following weekend, Handbook of Daily Movement gets its hour of fame. I’m super pleased that this labour of love with Sudhee Liao has been commissioned to be part of the Textures Festival. So we are expanding it into a full-length live performance featuring original music by Rupak George and four dancers. There will be two shows and also a screening of our original film.
And then a quick trip at the end of March to Ho Chi Minh City to sit for my third Milestone in my PhD journey. Ahhhhhhhhhhh.
From 11 June to 11 July, Alliance Française have graciously offered to exhibit the poems and photographs from Sightlines, my collaboration with Tay Tsen-Waye. The AF gallery is a lovely space, with loads of possibilities when it comes to displaying the work.
And on 13 July, I begin an Exactly Foundation residency on the nebulous yet fascinating topic of ‘offence.’
That’s a pretty stacked start to the year! At some point I am also hoping to squeeze in an exhibition with Cheyenne Philips of the work we created from the La Wayaka Residency in Panama. Hopefully that will come together in the usual way that exhibitions happen; a blend of serendipity, timing and opportunity.
Notes on autoethnography and practice research
Since late 2017, I have been pursuing a practice research PhD at RMIT University in the School of Media and Communications. Sounds cool, but what exactly does practice research mean?
“Practice as research might denote a research process that leads to an arts-related output, an arts project as one element of a research process drawing on a range of methods, or a research process entirely framed as artistic practice.”
University of Manchester)
Practice-related research goes by many names, ‘such as “arts-based research”, “practice-based research”, “practice-led research”, “practice-centered research”, [and] “studio-based research”. These are more or less used synonymously’ (Niedderer and Roworth-Stokes, 7). The term ‘practice-led research’ is typically the one used most consistently, perhaps because it puts the creative practice ahead of the research, a horse before a cart, as it were (Skains, 2018). The research question, which shifts and never quite settles unlike the traditional PhD, should also articulate how the practice is the research.
In my case, my PhD involves elements of creative practice produced prior to as well as during the PhD. My practice research journey began with my ekphrastic work. I thought that elucidating a ‘conversation’ between text and image was a way to define my practice. This led to an expansion of scope into collaborative practice, which segued into spoken word and various dimensions of performance.
One of the ‘problems’ that I faced in articulating my practice is that I have trucked all over the landscape. Publishing, performing, exhibiting and working with a range of artists from various disciplines on projects that are equally varied in theme and style does not easily lend itself to a focused ‘slice’ through the practice, which is what my supervisors at RMIT would like to see. Currently, my dissertation has moved into something extremely personal; my faith. Spurred on by a memoir-in-progress of twelve years in Christian fundamentalist churches in Singapore, I am writing, researching and producing work that negotiates my loss of faith from the perspective of a creative practitioner.
This, seems to be rather distanced from the subject matter of the journal, which located me in a very different space. Initially, I began approaching the residency like an extended travel trip. I thought that I would probably come away with a bunch of ‘travel poems’ and photographs that would accompany them. But what I created couldn’t have been further from that. ‘Far From The Plastic World’ was birthed from an impulse to explore subject matter without an endpoint in mind. It was also birthed out of frustration. I could not photograph freely, bound as I was by Guna laws and social mores that felt archaic and unreal. Yet, I had to honour and respect those practices if I wanted to remain part of the life of the village.
In putting the journal and its related media together, I started reading about autoethnography, which seemed to be a useful methodology for approaching this project. One of the many definitions of autoethnography is about “reflexively writing the self into and through the ethnographic text, isolating that space where memory, history, performance, and meaning intersect” (Denzin, 22). However, assuming the role of a creative autoethnographer was not what I had in mind when I was accepted for the residency. Autoethnography emerged in retrospect as a way of documenting, reflecting on and providing a frame for my experience.
The journal became an intersecting space that held both art and an informal cultural anthropology. Art is evinced through poetry and photographs. The latter are sometimes documentary in nature, but also have a representational element to them. The video and audio clips are definitely a lot more documentary-like in nature. The journal itself is a hybrid text.
While the journal’s form is clear, its contents aren’t as obvious. Certainly, it is a document that aims at communication. But it also holds fragments of observations from the other artists and myself. These sit within the landscape of the residency that extends far beyond the walls of the residency house. As Rutten says, “Autoethnography is both process and product” (Rutten, 300). As process, autoethnography researchers study a culture’s practices, values and beliefs then “retrospectively and selectively write about epiphanies that stem from, or are made possible by, being part of a culture and/or by possessing a particular cultural identity” (Ellis et al. 2010, 8). And much like how I brought my own practice in poetry and multimedia to Armila, other artists came with diverse backgrounds in sculpting, drawing and performance art. All of us wrestled with translating and transforming experience into forms that we were familiar with.
However, I believe that the journal became the nexus of my autoethnographic impulse. The form of the journal was a mix of observations of activities that we engaged in as artists, descriptions of the village life and snippets of ‘lectures’ by our host, Nacho. The journal thus becomes a repository of how I engaged in a more expansive way with the rich landscape that I found myself in.
The access to experience and the permission that was given to learn, listen and document was only possible because of the La Wayaka residency that was already in place and the relationships that the founders of the residency had established with the Guna in Armila. The anthropological angle is an unforeseen byproduct, a wonderfully rich outcome of working within such a vibrant and rich environment. The tapestry of Guna history, spirituality, daily life and culture is fertile earth for creative seeds to bloom.
So what is the point or value of building this repository? The journal reflects what Anderson defines as embodied writing, “relaying human experience from the inside out and entwining in words our senses with the sense of the world” (Anderson, 84). As a creative process, it gives rise to creative research insights into the Guna people through my personal experience, leading to further possible areas of research by offering a perspective that sits between the fleeting tourist gaze and the embedded eye of the writer as ethnographer.
References
Anderson, R. (2001). Embodied writing and reflections on embodiment. Journal of Transpersonal Psychology, 33 (2), 83-98.
Denzin, Norman K. (2013). “Interpretive Autoethnography” in Handbook of Autoethnography, eds. Stacy Holman Jones, Tony E. Adams and Carolyn Ellis. Walnut Creek, CA: Left Coast Press.
Ellis, C. Adam, T., Bochner, A. “Autoethnography: An Overview Forum: Qualitative Social Resarch, 12(1). (Online, last accessed 22 July 2020)
Niedderer, K., and Roworth-Stokes, S. 2007. ‘‘The Role and Use of Creative Practice in Research and Its Contribution to Knowledge.” In IASDR07: International Association of Societies of Design Research. Hong Kong.
Rutten, K. (2016). “Art, ethnography and practice-led research”, Critical Arts, 30:3, 295-306.
Skains, R. Lyle. (2018). “Creative Practice as Research: Discourse on Methodology”. Media Practice and Education, 19:1, p. 82-97.