An overdue post featuring amazing photos from Daniel Tan and Joe Nair from WEAVE on 6 July at Aliwal Arts Centre.
WEAVE was conceptualised and produced with SingLit Station as a multidisciplinary, collaborative show that brought together amazing artists whom I’m proud to call my friends. There was innovation and artistry, much laughter and some dancing. It was a farewell to 20 years of making work in Singapore, beginning with my roots in spoken word and branching out into video, photography, music and movement collaborations.
I am grateful for each and everyone who said yes to taking the stage and being who they are. Singapore continues to have artists who make heartfelt, honest and impactful work despite less than ideal circumstances.
Home for Carolyn and me (and Graham Norton) is Toronto for now. I’m looking to build artistic networks here, collaborate and even work on cross-ocean projects with folks back in Singapore. Feel free to reach out for online workshops, or if you know any teaching or writing gigs in Toronto or remotely, I’m ready to work!
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.
I’m very pleased to be able to launch a second season of Estate Frequencies. Art does not necessarily need to be a one-time project, even though funding bodies are not yet enlightened enough to take a multi-year, developmental approach to creating a body of work, and not just a single output.
Chong Pang & Chye Kay was completely self-funded and was made possible by the unflagging energy of Eugene Soh, who recorded all the interviews, created the music and soundscape and recorded my narration as well as Crispin Rodrigues, who helped to brainstorm and shape the episode. Cover art and design by Nicole Soh.
Many milestones to come in the next few weeks! On 30 June, I leave School of the Arts (SOTA), after a satisfying 2.5 year stint teaching creative writing in the Literary Arts Faculty. It has been wonderful to teach a bunch of talented, driven and vibrant young writers and I hope to carry on with this in some shape or form.
On 6 July, it’s WEAVE. This is a happening, a one-night smorgasbord featuring some of my most beloved collaborators over the years. There will be poetry, music, improv, movement, performance art, alcohol and dancing.
And on 10 July, Carolyn and Graham Norton (our cat!) and I move to Toronto, Canada. Forever? We don’t think so, but it’s definitely going to be for a while. Carolyn is off to do her PhD at the University of Toronto and I’m going to figure out life all over again. It’s going to be uncertain, quite cold but we are excited beyond belief.
So come say hello (and goodbye) at WEAVE if you’re unable to catch me otherwise. 30% of all proceeds go to ACRES.
Over 100 Indonesian election workers people died in the 2024 polls. That is dire in and of itself, but thankfully the mortality rate has come down from over 900 in 2019.
To lift a man and his party to the mountain-top,
he steps on the contours of a thousand upturned faces, using fingers and toes to clock
hours of votes that flood counting stations, that stop only after the opposition is stilled.
At the end, a man accepts praise, early declarations of victory
while those who have added up the legislature of his new life return to their own,
carrying exhaustion like a flag listless in the aftermath of a storm; these votes that remain uncounted.
‘Thank You For Holding’ is a step into unknown waters. It sprung from a simple premise: how do I perform the experience of trying to reach an operator at a call centre? We know all too well that the customer service experience is marked by long periods of waiting, with menu choices sometimes leave you at a dead end.
The show encapsulates all of these emotions but, rather than replicate the horrible experience of trying to reach an airline or telco (yes, we’ve all been on hold there), I created a speculative world for the call centre. Called the city under the city, this is a nowhere place, both a commentary on the unequal commodification of labour and an escape into another world.
Through a combination of movement, monologues, and live music, the audience decides how the narrative unfolds. Your choices will lead to further categories and subcategories, triggering various responses – some in the form of a story, others as questions, and still others as confessions. And maybe, just maybe, you’ll get to listen to the Operator.
Catch ‘Thank You For Holding’ at #Textures2024:
19 Jan 2024, Fri at 8pm 20 Jan 2024, Sat at 3pm & 8pm Venue: Play Den, The Arts House
Written and directed by Marc Nair in collaboration with Sudhee Liao (choreography), Mantravine (music), Audrey Ng and Low Zi Hao (art direction). Featuring Arunditha, Chan Hsin Yee and Jack Ng. Voiceovers by Carolyn Oei and Marc Nair.
How do we see a city? From skyway, bus, car, train, or taxi? On foot? How do we consider the smaller units of the city? Parks, neighbourhoods, malls and markets? Are they experienced as discrete units or do we think about the intertwining aspects of they way we ambulate, the way we commute beyond the quotidian?
Estate Frequencies is a brand new project that I’ve written and voiced (at least for this first season) that offers a through line to experience neighbourhoods in a city, connecting history, culture, art and people together in the form of an audio walking tour encompassing narration, interviews and poems that can be experienced in person or remotely.
The first neighbourhood that’s being featured is Tiong Bahru, Singapore’s oldest housing estate. One might say that it is almost inevitable given the compact size of the estate, its pre-war beginnings and the many visible layers of ‘storying’ that are part of its landscape; from its much-photographed architectural style to the iconic market and its penchant for being part of social media backgrounds.
But Estate Frequencies is also after the invisible, i.e. the people who make up Tiong Bahru. They represent, in many ways, a sounding board for the estate, one that reverberates at a different frequency from the ubiquity of the community centre as a kind of faux nexus for communal life.
Estate Frequencies: Tiong Bahru is a three-episode series that encourages the listener to walk the street in real-time, adding a spatial dimension to the narration and soundscape. The latter, composed by Saturn Sound Studios, takes in the diegetic sounds of the neighbourhood and intersperses it with specially composed soundtracks for the poems. Poetry also offers a different way of seeing the estate, one that isn’t marshalled by the immutable aegis of government agencies and the throes of late-stage capitalism. They offer a space to imagine and wonder, even as we wander the streets and backlanes of Tiong Bahru.
‘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
In many ways, humanity’s basic needs have not changed for centuries. Survival is still paramount for large swathes of the population, while it is only a minority who can think about higher order wants. But it is also worth noting how the necessities no longer solely encompass food, shelter, water, and sanitation. There is access to the digital world, material and immaterial desires and longer arcs of thought about the future that, arguably, affect everybody.
The classic pyramid that Abraham Maslow envisioned is now filled with other things, things that consume us in ways that terrify us if we stepped back from ourselves to consider how and why we prioritise citadels of the self against the vaster city of time we live in. The urge for the new is the distaste for the old. Anything acquired becomes obsolete. We purchase and immediately set forth on the next conquest.
The text in A Modern Hierarchy of Needs apprehends the pyramid with new eyes and populates it with a different way of being. But the pyramid is also the precursor to a mode of thinking about art making. I have noticed a tendency in my own creative practice to utilise an adaptive reuse of ideas. Adaptive reuse is a broad, interdisciplinary concept that is usually connected with significant changes resulting from conversion to a new function (Remøy & Van der Voordt, 2014). Adaptive reuse as design practice in architecture is often seen in the way churches, power plants and other abandoned or disused buildings are refurbished and adapted to become art galleries, performance spaces or museums (Pieczka & Bogusław, 2021).
If we extend this to thinking about artistic ideas, what could it possibly look like?
The origins of A Modern Hierarchy of Needs began as a casual conversation in Hong Kong in 2016. At the opening of an art gallery, I met Sudhee Liao, a choreographer and dancer from Singapore. We found common thematic strands in our work and expressed an interest to develop a collaboration. This slowly took shape over the next two years and eventually settled on a series of movements that responded to text. The process was iterative, and the final product was a short film comprising ten vignettes, filmed in various locations in Hong Kong in 2019. That film was called Handbook of Daily Movement.
In 2020, commissioned by The Arts House in Singapore for Textures, a literary festival, we adapted the film for the stage, working with Mantravine, a musician, and three other dancers to realise a fuller production of text, movement, and music. To layer ideas of eco-fragility and push back against wasteful consumption, some of the costumes used for the production were created by set designer Audrey Ng out of kombucha. We also published a zine containing the text of all the pieces.
The current exhibition keeps the text as the fulcrum of meaning but adapts it once again for the screen, this time with a collage of images as the background. The ephemeral nature of the text coupled with how it loops becomes an objectified exemplar of how an idea becomes embodied in different ways, from movement and narration to a performative expression and back to the screen as moving text. This process was not intentional. There was no grand creative arc of production. The work morphed and shifted through chance encounters, conversations, and opportunities.
A Modern Hierarchy of Needs screens on ten screens that typically display movie posters but have been adapted to play video. The exhibition, presented by Intersections Gallery, is held in the nostalgically named BladeRunner Ballroom, a circular space in The Projector X: Picturehouse. This is a pop-up initiative of The Projector. Taking over the empty cinemas of Cathay Cineplex, the Projector X is itself a temporary intervention. In a city where land scarcity necessitates constant renewal and the optimal use of space, it is unsurprising that ideas, too, should live on and gain new forms of being.
References
Pieczka, M. and Bogusław W. 2021. “Art in Post-Industrial Facilities—Strategies of Adaptive Reuse for Art Exhibition Function in Poland” Buildings 11, no. 10: 487.
Remøy, H. and Van der Voordt, T. 2014. “Adaptive reuse of office buildings into housing: Opportunities and risks”. Build. Res. Inf.42, 381–390.
