native songs, songs I would have sung to my children

Many of Liang Wern Fook's songs contain water. Especially the ones I like. In my secondary school someone who has a lot to say about anything could be mocked as "having ink water" (literal translation from Mandarin). But I don't mean this about Liang Wern Fook's songs.

"Time flows by like a stream and nothing remains the same.
But friendship is a stream that flows forever."

These are sentiments from a very popular LWF song. Sounds a little cheesy in English, but in Chinese the idealism and hints of poetry shine through.

Another song goes:

"I am water and I come from the hills . . .
Dark clouds fill the sky, from North to South to East to West.
Nobody knows where I am.

Gently I descend back to the earth, filling fog and rain.
I am the droplets that land in your heart, in the core of you."

And in a more recent piece where LWF wrote the Chinese lyrics for a song that was composed in Japan:

"Eyes which have shed tears can see more clearly.
And it is a blessing to think of someone with tears in one's eyes."

Italian poets speak of inspiration coming to them as they walk by rivers and streams. In these xinyao (Singaporean Chinese ballads) there is nothing spelt out about the water of composition and the water of lyricism. Water is simply the element of emotions and ideals. The songs are not self-conscious; they were written to be sung, to be recorded, to be played, and to be heard. Perhaps this explains their appeal and the way they weave their way into memories, becoming part of one's life. I am grateful that I got to listen and to sing many of these songs during my teenage years. And they made me see Chinese in a new light.

Like me, many staunch fans will go through their old collection of tapes after hearing some of the songs in the Theatre Practice musical based on LWF's songs (sold out performances this time round, but they say there will be a production again in 2009).

and finally, let me go to a light-filled space

The British sculptor Anthony Gormley's exhibition at the Hayward Gallery ends tomorrow. I went to the exhibition in June when I was in London. If I was still in London now, I'd go again.

There is so much to say about the exhibition, I don't know where to start. It's the reason why I thought I would blog about it, from the time I was at the exhibition, and then I thought about it on and off after I got back to Singapore, but I just didn't know how to write about it.

Maybe I could begin today by describing what happened to me when I encountered one of the installations at the exhibition, the one called "Blind Light". It consists of a glass box, the size of a HDB living room. The glass cube has a doorway, the size of an average bedroom door. This is the only exit and entrance into the box. The box is filled on the inside with fog and white light. It is like a cloud that has been captured in the glass box and illuminated with relentlessly bright white light.

I approached it in 3 ways. First, I walked into the box, just half a metre past the doorway, and then I quickly walked out. When you are inside, you can't see anything, not even your own hands (not unless you held them right up to your eyes). I kept thinking, what if I walk into someone?

Next, I stood near the doorway outside the box and observed what other people did when they saw the installation. It was a weekday morning and the visitors were mostly tourists or old age pensioners. There were people who went in in pairs. There was a late middle-aged woman who said to her friend, "I think I'd better not go in, I'm wearing slippers and it looks wet in there." She changed her mind twice but did not go in in the end. There was an elderly couple who walked in holding hands.

Then I walked all around the box, following the hand of a person that was feeling its way around the box. All that was visible of the person from the outside was his/her hand. It was pink and fleshy.

Thirdly, I decided to go back inside the box and walk along its perimeter. I wanted to feel my way around the box and have someone outside see my hand. On my way to one of the glass walls, a drop of water fell onto my face. I almost jumped out of my skin. Because it was not possible to see anything, I felt strangely liberated. I also felt my ears pricking up at all the sounds around me. And I tried all the time to see something other than the whiteness and the nebulousness.

The most unexpected thing about this third part of my experience of "Blind Light": I smiled and I teared a little, and I wondered, "Is this what it will be like? Not being able to see in a space flooded with light and hearing lots of voices of people whose faces and bodies can't be seen?" I felt joyous, jubilant, as if something I had long intuited had been empirically confirmed.

This morning, in the artist's interview, I heard something that brought that morning's experience back in a flash. The interview was conducted some years back and Anthony Gormley was talking about a general misperception of his aesthetic:

"it's interesting because people have talked about the total lack of ecstasy in the work, and in fact I think it comes from a very profound sense of the ecstatic. I hope that the spaces that I make are deeply paradoxical. In one sense they are entirely about the human condition as a condition, but on another they're also about freedom. I think they are about the fact that if the body is completely still the mind is able to extend itself in ways that can only happen if the body is completely still, and that's what leads me to sculpture, because sculpture of all the art forms is the most still and the most silent..."




Interviews with Anthony Gormley can be found at:

http://www.bbc.co.uk/radio3/johntusainterview/gormley_transcript.shtml

http://www.bbc.co.uk/bbcfour/audiointerviews/profilepages/gormleya1.shtml

881 . . . AWAS! this papaya shake has spoilers, don't read before watching the film!

I sat through Royston Tan's 881 waiting for one of the papaya sisters to die.

This death is an event that is breezily reported to the audience very soon after the opening of the film via a lighthearted, whimsical and short segment about the lives of the two young women before they met and became the Papaya Sisters.

That segment - the way it is filmed and I remember particularly the use of paper-cut-outs (not sure what the proper term is, but they're like paper dolls with clothes to mix and match, except 881 used cut-outs of Small Papaya's photographed parents - reminds me of the way the childhood of Amelie was narrated in that popular French film a few years back.

By telling the audience that one of the main characters will die at the age of 25 early on in the film, the narrative takes away the surprise of the later parts of the film where hints and scenes build up to full knowledge of the impending death.

Knowing that Small Papaya will eventually die from the outset means that there will be no climax from the moment that knowledge is uncovered as part of the plot development. Yet it would seem that knowing about her dying is critical to the climax of the film at the scenes where the Papaya Sisters have their ultimate battle of song and dance with the Durian Sisters.

Ya, I like the way the film plays tricks on the audience.

With gaudy costumes and choreography calling Mardi Gras to mind, the battle scene seems to invite the audience to drink in all the colours, to revel in the cheesiness of it all, to laugh at the extreme preparations that have been made by both sides.

And yet, underlying the glitter and the slapstick humour, there seems to be a serious face-off between life and death, between those with all the time in the world and those who have only a little time left, between the flashy spikiness of the funky technologically-powered future and the soft persuasion of the old-fashioned and the nostalgic's feathery caresses.

The other trick was in the characterisation of the ge-tai Xian Gu (Senior Fairy is my literal translation). At first she seems to be a stock character put in for laughs, like the prince of Ge-tai, played by the actual prince of ge-tai himself, Mr. Wang Lei.

But it turns out that there is more to her lofty seclusion (in a court complete with handmaidens) in a Chinese temple than the director's comic literal representation of her demi-goddess status in the world of ge-tai. She has magical powers and a pair of wings to demonstrate her immortality, and this is hilarious at first because it is a literal acting-out of the idea of someone who becomes a god (chen xian in Mandarin).

Xian Gu had retreated from a love triangle earlier on in her life, and so her cloistered existence takes on another layer of meaning in relation to her estranged relations with her twin sister, the seamstress who manages the Papaya Sisters. Her presence in the story proves to be for more than just laughs: she bears the burden of a secret love that is eventually uncovered.

Even immortals have unspeakable sorrows, so death, where is your sting? I guess this is why seeing Small Papaya on a sliver of moon as the film credits roll at the end becomes totally different from seeing the same image at the opening. That image is enlarged, in the small span of the film's length, from something that is glossy and pretty into something that is beautiful, arresting, powerful.

eye candies, mind boggles

Saw a friend's picture of chupa chups lollies doing a dance and thought of a dance sequence in Tsai Ming Liang's Hole. The power of suggestion!

What quickly followed: marvel at the evidence of dogged labour: 3 cm strokes in groups of equal size covering large expanses of paper into magic ink bursts of fruity colour - and what impressed: the severity of the composition, the harsh assault on the question of value in art - lightly veiled. I do not paint, I do not draw - I am outside of these issues - making art out of language has a different set of quarrels.

One of the artists was weaving his web when I visited. Seeing the threads worked from hand to wall to ceiling made me envious - writing is material in an inside space, weaving with words is always threatened with the tottering over into incompletion, and then the nothingness of the incomplete is not a void but it is not discernible to anyone except for the ill-disciplined or hindered writer self.

Works alluded to are at - Go see! -:

"The EXTRAordinary Tales of Skylarking" by Hong Sek Chern, Ernest Chan, Noni Kaur, Khiew Huey Chian, Lim Kok Boon, December Pang, Ian Woo and Ye Shufang
Singapore
2 Aug - 2 Sep 07, Thu - Sun, JENDELA (Visual Arts Space)

when the present and the past are both not here

A group of us went to watch Tan Pin Pin's Invisible City after work on Wednesday. Afterwards the Chemistry teacher said it made him want to go back to his school Chung Cheng High. It's one of the Chinese schools in the video, the one with the lake.

Actually I was surprised to see that the school is still at its original site in the Mountbatten area and that the lake is still there. I come from Dunman High, a school that used to hold an annual inter-school sports meet together with Chung Cheng High, Chung Cheng High (Branch), and Yu Hua Secondary School. This event was held at the National Stadium (recently closed and in the process of being erased). Apart from Chung Cheng High, the other three schools have lost their original buildings and locations.

Dunman High School was on Dunman Road. Next door there was another school, Dunman Secondary. Now Dunman High is at Tanjong Rhu and Dunman Secondary is in Tampines. The two schools are now separated by a sizable chunk of the east coast but their names can still thankfully be relied upon to cause some confusion. The confusion is the only thing that remains of our history as neighbours.

The first line in the Dunman High school song still holds truth, if a little stretched: "Dunman High School, here in Katong . . ." That song was probably written at a time when place names had umbilical cords to the places they named.

The Chinese pavilion near the science labs at the old site of Dunman High was re-created in the front yard of the new site. You can see it as you drive past. It's a smaller replica of the old pavilion and it looks like a toy. Every single time I've gone past the school and looked at the pavilion, it's been empty. It has an air of desperation about it. Like an unseasonal stage prop.

Some of the black and white photographs of old colonial houses in Invisible City also reminded me of toy houses. Maybe it's because the pictures were of houses and interiors without people in them. It's funny to think that these buildings used to be around, this spectral toyland. Of course it was all very concrete and real to the people who lived back then, like the photographer who took the pictures.

But as pictures in my newly-acquired memory of the city that was around before I was born they have a freshness, a newness, an alien-ness. Like the new pavilion. I cannot picture the old pavilion without hearing voices, laughing, singing, chattering - those Sec 1 afternoons come back in these sounds.