Doubly Displaced

Weekly column written for the Singapore Unbound newsletter. Sign up here. 

I first met Boedi Widjaja at the Dome cafe in the Singapore Art Museum. It was surprising to both of us how quickly we fell into easy conversation. Because of racial tensions in Indonesia in the early 1980's, his parents sent him and his sister to Singapore to live apart from them. He was just nine years old and he did not know a jot of English, having grown up speaking Bahasa Indonesia. Singapore was alienating and he longed for home. At our meeting, I was living away from home too, having transplanted myself from Singapore to New York. Migration is, we discovered, the keynote of my poetry and his art. Both of us are sons of Chinese diaspora who have not just settled in one new place, but having made the place home, have moved again. We are doubly displaced.

As our friendship grew, so did our appreciation for each other's work. I attended his art shows in Singapore, where his intensity in live-art performance was gripping, and he attended my poetry readings. He kindly gave permission for the use of his work on not just one but two of my book covers. An image from his lovely mark-making series "SUNGAI, SEJARAH 河流，历史，源" (2012) graces the front of my book Steep Tea (2015). My collection of essays Bite Harder (2018) faces the world with an image from his series "DRAWING CAGE" (2013). We wanted closer collaboration, and so we proposed a joint live-art performance to the Singapore Writers Festival one year, but that idea fell through unfortunately.

So it is with great excitement that I think about the opening of his debut solo show in NYC this week, at Helwaser Gallery, and about our joint artist performance for the show this Saturday. What couldn't happen in Singapore is happening in NYC. "Threshold I" involves a literal exchange of roles and places; it involves poetry reading and rock tracing. How are the two activities related? We have no prior or fixed answers, but are open to the living moment of interaction with the audience. Come with questions.

Jee Leong Koh
September 12, 2019

Comments

Post a Comment

Popular posts from this blog

Goh Chok Tong's Visit to FCBC

Image
I am surprised by how much this incident is affecting me. I thought I have moved past my former religious life, left it behind in Singapore, but like tin cans tied to a dog it has followed me and is rattling me. I am posting the incident, and my response to it, here on this blog, because I want to remember that the past is not yet past. When Emeritus Senior Minister of Singapore Goh Chok Tong visited Faith Community Baptist Church on 13 January during a Sunday service, Senior Pastor Lawrence Khong took the opportunity to deliver a hateful anti-gay message . Among other things, he said: We affirm that the family unit comprises a man as Father, a woman as Mother, and Children. This is the basic building block of society, a value foundational for a secure future, a premise fundamental to nation-building. and warned ominously that We see a looming threat to this basic building block by homosexual activists seeking to repeal Section 377A of the Penal Code.   Example...
Read more

Wallace Stevens' "The Noble Rider and the Sound of Words"

Just read three essays from the "Poetics" section at the back of Volume One of The Norton Anthology of Modern and Contemporary Poetry : "The Poetry and the Present" by D.H. Lawrence (1919); "The Negro Artist and the Racial Mountain" by Langston Hughes (1926); and "The Noble Rider and the Sound of Words" by Wallace Stevens (1942). The first is an artful polemic for free verse in contact with the "insurgent naked throb of the instant moment." The second is a spirited rejoinder to a young Negro poet who wanted to "write like a poet--not a Negro poet." The third, my favorite, is a wide-ranging meditation on the nature of poetry and the role of the poet. So many grand things said but I will only quote a few passages: I am interested in the nature of poetry and I have stated its nature, from one of many points of view from which it is possible to state it. It is an interdependence of the imagination and reality as equals. This is...
Read more

Steven Cantor's "What Remains: the Life and Work of Sally Mann"

Image
Sally Mann, The Perfect Tomato , 199 0 Since it is moving pictures, a film necessarily captures--produces--a process. It turns photographs into the making of photographs. It joins moments ("spots of time") into a Life. This I expected watching Cantor's documentary on Sally Mann's creation of the exhibit "What Remains." So photographs of a long-dead beloved greyhound "lead" to photographs of the Civil War battlefield of Antietam, to photographs of Mann's Virginian farm bloodied by the police killing of a runaway convict, to photographs of decomposing bodies in a forensic study site, as if each group of pictures forms an independent yet preparatory stage in the creative process. What I did not expect to see is the influence of the film-making on the photography itself. Mann begins to think of her exhibit as a "narrative," and wants the narrative of death to end on a more uplifting note. With such an idea in mind, she takes close-up pic...
Read more