From the National to the Neighborhood

Hello from the first day of Lunar New Year! Always nice to have a second shot at starting the year - especially since Monkeys are supposed to be on top in the Year of the Snake.

Last week, I was on a panel at Singapore Art Week Forum. Today's Signal is a version of the 15-minute talk I gave, followed by a mini scene report about what else I got up to during my time in Singapore.

I love writing this newsletter, and love you for being here. This year I want to work on keeping this going. Screen time down, cute outfits on, being enough with the land, in control of the sacred fire that burns in the precious time we have left... smoke good, signals strong, let's go!

From the National to the Neighborhood

Presented as a talk at Singapore Art Week Forum 2025.

I’m going to start with this meme. It went semi-viral in 2019, with the caption ‘Name one thing in this picture.’ A reddit thread from 6 years ago says it “was designed to give the viewer the simulated experience of having a stroke (particularly in the occipital lobe of the cerebral cortex, where visual perception occurs.) Everything looks hauntingly familiar but you just can't quite recognize anything”. And that’s what I told people, until I dug a bit deeper. Turns out, it's simply... untrue. The image was made with an early generative AI called GANBreeder, and first posted to Instagram by a user named “busyrotting” on March 10, 2019.

Apparently. I mean, it’s the internet. Who knows how far this rabbit hole goes? 

I was thinking about the meme, especially the misinfo part, after an encounter with a local elder in Port Dickson, my adopted hometown. I was out on my favorite beach last year, wheatpasting photos of these two mangrove trees that had blown down in a storm. 

The exchange got kind of heated, going from how hopeless and racist Malaysia has become, to how we’re chumps for not moving to another country like others of our generation, to how we need a strongman like Trump or Modi to set things right. We asked him, you know, Uncle, why did you stay in Malaysia? The answer? Well, he loves Port Dickson. And it’s true, we see him at this beach all the time. He’s known the two trees longer than us.

“Name one thing in this picture.” Though we were obviously deep in our respective rabbit holes about things like the nation, race and politics, we still shared a solid baseline reality: this place. When the enshittified internet seems inescapable, and inseparable from daily life, I want to suggest the idea of place itself as a mediator, a kind of medium for making sense and meaning. 

I somehow feel the need at this point to establish some credentials as an artist who can speak on matters of the national. I grew up in the capital, Kuala Lumpur, and came up in the KL art scene of the mid-2000s. I witnessed and participated in the political movements of my time - some of my work from the 2010s reflects this: 

“Mandi Bunga” was a public flower bath with a hundred people - informed by Malaysia’s Bersih street protests for free and fair elections, which happened around the same time as the Arab Spring and Occupy Wall Street.

The “Weeds” series was painted on political party flags collected from my neighborhood in the lead up to the 13th General Elections in 2013. 

This all culminates in the 14th General Elections of 2018, in which Malaysia voted out the ruling Barisan Nasional government for the first time since the nation's founding in 1963. That election was known for having the most intense flag wars ever during campaign period, in terms of sheer volume of fabric. “In the Skin of A Tiger” was sewn out of patchwork fabric reclaimed from those political party flags. It's a monument - a soft one - that can fold away into two Ikea bags. 

This textile piece is more recent. It’s going to be the cover of a forthcoming book of oral history (Bahasa Melayu version) about the deadly 13 May 1969 racial riots that shifted the course of Malaysian history. I was inspired by a piece of patchwork made by my partner’s grandaunt that we found in a cupboard of the house in Port Dickson, when we moved in. 

I was also thinking alongside a couple of other works: “May 13 1969” by Redza Piyadasa, on permanent display here in the Southeast Asian galleries. I make it a point to spend time with this work whenever I have the privilege of being in Singapore. 

Next to it, “May 13th” by Ibrahim Hussein, also known as the “Black Painting”. It has a Malaysian flag picked up from the streets after the riots, which landed the artist in alot of trouble. Then Prime Minister Tun Razak himself had to approve its display, on condition that the painting was never to leave the country, and never to be sold. 

Back to the neighborhood…

I moved to Port Dickson, a small town 2 hours drive from the city, in 2011, but it took a decade before I showed any art there. I Like This Place was an exhibition about the beach, the one with the two trees, held in a rented house next to the beach. 

I’ve shown in galleries and museums, shopping malls and street sidewalks, but my encounter with local visitors in PD was unlike anything I’ve experienced, before or since. This is what happened: people wandered in, and I’d lead them through the exhibition. They’d listen and look closely at the works, then turn to me and start telling me their life story. The most intimate details.

One lady said she was telling her priest that she spent too much time cleaning the house, when what she really wanted to do was read and write books, but that could mean she was a bad wife, and she had this hall with so many objects in it, she loved them but it took too long to clean and on and on,  etc etc etc. This other  guy said he’d been up since 4:30am making nasi lemak for a hotel contract, Covid had been incredibly hard and if he didn’t fulfill this order it was over, the company was in debt, he had been super depressed but now things were looking up and etc etc etc. They would pause, look at my work again, then turn to me and continue their story where it left off.

This happened a few times!

I didn’t know what to make of it. Was my work failing to communicate? I told some art world colleagues and they didn’t have a clue, either. Then Grupo Etcétera, an Argentinian art-activist collective (and mentors in the Prince Claus CAREC programme), said that it sounded as if these people were behaving like social protagonists. I formed a theory: maybe this is how people react to art in the absence of mediators like institutions, galleries, festivals, or the market. That is, without entities that telegraph… credentials, people might behave less like audience spectators. 

Why should we care, besides making me feel special, whether people behave like social protagonists or audience spectators in front of art? I argue it matters, when you live next to Mordor… by which I mean, two oil refineries. 

This is Hengyuan Refinery, formerly Shell, and this is Petron, formerly Esso-Mobil. We’re 200m from the fence.

Let’s say Mordor was taken over by new management, and has been pumping out smoke, toxic smells and a high-pitched eeeeee-whining noise 24/7. It’s driving you crazy, you can’t sleep, you feel sick all the time. You have projects, deadlines. You need to work. You start to write letters, make complaint calls. You realize you can’t do much alone, you’re going to have to talk to your neighbors to get some collective action going.

Now, do you hope your neighbors react more like social protagonists, or audience spectators?

Living next to Mordor made me an activist by necessity. To be clear, this work [“Creatures on the Move”] is NOT the activism. No, that looks like spreadsheets, by-laws, regulations, managing petty disagreements in the neighborhood Whatsapp group, going around getting signatures, people doing this *shuts curtains* when they see you at their gate, building goodwill and sheer face recognition by distributing a bumper crop from our avocado tree around the neighborhood, and so on. We interface with institutions too: the Dept of Environment, the police, the fire dept, and the local council.

So much of this work is necessarily off Instagram. I’m not on Insta much anymore, which is not good for my artist credentials right now! It's not like I'm any less addicted or FOMO-crippled than the next person, I just don’t have the time. 

These are photos of shadow puppets, lit entirely by the flarestack of Hengyuan refinery. We shot at 3am, with no other source of direct light. “Creatures on the Move” is currently part of DALAM Southeast Asia: Figuring A Scene here at the Gallery, curated by Dr Flores. It’s in the space next to the one with Piyadasa’s May 13 work, actually.

The animal designs started as a linocut print documenting the creatures I observed in my garden in Port Dickson. When I made this print there were two refinery flarestacks, now there are three. 

The print is also in Creatures of Near Kingdoms, a short story collection about fantastic flora and fauna set in Southeast Asia, written by my partner Zedeck Siew, illustrated by me. We enlarged the animals and took them to the streets for a climate protest in the capital. 

Now they’re here, in the Gallery.

When I started out, I thought the work I was making about the national mattered to and for everyone. But the local is her own creature, a protagonist that responds directly to our daily care, and it’s this specific energy transfer that elicits a belonging and a cherishing so deep, it holds my attention more than any screen.

When the animals of the neighborhood heard I was going to speak at the National Gallery, this is what they told me to tell you.

Scanner: SG Art Week edition

Dr Lilian Chee was part of my Forum panel. Her book Architecture and Affect looks fabulous.

One of my favorite artworks of the week was a little sculpture miming an egg in boiling water. Part of Hope you are keeping well! - an embracing show curated by Lenette Lua at Objectifs. Archival posters about Singapore's productivity campaigns gave focus and bite.

I picked up Now & Again Issue 5: Cinema, and Marg1n Issue 1 from the awesome selection at Objectifs bookshop. How I love magazines about films, almost more than films themselves.

Everything about The Eye and the Tiger - a show about the colonial gaze housed in a colonial bungalow - was excellent. Alan Oei runs a tight ship at Open House!

When I'm in Singapore I think about this poem (pdf, scroll down to Appendix C) by my friend Marc Nair: "Preparing the City as Canvas": The tools that pull taut have stapled us to frames of decision. The sea has never stopped ceding; the jungle has never stopped howling. The night has always been loamy on our skin. Hold us to the light.

I went for a talk by Dr Margaret Hillenbrand at City Book Room about suicide shows, an emerging form of protest in China.

Had Minang food opposite Sultan Mosque - peak Singapore experience.

Then spent hours at Wardah Books and their truly incredible selection of titles about the Islamic World, with a focus on Singapore and Southeast Asia.

Beyond thrilled that you can now get Creatures of Near Kingdoms at Wardah Books and City Book Room!

Had mixed feelings about The Utopia of Rules, though I understand why people were saying the exhibition was a must-see. I enjoyed Wang Tuo's film "The Second Interrogation", which accurately captures the almost erotic intimacy that forms between artist and censor. Dr Margaret Tan's prototype of a smart apron for domestic workers is from 2003 (!!), and retains a genre-bending radicality two decades later.

There was alot going on at Singapore Art Museum at Tanjong Pagar Distripark. Kawita Vatanajyankur's puckish videos about domestic work were wonderful, and I was moved by Tengku Sabri Tengku Ibrahim's suite of drawings about recovering from a stroke - both in the SAM Collection show Everyday Practices.

Couple of trends I picked up: I think exhibitions are being lit too darkly? Also, I spotted shelves in art installations at least 3 times.

Let's end with something completely different: I'm five years too late to this essay Another Art World by Nika Dubrovsky and David Graeber. I read it before my Singapore trip and all I'll say is, I am not the same.

This has been Signal 008. Thanks for reading! May you rise to all the occasions required of you in the Year of the Snake. By the way, the animals of the neighborhood also told me to tell you to subscribe to Smoke Signals.