Two rings of fire

It's been awhile since my last send. I have alot of updates, which I'll put in the next letter, so we can get straight to the Signal!

An image at the gates

I was out on the beach at the end of November, 2021. Milky light, bright breezes, and the tide coming in - a perfect afternoon. Walking towards the mangrove tree at the far end of the beach, my heart beat like I was meeting up with a crush. To get to her, I would pass two smaller trees growing side-by-side. They were same Sonneratia species - perepat, or white mangrove apple. The gates to this place.

From a distance, I saw a strange shadow around the roots of the two trees. It moved with the tide. At first I thought it was shadows cast by their crowns, but that was impossible - the pair of trees weren't thriving; there were hardly any leaves on them.

A scene unfolded with light refracting through the unusually clear water. No shadow, but a rippling body of small, silver-grey fish, dancing around the sick trees to an orchestra of waves. I'd stumbled upon some ritual performance that wrapped me in a trance, to be released only after its image settled into a fold of my brain like a gemstone.

Afterwards, I wrote down:

My grief is like two trees
growing on bare rock
fish swirling, circling
my grief
like two trees growing on bare rock

At bottom of every bottle

The beach isn't a sad place. It's just a place where things are what they are, so it doesn't deny that grief exists. Maybe that's why people find relief here. Men come to drink on the beach - the cheapest liquor, even the stuff used for prayer ceremonies. It’s poor man’s therapy, and their empty bottles are strewn across the land, like the empty bottles scattered across my childhood and adult life. As a descendant of alcoholics and a recovering alcoholic myself, I'm familiar with the bottom of a bottle.

We collected dozens of them during beach clean-ups in 2022. Since glass isn't widely recycled in Malaysia anymore, we arranged them in rows at the feet of the ketapang trees on the back shore. Incredibly, when these trees were cut down last year, we found the bottles still buried in the earth, undamaged.

An image occurred to me, of these bottles arranged around the roots of the two mangrove trees, then lit on fire, at low tide.

Julie Bryne's magnificent album The Greater Wings was the soundtrack to my 2023 and 2024. In "Hope's Return", she sings:

"your image comes to me / like terrains of fire"

Only I kept (mis)hearing it as "two rings of fire". The image was beginning to insist on itself; an artwork wanting to be made.

All my plans and projects

Earlier this year, the South Korean, Singapore-based curator Haeju Kim invited me to make a new work for the Asian Art Biennial in Taichung. Here was the container the work was waiting for! My proposal for an installation and performance about the two trees was approved. It was all going according to plan.

On a Friday night in July, Zedeck and I went on the beach to take some test photos. I set out confidently on the path I'd walked scores of times by now. I could find my way to those two trees in the dark.

They weren’t there. I groped the night air, breathless. Zedeck turned on his phone light to shine on the ground. A few roots stuck out of the rocky land, here and there, in two rough circles. In the middle: sand and shell.  

I’ve never known the beach without these trees, this portal. Without the gate, how would I enter? I thought they would withstand any storm, at least long enough for me… ME… my projects, my timeline, my healing, MY transformation. Time enough for me to turn all occurring images into historical reality, the only thing I'm really good at. There was going to be the shadow play with the screen stretched between the trunks of the trees, and how many other fun, meaningful, creative, laudable projects waiting to emerge? I thought my specific love was enough to cheat the wind, the storms of a warming world and death itself. I gripped wet sand in my fists bitterly, and wept and wept.

It isn't easy to face a hard night as a sober person. But morning dawns on the discovery that there's such a thing as a clean grief. I know the portal is in the land. If I’m part of the land, and the trees are part of me, then the portal is also in me.  

Light the fire, say the prayer, open the gates. No summoning of spirits. This is calling people back to the land. To witness and transform, to grieve and heal. In the gathering storm, in the dark.

'Portal' is a commissioned work for Asian Art Biennial 2024, titled How To Hold Your Breath. The Biennial is on view at the National Taiwan Museum of Fine Arts in Taichung from 16 November 2024 to 2 March 2025.

This has been Signal 006. In upcoming sends, besides updates on all the other projects, I'll take you behind the scenes of 'Portal' with a couple of interviews.

Btw, did you know if you subscribe to Smoke Signals you help yet another image become historical reality?

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This is where I leave you some cool links:

• The music video for "Mayat Hidup" (Living Corpse) by Hawa has great art direction and reminds me of the cult horror short film by Cecelia Condit, "Possibly in Michigan" (1983)
• Small Southeast Asian horror comics publisher Ghaust Haust Comix is backkk! NO COMIX NO GLORY!!
• I was completely beguiled by Iranian-born, US-based artist Ziba Rajabi's "That Lost Folio Vol I" and "Vol II".
• In Taichung I visited the very cool Risograph Museum and blew a bunch of my artist per diem on prints and zines.
• Two Taiwanese bands - Cicada (land-based chamber music) and Mong Tong (Southeast Asian influenced psychedelia)
• An essay about Ursula Le Guin's old website

Until the next send, keep lighting those fires.