Ng Yi-Sheng


As an official blogger for the Singapore Biennale, I decided to initiate a project. I arranged for free exhibition passes to be given to several local poets and asked them to write pieces inspired by what they saw.
 The results of this project may be viewed at the Biennale blog at www.singaporebiennale.org/blog, but I’ve received permission to reprint three of my favourites here. 



I’m also including links to a few that I couldn’t print here for various reasons:


Toh Hsien Min’s “Sleeping with the Fishes”
Alvin Pang’s “thirteen ways of looking at a snowscape”
Tan Chee Lay’s“禁锢飞翔”
Cyril Wong’s “A Walk in the Park”

Pooja Nansi’s “Spinning Yarns”


South Beach Development, formerly Beach Road Camp. Image from Universes in Universe.

AREA CLEANING


Yong Shu Hoong


Watching the melodrama of desiccated leaves
devour grassy grounds, or upon a ledge
one floor up, choking rain gutters to death, I feel
my right fist tighten over an invisible broomstick.
After all, this was formerly an army camp; rules
and commands were obeyed without second guesses.
But now that the officers are gone, paint brushes
have invaded with stencils and broad strokes.
New embellishments, as there are invisibilities.
Perhaps that’s why I couldn’t locate the canteen
where I’d sipped teh tarik during in-camp long ago.
Still I’m sure it was in a room within Block 14
that I was sealing envelopes and shredding paper
with fellow soldiers; we didn’t care to create art
installations out of military stationery after lunch.
Now, near the cookhouse, an artist has completed
a meaningful project out of domestic objects.
A billboard proclaims “One hundred years of solitude”
at one end of the parade square that’s long devoid
of foot drills and speeches. A crescent moon hangs
from the gnarled branches of a tree. But I start
to get intrigued by what the old flaking paintwork
is trying to communicate. I admire topographical
stains on the floor and unwittingly let leakage drip
onto my head. Did the spirits hiding in these walls
recognise me from before? Instead of conversing
with them about defining miraculum in art, I hope
these long-staying ghosts have made practical plans
after gazing, transfixed, at this empty neon-lit swing
going back and forth and back like a wrecker’s ball.



Ki-Bong Rhee, Bachelor — The Dual Body (2003). Image from Universes in Universes.



THE THIRD MONTH

Lee Yew Leong

Today I came home to find
the Schopenhauer I bought in New York
wadded with Kleenex. Where bookmarks did not separate them,
the tear-soaked pages clumped together, fat.
A curtain flapped. The pitcher got knocked over.
Now this stuck accordion.

Feeling useless,
I remembered the Wittgenstein I’d seen in a show:
Tractatus as aquatic life, buoyed by currents and
oxygenated through gills of words. The book
opened and closed with ease. Breathed.
Water’s metaphysic filtered through and nourished it.
But that was art; this,
Singapore.



Charly Nijensohn, El naufragio de los hombres (2008). Image from Universes in Universes.

On Charly Nijensohn’s El naufragio de los hombres
Koh Tsin Yen

1.

A man stands on a pile of broken stones in the rain.

Long bank of cloud trapped in the salt flats.

The cracked flooded silvered surface of the sky.

2.

We sat on the floor and watched the film loop, once, twice.

You kissed me in the dark. Lightly, lightly.

3.

For the takes, I had the assistance of the Aymara community of the village of Colchani. … Salt is still a central part of the region’s economy, and the blocks of salt in the pictures are frequently used for building owing to the lack of other materials.

4.

I think of Georgia O’Keeffe, twenty-four years old and newly moved to Texas, walking out of town with her sister to watch the evening star come out. My sister had a gun, and as we walked she would throw bottles into the air and shoot as many as she could before they hit the ground. I had nothing but to walk into nowhere and the wide sunset space with the star. Ten watercolours were made from that star.

5.

A line of men walking slowly over cloud, mirrored in the sky.

6.

Isn’t that what we’re looking for, or part of it? The magnificent indifference of the wind whistling over the salt flats and falling away into whiteness. Walking into nowhere and the wide sunset space. If you could scrub away your skin, if you could fold into the stillness, you could learn to be stone.

7.

Still, it’s life we choose, or that chooses us. We bring a gun to shoot at bottles, fix the evening star in watercolour. Take the measure of the vastness of salt and sky. Owing to lack of other materials. Salt of you still on my skin, under my tongue. Tell me which is the greater betrayal – to go on or to look back?

8.

Cloudlight bursting through after the rain as it did at the creation of the world. Here at the edge of things.