Category: Writing

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Writing

work time

The lens through which I want to understand my creative position is the quantity and quality of time I inhabit with my art practice. What I do in my studio does often involve mental and physical exertion, and the process is often challenging technically and psychologically. However, neither labour, which emphasizes the toil involved that makes financial compensation necessary, nor work, which is driven by the need to create a particular outcome, are generative concepts for reflecting on my studio practice.

Instead, given that I am engaged with various facets of my creative work for far than the standard 40 hours of work per week, I would like to reflect on my creative practice through how I inhabit time. In Planktons in the Sea, Raqs Media Collective writes, “if we view time from the point of view of the individual then the truth that each of us lives only once (hence each moment is unique) and that death is inevitable (hence, one day, our time will end) make time itself the most scarce commodity we have. That is why we buy time, save time, and hoard time.” Despite the heated discussions on sustainable financial renumeration in the art world, time is actually what is really at stake – we want to be paid well, so that we can devote more time to making what we are most excited about.

In my art practice, I am trying to discover ways of inhabiting time that slow the breakneck pace enabled by modern technology, and challenge our linear and capitalist perception of time as a commodity. However, in my studio practice, I find myself constantly scrambling over deadlines and editing my ever-growing to do list in order to apply to grants, residencies and shows, learn technical skills, purchase materials and obtain approval for installation sites. Time is both my core subject and material. In order to better understand it, I have recently started to develop performance installations that require both my presence and the accumulation of time-based processes over many days. I apply layers of pigments and wait for them to dry, or I light candles and wait for them to be consumed. In between, I create these open expanses where I can neither check my email nor rework an application, so what I do is observe time that is temporarily unbound from the tyranny of clocks.

Raqs Media Collective starts the text with, “To ask a human being to account for time is not very different from asking a floating fragment of plankton to account for the ocean. How does the plankton bank the ocean?” This slippery quality of time becomes increasingly apparent as I read about the unpredictable multiplicity of time in quantum physics and the simultaneous, cyclical nature of time in Zen philosophy. I need to activate material processes that reveal the accumulation of time in order to reflect on what language cannot fully articulate. Thus, my creative practice is primarily neither work nor labour, but a means of becoming aware of how I have been and how I want to inhabit time.

It goes without saying that these contemplations alone do not allow me pay my rent or purchase food. On a practical level, I do need to spend time applying for grants, obtain commissions, or teaching artist workshops in order to sustain myself. But I also want to remain lucidly aware of Raqs Media Collective wrote about Ian Walker’s research, “if people had an endless supply of money, more than 80 percent would use that money to buy time. In other words, he argued, most of us use money to buy time. But given that time is money, we are back to where we were a little while ago, using time to buy time.” In this way, using my creative practice primarily as a means to experience time is a shortcut that by passes the conversion from work/labour into financial renumeration, that then gets used to purchase goods and services that enables us to have more time. More importantly, I see my studio practice as not just a way to reclaim time, but to open up ways of inhabiting time by freeing it from our assumptions about how we should be using our time.

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Conversations References Writing

reflections

I grew up in Singapore, a former British colony. English is a colonial language, but it is also the language I am most fluent and expressive in. It’s heartbreaking and alienating and fascinating to think of English as a force of infiltration because I write copiously for myself. I write in English about the moments and people who I cherish the most. I write descriptive details of what my loved ones were wearing, or I write down lines from conversations from years ago that I still think about, all in English.

English is the language of a colonizers but it is also me. Speaking and continuing to learn Chinese now is an act of reclamation, but a reclamation of a personal history that I didn’t grow up with.

I do speak Chinese when I’m bargaining for vegetables or ask my grandmother what she ate for lunch. But it’s in English, that I really say “you’re important to me” or “I’m thinking of you” or “look at this tree”.

What personal and collective histories haunt our words? Have I reclaimed these words for myself by using them so intimately, by using them as placeholders of love?

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what does your voice sound like? and how does it feel when you can speak in that way? (Juliane Okot-Bitek)

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A light year is the distance that light travels in a year. It’s both time and distance.

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Flatlands, A Romance of Many Dimensions (E. Abbott)

Categories
Line Candles Process Studio Projects Writing

drawing

What does it mean when we observe speed or altitude changing the pace of time? How can different outcomes in time both exist in a “superposition”, or even more bafflingly, cause reality to split off into different worlds? Beyond the artificial, oversimplified construct of hours and minutes, the nature of time, which resides in all living and non-living things, is incredibly difficult to understand. For this reason, I have been drawing.

I use thin cotton cords coated with wax to draw. The balance of flexibility and structure lets me draw the line in almost any direction in space. When I’m satisfied with the drawings, I coat it in layer upon layer of wax until it becomes a candle. Neither the wax nor the wick is truly my drawing medium though. The only basic law of physics that distinguishes the past from the future is: if nothing else around it changes, heat cannot pass from a cold body to a hot one. What I am drawing with is the arrow of time – heat and the potentiality for heat.

In Andy Goldsworthy’s Storm King Wall, he draws a line that extends from the highway into the river, then emerges from the water and winds through the woods with a stonewall. In Rivers and Tides, Goldsworthy says of this work, “A wall is the line that is in sympathy with the place through which it travels, and that sense of movement is very important to understanding the sculpture. All the movement and passage of people, the movement of the wall, of the stones as they run around the trees, the river of growth that is the forest. And it has made me aware of that flow around the world, the veins around the world.”

Like Goldsworthy, my drawings help me to see what surrounds us but is perhaps invisible to the everyday glance. I am not worried about the exact shape of the lines I draw, because if time is both relative to where we are and constantly splitting into different worlds, then it stands to reason that it exists in every shape, whether we are aware of them or not. I meditate on a memory of mine – important but faded, embedded underneath time – as I draw. I find that the lines I make nearer to the memory are more circular and enclosed, multiple loops leading to the same direction; those that are further away from the memory are more open, gentle bends leading to wildly shifting directions.

In Tim Ingold’s book, he writes about John Ruskin’s leading lines :

“.. lines that embody in their very formation the past history, present action and future potential of a thing. The lines of the mountain show how it has been built up and worn away, those of the tree show how it has contended with the trials of life in the forest and with the winds that have tormented it…”

The lines that I’m finding with candles wicks attempt to show not the history, present and future of a mountain or tree, but that of a memory. From the temporal location of the memory, I turn around and notice that the numerous lines of possibilities in the distance have become much fewer and more enclosed, as I get close to the moment that has already transpired.

When I install my candle drawings on the walls, they cast shadows that look like letters of a language. In Ingold’s text, he asks, at what stage does a child cease to draw letters and begin instead to write? Referencing the work of Russian psychologist Lev Vygotsky, Ingold quotes:

“There is a critical moment, however, at which the child discovers that the mark he has made on paper is a depiction of something, and moreover that this thing bears a name. Thenceforth the naming of the object can precede rather than follow the act of drawing it… But he is still not writing it. Writing calls for one further shift, prompted by the discovery that letters can be arranged in meaningful combinations to form words… Only when he can read can he also be truly said to write.”

Like the child who first draws and then discovers the name of what he has made, I have to first draw before I recognise in them the lines of tree rings, water ripples, gnarly branches, before I discover in them the movement of time. In Ingold’s terms, my candle drawings and the shadows that they cast are notations – notations with multiple but certainly not arbitrary meanings and associations. Despite the visual similarities to calligraphic strokes or alphabets, perhaps my drawings cannot become writings because I cannot read them with certainty.

But by Vygotsky’s definition, I also refuse to let my drawings become writing. In the West, alphabets are used as a tools for communicating ideas in written form. Therefore, it is not possible to write what we do not yet know. Towards the end of the Rivers and Tides, Goldsworthy expresses that it is often difficult for him to talk about his work because his drawings, made from natural materials, create for him a world beyond what words can define. But Goldsworthy’s recurring lines in nature already form a language. I want to propose that we can write what we do not yet know by letting our drawings discover their own layers of notation.

    Categories
    Line Candles Studio Projects Writing

    reading time

    In every moment, we experience layers of time, woven from memories of the past and anticipation of the future. These layers influence how we experience the present. Now, I am sitting here writing at 9:10pm, but I am also conscious of:

    The move I made from Singapore to Vancouver last week.

    The two week quarantine I am in, of which ten days have passed.

    The next parcel that will arrive via DHL, which is projected to take 2 days.

    The finite but unknown span of my life.

    The last time I received a voice message or text from my friend Asch, who I usually hear from daily.

    The move I made from Atlanta to Singapore three years ago, which made me feel just as foreign as I do now.

    Some of these temporal layers have no known durations, some of them straddle across different spans of chronological time. But together, these shifting times form the ground of all my experiences.

    In contemporary life, we are expected to divide time into clinical blocks of hours and minutes. We are so accustomed to converting time units into wages or prices, we constantly measure our experience of the present against the rigid divisions of hours and minutes to determine our own ‘productivity’ and value.

    Because I feel that the linear and clinical way of dividing time into hours and minutes falls far short of understanding what the value of time truly is to us, I’ve been experimenting with making objects that can be used to measure and inhabit time differently.

    I think of these as experiments. Like I’m inventing clocks and working out the kinks. Except how I evaluate these clocks is not their mechanical precision but how they influence the way time can be experienced or visualised. Right now I’m working with candles because before the invention of pendulum clocks, candles were widely used across many parts of Asia to measure time.

    I’m also interested in the heat generated by the burning of the wick. The only basic law of physics that distinguishes the past from the future is that: if nothing else around it changes, heat cannot pass from a cold body to a hot one. None of the other elemental laws of physics distinguish between the past and future.

    We are expected to divide time into clinical blocks of hours and minutes, but that doesn’t really allow us to understand the value of time to us. I’ve been trying to make objects that can be used to measure and inhabit time, but I’m not interested in mechanical precision.

    The only basic law of physics that distinguishes the past from the future is that: if nothing else around it changes, heat cannot pass from a cold body to a hot one. None of the other elemental laws of physics distinguish between the past and future.

    Time moves at different speeds in different places

    Times moves at different speeds depending on how fast you’re moving.

    Most of the universe consists of times that neither the future, present or past relative to us.

    How do I touch what is too abstract and large to really understand or experience?

    Categories
    Process Studio Projects Writing

    materials

    Inks made from beetroot, bluepea flower, coffee, vinegar on rice paper and watercolour paper

    Thinking about where my materials come from. I’m captured by these two points:

    • The yellow of beeswax comes from the accumulation of pollen over time as the worker bees chew wax to build hives.
    • It takes the lifetime production of 2 – 3 worker honey bees just to produce 1 gram of wax.

    This feels powerful and significant, especially while I read Braiding Sweetgrass and think about materials as gifts from nature.

    We are often so detached from the sources of our material world. We think of materials as things contained in plastic boxes with price labels, rather than as matter with connections to plants and animals around us.