Intertidal Polyphonies

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: Charles Lim 4; Charles Lim talks about land reclamation and his SEA STATE project "Inside / Outside.", Charles Lim: I’d gone through this whole thing, the art school, the ways of looking at—actually, the way of looking at the sea became more critical, you know, I wasn’t like the sailor anymore just looking for the wind. So, what happened was that I went out to sea, and then I realized that actually, there was a lot of things going on with the sea. Land reclamation, there’s a sea wall that we built on the east side, it was almost like The Truman Show, I would sail and then, bang! I hit the wall, you know, and then this strange sign that said HDB, because it was owned by HDB. So, what happened was that—later I found out was that actually, the state gave HDB a part of sea, and then they walled it up for many years. I wanted to do things that would grapple with this thing. And then there was a fence on the north side of Singapore, trying to stop immigrants from coming in. And then what happened was that the work I did, I wanted to be super critical—I wanted to show all these things that were happening. In a sense I was quite angry, you know, I’m a sailor and like, hey man, you know, I used to sail in this area called Seafix, and then it was all totally reclaimed, I can’t even sail there anymore. And that place used to be—used to represent the far away for me. Because my coach would say, “Oh, if you can sail the Seafix, you’re very far away.” And then you can imagine that far away place has become land, actually. And so, what happened was that I had this project called “SEA STATE 1: inside/outside.” And I remember wanting to do this work and then…I think even my father was quite worried for me, you know, “you’re going to talk about land reclamation and all these things, they will not be happy.” And then what happened was that I was working on the Tsunamii projects, and in a sense, I’ll say that the Tsunamii projects actually failed, they weren’t that good. Although we were all over the place, we were on these big shows. And at that point in time I was a young artist, I realized the problem was that the kind of things, issues that I was talking to you about was that I was trying to load too many issues into the artwork. And I realized that I had to kind of like invert the way I was working, actually. So what I did was that…I wanted to make works that were highly politicized, but at the same time I needed a kind of cover, and then, you know, at the same time I come from the art world, and the art world has the art market, you know, it’s not all nice and wonderful in the art word. The art audience have a certain kind of expectation, they go there, they want to see pretty things, they want to see—they have a way of looking at things. And then I realized that…how do I make work that I’m able to operate in the art world, in the field of arts, that engages me also, and then at the same time I’m able to do something that I want to talk about, actually, that it’s about my space? So, what I did was I began to do conceptual art. And then I realized that, you know, conceptual art, it’s actually very simple, all you are doing is come up with one concept, a simple concept, and then you just execute a common concept. And then, you know, and then people ask you like, “why are you doing this?” Then you just say like, “oh, I’m doing it because of this concept,” and it’s as simple as that. There’s no other reason. And, actually, that’s what I do, you know, for my artwork. So I did a project called “inside/outside,” and I came out with this concept, and every time someone asked me, like the state would ask me, “why are you doing this project?”, I’ll say, “oh, I simply just want to look inside and outside of Singapore.” Because when I’m outside Singapore I tend to think about Singapore a lot, you know, I miss Singapore when I’m in England, I miss Singapore a lot. But then when I’m in Singapore I don’t think of Singapore, you know. So, I feel that I need to be just outside Singapore to think about Singapore, I want to be in that situation. So what happened was that I did a project where I took a boat out on the border of Singapore and then I would go outside Singapore—every time I would see something floating along the coast of Singapore, I would go outside Singapore and take a picture of inside Singapore, and then I would go inside Singapore and take a picture of outside of Singapore. But actually, I’m not interested in the objects that are floating. And it’s quite interesting because a lot of the people that first saw the work, they think that the work is about buoys, the work is about those things that are photo—but actually what I’m more interested in is the things on the background. So, I’m actually showing the fence on the north, I’m showing the reclamation, actually. All these things that happen along the coast. And it was quite interesting, that project when I was doing it, was actually funded by—it was the president’s young talent award thing, actually. So, I actually had to shake Nathan’s hand (laughing), and then he was looking at the things. So, it was kind of interesting too. So, there are kind of two facades, actually. So in a sense I kind of like operating like that also, because I think it works both ways, you know, in some ways I want to say something, but then at the same time, as an artist when I want to say something, there’s always that question, “am I right?” When I come in here and say, “this is how things are, the state is doing this,” and then I’m going to show it, I’m asking myself, “am I right, do I have preconceptions on these things?” Maybe what they’re doing is not that bad. So what I’m trying to do is actually…having that very simple concept is interesting because when I do that it gives me a certain kind of rigor, you know, to push myself into spaces that, that will challenge me, and might challenge my own perceptions of what I thought.

: Charles Lim 5; Charles Lim discusses anxiety as a cultural phenomenon for Singaporean artists and talks about the importance of continual dialogue between opposing opinions regarding social change., Joanne Leow: I was thinking of the other “SEA STATE”s as well, like you must film the waterways, you must film “all lines run out,” right. Do you think that if you live in a different country you wouldn’t have this kind of anxiety? [0:13] Charles Lim: I think it’s interesting, I think the anxiety is interesting. Because at that point in time, when I was in, I think, in the ‘90s, or when I first started engaging in art, self-censorship was real, man. It was real scary. It’s really scary to make work and then someone will come…that kind of thing happens. And actually, it affected a lot of artists, they felt afraid of transgressing. But the thing is that I was actually studying abroad, so I wasn’t…I mean, if I was studying in Singapore, I think that that fear would have been embedded in me completely. But when I came back to Singapore and I was from abroad, I guess, it was not so embedded. So, what happened was that I kind of challenged that, actually, in a sense. But then I tried to find a strategy of doing it. But I feel that it’s interesting to engage with that, I think—I feel that we should, actually, engage with it. Also, in a sense, the problem is that, you know, I see the state is—and then you have the people on the other side. They’re both trying to show a future, they’re both trying to say—like the state will say, “oh, look at our future, it’s so wonderful!” And then, you know, the powers-that-be on the other side, then you’ll be showing another future, like, “oh look, we have this future, it’s so wonderful”—or they will start looking backwards, they’ll go, “oh, it was so wonderful before!” I feel that as an artist I’m not interested in the future and projecting a future, I’m more interested in actually living in the now, actually. Through living in the now, informing our future. I think that’s very important, because otherwise you’re always using a solution that is from somewhere else. And the problem is that that solution is not aware of your presence. Say like, maybe an NGO from outside, they will say, “oh you need more this,” you know. But it’s not quite tailored for who we are, actually, as people, and I think that’s important. And the other thing is that, I think with the state, what’s—and when I’m talking to power, actually, this is something I’m slowly trying to formulate when I speak to them, is that—when I show something negative, I try to tell them—I don’t know whether it’s working—but I try to tell them that when you’re trying to form a picture, a real picture, a portrait of someone, you need to show the flaws also, because if you don’t show the flaws, it is a form of violence on itself, actually. Of course, you want to be perfect, clean people, but that perfect person does not exist, even in the most perfect place. So, I think it’s this anxiety of being wrong, I think we need to get away from that, or being “good.” I think, in a sense, we’re all kind of biased also, and we…although, say like we do something, say like, I’m doing a work about the sea, and I know that there are—like, my friends from the Malay community, like Zai [Kuning] he’s doing something about…I feel that I cannot represent them also, you know, I can’t. So it’s important to have a conversation and allow that to happen. [3:26] Joanne Leow: And to understand the limitations… Charles Lim: Yeah.

: Cindy Mochizuki Clip 1; In this clip, visual artist Cindy Mochizuki comments on her work called Paper. Mochizuki outlines the inspiration and history of this project and this discussion leads to topics of space, globalization, ecology, memory, and the trans-Pacific., CM: Hi my name is Cindy Mochizuki, and I'm a visual artist, um, and I make multimedia installations, drawing, and performance.CM: Um, so, Paper was based on um, or it came out of a research residency, um, that I went to in 2014 in Yonago, Totorri ken in Japan. Um, and at that time, the curator that I was working with, Makiko Hara, was doing um a lot of research on artists working back and forth between Canada and Japan. Looking at the trans-Pacific, and she'd invited me to think of a work to be made for Yonago. And, uh, one of her curatorial premises was that she thought that Vancouver or the islands of Vancouver, the Gulf Islands, resembled the islands of Yonago, in the sense that even just aesthethetically, this really red sunset, the vast oceans, and then so she thought that there was a connection there and so she invited me to think or imagine a work for um Yonago. And when we went there, we were invited to do different site visits and like almost take like a tourist through this city that I had actually been to before. So, I was fascinated with some of the artists who had come out of Yonago, so I'd been there sometime prior. So, I was familiar with it in terms or some of its tourists’ sites, some of it's like what they’re known for. Each region of Japan is known for specific things. And so, we were taken to this elder in the city of Yonago he had this he offers a boat tour for about ten dollars Canadian, and you kind of traverse through the travel through the canal ways. Yonago used to be a castle town so you can still see the canals that merchants would come to sell goods. And he takes you on this little boat tour. And I think his perspective is very much sort of about the gentrification of this area, or this island and so he's pointing to things that are disappearing. Very much from the ground-level of a citizen that cares about what's happening to the waters there and what's happening to the island and it's actually called the Nakaumi, the brackish lake, so it has it has um it's a lake but it's also, or, it's lake waters connected specifically to the ocean as well. To the Japan sea, so very different species and vegetation and life would grow in that kind of water, and I guess back in the day many families would spend time there, and now if you go there it's like polluted and people have forgotten about it. So, he kind of stresses the importance of that on this tour. In Japanese. And he pointed to this island just off the shoreline that we were on called Kayashima, and he just kind of briefly said: "when I was a little boy, my grandfather told me that this woman made these great noodles and there used to be a restaurant there and people would have to go there by boat,” and then he sort of carried on and I was very fascinated by this nugget or this little story that came out of this. And so I said to Machiko, "well, I think I'd like to make a story or make a piece that's about this island. Whether it's fictional or non-fictional, or hearsay or whatever, I think that's gonna be the root or starting point." So, I went home, and did some research about Yonago to see if it had any connections to B.C. And so, I found that in the 1900s there was a boom of migration from that region. Not necessarily Yonago, but another region nearby called Sakaiminato to Vancouver and a lot of Japanese migrants worked in like um the lumber mills or worked on hot house tomatoes on main island and Gulf Islands and were part of the industry building of that time before the internment. And so, in Paper, it's about a 20 minute audio work that I had imagined you would listen to on headsets and you would um it's for that boat tour, so we asked the boat elder who was giving that tour, "if I make this piece, is it okay if we play this while you tour or you drive the boat?" He said "sure." It's a 20 minute audio work where there's a woman named K, just the letter 'K', and she's working out of this restaurant, it's a family business, she's trying to master this very specific Kakiage tempura, just like burdock roots and carrots --it's this sort of mash of tempura and carrots and very bored and kind of like running this family restaurant and she encounters this ghost, or what I know is the writer's ghost of a Japanese-Canadian lumberjack that kind of passes through and drops behind this letter. And the other thing that I had discovered when I was in the archives doing research about Yonago and Vancouver is that the boom of migrants that came over, came because they were called over by somebody that got here first, and they wrote what's called the Yobiyose letter or a calling letter to kind of woo families over. A little bit kind of in a sort of very nostalgic sort of flowery kind of way by saying “we've got this great ocean there's salmon and abundance of work,” but then they come and it's like complete like difficult times as a racialized migrant to come over and you know you're not getting paid well and you’re like, it's you know the complete opposite. The letter that I found in the archive was someone from Yomi, Yonago kind of extending out to be like "come on family, I bought this forest, there's lots of work to be done," and so the piece in the very end shifts this connection to the menu which is actually a papery menu and when the ghosts leaves the menu, sort of a hole rips open and she's able to see this Douglas Fir and this forest. And then when she goes back to the wall where the menu had fallen, and so where the menu hit the wall, also there's a rupture in the wall so she's able to see through to the 1900s B.C. and she starts to see um the sort of like this lush forest and it kind of ends there. And I had imagined that the chapter, that I would come back and finish Rock and Scissors. Rock, Paper, Scissors in Japan is actually Janken-pon, or it's like um, it is you know the game the kids play, of course, and it's sort of a game you play for who goes first or who gets the treat, you know it's like a common game in Asian families. I didn't think, well at some point I thought I would write Rock and Scissors, and Paper was that story that's sandwiched in the middle. But what happened was that when we finished the work everybody from the community or different people kind came forward and I know something about the island or I could tell you something, and um, I was invited back in 2016 for a different residency to kind of gather all this stuff and then Rock and Scissors was born. So that's how Paper got started.

: Cindy Mochizuki Clip 2; The second audio clip discusses the work’s use and layering of space. Mochizuki’s then comments on how her work connects to the ocean and water—leading to a discussion of the culture of diaspora, history, space, and transnationalism., CM: Well I was definitely wanting to create this idea that um that you're gonna be receiving this story; that you're gonna be on the receiving end of a story that will traverse some time and kind of lace over two different landscapes and two different cities as well, so literally it would be Yonago and Japan, as you said, layered on top of each other, and I…you know it's different than going on a walking tour. In this case, you're on a boat so you're floating at sea, so I thought of this idea and I've done works before where you're listening on headsets, but it really takes place in in…it really takes place in your mind and in your memory and something that's really between your two ears. And you don't really need visuals to see this, it's kind of happening there, it's a stage in your mind. And what was really interesting for me was you know you're at sea, you’re floating out in the Japan Sea, and you're listening to the story and I actually performed it in Japanese. My Japanese is, it's pretty okay, but like I wouldn't say it's like…because I'm not like native born Japanese and it was for a Japanese audience, so I think they were like "who is this? Where is this? Where is she? What's happening here?" right? because it's so, the speaker is from another realm and so I think that was added to this really weird fictional story that's maybe reality, maybe not and then when they took off the headsets in this vast ocean, they were kind of drifting out in the middle of the Japan Sea and then the man started up his "Hi Everyone Welcome out" in Japanese and did his tour, and so I think there was like a rupture there in the moment and so I think the headsets—it's a very simple device and many artists there are many artists that use this. But for me it because so much is about thinking about the future and the past and not about watching movies or moving pictures, I think that was the form that worked the best. Almost like a bedtime story, somebody is whispering this thing to me just like the elder on the boat that just kind of like told us this story in passing. I'm very interested in the passage or slippage of these like almost periphery sorties that hold something that hold a grain of like a key to something that's much larger and so I was thinking of that. 10:42 JL: Also, what's really interesting is in some senses it's also really connected to the ocean the water and there's that element in that work there—in some of your other work as well, the project you did with school children for instance. Can you talk a little more about that connection then, because we're thinking about this Trans-Pacific connection, and yet, each space that you're going to has this really really specific, local, waterway history, right? So how do you sort of bridge that gap between the oceanic connection and the really local, the inlet, the false creek, like you were saying, the canal? 11:19 CM: Well, I think I mean I think being somebody who's of a culture of diaspora, of, like my my father was you know third generation Japanese-Canadian, my mom is from / was born in Osaka and lived in Yokohama and they both have, you know, returned back to Canada on different occasions on like my father for example, after the internment they exiled to Japan and they came back on the Hikawa Maru and so um I've been fascinated with this Pacific ocean or there's the Japan Sea, or there's this this bodies of water that are stretch out these long (x6) lines um but they lull you back, or they bring you back. And I'm interested also in things like war and history and these things that are about water and having to eat water, and living and so it's true like many different pieces of mine there's water imagery, things on the shore line, asking children to work with material of water and ink and salt to create the imaginary or the imagined. And so I think for me it's just an important place to kind of to be because we're all settlers we're all you know we've washed up ashore, we've floated here and have different histories and different and I think now we're being asked to think about um why what are you doing here? What are you contributing? Why are you here? And the ocean line or the shoreline I think is like a really good kind of um periphery space or something where you can sort of ask those questions and I'm curious about that, I’m interested in that, as a notion I think maybe.

: Cindy Mochizuki Clip 3; This final clip of the interview discusses translating history into art and the use of multiple media forms in Mochizuki’s projects. She comments on her position as an artist and how it influences her representation of history in her work. The conversation then shifts to the role of audio in creating a space for the audience to stop and think., JL: History. When you’re trying to translate the personal, and / or collective history into an art form—and there's things that always have to be left out or actually sometimes fabulated, confabulated, because you're trying to tell a narrative, right? so if you could talk a bit more about that process and when you're doing it and it doesn't have to be specifically about Paper, but it can be, what is going through your head? What are some kinds of the challenges you face when you're doing that kind of process? 14:18 CM: Well, definitely I think I can't speak. My position is as an artist, so it's definitely not of historian, so it's definitely a different way of mining through the archive and mining through materials. I definitely think that sometimes, like in the case of Paper, there was an invitation by someone, there was an ask to make something so I think about that ethically and aesthetically, also, like what does it mean to like carry these materials forward and what does it mean to make it into an artwork? Um, I don't think I’m necessarily making something that’s like “I'm going to state the facts, this is the history of Japanese-Canadian internment.” It's not about that. But I feel definitely that…I think art can lend itself or writing or text or something that comes more from a creative place, can lend itself a different viewpoint of understanding history or understanding something very complex. That maybe, literally, that history can't alone…maybe or that certain academic research alone can't can’t kind of…cause you're actually calling upon things are invisible, right? And so here this might…we can go into the other question, why work with so many different mediums, it's almost like I'm tracking this spectre or this thing that I cannot attain, right? Even personally, as a somebody who's looking back at history trying to understand her history and you know as I get older even I think "maybe I'm done with this issue" because like you come up with something else and you're like “what? how did that happen?” But it's a living thing, it's a living archive, um creature in itself and so, I think that I move through different mediums because what's the best way to channel that through and bring it to so we can even see this for a temporary moment. And so I think performance or even audio work or these experiences where people come and experience something and then leave and it's not necessarily object or a monument, I think that, to me, has the most…I think it's the most interesting to me because I'm interested in what happened after, I guess the affect of it and how people and audiences carry that with them afterwards and then how that kind of ricochets and breaks open something else. So, I think I'm more interested in that, and a lot of that is unknown and so somebody could come and be like “that conjured something dark in me” or whatever, something, now I'm gonna go off and do something else or maybe not, maybe you have no reaction to it but um like I’ve worked with or I've you know worked in a room with artists and you know collaborated and then you know brought together a bunch of images and then somebody be like “oh my god this pairing of this like made me think of this thing,” and so, I love those kind of moments like a ricochet of things like a knock of dominoes or affect of something so I think I'm more interested in that as a process. 17:17 JL: And I think the last question I have for you, just following up on all the things you've been talking about, is this that a lot of your work as well requires that the audience pay attention; pay close attention, be listening intently, or be looking intently. Can you tell me a little bit more about that kind of impulse in your work? That drawing in but also that kind of…it's almost like you're holding open this space, but you're also holding a space that's telling you "hey, stop and just like really listen. Like really listen." Can you talk a little bit more about that? 17:47 CM: I think, well, I think I'm very…I'm interested in this idea that…I mean it's so difficult to do. It's very difficult to slow down, stop, and observe everything. We live in this capitalist society that's go-go-go, we have deadlines, like I said I'm working on 8 projects, like what? But I think that in, there's something in, especially in terms of storytelling or listening or receiving that it's in that very quiet interstitial, that really quiet moment where something ruptures time, I think, and to really get that, to really see that, is sometimes not a mass theatre production for 180 people, I think sometimes it's a small journey, sometimes it's a taste, sometimes it's a little moment, and very recently and in some of my work it kind of comes down to that and I think it's about really carefully looking at something that's invisible and each individual person carries a different way of interpreting it; so, how to create the stage for that, how to create the space for that, I think that is important for me.

: Clara Chow 1; In this interview, Clara Chow and Dr. Joanne Leow discuss the various islands that belong to Singapore and are barred from public access in regards to Chow's short story "The Wheel" (from her collection Dream Storeys)., Clara Chow: I’m Clara Chow, and I’m a writer. I’m Singaporean. The official propaganda or whatever is the official Singapore narrative hardly ever factors in the southern islands. I mean they tell us about Sentosa, and then, that’s about it. And everything else was sort of not talked about. And actually, Singapore has a lot of southern islands, and I started wondering why do we not have this connection to our islands? And I think that, if you don’t talk about the islands, then the islands themselves lend themselves to other uses that you don’t have to justify to the public. I mean, for a while Pulau Tekong was where this—it is still, where— [0:43] Joanne Leow: It is still, yeah. Clara Chow: Yeah, where, you know, you train your NS men. Bukom is where you refine oil. You could use these islands to do things that you don’t want to do on the mainland, and then you don’t have to justify it to anybody because it’s just off everybody’s radar. So, I thought, okay, if that is the case then if you decide to have political prisoners and they want to go away, then the islands would be the not-talked-about space where they can go, too. And they can kind of co-opt this—I mean it works both ways, right, like if the authorities can do this then the rebels can do that too. [1:20] Joanne Leow: They did detain a political prisoner on Sentosa for— Clara Chow: Yeah. Joanne Leow: —many many years, right. Clara Chow: Yes. Correct. Joanne Leow: So that’s also a thing, even though Sentosa is used for tourism. And then you find out, obviously, at the end—I hate to spoil this—but that it’s been all this reality TV show, which is really fascinating to me, because this idea that, yes you’re saying this weird space of the islands, but it’s also a space of surveillance, in the end. [1:43] Clara Chow: That was, again, the husband came out with it, right, but I liked it because I thought, this is this nihilistic view where you think that you can make a difference, you think you can break out of the cycle, but then actually, “no, lah, there’s no such thing.” So, it’s kind of, like, hopeless. You can say, “let’s rage against the machine!” But at the end of the day, the system is so much bigger than you are, and you kind of get sucked right into it. This is a really early story. At the time I was kind of feeling a little bit like that, maybe because, you know, as a writer I was still finding my way, and I thought, it’s so hard to do this fulltime, because the Singapore environment doesn’t really understand someone who wants to write fiction and be penniless, right? Over the years I’ve kind of changed, and I think that I’ve revised my views. I don’t think it’s that hopeless after all. I think that if you do want to be an activist, you do want to campaign for something, you can make change. You can really make a difference. So that was just the worst-case scenario. [2:50] Joanne Leow: And yet that story’s last. So, I was really interested in the placement as well, right. Clara Chow: It was probably the first to be written. The book is chronological, so, the shopping mall story is the first one, and it kind of just went that way. But if I put “The Wheel” as the first one, even though it was written first, it would be, kind of a very sad note. So, move it to the back (laughing). 3:13 Joanne Leow: To end on a sad note (laughing) That is so funny. I want to talk a little bit more about two things, I guess, about that short story first, maybe. First about the role of Pulau Hantu. So we talked a little bit about how you—they displace things at the other island…obviously the name as well, I mean, what is it about the coastline of those particular islands that makes us think about spectrality, about ghosts, about haunting? [3:37] Clara Chow: Yeah, when I was looking for a southern island to set the rest of the story in it was a toss-up between Hantu and Senang, because Senang had that whole prison riot thing, and that was a very real and bloody part of our history, which, again, I think a lot of young people don’t know. But then the name Hantu is always special to us, because Ghost Island, right, so haunted, right, so scary. And I like the idea that there were two Hantus, it was Pulau Hantu Besar, the big one, and then Pulau Hantu Kechil, the small one. And I thought, how interesting that we—okay, at least I—didn’t know that there were two islands, we just thought, oh it’s just one big island. So even the island itself resists your stereotyping of it; it splits into two, right, it’s just like history splits into two and you can have this version and that version, so you can have the Kechil version, the Besar version. So, I thought, okay, really interesting, Pulau Hantu, in terms of symbolism. And then the fact that Hantu, from Hantu you can see Bukom, because it’s really that near. So, geographically, Hantu served its purpose, in terms of how they can just move from point to point. [4:51] Joanne Leow: And I was thinking of that ending, right, that really bleak ending, right, but then that ending is also really aware of the kind of ecology, that almost man-made ecology, and you were saying Bukom is so close. So, what do you think of when you think of that space then? You know, it’s not just a natural space, not just an island that you go off, but there’s something as well incredibly industrial about it, what were you trying to convey? [5:16] Clara Chow: It started when I used to have this friend in JC and she was dating someone whose father worked for Shell, and then they would all live on Bukom, and then he would have to—like, they would go on dates, and then he would have to rush for the last ferry to go back to Bukom, so their dates could not go past ten o’clock or something like that. So, I always was fascinated like, why, how come, some people can live on Bukom, right. And then over the years I would read—I would hear about people who worked at Shell, or I would have relatives who worked there, and this idea of Bukom as kind of like a private, corporatized island, it belongs to Shell. But then, this didn’t gel with me, because it belongs to us Singaporeans, right, but then it’s kind of been sold to Shell in a way. And if we are not authorized we can’t go to Bukom. There’s no way ever that I can ever get on Bukom unless Shell invites me. So I thought, what if, at some point, this corporatization of Singapore ends, because there are a lot of spaces in Singapore that are also like that, like the Google headquarters, right, it’s just this quasi-public but actually corporate space, and it’s a huge chunk. What if they all pull out at some point, and then what are you going to be left with? You’re just going to be left with this corporate ruins. I was thinking of that when I wrote about Bukom. And then how it ends with her going in that direction, so how can we reclaim that—at some point, right—how can we reclaim those spaces.

: Clara Chow 2; Clara Chow discusses how she resists official Singaporean narratives of progress through her writing and assuages personal anxieties about space / purpose / production through crocheting., Joanne Leow: You’re really imagining the the death of capitalism and the kind of horribleness, the dystopia that you’re left with, like what are the remnants—the horrible poisonous things. [0:09] Clara Chow: I believe they can be reclaimed, because I believe in the power of nature, right, like even if it’s really polluted, at some point the corals will start to grow, it will be rehabilitated. So there’s this end of civilization. 0:23 Joanne Leow: Yeah, not in our timeframe, not in our timeline. That’s so interesting. So, I guess jumping off from that, maybe two more questions. One about your thinking about Bukum, and I really love what you’re saying about the island, like, you know, is it a corporatized space, what happens when it’s not in the end. I’ve been thinking about coastal changes—and also in the context of your book, right, because you’re talking to architects, you’re thinking about unbuilt buildings, but then you’re building them in the stories as well. So, what do you think is that relationship between the words that you’re writing, the stories, the kind of buildings you’re imagining, or even the coastlines you’re imagining, and the actual, material—have you thought about that? Like the materials that we’re using, like sand, like cement, like glass, workers’ labour? [1:06] Clara Chow: Okay, so sand is interesting, because when I was writing, there was this whole sand shortage going on in Singapore and Joshua Comaroff, who is also interviewed in the book, he wrote this whole essay about sand, and how it’s precious, and our relationship with sand and Indonesia; so, in a way, that comes up because sand is the key to our survival as a city, so if we didn’t have any more sand, then Singapore can’t really function anymore. That’s one aspect of it, but the other aspect is my anxiety as someone who has never actually made anything with my hands. Like, my entire career was just writing and arranging words, and I look at architects where your entire career can be mucked up in this house, that building, and even like a competitor. Your entire career is that you make this cupboard, and even if you are ninety years old you have made this cupboard so many times, you’re a master craftsman, and you can still make this cupboard perfectly. We don’t have that assurance as writers. So, by the time I’m ninety I might have Alzheimer’s and I wouldn’t even be able to string a sentence together, so practice doesn’t really make perfect in our case, right…it was really depressing. To me, I felt like materiality was the key of this anxiety, so if you could kind of make something, and at least that would stand as a testament to what you have done. So probably a little bit—not the same as what you’re asking, but I do think about materials now, but I do a lot of crochet, and just working with yarn calms me a lot, like I’ve gotten past the, envying the architects, because that—okay, yeah, you work with concrete, you work with tar, you know, but I just do my domestic thing, and I work with yarn, and it’s really really calming, and then you make a scarf, and you’re like, okay, at least it’s something. So, there’s this whole tension between producing something that is intangible and producing something that’s tangible. [3:20] Joanne Leow: But you produced the book, the book is a physical object! Clara Chow: I know, I know, okay, yeah, that’s what people say, right, you make a book— Joanne Leow: You made a book, I mean, c’mon! Clara Chow: —but, but, I want to argue that if no one reads the book it’s still not a thing. The book only becomes a thing when someone reads it. Whereas a scarf is a thing, its thingness is indisputable. Does that make sense? Joanne Leow: Yes, yes that makes sense. Clara Chow: Of course, then you can counterargue and say, but a scarf is not a scarf until someone wears it, a house is not a house until someone lives in it, and I’m like, yeah, but, you know, a house is a pretty big thing, you can’t ignore it. Joanne Leow: (laughs) Depends, maybe if it’s on Pulau Bukom you could. Clara Chow: (laughs) True dat. [4:01] Joanne Leow: Maybe one last question. So then, I guess, a more broader, philosophical question. Now that you’ve written it—and I know writing the book you were thinking about space in Singapore—what do you think is the role of the fictional text, then? Because I mean, the fact that you chose to build the buildings that they hadn’t built, right, means also architects in some case are also…they’re authors, right, they write fictions. So, what do you think is the role of the literary text, your literary text, but also many other people writing at the same time right now thinking about space here? [4:33] Clara Chow: In the course of writing the book I realized that architects are actually very good writers, so they actually don’t need me around, they write fantastically and they do write fiction, and there’s this whole subset called architectural fiction where architects themselves write like sci-fi and all that. So, I think that architecture and fiction has always gone hand-in-hand. Even when you go to architecture school, there are these modules to tell you how to write so that you can convey your vision of what you’re about to build, so space has always been contingent on the words. It’s like the: “let there be light,” right, and then there’s the world, so “let there be words,” and then there’s the building. The role of the text in the city, then, is, as I say in the preface, it’s a set of alternative blueprints. So, we have the physical landscape, but these are only the buildings that made it into concrete, right. There were all these other rejected buildings, like, for example, Golden Mile Complex, like it was really supposed to be entire mile, and continue on and on. But because, for whatever reason, it was never built—but imagine if it had been, right, and then this city would look different. So, I just thought that, if we could kind of do our own alternative blueprints, then that would be a form of resistance to official landscapes, official narratives. And even though they don’t get built, we don’t have to feel like whatever we think about or whatever we imagine is not valid. It’s still collected somewhere; it still will survive in some form or other.

: Clara Chow Reading Excerpts from âThe Wheelâ; Clara Chow reads excerpts from her short story “The Wheel” from Dream Storeys. The story ties together themes of economy, space, politics, and nationhood that all come together in Chow's reading of the text.

: Clarke Quay 1; Boats on the river beside Clarke Quay.

: Clarke Quay 2; Metal post in the river. Clarke Quay in the background.

: Clarke Quay 3; Close-up of two boats on the river.

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Intertidal Polyphonies

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