Jason Wee: I’m Jason Wee. I’m from Singapore, I live between Singapore and New York now, and I’m an artist and a writer, and I run Grey Projects here in Singapore. I think a lot what the idea deserves when I think of the medium, so that’s really how I work now. So sometimes it’s really where the reading or the original inspiration or the material that I’ve found would lead me, and I would follow it for as long as I can. And sometimes I could start with an image—like a photographic image—but the result is really in the end a video or a drawing, and other times I would begin from a text like Boey Kim Cheng’s poetry and then I end up with sculpture or installation. And I think that’s partly a function of how my brain works. I think I’m internally restless enough that I can’t sit with one without feeling like actually the medium or the form would actually exhaust me, and then I feel like I would need to move to something else for awhile before I come back to it. [1:12] Joanne Leow: Do you think it’s the nature of what you’re interested in? I mean I know you’re interested in space generally, but also urban space, and you’ve been working on islands and coastlines. Is it because of the quality of the thing that you’re focusing on? [1:24] Jason Wee: Partly. I think it’s also how I stumbled into art; I didn’t think that I would be an artist, honestly. I wanted to be a writer first. It’s because I had such a difficult time coming out with fresh poems—I had a terrible writer’s block—that I came into art. And even when I came into art through photography—and that’s what I did initially and that’s what I went to graduate school for—with photography it wasn’t so much the medium, you know, the paper you use or the camera you use, as much as why the camera in the first place? I was interested in how certain kinds of discursive acts come together around certain kinds of materials or machines to generate a tradition that we identify as a genre or a particular kind of art medium. And so, at the back of it, there’s often something discursive. In my head it produces a kind of fluidity that then generates other kinds of possibilities. Like it could sometimes be solely discursive in the way that I then only want to think philosophically, and then the outcome is really a conversation or a text. And I feel like this is a really embodied experience, like even thinking philosophically, that sometimes the thinking runs up against something in me that I feel can only come out sensorially. Like I need to touch something, I need to move something, I need to go somewhere, and then at that time, sometimes, the output changes, so at that time, the ideas become material because of an engagement that I need with the world though my senses. [3:05] Joanne Leow: So then the materiality sort of comes back in that way. [3:09] Jason Wee: Yeah. There’s a quote that always runs in my head a lot, and I feel the reason why archipelagos and islands resonate with me a lot is partly also because of, “the leaves and grass grow where we contain multitudes.” And I feel that often, like, no man’s an island because no man’s one island, I’m, like, several islands.