Joanne Leow: The work on Labyrinths—you move then from thinking about space as blurring the line between fictionalization and reality, but also think about borders and fencing. And I found that work really fascinating as well, because earlier as well you were thinking about the material object, “can I gather these material objects?” What were you trying to do in that particular piece when you’re producing this kind of collage effect? [0:21] Jason Wee: I think it started for me just really thinking through choreography, and I was thinking a lot about what it means to dance, what it means when someone directs you through a certain kind of movement through space. And partly, maybe because I’ve never been very comfortable thinking of myself as a performer or a dancer, and I’ve tried getting myself involved in dance environments or performance workshops, and hearing this that, you know, we all have our own movements if we just let ourselves into it. But then I walked through the city and realized how I am often not left to my own devices. There are subtle and not-so-subtle infrastructural ways that don’t, in some ways, announce themselves through signs or language, but they really direct your movement; they tell where to cross, not to cross, how to move through streets or even when there are no streets or a field. And I started getting really annoyed, but then I was also thinking, in some ways they, this is a kind of imagined choreography. They did not intend to think of this as kind of movement-related devices but they very much are of a movement vocabulary. So, I then think of the other ways that they begin to shape movement generally. And then the other piece of information that really got me started on putting all the work together was when I found—I don’t know what the Parliamentary records are called here—Hansard? Something like that. And I found that they approved—the Home Affairs, Ministry of Home Affairs—an increase in the budget for coastal fencing to a point where I think we have more coastal fencing than we have shoreline on the main island of Singapore. And these coastal fences are highly defensive. And you know we have, like, 750 odd islands—but they intend to make several of them completely uninhabitable. So, they surround those totally, and actually if you sail to…if you take a southern route to Riau, actually, you will see them, like small islands that only have mangroves or small stands of weeds, that are completely surrounded. The second type that they approve that was highly extended was that they generated these maritime fences—blue barrel buoys, they’re connected by chainmail, but both are meant to prevent—partly to enforce our no refugee policies—the blue barrels are intended to prevent ships from coming close enough where you could swim to shore, or that you could physically land on something, and the same thing with those island fences. And then the final item that they produced was these kinds of stone-base gravel mix that they then generate very very high walls that will not be out of place in, Israel Palestine, I mean, in terms of the materiality of it and the solidity of it, it’ll be like that kind of fence. And those three things plus the fence that I see every day came together in a way that I thought that, there are the fences that we—are already out of sight because they are basic infrastructure, and then there are the fences and borders that constrain our movement and define sovereignty and territory and our sense of citizenship and nation, they’re like completely out of sight because they’re out in the water, or in places that we almost never go to or can never arrive in even if we want to. And I thought: “what are the other moments where I feel space has been constrained” Not discursive space but territorial, physical space have been constrained. Or even the contestation of / for spaces, the demands made of public space have been foreclosed in a certain number of ways, so I started thinking about what happened with Pink Dot last year, with Sungei Road, and with Oxley Road. [4:28] Joanne Leow: And so the iterations become almost like—I mean they’re repetitions, they’re echoes of each other— Jason Wee: Yeah. Joanne Leow: —because if one thing works in one space then why not replicate it? And, of course, it’s—I think it’s—colonial. You’ve got to rule by segregating, categorizing, labelling, and keeping apart. And nobody wants to think about that but it’s true. Maybe two more questions. One, I’m really interested in, in the fact that you turn to Boey Kim Cheng to think about the coast, and why? You know, you’ve been talking about surveillance, technology, but almost like a brutalist kind of control over regimentation space, but then on the other hand you have this lyric poetry on the other side. So, in your mind, what is that relationship? [5:12] Jason Wee: Quickly about the works, you mentioned found objects, but the assemblages, they relate to your early question. I haven’t done a show in Singapore for three years so I wanted to let people know that I’ve been doing a number of different things, but they can come together. So actually, some of the objects were found, but they were mostly fabric. The rest were actually—I fabricated the fence as well as the wood, and there is photography in there as well as watercolour paintings. Joanne Leow: Yeah, I saw that. They’re really beautiful. [5:40] Jason Wee: So, that’s one reason why the works came out that way. Then, I was thinking about creating a large installation that could demonstrate the way that your movement will be shaped by space, through space, without me having to say very much. Like I didn’t want to do the conceptual move where you write about it in a text and then you read it and understand what you’re doing. When I was rereading Kim Cheng’s book again, and this line really popped out where he says, “you move from the coast of remembering to the coast of forgetting.” And I thought that, you know, that path could not possibly be a straight line. You’re likely to move from coast to coast in the way that gets swept by the winds; it’s a zig-zag, it’s labyrinthine in its own way. And then I also found that these…tactile paving that’s used to guide the visually disabled was actually patented in Singapore. So I decided to write that line of Kim Cheng’s verse in Morse Code so that you could actually tap your way and read his work, so to speak, and that even if you can’t read the work, as you move through the space you know that you’re navigated by something that is a code, that’s a linguistic code, you could see that the patterns repeat—don’t quite repeat, or they repeat in ways that suggest vowels or articles. [7:09] Joanne Leow: And it’s a space accessible to somebody else not able-bodied. [7:13] Jason Wee: Yeah, and then everyone will face an obstacle with the way that the fences are cut and they way they abut the wall; no one will find the exit because I smashed the exit into a wall (laughing). Joanne Leow: That’s so existential (laughs). [7:32] Jason Wee: (laughs) I really have a great deal of difficulty with the production of nostalgia in art and culture here that, for me, it becomes production of an affect that only allows urban development to proceed as it always has, rather than produce counter-movements to it. So, it’s also a reason why I move between these two coasts of remembering and forgetting through that labyrinth, because I’m like, we’re getting lost in it, we’re not finding a way out. I’m not sure nostalgia’s the way to go.