Le Thanh Tru and Quach Phong

It's our last day in Vietnam. Tomorrow morning we fly off like so many migrant birds. Free and easy till 2pm; skyped with my sister, shopped for an ersatz Prada bag, ate flattened pork chops with rice and creme caramel with green guava juice.

Now we're having a talk in San-Art by Le Thanh Tru, a soldier-painter of the Vietnam War (strange, how I've read that it's called the American War here, but Arlette always translates it as the Vietnam-American War or the American War with Vietnam). He looks into the slideshow on our laptop and explains the history of each image: lacquer paintings of soldiers bearing armaments crossing a bridge; a journey of 10 days in a train from Hanoi to Leipzig in his capacity as a writer/filmmaker, and all the Germans could read the war in the warp of his shoulders. The cranes of his hometown which he left in 1954 for 20 years. "He heard the accent of the South and he woke up again. No-one imagined that the whole country would be reunited again. He saw the night sky and everything was different."

Quach Phong, who did watercolours and sketches, women soldiers stitching uniforms in 1964, also speaks. The soldiers never asked him, he says, why he was painting in the jungle rather than fighting. They feared for the life of a painter on the battlefield. They enjoyed his presence. A reminder of civilisation: recognised as sacred, for his freakish ability to recognise the jungle as beautiful. Today, he says, most of the men he painted are dead: the paintings have become a document of war.

Keng Sen tells of how every artist he meets can remember how they were doing this in Stockholm or Chicago during the Vietnam War: taking part in marches, protesting. I missed the first 40 min of the talk because I was helping Meg with dictation on her Euro-keyboard Mac; some interview for an A-star dance magazine in New York, asking her about her practice before she left Manhattan for the uberalfabetstadt of Berlin. She remembers the trauma of the AIDS crisis, artists of the 80s and 90s pulling together as their queer brothers dropped like mosquitoes in winter, and how that informed her work as a choreographer of bodily trauma.

Violence and liberation. Everywhere but and now.

Text and Image

Talking talking: better today, our sources of local wisdom: again translation diffused Hui's Project Art Marathon display at the Art Cafe, but we got a decent survey of the clash of poetics 'n' politics from Choang Dai's studies on 20th century Vietnamese lit crit (false dualities of party/literati; reappropriation of Marxist language in defence of counter-revo aestheticism; whose Doi Moi anyway), plus a stilted dialogue with the thoroughly badass samizdat publisher Ly Doi of Open Mouth, who together with Bui Chat, Khuc Duy and Nguyen Quan rebel against Writers' Union stanzas of "enchantment" by issuing texts like “The Cunt Has Left and Other Cursing Poems”; oh yeah, that's what I wanna hear.

Also got to meet Nguyen Trinh Tih, filmmaker, who screens her documentary "Love Man Love Woman" about the dong co, the gay transvestite shamans: they dance for Dau Mao, the Buddhic native Vietnamese goddess who was cast into heaven as punishment for strangling curious imperial scholars when disguised as a pretty street hawker, her one mercy being the promise of human entertainment hence the divine dancers; and these are urban priestesses, mind you: they dial their boyfriends on cellphone and webcam and clinicalise homosexuality as a phenomenon/disease/destiny, for only in genderlessness are they deific. Should interview her for Fridae.com.

Now, on to Superintense!

Hochiminologues

Well now, I'm finally getting up to speed on these blog posts. My room in Hotel Thanh Lien has glorious wireless Internet access (there are no windows, but I'm typing in front of a big mirror, so it actually looks like there's a wide open space over there with a handsome young gentleman I keep trying to cruise).

As said before, I'm in a much springier mood, thanks truckloads to the 8 1/2 hours' sleep I had last night (we're going easier on ourselves in Saigon, plenty of time to what's the word we keep on using again oh yes INTERFACE. Which really means just having time to get to know each other better, talk-talk, brainsquall which is maybe a less combative form of brainstorming, jimmy each other's locks.

And today our programme was relack-relack, listen only, no need to hop: on to Sàn Art Gallery, 23 Lý Tự Trọng, a little whitewalled space which together with Queen will be our centre of ops for the next few days. Here is a mini contemporary arts library which we can use as an office space: power outlets galore. And wireless of course: we all log on, overloading the system.

Dinh Q. Le is here to talk to us about his work, reflecting crucially on his experience as a Viet Q who left his village at the Vietnamese/Cambodian border at the age of something tiny, wandering into Californian libraries with no knowledge of English he began reading books on Renaissance art + memories of basketweaving with his aunt => his art school projects, weaving his orange-yellow face into the crucifixions of the Old Masters: later remembering Pol Pot and the Khmer Rouge: a chamber of eyes from S-21 interrogating the tourists for having done nothing, nothing to stop the slaughter; more weaving, of the faces of Angkor Wat, of the faces of Apocalypse Now, of the faces of second-hand photographs he buys by the firkin to search for his lost family portraits. Guerrilla work: a market stall selling frocks and babythings for Siamese twins, whose incidence in births increased by 1000% in Vietnam after the use of Agent Orange. New video work: Viet Q reexpatriates confessing themselves before a projection of clam pickers walking into the sea; the farmers' memories and forgettings of helicopters, attack and rescue, attack and salvage.

Two of the afternoon presentations fall into traps of translation: the professor of architecture buzzes on with the official party line: Hoang Ly, the first-generation feminist installationist charms primarily with simplicity and becomes less coherent once she calls for a translator. (Not to discredit our blessed interpreters, who are volunteer students from the university, Arts/MBA/Language and Literature/Biology.)

Provoking for me however is Hoang Hung, the celebrated poet, jailed for 39 months without trial in 1982 for "distributing counter-revolutionary culture objects", namely the banned poems of a fellow poet; now both are award-winning national cultural heroes and aesthetic poetry is way-okay, but the cultural police still look askance at explicitly political writing including Om Hoang's contributions to the online Vietnamese journal TALAWAS. His daughter tells us that it's still the poets of the 70s who shine brightest; the oldest writers are dying off and she attends their funerals and dreams of collating their forbidden manuscripts for online publication. "You miss my scent like a cow misses its excrement in the garbage," recites Om Hoang, reading from "The Smell of Rain", written for his wife while he sat in his jail cell learning English from the dictionary. This is one of the prevalent themes of Southeast Asia, says Keng Sen: remembering and forgetting, the culture of amnesia.

Parallels, parallels: in Vietnam, they still issue permits for book publications; they watch over music and literature like hell and the people love it to bits. Which makes me wonder: why doesn't Singapore have a culture of political poetry (yes there's the Edwin Thumboo nation-building series and the Lee Tzu Pheng to Alvin Pang architectural-loss series, but aside from Alfian, no-one else is angry, fuckit). Contrariwise, of drama the Vietnamese only love comedies - no political theatre manages to slip through: David Chapman tells me the censors turn up at your final rehearsal and then tell you whether you can send out the publicity or not. He's a charming young Chicagoan drama teacher in the city trying to stage re-contextualised Chekhov.

Tired already: popped out for a nightsnack and got hopelessly lost within two blocks of the hotel; had to run like hell from prostitutes on motor scooters and little girls bearing roses and bubblegum. Also bought some rose apples from the street vendor and they're bloating my stomach something dreadful. Sweet, though. Seeya in the morning.

Letter Home

Dear Mum, Father, Ching, Xian and Maria,

Yo! Safe here in Ho Chi Minh City - touched down this morning at the spanking new modern airport; got delayed for a while because someone knocked my suitcase off the carousel, checked into Thanh Lien Hotel (135-137 Ly Tu Trong St, Room 407), napped for an hour. talked strategy in our Liberty 6 suite-cum-office with negligible wireless reception (ok that was the artists, I was just keeping my head down and typing), met expatriate-repatriate Vietnamese-American-Vietnamese artist Dinq Q. Le, ate at Pho-24 (raw beef in hot broth and ethereally iced tea), visited the War Remnants Museum (originally the Museum of American and Chinese War Crimes), got mildly depressed because the debilitatory effects of Agent Orange and Dioxin confirmed the impossibility of using mutagens to turn us into superheroes (seriously, I think my Hegelian weltanschaung regarding the advancement of man thru technology was rudely shattered), slept in the park, got scolded by National Guard for sleeping in the park, had cappuccino freddo and choux and garlic champignons at the late-90s chic Taiwanese-investment suburb of South Saigon (which uncannily resembles Orange County/Tampines), visited our performance space, brainstormed at the performance space, renegotiated reinventions of our Superintense project at the performance space (that was them again), broke for a dinner of street food and ordered the custard apple shake, the pennyworth-coconut shake, the spring rolls and the five-flavour frog, whole and unbutchered, with the speckles still visible on its Cajun-blackened skin and white rice, bought bottled water, bought an adaptor, started blogging, blogging....

Will be keeping the world informed of my activities on http://flyingcircusproject.blogspot.com

Your son/sibling,

Yi-Sheng
B).

Cruise to Nowhere

Sorry I’ve been so disoriented of late with my backlog blogging. I blame it (semiconveniently) on the sea: our sailing expedition with Charles Lim. Charles: Olympic sailor for Singapore who boggled the eyes of the scholarship boards when he elected to study Art.

At Documenta XI in 2002 he and Woon Tien Wei of Tsunamii.net (which also included Melvin Phua) walked 30 days from Kassel to Kiel where the Documenta Server was housed: theory at this time was chockfull of declarations that the Net is Flat, global interconnectivity = democracy, let the subaltern chat: Charles recognised this concept as inherently flawed because he kept getting knocked off Counterstrike for being a “high ping bastard”: players from the USA where every signal passes through the servers of the CIA could tell a thirdworldy slowed the game down: likewise, at Documenta, say a Bangladeshi video artist watching her own work on the website would have to pay to go thru the German server itself, back and forth, centre to periphery: why not physicalise this hegemony itself by walking to the site of the data, said Charles? 30 days of trudging from village to Teutonic village to get to the server farm: major bum rash, plus they missed the opening party.

Today Charles buses us to the Sentosa jetty, just off the country club ONEº15, boards us on a ship by good ol’ salt-haired Captain Blake who drifted here from New Zealand in 1965. Life saving drill: “quite hard to fall off if you’re sober,” Blake tells us: there are three bows he says on this trimaran (a word half Polynesian and half-Greek) so we can do the Leonardo di Caprio thing thrice over (David and Julie do), as long as we keep an eye out for icebergs.


We are on a 5-hour odysseyette (ideally it should have been have been 10, to circumnavigate the island) to discover a distant strip of reclaimed land: Charles brings maps and .wavs to demonstrate the changing shape of ourselves since 1819: bizarre outcroppings and conglomerations, Tuas, Sisters'-St John's Island, once we were a country of hills (compare Malaysian horizons) but we flattened the ground. And once we ran out of mountain we started to buy our sand; once they cut it off we kept buying under the table; come here weeknights he says and you'll see the clandestine barges, ferrying tons and tons of black market Indonesian sand.

On the way, we're scarpering across the deck, clad in shirtsleeves and speedos, lunching on 3-minute microwave otak-otak and white wine. When the yawling begins I climb to the wheel: Blake tells me how he only started commercial sailing this year: curses the corporate assholes who pay big money to party hardy on the boat to hip-hop when he wants Chopin; blesses the Edusave schoolkids whom he's licensed to take on 7-day peregrintations to the uninhabited islands of the South China Sea, lots of 'em, he says, where you can hike up a trail with a telescope and study astronomy with none of our lonely light pollution.


Eventually, we reach not the island but a promontory, an-insular-peninsula, a snaky reach of dumped sand that winds all the way back to the mainland. Illegal to dock here (HDB owns the land for chrissakes, though its identification as Singapore land is laughable yet legal) so we drop anchor and speedboat and swim.

I have no pictures of the land itself. Brian popped into the water fishlike with his glasses on and I did likewise, forgetting that I swim like a stone: took all my stamina and presence of mind not to lose my 200-degree lenses in the briny deeps; hit the beach with the back of my head while backstroking for breath; bumbled over, scrabbled onshore where the girls were ouching at the shards of shell and coral beneath their barefeet: this is what you call a new beach, says Melati, who's seen them in Indonesia: the detritus hasn't had the time to grind itself fine into powder.

Of course I couldn't bring my camera, but others did: they will have the photograph of our raggletag ensemble poised on the bizarre mesa in the centre of the strip: Naeem's T-shirt hoisted on a length of driftwood IwoJimastyle: DEFEND BROOKLYN is our flag. Also images of my excursion with Charles and Chee Wai, walking steadily back to the mainland, encountering landbound creepers of purple labialike flowers, orange parasitic networks strangling the orphan tuffets, dogprints, abandoned tupperwares of kimchi, a barnacled Pokeball, a superior grade of sand Charles stuffs into a bottle, and a beautiful mound of hysterical driftwood that inspires us to re-enact the legend of Sindbad and the Old Man of the Sea (minus the bit where I defecate all over his face).

We are the last ones back: we change and hurry into the salon, where Charles delivers a lecture on his practice while Blake sails us back to Sentosa, rocking our poor seasick bellies like so many jellybeans in a pinata. We are an odd sodden lot:


Charles details his practice: from the rupture of SEA ME WEB 3 and the inaugural New Media Arts grant to his Sea Stories series, shooting buoys from an interior and exterior view of the island (and why all this value on land, he asks, given that historically it is the sea that the Orang Pulau Singapura lived on: fish prawns and trade while the land itself was inhospitable, untameably jungled, malign). SEA ME WEB 3, incidentally, was and is the Internet cable that connects Singapore to the States: every time a shark chomps it or an anchor rips it apart or a seismic seaquake pops its guts the Wonderful Worldwide Web gets chopped off, brutally. The Net is not flat, nosiree. Then reawakening to the reclamation projects: woohoo, wanna talk about Land Art? Move over, Robert Smithson: HDB does it for realz.

"People talk about their land, their soil, their blood. But in Singapore, land is just another commodity that can be traded."
-someone or other, forgot to take note

"Buy land. They're not making any more of it."
-Mark Twain

"You guys are really obsessed with that. Being part of the world map."
-Julie.

Xref. environmental impact of all this monkeying around: more land => smaller straits => higher, more dangerous currents, fishing habitats transformed, we used to be natural haven for dolphins and dugongs, you know? Julie takes this very personally, being a mermaid herself.

Also a screening of Charles and his wife Wee Li Lin's new silent film, Wrong Turn. Trust me, it's AWSUM.

Roundtabled adjourned slept and docked. Read one of DJ Spooky's comics before he left. Went home to pack. Realised only when I collapsed into bed for a three-hour shuteye that Charles's warning had been right: after you've been on the sea, you get landsick: our bodies are attuned to naturally compensate for the motion, so afterwards stillness disorients us.

Which is why I've been feeling like shit lately. Better now. Ta.

UPDATE: Photos from Charles Lim: the island looks like that.

Talk by Dr Alan Colman

Meet Dr Colman, former Executive Director of the A*Star's Singapore Stem Cell Consortium, now academic and researcher who worked with the Roslin Institute in 1997 to clone Dolly the sheep. What with Singapore's positioning as a biotech hub, hardly anyone knows what they're doing with our moolah. KS invited him to do a presentation yesterday at Kamariah's house.
Post-human tech in a kampung hut, rain beating down about us. Nature, art, science. Below is an albino South African claw-toed frog: extremely useful for genetics research because it spawns whenever it's tickled.

In fact, in the midst of the lecture on the raw basics of cloning and stem cell tech, the stuff that sticks out most is the systematic idiosyncrasy of the science world: animals named dolly millie christa alexis carrel dotcom snuppy prometea xena and the politics behind naming a goat after a French eugenicist, Fidel Castro's appeal to clone a cow that yielded three times more milk but who'd been dead for ten years, the bad science of journalists with Photoshop. Art meets life science: Ira Levin publishes "The Boys From Brazil" about 64 clones of Hitler, adapted into a bad movie starring Gregory Peck; Colman himself is soundly trounced in a debate with university philosophers about whether we'll ever be able to know everything about what how our bodies work. And the idiosyncrasy of the man himself: madly Mancunian, clumsy at ice skating but joyous in his newfound grace through tropical scuba-diving, married to a monozygotic twin.

A few words from that afternoon:

“Dying people are desperate. Most of the royal family of Saudi Arabia have heart valves that come from pigs.”

"I actually gave up cloning some time ago. I came here because I wanted a change and I was spending huge amounts of money. Government money, other people's pensions. Venture capital money, I can be comfortable spending that... but to continue spending at that level I had to move to Singapore."

"Armadillos always have quadruplets who are genetically the same."

On fears that science will one day clone Hitler:
"I don’t think Hitler needed that kind of technique to make mentally cloned people... What Mancunians really fear is cloned Liverpool fans."

On the early death of Dolly from a viral disease:
"I worked in Scotland for four years and I can tell you Scotland is not a healthy place to live. Most people over 40 don’t have their own teeth. They have deep fried pizza there. They have deep fried Snickers bars.”

"Kidney transplantation caused a huge uproar when it was first invented. Putting an organ from a dead person into someone else... when the first test tube tube, baby Louise Brown, was born in 1979, the scientist and doctor were ostracised. Now over 1,000,000 people have been born because of this. It's a strange philosophical question of whether it’s better to be alive or not alive."

On his research into cures for heart disease and diabetes:
“Don’t believe anyone who says this treatments are around the corner. It’ll be around 10, 15 years before they’re effective.”

"I am wary when scientists say, 'This will never happen."

"In Italy, the cloning of animals is illegal. And a friend of mine cloned a cow, whom he named Galileo. And so there was a possibility Galileo would go to prison again."

"I think Italy is the greatest country in the world, I want to retire there. "

"No I don’t read science fiction, but I used to before man landed on the moon. That spoilt it. For me, nothing surpasses the human imagination."

Talk by Sylvia Lim

At 7:30pm we had our first of three talks by Singapore informants: one each to represents the fields of politics, science and art. Our guest speaker was Workers' Party Chairman Sylvia Lim.

How did we get hold of her? Turns out that she and KS were in NUS Law together; they published the Law Review and worried about legal aid and poverty and capital punishment and the authenticity of the curls in Keng Sen's hair.

Sorry, ISD, she didn't say anything defamatory. Most of the evening was her giving simple background data to the foreign artists: our GRC system, our shortage of effective checks and balances to the executive branch, the fact that the constitution has been amended 27 times since 1975 (which means nearly one amendment per year), racial rhetoric and 377A.


Interesting dialogues:

* Mark noted that back in Italy prisoners can sometimes wait up to 13 to 15 years for trial - so it's not detention without trial, but it's still pretty fucked up for human rights. Sylvia said this'd never happen in Singapore 'cos we're so efficient.

* Kaffe mentioned how after 9/11, powers of arrest and surveillance in the UK have increased dramatically. Sylvia noted that in Singapore, the police have always had those rights - and now all those Western nations that used to criticise our human records are suddenly quiet, 'cos they've realised powers of detention without trial are pretty useful when you're trying to root out terrorists.

"The scary thing is, most Singaporeans buy into this crisis discourse, the need to be safe, the fear of mass deaths. Even I buy into it."

* Naeem said,

“In Bangladesh the intelligentsia is obsessed with Singapore. You know we just had a civil war, with the army coming in. The Chief of Army, the Head of Education, the global head of the Kosovo mission - people say he could be the Lee Kuan Yew of Bangladesh. How did Singapore get where it is today? The explanation is that they don’t bother with this messy, ugly democracy."

* Caden (on the relentless search for humane capital punishment in the USA):

“If we could only find a nice way to kill someone. I’m sure we will.”

* Caden (on 377A, the law against male homosexual sex in Singapore):

“They said that in America as well. We won’t prosecute, it’s just symbolic of how much we hate you.”

Going to Pulau Ubin tomorrow. Madness, utter madness.