Ubin Photos

KS suggested I put up a few of Brian's photos. Particularly liked his shots of us on Pulau Ubin:






...and one from me.

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.

Pulau Ubin Experience

Good excursion today/yesterday: big chill touristy vibe for everyone to kickback and gabble. Met at 7:30 am at the Robertson Hotel lobby where the boys were breakfasting before the bus bay.



Departure at 8ish, with some delay because Naeem had zonked himself out on Nyquil and was systematically slamming down the phone during wake-up call. Arrival at Changi jetty at 8:45ish, rendez-vous with KS, Tay Tong, Brian and Ka Fai.


Bumboating. Whee!



Pulau Ubin is 10 min from Singapore’s central island: depopulated by government decree wit aims to build it into a Sentosaesque megaresort, it was suddenly okayed for preservation on the discovery of invaluable ecodiversity in its Chek Jawa district. One up for the conservationists.

Biking for $6, all-day. Whee whee whee! Van for the squeamish.


Breakfast at 10ish at Kampung Sungei Durian, one of the older Malay-dominated villages that occupied the centre of the island. Left standing is a 200 year-old stilt house with its attap roof replaced with zinc (yes, 200, the owner Kamaria traced her family history back to a Riau fisherman who migrated here in 1803). Kamariah Samsiah & family serve us lontong, vegetable curry, agar-agar, curry puffs, hot hibiscus tea with ice cubes. We sit on the floor and munch, while they describe the history of the house: this is modified floor, this is the hole in the floor where we shat as children and this is the hidden trapdoor to the roof where we played hide-and-seek when the Japanese invaded.

Kamariah takes us on a walk to investigate herbs: citronella, cashew leaf, passionfruit. On the way to her old swimming hole, we pass the disco ball under the tree which her father installed: as the town barber, he would instruct people to gaze into its glittering mirrors while he shaved them bare.



We’ve been joined by Norah, a niece who works as a stewardess for Cathay Pacific and Mali, a cousin who works as a technician for QANTAS in Melbourne. Mali tells me how they used to hunt monitor lizards and sell them at the Chinese village at the jetty; there used to be a whole community here, huts everywhere, children running and laughing. Now even the eponymous durian trees are getting older and older; no-one plants new ones anymore.

We stop at the pavilion near the Cookie Monster statue. In the grass, the artists see a wild boar, but the documenters are too startled to capture the moment.


Back at the house, Kamariah’s sister Ruqxana hosts her Kampung Cooking Class: DIY butter prawns, sambal belacan and nasi kerabu, chopped and pestled from the gatherings of the jungle itself. Herbs galore: lemongrass shallots turmeric galangal coconut lime leaf coriander basil mint noni semangkok ulam raja Asian pennyworth red chilli garlic grated coconut gula melaka tamarind torch ginger blossom salt and pepper to taste. Minced and medleyed into white rice. The best thing, she says, is that every bite you take is slightly different. Four or five to a wok; our cooking is amazingly effective (the recipes are idiotproof anyway), our sambal paste ends up chunky and oversugared but we like it better as if it’s chilli jam.





Over ice kacang we begin to talk shop: copyright and culturehacking, heritage and fetish. I am personally often terrified of opening my mouth lest I interrupt the exchange of intelligent ideas among men and women so gifted that they switch from issues of intellectual crisis to so how is your new girlfriend is she alright? Or is that what we always do – never quite dividing the personal and the political, the heart and the mind, the manifesto and the valentine?

Mali decides to lead a group of enthused artists for a swim before our featured guest arrives. Five minutes after they set off on their bikes, the dark sky cracks and pisses on us all: sweet thunder where there should have been maddening one o’clock sun. I nap in the hut. The swimmers come back, clothes marinated with rainwater, with reports of a beach paved with litter: Kamariah’s household gifts them with sarongs to wear while their trousers dry.

At 2:30ish, our guest comes: Dr Alan Collman, big A*Star biotechnologist, stem cell boffin and genius genesmith of such creations as Dolly the doppelganger sheep. More about that later.


Cyclic progression up to the Temple of the German Girl, Nadu Guniang, a keramat shrine for the spirit of a young madchen who lived on Ubin with her parents on a coffee plantation till the break of World War I, when she took refuge to hide from the Brit soldiers and kena fall off a cliff and become superlotterynumbergoddess: cute trick. Very Theatreworks artefact, her shrine: syncretic fusion of a Barbiedoll idol before an urn of decaying hair and deutschmarks surrounded by tuapehkong icons in songkoks and Kuanyin and Sun Wukong and sacrifices of angpows and lipsticks. Evidently I didn’t make a sufficient donation of libatory oil: got hopelessly lost and mud-spattered on the way back to the jetty; only saved when I spied Mich and Tadasu spinning in steady sync on their tandem bicycle in the distance.



Returned the bikes. Bums sore, sipped beer and baby coconut water. Talked more culture and politics and domesticity. Dinner at 6:30pm at the Live Seafood Restaurant. The artists ooooh and aaaah over decent but unspectacular zi char favourites: or luah omelette cut into quadrants, stewed cauliflower with glass noodles, crisp baby octopus, lemon chicken, small perch. I hope this will happen in Ho Chi Minh City: that everything unfamiliar will be zingfully delightful for its novelty; yowzah; right now I feel guilty that they’ve been eating such mediocre food in their last few days that this bunch on paper plates seems ambrosia.



Sumei and KC and guests arrive by bumboat. Presentations. Moreaboutthatlater.

Brian and I are hectored by a precociously self-possessed Mandarin-speaking 6-year-old named... wait for it... ROYSTON. He's the son of one of the stall-holders. He's actually named after Royston Tan, I think.


We’re done at 11pm. Woozy, exhausted; trudge back in the darkness to the jetty for a final boat ride home. Keng Sen and the others step out onto the poop to take in the breeze.

Bus back to the hotel. Me, I have a three-leg series of buses back home. Also discover that I lost my handphone in Kampung Sungei Durian. Scheisse. The jungle takes its due.

Desire Paths

Today's itinerary: everyone got a slot to do tech for their presentations. Big headaches. In between, we got to go to Little India to do Spell #7's Desire Paths.


Desire Paths is a discman audiotour around the streets of Little India, created by Kaylene Tan, Ben Slater and Evan Tan, following phantom voices who instruct you on the history and cultural landscape of the neighbourhood. The bells of the temple ring in the strings of your ears and you follow invisible footsteps and dodge traffic which isn't there. Very beautiful and very Unheimlich.

Went on the three o'clock tour with Kaffe and Rudi (he's an observer from Norway, with a specialty in Circus Studies).


Kaffe's favourite bit was where Ben's voice tells you how Race Course Road was once a real race course, where the first plane landed in Singapore.


There was a video art student, Brian, who was assigned to document our journey.


I kept getting us lost. I documented his documentation.


Then we broke for bhattura, pooris, rice cakes and mango lassi on the go at Komala Villa.


Poor Kaffe's been overpaying for all her meals so far. She kept getting directed to $50 restaurants of mediocre Indonesian fish.


I like fragmentary signs.

Go take the tour yourself. To make an appointment, contact spell#7 at info@spell7.net or +65 6392-1772.