these past months have been feverish. finding space in the midst of all of it to weave i think has in many ways been more intimidating than i thought. every time i am away from my loom it gets harder to return to it. the irony of this isn't lost on me though - between myself and all of that uncertanty are only lines of thread, crossing each other forever and ever.
terrifyingly, i have braced myself for the worst news ever from any possible person at any possible given time. the way things have shaped themselves and how i've moved between walls and ceilings and borders - moving is no longer an act of running. i now refuse to run away, so i no longer work into oblivion if there is no longer anything to run from. this has probably been the biggest shift in my practice so far. often i don't know what i am confronting in my work, or i am even confronting anything at all? i believe i am continually easing myself into that tension, that the work performs for me.
perhaps this is why i weave, in that liminality, where the only thing that exists is the tiny square between my warp and my weft; where every movement is premeditated and constant. everything is between my arms and my feet. i can lose myself in those lines because they matter far less than the lines that structure the borders i am confronted with, that gap in between. or maybe i just like to know that at the end of the day, the cloth doesn't matter. i think weaving has made me wholly unafraid of these bodily extremities. when i tire myself out, it is because i have spent it in an act of nothing, to keep myself alive by trudging against any act of positive production. that has always felt incredibly worthwhile.
these days i have been thinking a lot about my first show with sheryl 3 years ago. somehow i've carried that with me. in some strange way i think i've gulped down that exhibition and regurgitated it into a million shapes and forms and now i find that i am a being on a threshold... and i cannot seem to escape this. i return to my 23 year old self, whose mother's ghost still haunts her, and who wove her body into destruction. this yearning hasn't happened since then, largely because that process was so transformative for me that i have no choice but to rehash it in ways that allow a rethinking of sorts. i have been renaming all of my old work except for that one.
in a single breath, to say i am leaving and coming back at once is one of the most phenomenal things i have ever realised. when i plant myself, i know that life will keep happening, and i will find spaces to weave.
i promise i will return.
x
我又好像很久沒給你寫信了。更奇怪的是我覺得這一年過來一直翻來覆去地想著你。
以前寫信的時候多數是往紙上發洩，這些心事啊 妳在世時我也不會對你說。到底還是走了，語言生活上都自由了。
倫理來說，我應該是想你的。而且覺得我一直在以前的對象當中反覆地找回你的影子。我也知道人逝去了，去哪裡都無所謂了 最終還是一場空嘛。但回想起那個一直找著媽媽的女孩子，我是有些同情。
媽 我堅決不遺憾了。這九年來，沒了你，每一步，對著這一切的不後悔，我挺震驚的。對母親的那種依賴也是另一種靈犀的愛護。我想知道 妳二十五歲時也是這樣瀟灑笨拙地過著日子嗎？我這個年齡的妳，還會向往著青春嗎？
我今年的變化好多啊。順著每一個發展，妳在我腦海的影子反而越來越小。那年的我，我如今只能靠著網路上的照片記著。這些事我真的逐漸淡忘了，但我不恐懼。如今我活得有些橫衝直撞 沒頭沒尾的 也許是辜負了妳要我過的完美人生吧。所以沒了妳 我知道我勇氣大了，敢做人了。媽媽 我也不再渴望妳的讚許了，我只求妳為我開心。所以我還想妳嗎？也許沒那麼多了。這份驕傲，我得留給自己呢。
媽媽，我愛你。
萱萱
this work was crazy... i think this is the first ever thing i’ve ever made completely divorced from anything about my mother, confronting that sort of residual grief in a not suicidal ideation kind of way... was really rewarding. although the intercultural ancient divinations were spiritually really confusing i was wondering whether i was dreaming or researching the entire time. my synaesthesia came back in full force while working on this so i was seeing colours everywhere and it was so overstimulating... i have never been more glad to have an uncoloured sort of practice. the intensity of this was quite insane... i feel like it is so difficulot to articulate how not only i had to translate ancient chinese script but also pick up random bits of sanskrit to understand vedic sutras and then on top of that i read so many proofs for pythagoras theorem i was seeing triangles (and colours) everywhere i went. and also speedran so many python courses to learn what i was coding.
thankful once again to my body for not giving out these 5 months. every time i produce a work i emerge from it with a new appreciation for this corporeal self. making work is so long haul for me.
x
in code, i grieve into a resolution, hoping it will grow into something else, premised on a foregone immediacy. my days, spent in frenzy, do not articulate themselves
an interpretation of what i remember, disrupted and extended all at once, soluble in oil and ethanol; wipes itself from the ceilings and collapses into damp ash, reliant on a nascent sky that opens. it runs counter to the trail of smoke. i return it to a heaven
temporally, these gifts are immobilised, circling back on itself, casting aside its hairs, akin to a spectre, which reduces its context to nothing, flourishing under the slick of the same sky
eventually i will lose the textures of this world in a sobering practice, waiting for my own reawakening, sweaty and ancillary to the whimsies of a made-up discipline. at once, this convolutes into the present.
can i still channel that same daft yearning? pierced through with wild abandon, recklessly, darting sharply into the blank. caught onto these objects, which sift through into a pile of wet sand, kneaded into a lump, shaped into the hollows, forced into their own curves
how do you part? in time, with a hand pressed softly to the wall, caving to its acoustics, dreaming out of its future. it loops and i end back at my beginnings, no bearings left to spare, emptied into an urn.
before the sky ends, it seems i am rushing, palpitating into a mistake.
the time holds me: its palm opens, but it does not beckon. the stones clatter onto the concrete, tracing across its figures. an aching forearm falls for the ceiling, which in turn aches for its creaky floors, surging towards its open grey sky.
will you come back to me? with a tear running down the cracks of your brick wall? sticky to the cold, dampened with difficulty, protesting its metrics. i will not cling – feeling like mud, sitting atop a stomachache, slip pouring down my ribs
my chest will continue to dream.
sleep until the morning. snuffed out in the dawn, left with the devastation, without a trace. are all my cards on the table? laced with the sunlight, waning, rehashed over and over again
a semblance of guilt in my breastbone, tended to by the honeybees, frozen in the wool. pared down to my barest self, searching for the evergreens. i refuse, this time, to leave askew.
… sleep in the morning. form the same habits and never break them again, did you like to be alone? will you be karmic for me and peel the stickers halfway?
woke up slowly, knowing back home is endangered, crooning into the distance. some days, the sigh seeps through the pores- a hermit crab, folded into child’s pose.
the workings of the wet cement mumble. in this world, the village idiot will ring for the constellations to be sentient, and piece together its flesh, stilled by the tides, swaying in the breeze. i will scrape together these bits to form a pillar, built into my spine.
beneath the mattress, the joy is visceral and temporary. nothing is concrete anymore – not even the cobblestone trail, up the bridge, hiding behind a dying moon. my cowardice bides for a lapse in judgement so that perhaps one day, it gestures towards a resolution. i will somehow expire here, beyond a coded finality, and speak to you from the past.
show me how you persist. in throes of footprints, in the smoke in my eyes, in the clouds, denying its impending bloom. erupt all at once, so that i may forgive. i gain on the blurriness, watching the dust flood, and the underbelly twist.
am i watching you on the white walls? or on the straw mats, draped on the scaffolding? in theory, victim of sunk cost, enveloped in the glare of possibility. half the age of my mother, sinking into the calendar, reading on the uphill.
somewhere in the corner: in the heat, everything stops.
my callow hands work towards a limpid conclusion, wading backstroke, salt on my shoulder, carved into the trim, jammed into the groove. vacantly, another fraud, trudging along a path of smoke
recovered in the morning, braiding split ends into bile, belly-up, lowest on the top floor, sun broiling the rooftop. turn slowly, innocuously, away from me, so that before i realise it, there will be a gaping hole in the air.
in here, there is no heaven, so i meet you in the clouds, contracted, a functioning cataract. almost arcadian, there is no fantasy to throw me into bliss - teetering. the train platform will not hold. watch jealously, as it falls apart, vaulted over the iron gate, a broken amulet
irony in that convex mirror, swerving. at the end of the lane, the cadence transforms. what is it, when it arrives? screech away from the nuance, hammer a nail through this moment, slashing in the orange glow, almost gleeful, mostly desperate.
left by the curb, illusory, the roads undo and curve. dimensionally, the doors steam open.
came full circle again, the same way it felt after thresholds of being last year. i am actually not really sure what else to say, after all the outpouring of coincidences and emotions. i feel as if i have actually completed something visceral in me and it will be a while before i will weave this intensely again, but now i know this is something i will always desire. i am grateful for this.
i thought about my name a lot this past year - and how i have not heard it in successive repetitive affection in years now. no one around me can give me that. is that lonely? what am i looking for? was this what i was so fervently digging through, spending 10 hours a day at a loom?
i think i am just a name given on a whim. this makes me inordinately happy.
x
萱 is a wild flower in long grass tall thin stalk orange petals it likes the sun doesn't need much water prefers colder temperatures great for medicinal purposes it means 7 as in mother built up all of my work and all of my life into grieving for my mother it is second nature on my birth certificate when i was 4 years old after i drew a sun and a grass patch with a young girl and her dad and her mum in crayons i wrote her name on the back in the centre of the a4 drawing block a legible black crayon scrawl when i write her name in the temple and in letters to her mother and my aunt tells me my dad made a donation to the monastery so which name does she use because my dad accumulated good karma for me of a tall day-lily that towers an invasive species can barely survive in singapore because it is so humid that all memory of my name sweats off my nose and cheeks i thank my father for the good karma but actually i do not really need it i am convinced that my life ends here in a full circle my identity dedicated to a mother that once was mine but now belongs to a long long long lineage of more mothers whose names i never knew and sat at a loom beating sacks to line roofs for new homes under the weight of their sweaty nose and cheeks named me because it sounded like a sweet name looked pretty because the character is symmetrical ran away from home abandoned her poor lonely father made long swathes of linen cloth that remind her of a home a mother that died at the bottom right opening a bank account in london a link seminar a therapy session where 10 people represent different things in my life spill out across the crit room and i think to myself that my friend behind me reminds me of mother asking me if i am comfortable lying in bed like her mother's mother crossed a few borders and wants to adopt a black cat reading derrida feeling like spectres of marx is more like spectres of mother if i just cross out marx berlin and europe and replace it all with singapore muar and kuala lumpur where my mother's ghost haunts me many thousand miles away in london working into nonexistence the same wild flower who is spending all mother's inheritance on an art education on a paper about the origins of something quite so feminine but quite so uncontained the next border i will cross with the name my parents wanted me to have that rolls off the tongue a single syllable contained in its own childish glee a bright orange a conversation that occurs only in circles housed beneath a cold winter sun the same woman who tells me she wants to watch me walk down the aisle but leaves before i even date any boy a trail of smoke that floats up in front of my red council house flat the sweat on my nose evaporates in a crisp air that does not exist where you came where the damp warmth sits on my eyes and my tongue morning dew turns into pool where i came my mother waited for me to run away in a pale blue mitsubishi colt shaped like a dinosaur egg under a 100 year old tree that grew by the seaside until i no longer am a petal sending its last breath into the winter breeze a tropical storm reminds me that like water i will evaporate again
務必: all of it is cyclical, of surviving, drifting, labouring, wandering, dying. one day these ashes will be whole again.
--
the day i was born, my parents took my name to a seal carver.
萱草指的是母亲，北堂有萱兮，何以忘憂？
from derrida - i do not want to quote him simply because he said it. (i am really competitive so naturally i don't like when people say things that i resonate with even though i would have never said it myself) it is rough, you know, having the words of a white man in your mouth.
mourning always follows a trauma. i have tried to show elsewhere that the work of mourning is not one kind of work among others. it is work itself, work in general, the trait by means of which one ought perhaps to reconsider the very concept of production – in what links it to trauma, to mourning, to the idealizing itierability of exappropriation, thus to the spectral spiritualization that is at work in any tekhnē. (spectres of marx 121)
(this is all in lower case because i am spiteful)
i think at the bottom of the bottom trenches of a bottom is that i am still grieving a hole in my mind of a lineage that could be, a lineage of not letting go while trying to detach. i am not capitalist or socialist or anarchist or communist or buddhist or feminist or anything. i am trying not to be. who am i to tell myself i am a woman grubbing about in a soil of dead mothers?
i am not prepared for when you say you feel sorrow because you feel like you are holding me back. what if i want to be held back, what can you really do? how does my name really mean you?
谖草，令人忘忧。背，北堂也。
父母常说闷悠悠的话要种萱草 不是种出我一个女儿来了
那我的命克我母亲的命吗
whenever i return to this voice, it is of a 16-year-old girl. or maybe this voice is an ageless one, always a tongue left wondering in its warm discomfort, of a ginger now migrating from taste to smell, of a little hand grasping a little lion stone, and a callused finger sorting 28/2 weights of linen thread. i burn many things hoping that they are all blessings flying to you in a separate reality.
this is something i refuse to confront, wanting to evaporate, only because i know it now is a possibility that was not when you were in my everydays. my cats in their scratchy little cat scarf ask me if my tail goes in a circle the same way my mind goes in a circle too? everything has the same sameness. i lost part of the sea that day, and i have not seen the sea in a year. i am sad.
我这是真正心有余而力不足
the spaces in which you come back are now very wide. i no longer remember what you smell like, which is a good thing.
whenever you come back, i always dream in full colour.
// reflections on the 13 hr durational performance:
installing is so hard. i think i tried too hard with how i wanted it to look. originally i’d been trying to emulate barriers around funerary sites but honestly that felt like too much - i really disliked this in the way that it spoke to a concept that i really wanted to achieve but completely missed the mark. as i write this though i am not even sure what i was trying to do.
i am really happy with the 10m plain weave (on 2 back beams with 2ply raw waxed linen and 6 bunched untwister 1ply raw unwaxed linens) - my little squares of tension - i did not give her the justice she deserved. one day she will hang in a 10 metre tall gallery.
x
the plot is that when i was 8 i watched a film frm zhang yimou with my parents and at 21 i watched it again with my ahma and somehow the random recurring motif of working on a loom strapped to a piece of halfway fabric has been playing itself over and over since then.
i decided i needed to do this but i can’t find any resources for an oblique treadle loom in london? is it because its rural china? i heard that my ahpo’s mum used to weave but she’s dead so who on earth can i ask now...
this is meant to be a really primitive weaving method with a bunch of sticks. i feel like treadles were constructed because people were lazy and then jacquard was constructed because people got even lazier. then i realised that these sticks need to be precisely a certain type of stick with certain grooves which i do not have and this was precisely why i spent 5 days trying to figure out what was wrong with my very primitive loom.
going back to my matrilineal roots and my body at once and holding this tension emotionally, mentally, and physically was really fun. spending 7 hours a day trying to troubleshoot the loom was not the most fun but i can get past that. i am getting somewhere with uncovering my practice, in a process of learning. i can do this forever, i believe.
then i realised my loom was constructed just fine. everything was functioning well. i just chose the most fuzzy linen and forgot to wax it so the fibres were all velcroing together and had no movement and this is why i spent 35 hours intermittently crying in constructed textiles watching 3 people complete 3 rugs each on the tufting gun while i had a completely unworked bunch of strings. at some point i was praying that my mother could install some patience into my brain because i was going insane with how slow i was. i will get faster.
for the first weaving and first perfume i have ever put out and the first loom i have ever deeply researched, i will continue doing this. holy fuck i love it
also new discoveries about height because the hardest install for sure was being on the top rung at 4m height with the sweatiest clammiest hands. fishing line kept dropping and i had to keep going up onto the top rung to redo things after dropping the fishing line everywhere and losing it because fishing line is really hard to find. the good news is that i have found the medium i have been searching for. the bad news is that i was hyperventilating up there for a full hour so i don’t know how to take down the work now...
x
x
sometimes i want to say look i don’t know why i’m here, i want to be home and safe, but i am home and i am safe. i am my own home, but also every night i ask for pictures of the cats and i miss home. things have gotten very weird and i am just tiding through this polarity. no one is really here and no one will really be there- at the end of it i will really just be alone.