Welcome to my website!

13 Sep 2023
A piece of sea glass

I left 12-year old Sharon by the Mother tree on Pulau Burung. I dressed her in bermuda jean shorts, a singlet, a thick cotton shirt and good canvas shoes. Before leaving, I gave her my own parang, a 10-inch knife in a nylon sheath. She took it and strung it around her waist with a piece of washed-up rope. I buttoned up her shirt, delaying. The tide was coming in. She never said a word.

Z and I went to visit her last week. We took the back route, past the only red teruntum tree on Pulau Burung. The trunk had split in a storm. When I put my face in the wound, nose to the tan heartwood, I smelled roses. She was still very alive - even the part that had fallen to the ground sprung branches covered in distinctive small leaves and needle-like red blooms.

To be continued...

11 Sep 2023
The internet is just files

In 2005, I was a baby artist with an alcohol problem and a blog. At some point I tried starting over, as if I could rewrite increasingly grooved-in habits with a new blogspot. For at least the next 5 years, I drank, made art and blogged. Those chronicles read now like scabbed-over sores, they still hurt when pressed. An ex-friend called them (me?) abject. I deleted all my Instagram posts, but the blogs I'll keep.

Before I had a website, I made blogs for my art, one for each exhibition. That's how a curator found out about my work, and put me in his show - my first outside Malaysia. It's been like that ever since, more or less. I've never played the Art World Game very well, but enough people found me through the internet to keep me making and showing regardless.

Since the algorithimic timeline took over, being on the internet has been hell. At first it felt like losing a dark angel who'd always looked out for me and my art, then it felt like I was losing my mind.

I'm writing this in an index.html file, which I'll upload to my Home folder on neocities. The internet is just someone else's files you're accessing on an electronic device. The technology has always been in our hands, but what's the point when they've captured our minds? Now they're coming for our souls too.