This image features stock image vintage illustrations of hand shadow puppets.

Letters To What We Want is a series of letters composed by friends, responding to the question ‘What do you want? In 2021 and beyond?’. The format was left open, as was the choice to sign off anonymously or with a pseudonym.

In exchange, I sent them an artwork, which can be viewed at the end of the post.

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A friend once said to me many years ago: “Those who desire nothing have nothing to offer.” Although he and I have since fallen out, for some reason or other, his offhand comment (to which he later said he had no recollection of) stuck with me. 

Over time, it mutated into a kind of personal artistic mantra, with the implication that as an artist, I should always have desire (or a whole orgy of desires) in order to create. 

But it would be disingenuous of me not to admit that it irritates me: this constancy of wanting.

Those who practice asceticism say that desire will only lead to suffering, and that it should be the goal of every soul who seeks enlightenment to let go of all earthly desires. 

I wish I had the courage of spirit to go down such the so-called middle path. Alas, I’m no spiritual purist. My body remains irritated by wants and needs. 

Like everyone, I wish to love and be loved. To receive validation for one’s existence and achievements would be fucking amazing. To one day swim and dance with friends again would be heaven. 

But in order to have these things, so goes the strange logic of my personal mantra, I have to offer many things in return. In a way, this painting is one such offering.

It’s an interpretation of Janus, the Roman god of endings and beginnings, of passages and portals, of transitional periods. He’s an in-between deity, someone you pray to when you’re neither here nor there, which explains why he has two faces: one looking at the past, the other toward the future.

It’s a weird time to be alive. People sometimes say you never know what you have until you’ve lost it. But I think it’s ok to let things go; the unburdening of the spirit is something I think all of us can have more of.

– Jerome Kugan, Originally writer, musician, then artist

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Image of Country Musik: Movements #3, given in exchange for this letter.
An edition of this work is available in the shop.

This image features a stock image illustration of a common gecko.

Letters To What We Want is a series of letters composed by friends, responding to the question ‘What do you want? In 2021 and beyond?’. The format was left open, as was the choice to sign off anonymously or with a pseudonym.

In exchange, I sent them an artwork, which can be viewed at the end of the post.

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Gratitude is easy when times are good. Now that a pandemic has upended our lives, it’s harder now to even accept this existence, much less having any gratitude for it.

Yet –

All things considered, I am privileged and comfortable. I have never experienced war, hardship or hunger.

The worst thing to have happened to my physical self is a botched snatch theft and two dengue fevers. And I’ll include intermittent fasting – a bit of a stretch – and I’ll allow you to mock me.

In the stillest of nights, I find myself digging deep for reserves. When dawn breaks, I find that I have nothing left because nothing is left to fill up the empty.

I’m long past waiting for things to “return to normal” because it never will.

What I want is to regenerate. I want to be the mint plant on my balcony.

I realised this after basking in the sun every morning.

I don’t even want to be a Redwood or a Meranti. I no longer have ambitions of being mighty. If I end up being a garnish in a bowl of laksa, or a spring roll, so be it. If I wither and die, I’ll return to the land.

I need to embrace the organic to regenerate mentally, physically, emotionally, spiritually and psychologically. That’s all I have within my control.

And just for the sun rising, warming my face until it becomes slightly sticky with sweat, is all I am grateful for today.

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Image of Country Musik: Movements #15, given in exchange for this letter.
An edition of this work is available in the shop.

This image features black & white product photos of Polly Pocket™ toys.

Letters To What We Want is a series of letters composed by friends, responding to the question ‘What do you want? In 2021 and beyond?’. The format was left open, as was the choice to sign off anonymously or with a pseudonym.

In exchange, I sent them an artwork, which can be viewed at the end of the post.

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31st December 2020

Dear Chinese Hopping Vampires, Immobilized:

You are a pair of 28mm-scale geung si, made in pewter alloy. You came in a set of four.

Your siblings had vampire canines and arms stretched out menacingly. But you two had talisman paper stuck to your faces — so you stood stiff as old fence posts, poor and harmless.

Geung si minatures by John Jenkins Designs.

You were sculpted by John Jenkins Designs, a small tabletop miniature studio based in Hong Kong. John Jenkins mainly makes historical wargaming figures. Toy soldiers, essentially; hobbyists play out battles with formations and dice on felt-lined tables. They come unpainted; painting them is half the hobby. 

You were part of an unusual detour into Chinese fantasy: I remember there also being a mummy in a jade burial suit, and terracotta warriors.

A John Jenkins Designs jade mummy with his two terracotta warrior attendants, painted by Mr Saturday.

I don’t know who John Jenkins is. I may have emailed him? I vaguely recall. It was not so easy then, online shopping. No Shopee.

And no money. I was working my first job, and trying also to be a sophisticated almost-twenty-year-old. So of course I couldn’t afford shipping in USD.

Now it is too late. Finding photos of you took some searching. A forum thread from 2009 talks about how difficult it is to find images of you. You were taken off John Jenkins’ website, when you were discontinued.

+++

That I still want you says a lot, maybe. I could stick all sorts of metaphors and angsts to you two, like magic seals:

How I wanted to get you, but didn’t, and now it is too late — something something about paths not taken, opportunities not seized.

Regret, something something.

How I suddenly thought about you, again, today — nostalgia, I suppose? I’m still the twenty-something I used to be. I still want to spend all day hunched under a desk lamp, detail brush in hand; I still want to spend all night dancing.

Twilight Actiongirl 10th Anniversary Finale Party. Photo by Danny Lim, circa 2013.

Except now both my hands have RSI, and I can’t stay up all night, and I’ll be thirty-five.

How you are not-very-good figures — but this is exactly the reason I want you.

There’s just something about you two. Cute — not in a “Look imma cute monster” chibi-trope way; but cute because you were made with personal interest and perhaps some sentimentality.. Sculpted in putty and casted, by a hobbyist’s hand. Made before the 2010s. More: “Geung Si Sin Sang is so fun” and less: “jiangshi will fill a niche in the PoC-stories-and-monsters growth market”, maybe. Maybe.

Screenshot from Mr. Vampire (dir. Ricky Lau, 1985).

How I want to paint toy soldiers — this month I spent close to a thousand ringgit, money I still can’t really afford, buying new paints and new brushes and spray primer and plastic cement and a headband-mounted magnifying glasses.

Every few years I return to the hobby. I remember Rizal saying that my interest in miniatures reflected a desire for a smaller world.

I remember feeling defensive. But it was a true observation, made jokingly, not meanly. Rizal himself reared betta fish, as a hobby.

I want to look at you with magnifying glasses and 0-size brushes like I look at nearites in tide-pools and ant-trails on a long bean vine. Or at neighbourhood associations and local unions. Attention to smaller worlds — because the bigger picture never talks about its hegemonic assumptions, and doesn’t know how it is blind.

+++

Anyway. Chinese Hopping Vampires, Immobilized — I think you two are really cool.

I don’t think I’ll ever be able to have you. I’ll settle for the next-best thing: living a life where I can make things that make me feel like you make me feel.

Yours, wistfully,
Zedeck

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Image of Country Musik: Movements #11, given in exchange for this letter.
An edition of this work is available in the shop.

This image features stock image vintage illustrations of grass.

Letters To What We Want is a series of letters composed by friends, responding to the question ‘What do you want? In 2021 and beyond?’. The format was left open, as was the choice to sign off anonymously or with a pseudonym.

In exchange, I sent them an artwork, which can be viewed at the end of the post.

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The mornings

The mornings always feel wild, somehow, 

like the world hasn’t fully turned 

to face us. We haven’t ruined it yet,

haven’t had the chance to plow

through with our desires, or forge 

paths we’ll later regret.

If I want anything, maybe it’s to sit

still, in that slow moment

as the sky arrives and birds call

out their business.

Maybe birds are petty in their own way.

Maybe they hurt each other without meaning to.

But the way they fill the air with messages –

they must know how to

listen, too.

—

I write poetry very rarely. I haven’t ever published a poem or even shared one on social media. (The closest I’ve come to showing people my poetry is when we had to write poems for school, on topics like Families and Seasons and Feelings. They would be written out by hand, then glued to a colourful border and pinned up on the classroom wall).

I wanted to share this poem with you, though. 

As I thought about “what I want” for 2021, I realised that what I had in mind was not so much a list, a goal, or an object – but a feeling.

There are many things I want, both big and small. But for several reasons, I’m paying more attention to the small things lately. 

It’s not that I don’t want to “think big”. It’s not that I stopped being ambitious. But I started to resent the idea of each new year being premised upon a checklist.  

Actually, I love lists. There are so many projects I want to complete. A novel, a short film, a screenplay, essays. But I don’t want the success of my year to be contingent on the success of my writing.

In 2021, I’d like to leave behind the notion that being productive is inherently good. I’d like to leave behind work that’s underpinned by insecurity and needing to “keep up”, or motivated by the fickle mirage of success and prestige.

A poem isn’t for anything, and it’s also for everything. Poetry always strikes me as a density of feeling, an attempt to translate a specific detail of being alive into words. In so doing, the form inherently asks us to accept failure. Perhaps that’s why I’ve always shied away from it.

So it felt right to share this poem here. 

I wrote this on a January morning, before the sun had come up. I was tending to my son, who wakes us up each morning before we’d like to be up. 

He is my daily work, and a reason why I’ve tended to smaller pleasures lately. This poem is an incantation for both more wildness and more restraint, qualities that I suspect I’ll need by the bucket this year. 

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Image of Country Musik: Movements #17, given in exchange for this letter.
An edition of this work is available in the shop.

This image features a stock image vintage illustration of a swimming swan.

Letters To What We Want is a series of letters composed by friends, responding to the question ‘What do you want? In 2021 and beyond?’. The format was left open, as was the choice to sign off anonymously or with a pseudonym.

In exchange, I sent them an artwork, which can be viewed at the end of the post.

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23rd December 2020

With much hope:

Dear all the trips I’ll take in 2021,

I won’t discriminate—short, long, near, far—I’m speaking to you all. How many of you will there be? I don’t know, cannot say, am unable to divine, shall not speculate upon. But I hope there will be many of you, even if they are wholly in my mind.

I’d like to make the weekly trip to campus and sit in a room with my coursemates and lecturers. Let that come to pass.

I’d like to make the more infrequent but just as valuable jaunts to museums, galleries, libraries, archives, collections. First they have to be open and that means case counts have to drop. Let that come to pass.

I’d like to wander into alleyways and antiquarian shops and second-hand booksellers without worrying if I’m about to breathe in a viral load and regret my decision. Let that come to pass.

Theatres and music halls, pubs with friends, train cars and buses, comic conventions and art fairs, spur-of-the-moment trips to a lonely windswept moor or mountain or forest. And even just a trip to a friend’s house. Let all of that come to pass.

I suppose what I’m really asking for is the freedom I’d taken for granted to move about, unhindered, on my own schedule, as I wish. And if I do get some of that back, which means you would happen, what will you teach me then? And if I don’t get to make very many of you, how will I carry on nonetheless and not let possibilities pass me by?

I await you.

P.S. I’d like to think of myself as a careful, cautious person and perhaps that is what’s keeping me from getting more of you. Deal with it then!

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Image of Country Musik: Movements #16, given in exchange for this letter.
An edition of this work is available in the shop.

This image features stock images of a Medusa head by Darién Sanchéz and vintage illustration of a back float from the Trousset encyclopedia (1886 – 1891)

Letters To What We Want is a series of letters composed by friends, responding to the question ‘What do you want? In 2021 and beyond?’. The format was left open, as was the choice to sign off anonymously or with a pseudonym.

In exchange, I sent them an artwork, which can be viewed at the end of the post.

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Dear Blank and Indifferent Universe,

Asking myself what I want on a morning like this seems laughable: ironic and absurd.

I’m writing this on the morning of the lockdown announcement, pouring the still steaming dredges of my feelings down the sink. Around me, work is piled up like unwashed dishes. You can keep clearing, but it never ends. It’s only January into our second Covid year but I’m already so tired, from having lived in a brain that constantly shoots off like a palpitating rabbit into future, yet unlived months. Seeking survival; seeking a safe place to take one’s cause and one’s people. Is August a safe place to land? September? Is December safest of all? Give me a place to land. 

Fists knock on doors, asking for decisions, directions, discussions. My demeanor is cold and closed off. I wish I could be warmer, I wish I could be human, but warmth will melt the wax off my face, and I need the cold to hide these cracks in my facade. So I that I don’t accidently blurt out ‘don’t ask me, I’m just as dumb and helpless as you’. The rabbit brain darts off again, running, wheezing. Grass flattens beneath my feet. I can’t even come down, because I don’t know the way back. Back doesn’t exist anymore, there is only forward, into the dark morning. I know when I break something, it won’t be just me to pay the price. 

I ask myself what I want. I want there to be no price. I want us all to survive with as little scars as possible. Some of my friends are frontliners in Sabah. Their voices sound different on the phone now – and I know I will never meet these carefree, mellow people again whom I once knew. Different people will return to us – harder, burning with a steely, bitter cold. Your accolades will feel trite to them and make them angry. They will keep their mouths shut and say nothing, preferring to ‘get back to life’. And I can understand, because I feel the same thing forming on my skin. 

I want us to survive. When all this is over, I would like for time and space enough to mourn. Someday, long years from now, I want to take off this apron and walk away, close all my accounts, and disappear unremembered, into the balm of nothingness. 

Anonymous Frontliner,
Jan 2021

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Image of Country Musik: Movements #5, given in exchange for this letter.
An edition of this work is available in the shop.

This image features a stock image vintage illustration of a slit worm snail.

Letters To What We Want is a series of letters composed by friends, responding to the question ‘What do you want? In 2021 and beyond?’. The format was left open, as was the choice to sign off anonymously or with a pseudonym.

In exchange, I sent them an artwork, which can be viewed at the end of the post.

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I don’t know what I want.

I want many things big and small. But I don’t know if I really want them.

My most frequent answer to most things is “I don’t know”. Or at least it used to be. It frustrated friends and loved ones. They wanted certainty. Certainty is decisive. And decisiveness is sexy. Or at least something that people trusted. Saying “I don’t know” is not very helpful. Not useful.

And yet I believe it’s more accurate. Because I really don’t know. And I think most people don’t anyway.

It seems like I’m writing a letter to my uncertainty. Or is it a letter to ‘uncertainty’?

I know what I don’t want. This list grows with every passing year, and inadvertently defines the gradually receding boundaries of What-I-Want-Land.

This land has recently experienced an invasion that has forced the inhabitants of this awful and clumsy metaphor to sort out their priorities – uncertainty was no longer a choice.

//

I want you to be strong, wise and have a good heart.

I want to learn about you, and learn from you.

I want to be your friend.

I want to be your teacher.

I want you to laugh and have fun.

I want to earn your respect.

I want you to remember me fondly.

I want, but can only hope, that you can forgive me.

I want to be able to say that I did my best for you.

I know what I want.

– Danny Lim

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Image of Country Musik: Movements #8, given in exchange for this letter.
An edition of this work is available in the shop.

This image features stock image vintage illustrations of two pots.

Letters To What We Want is a series of letters composed by friends, responding to the question ‘What do you want? In 2021 and beyond?’. The format was left open, as was the choice to sign off anonymously or with a pseudonym.

In exchange, I sent them an artwork, which can be viewed at the end of the post.

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Dearest S,

Thank you for your letter. I would dearly love to handwrite and illustrate my reply but post offices seem so far away by foot here.

What do I want?

I want sex. Sex is integral to being a Being and not feeling like a cup or a plastic clock or something with eyes and two legs.

I desperately want a tabula rasa on the government here and a magical government based on a Scandinavian/Dutch system with depth of cultural appreciation the Thais, Indonesians and Japanese have (perhaps a mix of the best systems worldwide. This list is about what I really want and things we REALLY WANT are often fantastical). I want to wake up on February 29 2021 and find that a whole new bunch of mystery people have landed and taken over governing this country based on meritocracy devoid of Religion, Race and Gender based policies. That public libraries mushroom at every 2sq miles of every city, town and village, and parks flourish like rainforest flowers do.

I really want to be able to survive decently on making art alone.

I want Najib and Rosmah and the rest of that gang in prison and serve maximum sentences. (Actually I want that yesterday).

I want to miraculously know how to use a computer in all its artistic offers, without the grind of learning how to.

I want Religion to never be in public domain and that individuals keep their faith in private.

I want ageing to be an easier process and not as bewildering and intrusive as it is.

I want a cure for cancer to be found tomorrow and that the 6 people I know who have it get “cured” permanently .

I want a dedicated work space where everything is hyper organised and needs no clearing up after each day’s work. This includes a sky light and outdoor area that’s extremely green smack in the middle of a bustling city surrounded by a cool community I really REALLY like, where the dog population is high and they are allowed everywhere. This would be of course part of a housing association where rent is affordable and controlled and with a high focus on independent living.

I want all the clothes I own to disappear and be replaced by a modest but substantial fare of only Comme des Garçons. Reminded by You who only wants a CDG mesh vest, i would like a cupboard full of them.

I want to be able to afford 2doz raw oysters per sitting without flinching at the cost.

I want (even though I don’t cycle) bicycle lanes and almost no cars. I WANT REAL PUBLIC TRANSPORT THAT FUNCTIONS without needing 60 mins to get from Point A to Point B with long walks and parking cars and horrific feeder buses.

I want my mother to be happy.

I want walkability in this country. That means we can walk anywhere for pleasure or practicality without danger and threats of snatch-thieves, or ugliness or hurdles.

I really really want for all women to unveil and reveal themselves with might and strength of character that I might see us better.

I need migrants to be treated equally and orang asli/asal to be compensated for all ills conducted on them over decades. I want us to be kinder as a nation for it seems to me that we are actually “not very nice people in fact”.

I want rats to go extinct. The only animal upon which I wish extinction….

I want local fruits to be available in abundance, and cheaper than apples and oranges.

I want to feel at ease with this country and to trust it.

I want choice comics and graphic novels to be essential reading in primary schools.

I want things online to be produced from all OTHER countries and not only from CHINA. (There should be a moratorium on how much China is allowed to export)

I want to have less pain and get physically stronger to sustain my work and how I want to work. As for the work itself, I want to continue being unshackled by the “Art world” that’s rather befuddling.

I would like my ability to be a bonobo to deepen and arrive at the next level where the-moment is always held in my paws, that being and breathing become one in perfect harmony.

I want clarity as to how to live this life here.

And if all that I want cannot happen, I want acceptance.

I hope you’re well and the oil refinery next door disappears out of sight. That all you want will happen for you. I want you to wear that mesh vest in front of me one day soon.

Much love,
Betik Lelo Tan

Ps: oh, and of course, world peace, for those on the balcony.

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Image of Country Musik: Movements #12, given in exchange for this letter.
An edition of this work is available in the shop.