This was the year I didn’t know I’d been waiting for.
It felt like I’d hit a vein of water after digging in dry rock for almost two years – which, if you count back, is when we moved to Port Dickson in 2011.
This year I worked with the frenzy of someone who has learned never to take the spring/source/muse/mojo/lalalala/whateveryoucallit for granted again.
The drawings of weeds I started as daily practice in 2012…
…led to WEEDS/RUMPAI, my first real show in 2 years. I found new ways of doing things and new comrades to do them with.
I went back on Facebook, and tried to relearn the Internets so that I could use it instead of it using me. Douglas Rushkoff‘s work by way of Molly Crabapple‘s work helped.
The best tattoos are revealed to you by your own life. It was time to learn how to fly, fight and be brave, so I got sparrowhawk feathers to balance out the leaves on my other shoulder. Fresh from the needle:
Elections 2013. I made political propaganda for Parti Keadilan Rakyat. It was the hardest thing I did. We lost anyway. I don’t regret a moment of my time – it gave me a close look at the political power machine that controls our lives, and convinced me once and for all that my path doesn’t lie that way.
We tried to bring forth the Malaysian Spring. In the hopeless hope I planted all the flowers from my #bungaBERSIH dress on the street. The last time I checked, they are still there, slowly turning black from exhaust fumes.
I hired my friends Roberto and Maryann to help me build a beautiful new website. This is the best thing I’ve done so far for myself and my art. The E-shop should be up and running sometime in the new year.
I drew alot, including #Alvivi, Malaysia Day Medusa and Ah Gow the treecutter. I want to get better at drawing, but also just want to draw more, because dammit, it is FUN. I hope this Dedication + Joy = Lots of cool art for your eyeballs in 2014.
This is a drawing of my cancelled performance for the controversial M50 exhibition in August. I meant to blog about it but never got the chance.
Mandi Bunga happened at Singapore Biennale. It landed me and over a hundred other brave, beautiful people dressed in yellow on the front pages of The Straits Times.
Me and Zedeck did a Flower Shower stall at Urbanscapes under Market of Experiences, and spent the week after scratching madly at mysterious rashes.
So much for doing. There’s always the dark side which never gets talked about enough – massive personal shit like dealing with the serious illness of a loved one, relationship shit which had me and Zedeck giving and taking pain in equal measure, and garden variety self-doubt/self-sabotage shit which… never truly goes away.
And then there’s all the other stuff around the edges, long hours spent at home, thinking, watching the sky turn slowly from morning to evening, cats, friends, wine, coffee, solitude…
The vein of water is deep, and only goes deeper.
Wishing you joy and art and dancing and pain and love and epic failure and dreams coming true and making things and doing things and being things. See you there at the source.
Happy New Year, diggers!
(Photo of me and my new pony by Ronnie Khoo)
just out of curiosity, why are your drawing subjects always nude? (:
Is it? Maybe you’re just looking at all the nudes ones, heh.
maybe. lol!
bless.