Update (7 April 2025): And we’re back! Everything should be working now. Thanks for stopping by!
Hi! Sharon here. This website is a bit broken at the moment – screws are loose, plugins are outdated, etc. Information is jumbled up all over the place. If you click around and can’t find what you’re looking for, please know that I’m fixing it.
Announcement: I started a newsletter called Smoke Signals: https://smokesignals.sharonchin.com! It’s a brand new home for the Blog and News sections of this site.
I’ve been blogging (never as regularly as I liked) about my art practice on here for more than ten years. The site has become wild and sprawling, and updating it has felt like a chore for awhile now. I’m not abandoning it though! All the old posts will stay up, and I’ll continue to archive my artworks in the WORK section.
Please come over to Smoke Signals, where I’ll be sending newsletters on topics like:
This is the text of a speech I read at the book launch of ‘Salleh Ben Joned: Truth, Beauty, Amok and Belonging‘ by Anna Salleh, on 1 Dec 2023. The book is out now from Maya Press, available at all good book shops.
I never met Salleh. I know him through words. When I came back from studying in Australia, I was full of ideas. A bit of Baudrillard and Berger. A sprinkling of Said and Mcluhan. Not many women though. I had Ursula Le Guin, but she went further back, from when I was a young girl. I didn’t find many women to mother me in University.
So I came back, and I went looking for the Malaysian in me. I read some Latiff Mohidin, some Usman Awang. But it was Salleh that spoke to the wildness, a kind of horny, cracked madness in me. My tongue was broken, disconnected from my brain and body, darting here and there, speaking in weird tones, searching for a mother, a mother tongue. I read somewhere, I can’t remember where, Salleh said your mother tongue is the one you drank with your mother’s milk, and it healed something in me. My mother’s mother was an English teacher. She married and divorced 4 times, and ended her life as a Buddhist nun. That’s all I know about her. I don’t even know her name. My mother was an English teacher too, a lecturer in university. Her name is Maureen. Koh Mau Reen.
If a mother tongue is the one you drank with your mother’s milk, does anyone know what a daughter language is?
English is a daughter language of Old English, which is a daughter language of Proto-Germanic, which is a daughter language of Proto-Indo-European.
Malay is a daughter language of Old Malay, which is a daughter of proto-malayo polynesian, which is a daughter of proto-austronesian.
Every language is a daughter.
I want to talk about daughters for a moment. When I met Anna for the first time, and she told me about this book she was writing, she was focused and intense. A woman after my own heart, a woman of action. I recognize a woman on a quest. We don’t choose the blood that flows in us, but we can choose our own course and what we take with us on that journey. A daughter on a quest can free us all. She changes the river she is descended from, she shows us where to go.
Kebisuan langitmu tidak mengapa Kerana rimbamu penuh kata-kata Dalam sentiasaan cuaca hakikatmu Kurasa suatu kebebasan yang baru
What matters if your skies are silent For your forests are articulate In the constant clime of your essence I taste a new freedom
When I read these words of Salleh, from the poem ‘Di Detik ini, Di Sini’, almost 20 years ago, I didn’t read them as love poetry, in which said forests are almost certainly referring to those between fulsome thighs, south of ‘dua susu kemuncak gunung ledangmu’.
I read the poem as the rediscovery of a home I hadn’t encountered yet. Of arrivals and deferred welcomes. I read it as a guide. My head was too full, my heart empty. The sky wasn’t speaking to me. I had to get to know the forests, the land under my feet. To me this poem was about fidelity, and the promise of freedom in staying put, and finding out what it means to truly come home.
I raise my glass to you, Anna. To daughters, to all that they carry and have the courage to change. Death to the old ways. Long life to the new freedom pregnant in us, as we dare to sing the songs of our fathers (and mothers) in our own voice, in our own tongue.
Pages 178 and 179 from ‘Salleh Ben Joned: Truth, Beauty, Amok and Belonging’ by Anna Salleh, published by Maya Press.
Practice Diary 4 – I wrote this on New Year’s Eve 2022, to Varsha, who had messaged me with a watercolor painting of her Tamarind tree in Baroda.
Art by Varsha Nair
It was low tide, and the small bit of shore in front of the tree was revealed. I went down there – it was like standing on the front porch of my home. A porch the sea was coming for, the tree being the house. I turned back to look at her, and from that point of view I finally understood the mystery of those exposed roots. Coastal erosion – allow me to translate the term: all of the intricate architecture of roots had once been covered by mud and sand, perhaps half a vertical meter or more lost to the sea. How long had she been like that, holding on to bare rock, with nothing under her feet? And how much longer would she be able to withstand the waves? I thought of things that I might do, like build stilts for support. It would be a good art project to propose, something about ecology and conservation, something about our dire straits. And even that would have been a gift from her – I once saw a branch washed up so that it was lodged just so under the one root that reached out towards the sea. The branch was so solidly placed that I couldn’t nudge it at all, as if an expert carpenter had put it there. It lasted a good 4 weeks, but one afternoon I visited and it had been washed away. Did I think I could do better? Yeah, I suppose so! A series of images of what I could try flashed through me rapidly; ideas are so pleasurable. But it faded quick. I couldn’t bear the thought of her propped up like a cripple, perhaps with screws or rebar – a picture to tell myself a story of human ingenuity and artful invention. Whatever I did I could not return the mud and sand, in this lifetime. My love could not return the land that had been taken. Here she was still standing on her own; she felt solid as a mountain under my weight – home, at last, for a lost child of immigrants – I was just another little snail nestling in a gnarled root. How did this place on the edge of the water become the center of my world.
Practice Diary 3 – Started 3 March, finished 8 March 2023
Behind every image lies feelings, memories, thoughts and emotions, pressing up like thorns, or a body… a body of thorns – their sharp tips push against the skin, threatening to puncture it. The screen is hard glass, but it offers endless images that are like skins. We perceive with our eyes, soft sacs of membrane and jelly. Behind every image lies feelings, memories, thoughts and emotions, pressing up like thorns, or a body… a body of thorns – their sharp tips push against the skin, threatening to puncture it. The screen is hard glass, but it offers endless images that are like skins. We perceive with our eyes, soft sacs of membrane and jelly. Behind every image
CW [Content Warning] – Blood, Gore: The images included after the mindmap below may be disturbing to some viewers. Includes photos of the author’s bloody face during a boxing match, and AI generated images (using CrAIyon) with the prompts ‘muay thai’, ‘female’, ‘asian’, ‘short hair’, ‘cut’, ‘bloody face’, ‘fight’, ‘oil pastel drawing’.
There is so much that I want to do. I want to collect all the red fabric that washes up on the beach and sew it into a mantle to hang around the shrine. I want to collect the fallen, tannin-rich leaves to dye an old bedsheet, and stamp it with a pattern of swirling grain speckled with star-like blooms, to leave this as an offering on a breezy day, when the sun is somehow both mild and bright. I want to push dozens of empty liquor bottles into the ground to mark a doorway. More than anything, I want to take the trash out of the sacred hollow and lay a curse on anyone who tosses so much as a candy wrapper in there again.
But the Bodhi tree is growing fine, nestled by garbage. Protected by garbage. Even the burned tree herself isn’t dead. A brand new trunk is somehow growing out of the remains, the leaves forming a perfect canopy above the hollow.
Every time I visit, I plan to do something. I want to a make a shrine. But the place says, in the tone of my old muay thai master and one I might have used myself, when teaching someone how to make a print: watch me first.
Tossing and turning in the chrysalis. Breaking down a dream. The images change but the pattern stays the same. It’s always a house I can’t leave. I think this is the first time I dreamt it as a Mall. It’s the one I grew up in – 1 Utama. I’m a ghost wandering down darkened thoroughfares, reciting brand names like I’m identifying plants in the forest: Watsons, NEXT, Laura Ashley, Somerset Bay, British India, Royal Sporting House, Dragonfly, ESPRIT, MNG, Topshop…
Nice to come home to my home on the internet. When did home become a place where no one wants to visit anymore? It’s warm in here, I lit a fire.