roadtrip

New brog! We Are the Weeds

Hello, dear people. How’s ARE you?

The first week of the new year always sfeels like a training bra to me – everything’s bouncing around to see how it fits.

I have art for you!

Last year, I started doing a drawing a day to get back into the feeling of making things again. (Art isn’t really something mystical, most of it is getting enough hand-eye coordination so you can bring the ideas in your head into the real world).

Over a couple months I filled a notebook with drawings of all the weeds and unknown plants in my garden, a different one everyday.

Around the same time, Barisan National flags started popping up all over our town of Port Dickson.

On the roadtrip, we passed this big mining pool on a deserted highway from Kuantan to Kuala Terengganu. It was stuck full of UMNO flags and looked like an art installation.

I remember our friend Azharr telling us about filming Malaysia’s biggest and oldest Cengal tree for his documentary about boat builders. He treks into the Pasir Raja forrest reserve and finally comes upon the 1,300 year-old ancient majesty. He looks up and…

Pinned to the tree is a PAS flag.

For months now, there’s been a feeling of not being able escape the flags. A flag to rule them all! Every person, rock and blade of grass. Every bridge, roadside and village!

So Zedeck has been helping me to harvest the flags in our town so that I can paint weeds on them.

This isn’t about political partisanship. I’ve said it before and I’ll say it again: I’m not politically neutral. I’m not afraid of politics. I don’t hide in my house, doing hobbies and wishing it would all go away. No, I’m a citizen. I take part in the political process.

This is about goddamn political party flags and why they are in my neighbourhood, in my landscape and IN MY FUCKING FACE when it is not election campaign period.

This is about the arrogance that comes hand-in-hand with the will to power. The claiming of people, the earth and the very sky as property and tools. This is about overcoming my own helplessness, not by bitching about it on the internet, but by making art.

This is about turning the tables, thinking instead about what the flags (and what they represent) can’t escape.

This is about working with time, not against it. This is about the beauty, strength, weakness and enduring independence of weeds.

We are the weeds.

We are in the buildings, the cracks, the fields, the roadsides.

Stubborn, that’s us.

We are many and not alone.

We are on the side of time,

We have time on our side.

Kamilah rumpai

Hidup di celah, gudang, padang, tepi jalan

Degil

Tak terbilang, tak bersendirian.

Kami berpihak, ya, kepada masa,

Masa berpihak kepada kami.

P.S. Did I mention that this is also about being a #cheapartist by recyling ‘found’ materials?

Roadtrip brog! Turtlely Awesome Turtle Alley

First I have to tell you: the journey’s done. We’re home.

Zedeck went straight to the Room Where He Writes and churned out story no.82. Me? I am… well, I’m being slow. I’m always slow with the re-entry after going places.

But this is not about that. This is about turtles. In an alley. In Kuala Terengganu. You dig the post title? C’mon it’s great. You know it’s great.

Kuala Terengganu was one of those places that crept up on me and made me fall in love with it in a few short hours.

Something about how the town sat in the landscape – just before the great river meets the South China Sea, it holds a few islands like pearls in a cupped mouth. In fact, something like this:

You see the resemblance? You can never again un-see it.

We were walking around Jalan Kampung Cina when I stumbled across a gap between two buildings. It was no more than 1m wide.

Holy shit! Someone had adopted this gap and filled it with art.

Behold the back entrance of Turtle Alley.

At the other end, which we reached eventually, there’s a giant replica turtle greeting you. I’m glad we discovered it by the back – for the thrill of surprise and discovery, the split-second joy. Yes, you know it. The childhood joy.

Along the walls are illustrated plaques telling the story of the Little Turtle Messenger, which is a picture book written by Dr. Chan Eng Heng and drawn by Tan Yi Sin.

In addition to the story, you get to hunt for a tiny turtle hidden in each picture. I cannot describe how much this place rocks my world.

Wait, it gets better.

As we wandered down the alley looking for hidden turtles, a group of ladies came in. They were loud and chatty and joyful. I have a soft spot for colourful ladies, they make me happy and hopeful for the world. It became clear that one of them was none other than Dr. Chan herself, the maker of Turtle Alley.

She’s a retired professor, award-winning conservationist, and children’s book author. She made many of the mosaics on floor and the walls of Turtle Alley. How could I not go up to her and gushily ask for a picture?

Here she is standing next to me.

We bought a calendar that will help out the Turtle Conservation Society of Malaysia. Go get one here, they’re selling fast!

She gave me one of the little turtles that she was going to add to the Alley that day. I thought about the space being slowly populated by art turtles, and could just about imagine/dream/hope the same about real turtles in the sea.

I think if I was kid growing up in Kuala Terengganu, Turtle Alley would have been one of my favorite hiding places. I’d probably spend all day there, reading or dreaming.

Prof. Chan, I am your fan-girl.

You. ROCK. Your art ROCKS. You found a gap and filled it with life and beauty. You made a magic art portal in your town. People go in, and they come out again – different.

Visit the Turtle Alley blog. Like Turtle Alley on Facebook. Best of all, go see it for yourself.

Roadtrip brog! Crying at sunsets, crying at Sigur Ros

Hello, you. Hello from a quiet little hotel in Kuantan. Hello from the East Coast – monsoon country this time of year, and just unfamiliar country to me generally.

My car tells us we’ve travelled about 2000 kilometers so far. I wish that number made more sense to me. I’m sure it will in time. Everything seems to be travelling at different speeds – the blog and my life, my body and my head. One of them arrives first (usually my faithful, serviceable body) and has to shout at the rest: will you hurry the fuck up?

Ok, now. Right now. It’s raining, of course. Zedeck’s beside me, working on story no. 81. Sometimes I suspect we went on this roadtrip just so he could write and I could blog from different rooms with different views.

There’s so much I have to tell you. How to measure the journey?

Well, there’s been alot of junkfood. The road has been paved with nuts, Cheezels, cigarettes, chips, prawn crackers (my weakness and poison), bubble tea, all manner of fried and crispy food; sudden blasts of SUGARY SWEET! and then…SALTY! It’s all starting to make me feel run down and… squishy. I’m lugging around more belly than I’m used to. This is ok.

There’s been GOOD food too. Malaysians? We fucking ROCK at food. It’s like we’ve reserved all our passion, creativity, sensitivity, attention to detail, sexiness, joy and unabashed embracing of the new and strange, and squeezed it into soups and little luscious morsels and deep complex curries and sauces and weird-ass things like rojak and and and…

At a kopitiam in Ipoh: this perfectly silky, french-chef-worthy, creme caramel pudding. I may never forget it. Blessed (or cursed) never to visit Ipoh again without thinking about it.

Just like whenever I go to Penang, I need to go to this beach in Balik Pulau. I know there are a thousand prettier places in the world, but this one’s mine. When I’m on this patch of earth, I’m complete. I mean, ‘complete’ like on a fucking cellular level. It’s like being with an old, old, old friend.

This time, we got there in evening. The sun was going down and the light was on the water. I stared out at the open sea and suddenly I started crying. When Zedeck wandered over and asked what was up, all I could say in a half-embarrassed sniffle-whisper was: ‘It’s just so beautiful’.

I felt like Double-Rainbow Guy, the sad Asian knock-off version.

Zedeck gets this, he gets me. I love him for it.

Also on the list of Things That Made Sharon Cry for Happy-Unexplainable-But-Really-Good reasons: seeing Sigur Ros play at Urbanscapes. I’m not even that huge a fan, but the music got to me.

Doesn’ t matter if you don’t let it in.

It’ll steal inside you like a thief, that thing, the beautiful thing.

It’s 3AM. Good night, now, dearest people.

Love,
Sharon

More Gates and Grilles

I’m continuing to collect gates and grilles as we travel.

This gorgeous art deco one was taken near Jonker Walk, Melaka. Whatever happens to the building behind it, I hope they save the gate.

This one is at Sam Poh Teng temple, also Melaka. We went there to search out the Sam Poh well, which was in one of our old postcards. We found it!

More gates and grilles on my Pinterest (thesharonchin).

In Ipoh now, about to check out. We’re slowly creeping north. Gotta go, more soon.

Roadtrip brog! Careless, thoughtless, fuckless, feckless

Hello dear people, greetings from… not the road.

Zedeck got a bad case of food poisoning, so we are like barnacles, clinging to home (and for someone, the toilet). After eating dry toast for two days, the poor man is much better, and we set off again tomorrow.

Been looking through the photos and footage I’ve taken so far. Most of it comes from me just trying to absorb the texture of the roads and towns – swarming swiftlets everywhere, broken fences, glass shards stuck on tops of walls, curbside weeds, construction sites, water towers, drain pipes, mysterious flyovers leading to nowhere…

Alot of what we’ve built in the recent past is ugly. I don’t know where the ugliness comes from, but I sense it’s a part of us, part of me – careless, thoughtless, fuckless (beauty is arousing, sensual, touchable, attentive, loving), feckless, hard, merciless, and wasteful, wasteful, wasteful.

But I watch the faces too… they’re beautiful. And the way people walk! There are as many kinds of walk as there are people. Hunched over, limping, tottering, running, striding, waddling – getting somewhere, somehow.

I don’t know how all this is going to get put together. I really… I don’t fucking know. It’s scary. I’m just going to have to trust it…

TRUST THE SOUP.

Roadtrip brog! You keep your morality, I’ll keep the tits

I’m posting this from home. We’ve stopped in Port Dickson for two nights on our way up north – for laundry, for internet, for sanity.

Tomorrow we go on the road again. I’m leaving all my art materials behind – the watercolor kit, brushes, color pencils, pencils, scissors, glue, fuckin’ stapler – and keeping only the video camera, small notebook and ONE pen. I had this romantic idea of making art on the road, you see. Alas! The will is strong but the flesh is aching, sweaty and unable to do much more than shower at the end of the day.

Right ho my dears, onwards with an actual roadtrip update. I’m trying to post these in the order they happened, so there’s some kind of continuity.

Before we left Singapore, we stopped by Haw Par Villa, or the famous Tiger Balm Gardens.

Dudes, Haw Par Villa is some serious CRAZY.

It’s just… ahhh, how do I even… Ok, you know what a diorama is? It’s like someone was ordered to make elaborate life-size dioramas of all the major themes/works/touchstones of Chinese culture, with sly and subtle focus on the ‘moral and ethical values’ of Confucianism, Taoism and Buddhism. So you’ve got animals from the Chinese zodiac, Journey to the West, Ten Courts of Hell, all manner of major and minor deities and more, so much more.

It’s fun, and very fucked up. I was brought there as a child, which I’m sure left all sorts of psychological scars. I remember being vaguely terrified but fascinated by the characters, colors and shapes.

This time though, after the initial high, I started to feel strangely oppressed. The artist kid in me still loved the visual LSD of Haw Par Villa, but the adult, the woman, couldn’t stand the morality.

It was like wandering around inside the head of a Chinese patriarch, full of gods, violence, misogyny, ghosts, rituals, rules and elaborate punishments. A colorful place, but a rigid one. Unyielding. I can’t live there.

Where there are lots of tits. (I don’t mind the tits. More tits. Tits forever!)

Tits ahoy!

Where evil temptresses seduce righteous men.

And… I don’t even know what’s going on here. I gather it has something to do with motherhood. Who IS that at her breast? Husband? Father? Father-in-law?

Where the punishment for prostitues in hell is drowning in a pool of filthy blood. Of course, only women are prostitutes.

Where wise, bearded men pronounce judgement on poor mortals:

There’s that judgy judge again. Strokin’ on his wise beard, watchin’ on a sawin’.

On the other hand, where this crab lady also resides. I wouldn’t mind being the crab lady. She is awesome.

Also, these dudes are cool. I would be the crab lady and I would hang out with these dudes. And then we would bust out of Haw Par Villa and set up a pacifist, non-hierarchical autonomous community.

We will take these freaky pandas with us.

Roadtrip brog! How will you know the thing you love?

Writing this on a clunky old computer in a hotel room in Johor Bahru. The view is of a highway.

We spent the last two nights in Geylang, Singapore’s red-light district. The view was a row of brothels.

Singapore is unbelievably close to Malaysia. Driving across the causeway felt like a biscuit toss over a not very wide bit of water.

On the other hand, the imagined wall is a mile high. They always are.

We saw our friends Nora and Rizal. Nora wants to start a Malay-themed traveling circus. Rizal is in the process of setting up a leftist bookshop. Yes, the force runs strong in these two. We talked for many hours about the unsevered ties between Malaysia and Singapore, boat building in Sulawesi and island hopping in Indonesia.

They live in a beautiful block of old-style apartments. Next door, a huge hospital is being built, which is going to cater to Singapore’s booming medical tourism industry.

Naturally, the old buildings are going to make way for shiny new condos. Some generic wall of concrete and glass is going to replace this pretty gate:

We also saw Mun Kao and Juria. Mun Kao took us to the CHINA Chinatown, where we got into a high state of grease by eating large quantities of mainland Chinese street food.

Juria is a badass. She knows all the secret adventure places in Singapore: abandoned haunted hospitals, unused underground train tracks…

We found the exact Indian temple in the old postcard! It’s in Chinatown. The postcard also shows OCBC (Overseas Chinese Banking Corporation) Bank building on the opposite side, it’s still there today.

Multi-level buildings like this one loom right over you. You can’t see them here, but there were people in those little white cage-like things at the bottom level. They were construction workers, but I can totally see those cage things becoming special booths in the hotel’s open-air bar something or other.

A beautiful thing about Singapore is the trees. There are many of them, and you can tell they’re well taken care of, as they should be. Without them, the place would be desolate.

This man. He’s missing.

The nets don’t catch everything.

We are going on a roadtrip

Yes, me and non-husband Zedeck are packing up and going on a motherfuckin’ roadtrip.

Here is our map:

Here is our itinerary:

I will be collecting visual material for my Epic Project.

Zedeck will attempt to finish his epic book-in-making on the road.

and and AND (oh, you will love this part so much)…

We are going to track down places in a bunch of old postcards that belonged to Zedeck’s parents. Here are a few of them:

SINGAPORE (can you believe it?):

JOHORE CAUSEWAY:

ST. JOHN’S FORT (A’Famosa):

PORT SWETTENHAM (Port Klang):

BIRD’S EYE VIEW OF KUALA LUMPUR TOWN (Yes, this is for real):

A TIN MINE DREDGE, KL (I love how this made it onto a postcard):

PENANG ROAD:

THE NEW DAM IN CAMERON HIGHLANDS:

I’ll try to update as much as I can on the road, either here or on mah Twitter. But I am notoriously bad at recording my travels – I get too caught up in living and being.

The land, the sky, the roads, the people, the rivers, the sea. We leave early tomorrow.

This is happening, it’s happening. I can’t wait but I also wish I could sit here forever and write to you about this feeling.

Should I bring my ukulele?

Love, Sharon

UPDATE: When @rezasalleh says you should bring the ukulele, then well, the ukulele is gonna be brought.