In June, the Japan Foundation Kuala Lumpur sent me and June Tan to Kinosaki for a symposium about reviving the Conference for Asian Women and Theatre, which was founded in Japan in 1992 but hasn’t seen any action since 2005.
They asked us to write a report about our trip for Teman Baru, JFKL’s monthly newsletter. I drew this picture instead:
Luckily, June wrote a proper report (and took pretty pictures):
It’s been easier for images to come out of me than words, this year. They’re like a bubbling stream, and on good days they’re even a strong river. All I have to do is sit down at the page and let it pour out of my hands.
Writing, meanwhile, feels like fishing for stones at the bottom of that river. I mean, they come. But god, so reluctantly.
I wonder about this a little. Before this year, I’ve never spent so much time drawing in my life, except maybe as a kid. It feels like my brain is being rewired – new pathways built, but more importantly, old connections reestablished. I like to imagine little brain worms wearing hard hats doing all this. Some are arguing over the plans and others are jackhammering my cerebral cortex.
I hope they dig me a channel where the River of Drawing joins up with the River of Writing and we all go white water rafting – you, me, and the brain worms.
And we will go through the door in the mountains.
Meanwhile, I swim madly in the image world and will drag up as many written stones as I can.
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Speaking of which, on route to Japan I worked on this commission for Poskod.my, commemorating 100 days of MH370 being lost. I wouldn’t recommend chasing your deadlines on a plane, but in this case it gave me a perspective from the inside:
I called it ‘Silent Seas’. Words were not possible. Even the image was hard, but it found me in the end.
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Here’s a photoblog to help decode the drawing:
Kinosaki is a hot spring town in northen Hyogo prefecture, along the coast of the Sea of Japan. We stayed at a guesthouse with lovely artists Shirotama Hitsujiya (left) and Sato Shimizu (right). Everyday, you pick a fresh cotton kimono, which you’re supposed to wear to the public hot spring baths. Naturally, I gravitated to bunnies.
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Upcycled plastic buoy cat heads.
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June and I presenting our work at the symposium to discuss the future of the Conference for Asian Women and Theatre. We were invited by Shirotama and Mikuni Yanaihara (far right), both productive geniuses in the performing arts in Japan. The discussion got pretty heated, especially around WHY there needed to a conference specially for WOMEN. I said I saw ‘Asian’, ‘Women’ and ‘Theatre’ as doors that lead somewhere, instead of walls that keep people out. If you don’t include any of those doors, you don’t get see where they go in the mountains.
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We watched a play about a stripper staged at an old cabaret joint. Next door was a strange shop, with old pachinko machines and this shooting gallery of tiny ceramic figures. It was manned by a charismatic old lady who insisted June try her hand at shooting. She kept dragging June’s gun until it was inches away from the figures. She really wanted June to win something.
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Shirotama organized a workshop at the marine research center at Takeno beach. I seem to be dressed as a communist, which is a look I enjoy.
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We identifed and tasted different types of edible seaweed…
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…and cooked octopus rice over a wood fire. You can’t see it, but a huge brown eagle was circling close overhead, waiting for us to be done so it could swoop down on our meal.
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Stuff we picked up from our fieldtrip. The amount of trash didn’t faze me; since living in Port Dickson I no longer have illusions about how packed with garbage our oceans are. No, it was something else that mindfucked me: as we walked along the beach, I looked down and saw the sand embedded with tiny, multi-coloured fragments of plastic, as uncountable as confetti. You could sit all day trying to pick the broken plastic out of a square meter of sand and still not take it all out. It stretched on as far as you could walk. The plastic was PART of the beach. I had never seen such a thing. It made my heart sick, and then, I felt something harden inside, a kind of determination to accept this reality, to face it with whatever tools I had at my disposal: my art, and the time I have left on this earth.
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Best for last. We visited this sea cave. A hole in the rock where the ocean came rushing in and out with a roar, over and over. The hole in the rock. The door in the mountain!
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P.S. Shirotama Hitsujiya is the founder of performing arts group YUBIWA HOTEL, a creative genius, and also the artist who invited us to Kinosaki. She’s in Malaysia this weekend and will be giving a talk called “Why we work with the community” alongside other Japanese artists. Come if you can! Sat, 9 Aug 2014, 4pm – 5pm at Five Arts Centre in TTDI.
