Tan Twan Eng's The Garden of Evening Mists has been a very good read. It's not as dense and meandering as Bolano's 2666, and is a very gentle sort of fiction. I'm discovering that I really like his tone a lot, and like the way the story is moving. I'm guessing it's the amount of text he devotes to nature and the amount of introspection by the protagonist, and maybe even sentence length. I think I might do a craft essay on it -- either on descriptions of nature or internal dialogue or sentences.
Writing
I'm beginning to think more and more that I want to explore memory and obsessions more in my writing. How does memory work, what do you remember, how much of memory can be controlled? How far can obsessions take you? What makes people obsessed? What are people obsessed about? I think this is in line with an ongoing fascination/intrigue with relationship breakdowns and repair/endurance. e.g. why abused victims stay with their partners, what causes hoarding.
Inspirations
Ai Wei Wei's 'Baby Formula'
On Friday, I went to look at Ai Weiwei's first solo exhibition in Singapore. It was meant to be a statement on the tainted milk scandal in China. He had arranged 4 of Hong Kong's leading brands of infant milk cans in the shape of China on the gallery floor and on the walls, mounted tweets that people wrote in response to it on glossy paper, with milk labels in bright colours as backgrounds. Apart from the fact that the mounted tweets were being sold for SGD $36,000 each and the fact that it was an Ai Weiwei piece, I wasn't particularly impressed by the work. There didn't seem any depth. (Side criticism: The pillars in the middle of the artpiece were distracting -- Gillman Barracks, if you want to be a proper art gallery, you need to have some pillar-less spaces!)
2 answers that stuck out from an interview with a newspaper that was reproduced in the exhibition catalogue:
Q: Many of your works are commentaries on current affairs. Do you worry that they may not endure and may not be seen in museums, say, a hundred years later?
A: This is the case only for fossils I think. My works for sure have a definite shelf life. The fresher something is, the quicker it rots.
Q: How do you keep balance and not do something flash in the pan though?
A: I keep coming up with new things, there's no issue. I will still have new things. It's like having a meal. Some people keep eating left-overs. If you always have freshly-cooked meals, you don't need to eat left-overs. I feel the basic condition of Chinese culture is about eating left-overs. All our food has been pickled or left there for a long time. After a while, you begin to have a distaste for fresh dishes. In matters of culture, people are eating leftovers. They are taking in what are considered masters' works. But they have never thought about how, when these works just emerged, they are not seen as masterly but were things that were dangerous or not recognised.
I'm not sure I agree that only the Chinese eat picked food or that the 'basic condition of Chinese culture is about eating left-overs', but these 2 questions centre on the idea of artistic immortality. I always feel this pang when I walk into 2nd hand bookstores or go to book sales filled with dusty paperbacks going for $2 each. So much time thinking and writing and editing, only for the book to be shunned, then probably pulped.
Shun-Kin
On Sat, I watched Shun-Kin, a play directed by Simon McBurney that is based on a short story by Jun'ichiro Tanizaki. The director made waves in London when it opened at the Barbican. This fact initially made me a bit wary, and I braced myself for a too-western, overly exotic interpretation. I was surprised by how much I enjoyed it in the end, not just for its stylistic theatrical elements (use of light and shadows, use of tatami mats and sticks to create or restrict space, blending in of technology) but by its restrained portrayal that seems very inline with Japanese Noh theatre.
In terms of the narrative, the play uses multiple narrative voices, something I think I want to experiment with in my writing, but wonder how to do so without confusing the reader. (I've reserved the book from the library to find out if Tanizaki does this in the original story). The play starts off with an actor talking about his own life (he is 80, every year he goes to his father's grave and plants a wooden stick in the grave that has a prayer and the name of the dead), first in halting English, then in Japanese. This then transits to him stepping into character (this is done by other people stripping his western garb off him and changing him into traditional Japanese robes) and becomming the old Sasuke. The focus then shifts to a man who is looking for Shun-Kin's grave, and who finds it beside Sasuke's. Then, the narrative splits again, with the introduction of a lady in a modern radio recording studio, who narrates the story and applies it in her own life (she is dating a much younger man, and clearly dominates the relationship), as well as another young man, who sits and writes on a low desk. Throughout the play, this young man, the old Sasuke, and the lady take turns to narrate, and sometimes, they repeat their lines, and tell different versions about what happened. For example, the blinding of Shin-Kin. One version is that she was blinded by a venereal eye disease. Another version is that an evil nurse somehow blinded her eyes with her urine. (Missed some details there about how her urine could blind the girl. I think that's one of the problem with translations -- the subtitles seemed a bit too sparse at some points.) I wonder why McBurney chose to use an all-Japanese cast as well as stage the play entirely in Japanese. For realism or exoticism?
Summary of story: Sasuke is a pharmacist who stays in a rich household. At the age of 13, he falls in love with the master's daughter, a beautiful 9-year-old blind girl named Shun-kin, who insists that he become her guide. What he becomes for the rest of his life however, is an incredibly devoted and much-abused, but never acknowledged lover, while still remaining a servant. They have 3 children, a girl, who dies, and 2 boys, who are given away at birth. When Shun-kin gets attacked at night and her faced is burnt, Sasuke blinds himself with a sewing needle because he wants to reassure her that he will not look at her scarred face.
In terms of obsessions, Shun-Kin is obsessed with her beauty. She keeps larks and makes Sasuke apply their droppings on her skin to keep it soft. She also makes him use his chest to warm her feet. From a young age, she abuses Sasuke physically, slapping, kicking and stepping on him repeatedly. Sasuke however, does not retaliate. In fact, he asks for more, and in his old age, after Shun-Kin has died, he repeats with great fondess 'how soft Madam's feet was, and how small -- they could fit into the palm of my hand!' One narrator (I think it is the young man) makes some reference to sado-masochism, and the lady at the recording studio tells her boyfriend that the story is 'about the 'S' in S & M'.
Singapore Night Festival
There was a segment of the Night Festival this year that was held at Fort Canning. It was a concert organised by Lianhe Zaobao, and which had the T'ang Quartet playing while an opera singer from the Kunqu Opera sang from the Peony Pavillion at one point. I didn't understand a word of it and there were no subtitles, but It struck me how one genre of art (Western classical music) and another (Peking opera) could collaborate.
A large part of the concert was dedicated to xinyao, a brand of Singaporean Mando-pop that was popular in the 90's, and which I missed, presumably because I was listening to boybands/oldies from the 60's during those years. This made me think about what 'Asian music' is -- a hybrid of Eastern and Western elements or indigenous tunes that might only be familiar to a portion (albeit a large one) of society or just borrowings from the West? I guess it's in the same circular argument as what 'Asian writing' and 'Asian art' is -- which may or may not be due to a sense of cultural inferiority and uncertainty, post-colonialism.
