Kill or be Killed
Photoshop CS3
February 2008
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Formed of a culmination of thoughts, emotions and experiences from two years of mandatory national service spent in the country's armed forces, this piece of work seeks to explore issues rarely touched upon due, not least, to the horrifying realities of war and disparaging relative safety of the Singaporean society -- issues pertaining to the citizen soldier's psyche, his freedoms versus perceived duties, and the functions as well as validity of a standing army in the role of a deterrent force.

I had made minor revisions to the accompanying text while submitting this for Noise 2008 last month -- removing first-person writer perspective - to make things sound better and less partial. The piece was completed in February 2008, there were two earlier iterations: one less finished version of the same piece from October 2007 that's currently in the gallery section, and the first attempt in May of 2006. Yes that last one pretty much looks like crap, but history is history, if anything it should prove to any skeptics reading this blog that one does get better with practice and effort, you are constantly moving and learning -- even now I am seeing faults with the piece on top.

It is true that the situation presented in the image is purely fictional, but the struggle as exemplified by the pushing and pulling between the unseen "viewer" and the other soldier (whom I had intended to identify as an officer but thought it better to leave rank ambiguous) was inspired directly by personal experience and observation while performing NS. With this painting drama had always been a main focus. Drawing on a viewpoint by now popularised by first-person shooters but hopefully producing a kind of visual and emotional depth as yet unharnessed by any game in the genre, I wanted something that is dramatic but not on the same level of the advertising and media campaigns. Yet I did not want to demonise the established institutions, that does not help anyone. Art is meant to engage, challenge, and question.

So I'm asking, "Can we do it? Can you do it? Can you kill in the face of knowing you might possibly be killed? Would that end up being your only motivation for acting in line?" Such what-ifs ought to occupy the mind of every person who serves because it is a fact within our mandate, but re-contextualise the above questions for a moment -- nothing about killing, but just doing a job. Duty. These are almost interchangeable words. It becomes clear that this is not even about just being in war, or coming to terms with the most primal of human instincts, for that is an often unrelatable extreme. The questions apply right now, outside of any closeness to firing a rifle or blowing things up. If so much is being taken for granted, if so many are abusive, manipulative, complaining, skiving, unmotivated, victimised, stressed, apathetic, shortchanged -- in a time of peace -- what could possibly go right in the event of a war?

What is this culture of fear perpetuating? We act in line because we have to. What are we protecting? Do you know? Do I even believe I have to? But still I do because I have to. Or else? Or else. There's nothing hypothetical about this vicious circle, I do not make these feelings up, certainly my work could end up being labelled myopic and subjective, but which part of an experience that comes out of living isn't?

So I've been on some sort of hiatus, granted I never quite knew how to fit myself into this blogging thing, it became especially glaring during the limbo after leaving the Forces, and then school came along and took away all my energy. Whenever I attempted to come back to this - loading up Movable Type or clicking on "new entry" if I ventured that far - it seemed like I had to carry on from where I left off and put myself back into the same mentalities for the benefit of continuity, even if it were impossible due to change. So it only grew harder with every passing day, because boy had I changed a lot in this time. Honestly I feel like deleting all the old entries now, but one may argue that these truly represented me at that point in time so there is no embarrassment to be had. Yet the dilemma here is that although blogging is an active process there are these passive states that I want to change around too - the site design, page layouts, themes and categories that no longer apply or appeal. I'll make do for now though, it's probably enough to just get this out there and understood.

I have had in the past, many disparaging ideas about what I wanted to do with this blog. Right now, I'm pretty much through with the recent (by account of my entries) fear of writing anything too personal or emotional because I no longer see this as even a platform for such expression. After having gone through a semester of college and doing a good deal of reading both on and off the web I have found that there are plenty of things outside of my personal life that I can write about and share with people. This is good too, as I think it'd force me to adopt a kind of objectivity and rationality even when posting and talking about work which is inherently subjective and introspective.

So for a start I'll post some old work (there are things from way back in February I have yet to show), and then probably write a series of entries about school and such. Hopefully I can get this done by next week, because school starts Monday and I can guarantee you will be seeing very little of me on the web after that. Oh and in case there's any confusion, what you see below is not old work, they're old shots certainly, but I put it together today.

Flight
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When I was sixteen I created what was probably my first true piece of art with something to say. I wasn't very good with titles so I termed it as best as I could, Popularity. That was the word that decorated in Verdana the full length of the first A3-sized board of preparatory work, mostly because I thought it a clever and convenient thing to do, "look that's one board down, only six more to go!" You might call it a sculpture installation even though I did not know what to call it at the time, not that it mattered since I never was quite able to speak about my work to anyone.

The sculpture was formed of two dull gray mechanical arms standing a couple of metres apart rising out of the ground, one shooting straight up to about eye level griping onto a sphere with its three-pronged claws, another bent away from the other at its base and elbow joint in a gentle angle such that it seemed reaching out for another identical sphere, suspended inches away in nothingness by a fishing line. I built this thing out of odd pieces of recycled and found materials - wood panel and foam board with nuts and bolts for the claws, cardboard tubes and dismantled bits of past students' works like a metal stand and a wheel hub to form the central structure, some acrylic and spray paint, sand, white glue, and two plastic inflated balls the kind that children play with. It was a strange yet fresh undertaking because up to that point, most of what I ever did was draw. I would come into the studio for Drawing & Painting exams and draw something I had thought up the night before even though we would get three weeks to develop ideas, or I remember one time in third year, draw the whitewashed motorcycle which was the centrepiece of our massive still-life set up - the then realistic manner which I rendered it led to much attention and also became the thing my fellow art students came to remember me for, I probably secretly enjoyed this a lot because finally here was something I was good at after embarrassingly failing all my other classes and being good for nothing in one of the top-ranked schools of the country.

I started on the project rather late, in August when it should have been April, perhaps only consulting my tutor thrice on what I wanted to do. I am sure he was perplexed and worried, but he would later comment to another tutor that I was very independent going about my work; systematically sawing, sanding, painting, drilling and building my odd contraption. I enjoyed this freedom, though I probably abused it more than I ever did embrace it. We got to choose our day for class, which corresponded with a specific tutor, of which there were three. So Friday afternoons I would stay for art class, the best class ever because it meant a late lunch with friends in an almost-empty refractory, walking into class with drink in hand, breaks as you liked it, jokes, and drawing. At times there would be rules enforced and work demanded or a lesson proper, but even then it was nothing like Elementary Mathematics whose quadratic equations I could still not do by third year. I remember we once had an ex-student come in, who had moved on to studying at Art Center or CalArts or some such fancy place in the United States because he was drawing shiny concept cars with markers, and that left a deep impression on me - it was like watching Feng Zhu work and talk about his work in first person.

Although I called it the first, I would not call it my favourite piece of work. For one thing I don't think I was ever very clear about what I wanted to say through it. Popularity really should have been Exploitation of The Desire for Popularity or I Do Not Understand Why Everybody Buys this Popular Shit or Sometimes I am Glad I am Not Popular, though I admit the original does carry with it a certain simplistic, ironic, sardonic charm. I might have had too much to say; at one point the installation was to include a weaving, twisting, repeating stream of rectangular possibly acrylic panels sandwiching the spheres, as it were, to symbolise a kind of basic contrast in shape and thus nature in this flow of life. The spheres represented in a sea of bad ideas good ones being snatched up and sucked dry and essentially sold out by some unseen corporate machine - as such they were also meant to glow with an alluring radiance. I did not possess the time, ingenuity or resources to create such a mass of objects but the idea stayed the same, I came up with the rationale that ideas are unseen anyway, and they are within us, perhaps the audience or the people walking about observing this scene before them, just as blind and oblivious as in the real world to what happens to ideas on a grand scale. Some people might choose to call this bullshit-rationalisation and that is fine because frankly I do not care anymore.

I was certainly proud that last night we slaved to beat the midnight chime to finish our works in the new gallery on the fourth floor; proud that I had managed to accomplish this thing which I never thought I would and how it actually managed to look pretty fine and mean something at the same time. Things seem simple those years ago, I am almost amazed now of having ever thought of creating such a piece of work, also at the rest of the cohort with their other abstract installations comprising of tree trunk sections, dismantled car interiors, blown-up colour-in covers of Time magazine, giant bee drawings with dead leaves, surrealist illustration on unused projection-screen and papier-mâché fist-sized cocoons. The environment encouraged a very hands-on, non-painting (yet focusing on drawing in first year and design concepts in the second), non-traditional approach to art, and although I did not realise this until I was in junior college where I had received a culture shock of sorts, it formed the conditions which taught me to explore the possibilities of expression through art. As I await to begin a next phase in my life, I am thinking and maybe hoping that this environment which I have chosen will allow me to make yet more discoveries, that I will do all I can to not have to regret it.

Sum
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So we've been out for over a month and a half. Whatever you want to call it, serfdom, jail, rot, torture, total waste of time, I think most of us bear the same rightfully negative sentiments. Disregarding overlaps, what differs are the experiences, no two can say they've had the same complete one (if they do they're probably mistaken in thinking so), and neither does anyone walk away from these two years with the same things, or amount of things, in their hands and on their minds. Thus the reasons or roots for such negativity generally differs, for when I say "waste of time", I am not as bitter as the man who thinks the government has stolen his youth that was meant to have been spent in glee and importance in a reputable and expensive university elsewhere, or the man who thinks his livelihood or path to such has been endangered and possibly destroyed. Not that they are not entitled to such views, or that my struggle needs more noticing (though it often feels like it does), but I'm just saying, and this shouldn't be surprising if you know me in some extent, that I am bitter over more sentimental, personal, and intricate trivialities, which do indeed seem trivial to many. I am not harbouring hatred for this person I've had the unpleasant opportunity to work with or cursing that person who's made me do things I hate doing just because I'm set for so much more, I'm not talking about bitterness in the way you may understand it to mean self-absorbed anger. I'm talking about malcontent that stems from a true waste of time with relation to something specific. I like to think that I actually have in my possession something, a skill, like a little plant which was for the most part simply kept locked up in an old cluttered drawer not to see the light of the sun or be watered or allowed to grow. I had and still have no desire in manipulating this sprout for celebrated purposes like wealth multiplication, and I disagree with the need for me, or anybody who also disagreed, to be forced essentially at gun-point (pick your weapon, bread and butter or rather the absence of it works too), to protect everything else that is intended for the proliferation of economy. It's ironic then that I've spent a larger part of this month and a half soaking in procrastination, ennui and outright laziness, be it due to overbearing inertia or a continued self-pitying jadedness towards this gap cut into my existence. I don't think this hole proved a total waste of my time, I don't think I haven't learnt anything, I certainly don't think I haven't grown in any way. But sometimes, in this time, it feels like that little plant has withered away, and I find myself lost as to what to do with it, or even what it can still do for me.

Harbor Raid
Photoshop CS2
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Popularity contests aren't the type of things I'm most comfortable taking part in, partly because they require a certain manner of shameless self-promoting which I have never been good at, and also present the void in definable merit which thus usually results from them. But perhaps for validation, exposure, recognition, and the chance to win a brand spanking new computer, I have inadvertently participated in one. Voting for the ModDB Concept Art Competition has opened, though I've been about a week late to garner votes for my work (above) due to practical and personal reasons.

Just so this does not come across as overwhelmingly self-absorbed, I've included eleven progress shots for good measure:
One. Two. Three. Four. Five. Six. Seven. Eight. Nine. Ten. Eleven.

There is also something else I've taken part in for approximately the same reasons - discounting the prospect of physical reward - and has not been decided by popular vote (or maybe just the populous of a circle of people in a meeting room). I was hesitant to go at it last year in my belligerence, but I think it's time to throw childish pride away and just see Noise Singapore as an opportunity. Unless I've been led to believe otherwise, my work At its Dawn, will be displayed at its showcase at The Heeren Shops from this Friday (that's the 7th) till sometime late in December, along with a few other digital painting and photography works on the website.

And on an entirely different note which seems not to deserve its own post...

I realised I need to stop pretending, here at least, that everything is fine with me and my life as I come around once a month or so posting well-veiled and construed thoughts, because in actuality, they are not. I have learnt, arguable if for better or worse, that I cannot and should not be throwing my emotions widely and wildly about based wholly on the notion of given freedom on the Internet, and should instead let my words reflect the person I really am because they are in the end, read by people who really are. I have never been good with being open and honest with my feelings in front of others, save perhaps anger, so it seems, even if it paints me as cold structured and clinical, that this works better for everyone including myself if just to save the trouble of explanation at the expense of perceived closeness. I am just sharing this realisation in hope that it becomes apparent that although this blog represents me, it hardly represents all of me, me at all times, or me for all time.

And We March On
Photoshop CS2
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If a tree falls in a forest and no one is around to hear it, does it make a sound?