Remaking Our City
Introducing the Art x Poetry exhibition at the National Library
It’s been a week since the launch of Art x Poetry Exhibition: A Journey Down the Singapore River, a collaboration between the Migrant Writers of Singapore, Poetry Festival Singapore, and the Aestheletic Fine Art. This show – brainchild of the wonderful Joelle David, gallery director – has been months in the making, and we were really pleased that veteran poets Robert Yeo and Lee Tzu Pheng, as well as Minister Josephine Teo, could join us at the launch.
I had the privilege of saying a few words to introduce the event:
Minister Josephine Teo,
Friends from Poetry Festival Singapore, the Migrant Writers of Singapore, and the National Library,
It’s a privilege to introduce this very special exhibition. We poets are rarely asked to give speeches. (After all, rhyming speeches can be hard to listen to, and I promise not to inflict one on you!) But poets also tend to leave their audiences with more questions than answers. Well, consider this fair warning, because I do intend to start with a question today – that is:
What does a building mean to you?
For most of us, the buildings that make up our city’s skyline contain offices, homes, gyms, restaurants, shopping centres; the places we work, play, eat, and live in. To us, familiar landmarks like our beloved National Library are more than a sunset on a tourist brochure. From the hawker centres where we meet first dates, to the hospital corridors where we comfort grieving friends, these are places that lend their shapes to our lives. Indeed, these are the places we call home.
Now, this applies not only to those who are born here, but those who have chosen to make a living – and make their lives – in this city. For painter MG Kumar, who practiced his unique blend of impressionism and realism for decades on the rich architectures of Varanasi, his family’s move to Singapore provided new soil where his imagination could take root. The paintings you see today recreate the history of our streets, brick by brick: not just with a painter’s careful eye, but the loving hands of a father whose children have come to adopt this city as their own.
Of course, he is not the only artist to have been inspired by his journey here. Every year, thousands of men and women arrive in Singapore, every one of them with a story to tell. Many of these stories are painful, the ache of uncertainty and separation made worse by debt, fear, and risk of injury. At great cost, but also with great hope, they build our skyscrapers and our flats, pave our roads and trim the trees that line them, cook our meals and care for our loved ones.
For these men and women who have painted every wall and dusted every corner – who know our homes better than we ourselves do – what do you think our buildings mean to them?
Today’s exhibition has been designed to create encounters between writers, including many migrant writers, and the landscape of this city, which is also a landscape of the heart. Consider the painting of the iconic ‘Warehouse Hotel’ by MG Kumar. The migrant poet Lora Jane Arugay, who is from Taguig in the Philippines, but has spent sixteen years in Singapore as a domestic worker, writes: ‘Three in a row, seats, white halls / Two mirrored on the river walls. / I alone watch as tears fall / Losing count of how many years of nightfall’.
Here’s another poem in response to the painting ‘Singapore River at Dusk’, also by MG Kumar. The migrant poet Nurul Alam NA, who moved to Singapore in 2009 and works as a site supervisor and driver, writes: ‘Cross the rough road / Life in hand. // Beside the nest, the birds will crow all around. / I want to come back home again and again, / Drink cold water after rain’.
The authors of these poignant lines belong to a group known as the Migrant Writers of Singapore, a diverse, migrant-led collective of passionate advocates for the arts, spanning different cultures and languages. Their responses to these paintings are a way of making new, once again, landscapes which since the birth of our city have been built by migrant hands.
Alongside these are pictures by the Delhi-born, London-based artist Geesha Elizabeth, whose love for art and technology have taken her into the worlds of animation, multimedia, and fashion. Her artworks transport us to a high-strung, high-tech cityscape where physical and virtual worlds collide. In response, writers from Poetry Festival Singapore have penned works in several different languages, capturing the heady Babel of present-day Singapore.
Perhaps because the building I work in today overlooks Clarke Quay, my own personal favourite is the poem ‘Singapore River to Winsemius’, in which the Manila-born poet Eric Valles takes on the voice of the burbling Singapore River: ‘I was plain Jane in need of a makeover […] / a wallflower stranded in the taxi dancing queue. / […] / Raffles waged war for the heart of Java […] / Now your people flock to my bank for cordials’.
Eric’s deft lines pay homage to the vision of one non-Singaporean, the Dutch economist Albert Winsemius, who reimagined the Singapore River and in so doing, transformed the city centre for generations after him.
In no smaller way, the labour of our migrant community – in construction, maintenance and domestic work, among other sectors – serves to remake a city that belongs to all of us, day after day. Equally, the labour of love you see around you, by the artists and writers gathered here and all behind the scenes, are part of that continual work of reimagining this place, and the people who live in it.
I hope you will be moved by their vision, as I have.
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You can still catch the exhibition, as well as a couple of other events coming up: a gallery tour by the migrant poets on 13 Nov, and a panel discussion (where I’ll be speaking) on 27 Nov! Also, download the exhibition catalogue, which includes all of the poems – plus a foreword by me – here.