Paradox, Passings and Other Unpractical Things: an interview with Jason Wee

Chow Huiru, Edwin Chen and Nikki Yeo

Image Credit: 5degreeshift

Jason Wee is a Singaporean artist and poet. He has two published collections of poetry, An Epic of Durable Departures (2018) and The Monsters Between Us (2013). In addition to working with installation art and photography, he also co-edits the poetry journal Softblow and founded the nonprofit artist-run space Grey Projects in Tiong Bahru, where he kindly invited us to have a chat about his process, and the making of his epics.

What was the thought process behind creating this space, Grey Projects?

This space mostly is a result of me not going to art school. I didn’t go through a conventional art education. My first degree was through NUS, and I wasn’t actually sure what I would do after graduation. I started hanging out a lot in artist-run spaces, and there were quite a few of them at the time. So I saw a lot of Singaporean artists installing, or doing their talks and events. And that’s how I got my art education. Hanging out there, and the Substation. And the Substation before is a very different creature from the one now- and there I learnt a lot just from hearing the diversity of points of view, watching people initiate different programmes at different levels… I finally went away for my MFA, and when I finally came back - a lot of the spaces started closing or had closed. Singapore was undergoing a point of change when it was implementing the Renaissance City Plan, which is the masterplan for cultural policy...the basic model to spurt the growth of the arts, they decided, was to seed the growth of very large platforms like Art Stage and the National Gallery. I feel like what Singapore needs is that middle layer between the art schools and the museums and fairs. We need a lot more small to medium size nonprofits. And that’s where I feel like we can do our most interesting work.

You do a lot of work across different mediums - editing, installation, poetry - we’re wondering how working in different mediums informs each body of work?

In my head, a lot of it comes from writing. Or just conversation. If you work as an artist, you’re in your studio a lot. And often, you’re isolated. And I really crave that kind of contact. I feel like I can have my friends that I hang out with, but you don’t always have the same interests or ideas. So trying to find the environment where you can just free jazz over some idea was one reason why I get a lot out of doing curating or editing work. I wouldn’t normally introduce myself as a curator. There’s a certain kind of institutional power and story that I don’t need for myself. For me, it’s just a way of working with an artist I enjoy. And sometimes they’re working on something I’m really interested in but I’d just never do out of my own practice. So I feel like this is me being this vicarious observer, and I get to be a part of the process. That’s a lot of where the curating and editing comes from.

Touching on exchange with other artists, your latest book An Epic of Durable Departures, which explores your friendship with Lee Wen, could you tell us more about that?

I’ve know Lee Wen for a long time - not very well though. This un-knowing is partly in the book, because the book runs backwards. So the last two poems are about how I met him. I used to see him at openings, he used to be this guy I saw getting drunk with his friends. And it’s already built in, this rep of a punky, socially-unobservant individual, really don’t respect rules about being punctual, about being quiet and polite. So that’s how I knew him as a younger artist. Then later when I started this Grey space, he came to see it on his own time and I think he then slowly saw me as sympathetical, someone who’s on this parallel path, who has some questions and ideas shared with him about What’s the value of an arts space in Singapore? Because he was running his own space, the Independent Archive, which is a library of performance art material. Then, one day he took the leap and decided Ok, Jason is worth the time, and he asked me to live with him for over a month in Japan. That’s when I got really close to him really fast, and became a kind of confidante that he counted on. And very quickly I understood that I’m going to know a person who has Parkinson’s, and it’s very - what’s that book? Written in the Stars or something?

Oh, the Fault in Our Stars.

(chuckles) Yeah, it’s very The Fault in Our Stars, because I know someone who is treating me like a best friend, and I’m going to have to get ready to lose him someday. I have to get ready for it. And I know that if I don’t process it, it will always be a challenge, but it would be a challenge for me in the end. It’s these new feelings that I’m experiencing. The other thing is - I’ve never had a friendship with an older straight man. They usually do the fatherly thing - you know what I mean? Someone who’s 15 or 20 years older than you. But this guy took me on as a friend. My friends were always asking me, “Why do you feel so much for him?” - and he’s also a reasonably complex person. He has these ideals about how an artist should pursue freedom; freedom’s a big word for him. How to live freely, outside of social constraints, people who speak to power. But at the same time he’s also very cunning and sly about how he gets funding, galleries. And he’s also not shy about asking for opportunities. There’s always that bit of an opportunist in him as well. Some people don’t take to him so well. So I have friends who ask, “Why are you so close to him? Do you have some daddy complex? Do you need a second father?” (laughs) And I’m like “No, leh, I have enough of my parents already. I don’t need a second set.” It’s just a very different kind of friendship and intimacy. I was trying to understand that, and that’s why I wrote the book.

It seems like how a collection is born is a very organic process, from contact with people.

Yeah, and I didn’t realise this until I started writing the first poetry book, but the way I watched Cyril put through his first books, or other poets putting out theirs over the years, that would’ve never worked for me – anthology-style, where you write out of your daily life and at some point you have enough that you could edit into a collection. And I realised that never worked for me because I need to begin with the structure and framework of a book. It is mind-expanding and a relief, to know I need and have 70 pages to think through something. One of the difficulties I experienced as a young person is thinking I needed to resolve every damn concern in a single poem. Then I realised, actually no leh, I don’t know why I felt the need to do that. I actually had 70 pages to do it. That was very freeing for me.

Where do these structures and frameworks come from for you?

I think what works for novelists sometimes work for me. The way novelists know the world, but don’t know what their characters will do. And so that kind of structure where the big pieces are set is very freeing on the smaller levels. I might not have each of the lines figured out, but once I have the world set, I know how to walk in it. The Lee Wen book was like, I have no idea what this grieving is going to be because I’m not there yet. But I know I’m going to spend the next two years working through this. That helped me a lot. Most of the first book was one sequence, I did this installation on ‘1987’, and I felt like I didn’t really do justice to the situation or the people involved. I was deliberately very poetic, very fictional, in that I wove in a lot of my own stories. And I felt I needed to give more space to the people who suffered that year. I end up meeting Vincent Cheng who was detained under Operation Spectrum and getting to know him. That’s when I feel like most of this book is going to be me as a ventriloquist dummy to find ways to let their voices be heard.

Most of the book is the sequence “Unreliable Evidence”, the first few is a prelude. I purposely did this bestiary, which is all these vulnerable, small creatures that are easy to step on. I always find this interesting thing about animals that have evolved protective covers, like a snail, but they’re incredibly vulnerable covers. A little more force in a single direction and then it’s just gone and died! I found that that’s a very good metaphor for how it is to live in this place - we develop this protective shell in defence, but they’re really fragile things only allowing us to survive so far before they crack. The rest of the book is about the scale of this force, how much is mobilised against individuals and young people in their early 20s, who didn’t think that they’d be involved in a moment of national crisis. A lot of the initial poems were a prelude. I just revised some fairy tales, the twists that some myths are going to be broken. Then a sequence of poems around monsters.

In both collections, there seems to be a certain fascination with myths, fairy tales, monsters, folklore. What draws you to these images?

The reason why I want to take them seriously is that they were the cutting age stories of their time….not just how impressive they are as acts of imagination but they were taken seriously as a kind of document, like… your story as a valid impression of a different way of life. So there was something that people took seriously, almost sociologically because they want to understand and accept that there’s another reality out there, another way of living.

Speaking of another way of living - in an age where political situations are so chaotic, what practical things can poetry do?

Poetry is interesting for me because a great deal of its power and intensity lies in its paradox. Poetry allows certain selves that are blind in public conversation or invisible to emerge, so I think poetry has real value in opening these to view. But I also think that I really enjoy it not necessarily for how it can change…you know how people want it to be practical, right? So I think it’s powerless in that regard. But that powerlessness is paradoxical because often the powerful few will find their power negated in poetry. A classic example is the most recent misreading of Alfian. The powerful will encounter poetry and try to make it do something. They want it to be a manifesto, a statement of intent, they want to define it as just one thing for you – but good poetry just won’t do that for you. I was rereading something that I wrote, and I’ve come to really understand that poetry, like the best modes of empathy, is about saying how sometimes, there is no good solution for a tough situation. it’s simply staying next to a person in a tough situation and saying that you’re not alone. So some people want the practical thing of finding a solution, but I’m like “I’m sorry, I don’t have the right to claim the solution for you.” But I can make sure you are not alone, that you are seen, you are heard, and sit in awe of that contradictory capacity.

It sounds like for you, poetry is a lot about bearing witness, and also doesn’t just lie in what is said but also in what is redacted, what is not or cannot be said?

I think freedom is a big word....but there are times where we feel the most ourselves, moments with friends, and very rarely with family, but sometimes even with family, when people give you the space to entirely be as contradictory, as weird and as completely unreconciled you are to yourself, where your intent does not match your actions, and that's okay. In those moments the person sitting next to you goes "You know what? You're still my friend, it's okay" or "You're still my child and it's okay". I think we are really attracted to these people because they give us this space and that's one thing that poetry does and can do - to not try to resolve these things into easy morals or into shoulds or should-nots.

We are writing ourselves and it's very complex and personal, the way you read something could be different from how I read it. My question is how conscious are you of an audience of the space you're putting the poems out into? Or how aware do you think we have to be?

In the end, the more comfortable you are with your own complexity and paradox, the more someone else will become your audience. There's something about that that people will find themselves drawn to. he other thing that draws me to poetry is that sometimes you can do things that people don't expect out of poetry. People always expect another form of writing to do that, like an opinion column in a newspaper, but I believe there is a real space for poetry to address things about oppression, but also about climate change, this sense of impending disaster. It's not entirely about drawing up a new climate constitution but it's actually letting people understand: how do you survive? How do you make your way knowing that there are predictions that in fifty years this world will be completely different? What's personhood? How do you hang onto a sense of place and home if you know that the idea of place is going to be deluged? I know there are a lot of people are writing very personal things, and I think there is space for that, but poetry is also sometimes speaking to things that affect all of us. And that I'd actually like to see more of in Singapore.

(laughs) That was going to be one of our questions.

A lot of the stories coming out are very personal stories, which there is always room for, but it's also troubling when poets are not aware that their attention circles too quickly to the same subjects, and the reason for this is due to the blind spots in their education and privilege. Because there are no other traumas in your life, you're not having to deal with racial microaggressions, for example, so so many Chinese poets from here focus on family dynamics. They end up going insular and internal into the home because this is as wild as it gets. So one of the questions is that blind spot - are you aware that yes, family is important, but are you aware that it is important because you don't have to think about other things?

Thinking about these Chinese poets whose biggest problems are their family dynamics, my question is: do you think they could write an authentic collection of poetry that could be anything else beyond their lived experience?

I think you could - there are plenty of really good examples of that. People are drawn toward Christine Chia's poems because she wrote such personal stories about her parents but she also understood there's something about the traumas she’d experienced that allows her to talk about what's happening in a social way - it's also a story of Singapore. So it's her way of saying that yes she recognizes these are very private material, but through it, she wants us to understand that the metaphor of divorce is already in our political language. Separation, divorce, marriage - these metaphors are no longer just private languages, they're political ones and public ones.

So would you say that some works you've read in Singapore are personal but not political?

Yeah....there's a lot of that (laughs). And inevitably, more than half of them are Chinese males (laughs). They write about the bus ride home, watching the light, there was one that was about distinguishing between different kinds of red wines - it's like how middle class Chinese can you get? And the poet was really offended - he was like "you're not focusing on my skill, on my craft", and my rejoinder is that what makes you think your choice of metaphor isn't a matter of craft? They signal class, they signal place, they signal your daily habit, they signal taste....it affirms too much of what I'm already comfortable with, and I don't come to poetry for that. I don't come to poetry to be assured.

You were talking about middle-class poetry, or even exhibition and how you have to cordon off space and who can participate in this kind of endeavour, so my question is about access. How accessible do you feel your work is, and how do ideas of access inform the way you write?

That's a good question. A few authors have been in my head for quite a bit - one person is Wittgenstein. There's something about what he does and says about ordinary language that I find very appealing - that it can be the greatest mystery. Without having to actively 'dumb down', just presenting ordinary speech, sometimes in a different order so you look at it carefully, is itself one thing. I am trying to get at questions of difficulty. This other poet Shane McCrae was asked a very similar question, and I found his answer really attractive - that he never thinks about accessibility at all. His main thing is that while he works with difficult language or difficult subjects, he makes these things clear and discoverable, ‘where any reader could pick it up and read’. My short answer is a bit like the experience of falling in love - for you to really love someone, a lot of that initial experience comes instinctively, it overwhelms your conscious deliberations, you are drawn to it. But the next things that happen in order for a poem to last are both education and labour. You have to work at it - I think that's the relationship between poem and audience. I feel like it would cheapen the love if I assume that the person cannot do the work - it's different from making my work intentionally obtuse, but it means that I can feel like I can be vulnerable about difficult subjects and difficult texts, as long as I make the things, associations and relations clear.

We get a sense that rhythm and sound is fundamental in your works. In An Epic of Durable Departures, you talk about imagining Lee Wen’s voice, and Lawrence Ypil also wrote a short excerpt for your book, saying that your poems read like songs. We were wondering what your writing process is like, is rhythm and sound the most important thing?

For Durable Departures, I wrote the Epilogue first, and I struggled formally with that. There were probably three different versions of it. By the second version, it quickly settled into three-lined stanzas. I understood, then, that I wanted to use a form that gives readers a sense that we were having a dialogue about someone, with someone who’s going to be absent, but is also partially absent in the book. You hear him sometimes throughout the book, but he’s also going to disappear because he’s passing. So, I ended up searching for a form that would work. I looked into the history of haiku, and learned how it originated from older forms like the renga. They were meant to be these playful, dialogic forms to which multiple poets can contribute. The idea of a haiku sequence then became very attractive, because I can write about someone and also include his words. I do depart from it sometimes in the book, because there are parts where I do think the escape valve and decompression is needed.

That’s really fascinating! Besides form, the themes you tackle in your works deal a lot with history and geography of certain places, as well as its people and their intimate relationships. We were wondering how your sexuality and identity as a gay man manifest in your poetry? Do you think about that?

I do! In my book to Lee Wen, it was a lot of me figuring out exactly what my friendship with him was. There are one or two poems in which I openly ask whether I’m responding to him as a father figure. I know the way I describe our friendship and intimacy can be construed as queer… I wouldn’t think two straight men would describe their friendship in quite the same way…(laughs) There are also parts of that book where I cut my own vulnerability with my body with his. It appears more in other mediums though, with poetry it is sublimated, simmering there. I think Cyril Wong and others have done a good job in creating space for the discussion of sexuality in poetry. But for art in Singapore, people often work with subtexts to get by with funding requirements and exhibition constraints, so much that I feel the need to foreground it in my own work.

You said that poetry and art are spaces for contradiction for you. How do you think this space will develop in the future, especially for people of marginalised identities?

For local writers, my first advice is to recognise how small of a city we are. Whether you are a woman, or a gay man, or a brown person, we sometimes forget how much is at stake in culture because of the intensity of our conversations. We are much smaller than other Southeast Asian countries, and yet we seldom read any poems in translation from Indonesia, or the Metro Manila poets, much less the ones that are based elsewhere. What this also means is that there is a real opportunity for you to establish a readership of your own peers, in a way the generation of poets and artists before you may have never done. And there are interesting parallels and divergences that I think can be very fruitful to explore. The relationships of the older poets are mainly characterised by tourism. So, now there’s a real chance for a completely different kind of relationships. I think this is also why I get so much out of doing residencies. I would encourage artists to go out and explore, for three months, six months…and don't go far away!

Right! People forget that there’s so much going on just in Southeast Asia. That’s quite a nice place to end the interview. I think we kept you for quite long! (laughs) Thank you so much.