Who is asking?
My work begins with questions rather than disciplines.
I did not arrive at this work through a discipline. I arrived through a question I could not put down, and the disciplines were simply the rooms I passed through while carrying it.
I was born in Malaysia, into a family whose people came from a harbour town on the Fujian coast, and to a father whose own people left Wales and Ireland and Germany for reasons nobody troubled to write down. At a month old I was carried across the causeway to Singapore, and that is where I grew up, until my teens. I grew up between languages, in the ordinary way that children of migration do, which is to say that I did not notice it until much later, when I began to look for the town my great-grandfather left and found that almost nothing about it had been recorded, and that what had been recorded was in a language I had to learn to read a second time.
I have always been drawn toward unfamiliar worlds. Not because I wished to belong to them, but because every unfamiliar world taught me another way of seeing my own.
For a long time I believed I was moving between different worlds. Acting in one country, composing in another, designing, organising festivals, sitting in archives. Only gradually did I realise I had been following the same question through each of them.
The question is not complicated. It is only difficult. What survives when a family leaves a place? What is carried, what is dropped in the water, and who decides which is which? And what does it cost, three generations later, to go back and look?
Because the goal was never the medium. The goal was perception.
The rooms I passed through
The oldest recording device is a melody. Long before a family could write, it could sing, and what it sang was where it came from. When I play the sape I am handling an instrument from a part of Borneo my own ancestors did not come from, and it still tells me something true about carrying a place inside a sound.
Design taught me the discipline of removal. Everything I know about pacing a paragraph, I learned from deciding what to leave off a page.
A camera is an agreement to look at something for longer than is comfortable. Acting taught me that a person is never only what they say; directing taught me that a place is never only what it looks like.
I photograph what I do not yet understand. The pictures I keep are almost never the ones I meant to take, they are the ones I did not know I was looking at until later, which is also a fair description of memory.
An archive is not a memory. It is what happened to survive, the fire, the war, the move, the clerk who could be bothered. Learning to read a gazetteer is partly learning to read the silences in it, and to resist filling them too quickly.
Writing is the only one of these that can hold a contradiction without resolving it. That is why the book exists. Everything I could not settle, I put into prose, where it is allowed to remain unsettled.
Presences poised on the threshold of a thought.
The seawas never simply water.
A recipewas never merely food.
A melodycarried memory.
A photographbecame witness.
A family storybecame a map.
Everythingpointed beyond itself.
The sea is never merely the sea. It becomes departure, waiting and return.
Every new work begins in the same way. With a question. With attention.
With the hope that another way of seeing might emerge.