Saturday 21 April 2007

hurray, i started work on my wall. sam, shoe (our bassist) and i are having an exhibition called THE WEIGHT OF AN ELEPHANT'S DREAM, at the youth centre. its right where the youth park is. come by, we should be done before may arrives.

Saturday 7 April 2007

the first of the brief lives series, updated under the art section.

Saturday 31 March 2007

i found peter curlyhair at the junction of duxton road on my way to jamming! rarrrrr!!

over the evening chores, my parents were having a conversation.
mom: this filipino girl so smart, she got a scholarship to america.
dad: scholarship to be maid? dont need scholarship to be maid.
and another-
dad: this royston destroy so much things!
mom: MANY things. things can be counted. so its MANY, not much.
dad: cannot count. destroy until cannot count.
AHAHA! my dad is hilarious, and he really dont mean to be.

Tuesday 27 March 2007

heres some new stuff ive been happy to work on, you can see them properly in the art section. the bednbreakfast is entirely fictional of course. and yonder, royston terrorizes.

Saturday 24 March 2007

im about to leave for an exursion to the museum, where my lecturer has an art exhibition. fyp is due next week, i havent had enough sleep, my armpit hair is growing and my nose is dented.

my nose is dented because of an ethusiastic manoeuvre by royston, whos turning out to be the most enthusiastic cocker spaniel in the world. he has already overtaken jakki in size, and continues to overtake him in matters of toy-snatching, furniture-eating, people-overpowering and underwearing-hoarding. i love him to bits.

so we are going to the philippines! tickets have been bought, hotels and hostels considered, and route argued upon. its only a small group for now, so please join us anyone whos up to adventure in the worlds current most corrupt country where the number one source of income among locals is kidnapping of chinese people. we're leaving for a week on 23 june!

Tuesday 13 March 2007

Monday 12 March 2007

disgusting. internet at home has been down for nearly two weeks and that miserable singnet hasnt had the time to come down and solve the problem. a beautiful new mac and no connection, delightful.

so here i am, weaseling some off somebody else's computer. MANILA IN JUNE, WHOS ON? volcanoes, beaches, spanish architecture and all that goodness.

Sunday 25 February 2007

A DOG A DOG!

Friday 23 February 2007

i succumbed, and bought a moleskin.

bird succumbed too, to winsome pictures of puppies, and made us take a trip to the spca. the dogs were sweet, but too big. we found a grey tabby called mimosa who purred and pawed and shed much hair on us, and bird almost catnapped her home.

a few words on loss.
it steals after us always like a shadow. romanticized to death by hallmark, real mourning is ugly and cruel and deep and wrenching but never invalid. today something whispered in my hart and taught me not to measure bravery against grief. God grieved in the old testament. "I wail over moab, for all moab i cry out," He says. "o jerusalem, jerusalem, you who kill the prophets and stone those sent to you, how often I have longed to gather your children together, as a hen gathers her chicks under her wings, but you were not willing!" and so how proud and silly it is, all our trying to sidestep grief.
gabriel is gone, and russ has left too. i know though, that they are in heaven, and one day where the sun warms the sky we will meet.

Sunday 18 February 2007

the first time i did it for love, the second time for grief and the third for pride.
"anyway im no artist like you," exhaled derrick as he patted up the blood matter with tissues. classify what? we are all the same, i said, only your canvas is flesh. he is happy with the words and announces it the oddest piece he's done in a long time, although he nearly went cockeyed stitching them. i am only happy to be breathing normally again, because i almost passed out many times in the past 2 hours. three angmohs had wandered into his loft earlier to ask about cliched oriental patterns, and callously forgot to leave their shoes at the door. derrick almost flung his bread at them.

the next morning i am shaking the hands of sweaty relatives, delivering mandarins and pocketing angbaos, dying to scratch my swollen back. they generously overlook my psychotic twitch because im not doing anything weirder.

Friday 16 February 2007

as i was inking that i thought it would look mighty fine on my skin.

the imac arrived, and i am smitten. now i need another mac-ed friend to soothe my transition woes.
while roses were being murdered en masse around the island wednesday, i was crumpled in bird's furniture wishing my uterus would stop feeling like somebody was beating it with a large stick. i'd come over to shout at him happy birthday. but then suddenly! biological thunder struck! after awhile he hauled my corpse out of his bed and we beat our way through the chinatown crowd to eat curry crab and buy a doggie collar for royston. the crab was spectacular but the collar turned out too big.

Monday 12 February 2007

eeh why my watercolor look like that

Saturday 10 February 2007

oh joy and happy squats, i've been invited to join the organisation of illustrators council. thanks, eeshaun!
doodles for a new project-

Thursday 8 February 2007

happy birthday joyce gallbladder! vampire vampire!

back in hcjc, we used to jam til real late in the guitar room because quanyi gallbladder was guitar president and naturally we forced her to abuse the key. we were almost always the last kids to leave school and had to climb the gate or something. anyway, joyce had (has) ikan bilis balls and used to get very scared (and hit us) if we whispered VAMPIRE VAMPIRE in her ear, late at night in school.
in the smallest last box, red panties for chinese new year!

Tuesday 6 February 2007

Sunday 4 February 2007

its been a screaming crazy month. we spent every waking hour at the youthpark painting chairs, cataloging, planning, panicking, drinking the strongest coffee anyone could find. thanks all who came to the live chair-ity auction yesterday, bidded for chairs, and caught the lentor incident at their virgin youthpark gig. www.100chairs.youth.sg to see what we've been up to. and ho, BID FOR A CHAIR.

huzzah, my chairs:

Thurrr(rar)sday 11 January 2007

we gave birth to this baby out of our overworked 4th year asses:

so i dont get the indie-kid thing. why should we have to dress like artists to earn our cred? seriously, i draw the same whether im wearing panties on my head or skinny jeans. some folks just try too hard.

Wednesday 10 January 2007

Wednesday 3 January 2007

Thursday 28 December 2006

im moving home and feeling genuinely lost. my parents arent delighted that the rabbits are coming with me, and ive installed them in the balcony. jakki tries to eat them, and when strongly discouraged by me, chews on their hay and pellets instead and chokes. since he lost his best friend he's stopped playing after-dinner tag. i tell him theres hardly a day that passes where i dont feel the loss is intolerable, too.

Black Saturday 16 December 2006

this is an artists' invite. c'mon, you know you want to. quanyi!

Black Friday 15 December 2006

Black Thursday 14 December 2006

russ left us on the 13th day of december, shortly after noon on my 22nd birthday.

we had him hospitalized for advanced kidney failure. in the last days, we each made our own journeys down to visit him everyday, and then also very often as a family. my ma cried every time. i tried to reserve my grief for solo visits. i always cried into the soft fur of his head, which until the very last still smelt of baby powder and puppy. my dad said most times russ wouldn’t even look at him, but when i was there he always raised his head and on the last morning he wagged his tail. the gravity in my heart almost made me fall.

he collapsed yesterday, and i told the vet we’d let him go. my ma did the crying for us all. i held him while the injection was done, all the while whispering hoarse words of comfort and thinking 13 years is too brief. my dog, who loved me with all loyalty and without condition for 13 years, stopped breathing against my chest, and i wonder if i had given him any sense of safety and relief in the end.

russ, gone to the gardens. thanks for the love and noise and shredded door stoppers and cold wet noses in the morning and your fearless, solemn dignity that first taught a small girl about bravery.

who will sit on my bed and scold random people who walk past my room now?

Thursday 7 December 2006

more

Saturday 2 December 2006

this is for the national youth council. hurray, it took me awhile to finish. clik.

Wednesday 22 November 2006

here they are, engaging in rabbitty indolence. see, puttputt gives me the eye of disapproval. she says, go and clean out my litter tray now!

i thought i'd indulge in an affordable professional hair dye job. the colorist said he would give me a shade that would make 'mei you ren gan qi fu ni!' (nobody dare to bully you). okay, i wanted red. omg no, that'd make me look like empress of ah lians, he insisted. a golden brown, he was thinking, to bring out my dark skin and bright personality, although i thought i was as pale as debiao's jokes and my personality had had only about 3 min of client-stylist interaction time to make itself luminous. we finished with an interesting shade of orange that makes me look like a whelp sibling of puttputt. which isnt too horrible, viewed through my optimistic experimentalist glasses.

Wednesday 15 November 2006

rabbit stories
One.

the voice of memory; it rolled like a warm wind over vague, distant hills. it woke the first of the dozing pair, who pushed his nose into the air as if he could smell the sun alighting on the walls.
it is dawn; it is only a small room, and there are two rabbits living in a dead girl’s dream.
i would sail the brown winds
to be free
forever sailing, to be near you

consider the garden and its lush cruelty. we think to ration beauty, and shut our eyes against the spectacle. this is a place for when the day has lost its light, and now it pulls a coy velvet blanket over its naked shoulders and wanders away barefoot, over a forest so urgently purple and silver that it challenges the stars in their firmaments, so that they must turn their gaze. every leaf is itself a wild, daring dream, a midnight glow, an acoustic whisper against our skin. the vanity of belief is that one day we shall hold this thing again in our hands, that hell was worth it, that such enduring magnificence was only a flower out of our own imagination. here is a green hollow where a rabbit could lie and dream of her first love; and here is the person you love, standing out like a dead branch against the sky. cruelty is the living sister of hope; the garden is cruel, it denies that our hearts have ever suffered.

perhaps she fell into the gap. either way, her body lay mild and cooling on the sheets while the rabbits, to whom her death might have seemed little more than an inconvenient matter of depleting food and water, found a sudden yearning for worlds wilder. they were not fenced in.