New work in progress

Rearranged my studio area and furniture. Finally its a conducive working space! Working on some new works at the moment.

My First Car

Last month I rented a vehicle in London to pick up stuff from outside London and I was allotted a BRAND NEW VW Golf straight from the showroom, with a million buttons, bluetooth, sd card reader, digital DAB radio, all the bells and whistles. The pedals (manual) were super sensitive, and everything was still mysterious. This generally meant that everytime I panicked and hit the indicators and buttons, the windscreen wiper would fly about, lights would blink, and the car would make beep sounds, adding to the general confusion.

It was good that the man at the counter was really busy, so he did not see this mad wiper/light/car-jerking-stalling action right outside the huge shop window as I spent the next ten minutes trying to recall how to start up a manual car in Central London lunch hour traffic.

(Note: people who still remember my "getting-stuck-trying-to-go-up-UOB-carpark-slope-in-third-gear-at-peak-hour" story, this trumps even that incident, except this time around, no one was there to witness my mortification...)



The story is generally that it was supposed to be a really simple half-hour drive back from Victoria (the pickup point) and Stoke Newington (my old house), and I had studiously mapped the entire route out already with a marker on my little A-Z map while standing at the counter. But the car rental guy told me that I could avoid the congestion zone (and the £8 congestion charge) by going by some devious route around the zone. As he spoke, he pointed to my map and accidentally smudged my carefully drawn marker line, which was still wet. I should have taken this to be a portentous sign and driven through the congestion zone anyway, but in trying to take his advice to avoid the congestion zone, I missed a turning and found myself in the nether regions of Maida Vale (west London).

MORTAL TERROR! AND FRANTIC CONSULTING OF MINIATURE A-Z! Which, doesn't help very much while driving. So I just drove around in circles around Central, desperately trying to find a familiar east london road like Old Street or Kingsland Road...

THREE HOURS LATER... I finally got back to Stoke Newington, where I was still forced to park ten minutes from the house because no one is allowed to park outside the house without resident's permit (due to its proximity to Arsenal's football grounds...).

Do you ever wake up in the middle of the night, wondering if your car parked a few blocks down has begun spontaneously combusting while you were away? I suppose for sanity's sake I better not buy a car in London if/when I move back there...

All I can say is that the experience as a pedestrian in London was much more pleasant than as a driver in London, where the roads are tiny, the road diversions are many, and the name of the road you are on is often not apparent as the only thing that is clearly signposted are the names of the roads running perpendicular to the road you are on. There is also nothing pleasurable about the start-stop driving with a manual car on small cramped London roads, plagued with construction boulders, unruly black cabs (one clipped my mirror, but no damage was done), and swarms of unpredictable cyclists. Fortunately my friend was much more steady at driving than me, so she helped me drive around on the other days.

I used to feel 'crippled' in the sense that I felt I couldn't afford to take too many cabs in London, yet the buses were wont to be late at times, or the tube might stop working, or some other public transport disaster might interfere with your onwards journey. So one might be late for something even despite one's best intentions, because of not being able to access the roads with a car. In Singapore I feel like I can get anywhere instantly because if the need arises I can afford to take a cab, and it will get me there as soon as possible. But after this driving experience... I have no idea how people even manage to get where they are going in London. The roads... are a nightmare. How does London even function? How do drivers and businesses cope with the massive jams and road diversions? This is a mystery to me...

But enough with the digression - what I meant to say is, I've never actually had a car all to myself before. Although i've previously driven VW campers and large transportation vans before, I guess driving other people's vehicles doesn't really count. So this makes it my first car, even if just for a weekend... and surely this is worth a photo moment:



MY FIRST CAR!

Tiny Housefronts, Big Gardens

A DREAM ABOUT... PROPERTY TAX?

Yesterday night I had a dream in which I went back to my old house in London, which had been redeveloped by the landlord, but my friends were still staying there. In this dream, the entrance to the house was very tiny (as it has always been). But as i went up the stairs and with each successive floor, the house got bigger and bigger. There were now 5 levels to it. It was soon apparent that the top floor was the hugest floor, and the house must have been built in a sort of inverted pyramid.

When I got to the top floor, the logical explanation I came up with for this phenomenon in the dream world was that the houses were taxed by their footprint on the ground, ie: the land area the ground floor occupied, rather than plot ratio or the type of uses for the building (commercial/residential). So as a result, in the dream, people built houses with small ground floor areas and expanded vertically and horizontally on the higher floors.

I think the dream logic arises from my observation that residental flats in London seem to have very tiny house fronts but huge back gardens. I was told that the reason for such small housefronts facing roads was because some portion of the UK property-related tax (perhaps council tax, for maintaining roads and other public works) was calculated by how much of the house faced the main road. So a dream about houses with tiny footprints but larger floors when you went higher and higher was just a logical extension of this idea! (Funny how sometimes ideas come together only in dreams...)

Does anyone know more about property tax in the UK? So is it really responsible for affecting how houses have been built over there?

Artist Talks

ARTIST TALKS
9 JULY 2011, 2pm
Goodman Arts Centre
Block B Gallery

Come down to Goodman Arts Centre on Saturday 9 July to hear me and the other participating artists talk about our works at the exhibition "Dream: Borderlands and other Territories". or just come by to see the works any time from now till 15 July.

'...this exhibition traverses the dual domain of waking and dreaming; in so doing, the nebulous interstices of hypnagogia are probed as well. These explorations run the gamut of potential angles of attack: From meticulous charts of individual dreams and general treatments of dream phenomena, to the instantiation of phantasmagoric scenarios, collective desires and forgotten futures.' - Bruce Quek

Artists Participating:
Mike HJ Chang
Chun Kai Qun
Debbie Ding
Joo Choon Lin
Elizabeth Lim
Yuzuru Maeda
Bruce Quek
Zai Tang
Mark Thia
Mark Wong Wenwei

For more information, please visit:
http://dreamborderlands.blogspot.com/
http://www.facebook.com/event.php?eid=225517177466822

Opening hours:
1st - 14th July, 11am - 8 pm
15th July, 10.30 am - 1.30 pm

Address:
Goodman Arts Centre, BLOCK B, 90 Goodman Road
(5 min walk from Mountbatten MRT)


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Manhole Covers

I've been collecting pictures of manhole covers around cities in UK and Germany, because it seemed like the natural extension to my survey marker collection (which now contains spots from four different countries!). Short of waiting for a construction crew to come in, the manhole and its cover provides the most obvious gateway to the world underneath the streets of a city!



Thumbnails of Manhole Covers in Germany



Thumbnails of Manhole Covers in London

Every single place I've been to lately seems to be undergoing constant construction work. Driving from central London to Stoke Newington, I seemed to encounter huge road diversions at every single turn due to the replacement of ancient victorian water mains or other major excavation and construction work, causing me to take a three-hour detour off into the nether regions of Maida Vale by mistake. And only with a miniature copy of the London A-Z on hand to find my way back...

A few brief observations: most of Germany's manhole covers are based on the same circular pattern with some variations. They also tend to be fairly spaced out. As for the manhole covers of London, they come in a great variety of shapes and sizes, and are scattered all over the street, sometimes with numerous clusters of them scattered haphazardly within a few metres, perhaps in testament to London's denser arrangement. I like to think drains are built because people need to look at what's inside, but also in a way maybe its also because things want to escape out from beneath. If i think of Berlin being characterised by its walls (berlin wall, brandmauers, gespenstermauers), then maybe it could be said that I think of London being characterised by things underfoot... London Underground... the tube, the sewers, basement flats...

Opening of Dream: Borderlands and Other Territories

Photo by Jeffery Liam

I'm back in Singapore now!

Quick update: After a hectic two days setting up the show right after touching down, its now at the gallery at the Goodman Arts Centre (better photos coming soon). I haven't had much time or internet connection to write while travelling through Berlin, Köln, Lengerich, Windsor, and London, but there are many more stories to recount, which I will do more of this week after things settle down.

Thank you to friends in London and Berlin who were kind enough to lend me their space or tables so I could work on these large drawings - especially Kaya, Rich, Richard Thomas, and Gunnar! Without having quiet spaces I probably couldn't have even tried to work on these while on the road. And thank you to Zai, Dawu, Kaiqun, Bruce, Mike, Mark Thia, Elizabeth, Mark Wong, Yuzuru, Kai, and all the others involved in putting the show together here in Singapore, and also building up the space (from what was essentially an empty room into a gallery space in a few days). Special thanks to Philipp and Jason Lee for helping me drill and mount the works at the eleventh hour (we finished mounting everything up at 7.50PM to be precise and then it opened at 8pm!). And of course thanks to all friends who came down to see the works and performances!

More information on the Map without Buildings series can be found here:


The exhibition is on at Goodman Arts Centre from 1-15 July so do come down!
It will be open from 11am-8pm daily, except for 15th when it will close at 1.30pm.

In the Eurozone

"So you are telling me that this euro coin was originally minted in Spain and the other euro coin was minted in the Netherlands and somehow these two coins have travelled to Germany and are meeting for the first time in the hand of a random Singaporean who has also somehow travelled to Germany."

"Yeah."

Brandmauer

All over Berlin there are buildings which end abruptly with huge walls that have no windows or openings - these are referred to as "brandmauers".

Huge blank brandmauer where Anklamer Straße meets Brunnenstraße



Empty lot next to the brandmauer


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Aerial View of street corner (showing the empty lot)

The area of Prenzlauer Berg where I am staying at the moment is described to have remained fairly intact from the bombing, as well as having escaped any significant post-war redevelopment, so it is quite uniformly populated with beautiful old five-storey buildings (largely built in the late 1800s or early 1900s). But even the house we are staying on Senefelderstraße has a brandmauer - there are no windows on one facing of the flat although there is nothing next to it, because there once would have been a building sitting right next to it. Living in such a house, one might say, "a pity, imagine if there could have been windows!" - but of course no one really means to build buildings with entire facings without windows, and the reason for these big flat blind walls and missing buildings in a street is the bombing of Berlin during WWII, which apparently destroyed up to half of all the houses in Berlin between 1943 to 1945.

I found a page that describes why its called Brandmauer rather than Feuerwand (a much more literal translation) - citing that "brennen" is more accurate as it describes a "destructive fire", as opposed to a more benign Lagerfeuer/camp-fire or Kaminfeuer/chimmney-fire; and "mauer" as "masonry" or a stone wall has more of a connotation of "blocking".
[Sidenote 1: A brand can be a feuer, but not all feuers can be brands; Feuer is a more generalised term for Fire]
[Sidenote 2: I suppose the Brandmauer can also be read as the wall that subdivides or separates the buildings to resist the spread of fire, in which case it was indeed successful in keeping all the buildings from destruction]

This only being my first trip to Berlin, one senses that very many years have passed since drastic events that have changed the landscape of the city. At the C-O Berlin I saw an exhibition of Fritz Eschen's black and white photography of post-war Berlin, which documents Berlin's devastated post-war state (the wall text seems to want to emphasise that as a berliner he documents it without pandering to self-pity or sentimentality - no point shedding tears; its all people trying to get on with their lives).

Fritz Eschen

I am always surprised to think of how recent it is. Just a few weeks ago in May I read that the last known surviving WWI veteran (who had also served in both world wars) had finally died, but it brings to my mind that there will still be many older people living today who will have some memory of WWII (and so, how long will it be before the last surviving witness to WWII dies?).

While hopping around trying to take photos of Brandmauers after first being told what they were, I realised for me I am less interested in the images of brandmauer (for they could also mean nothing to foreigners, and there have been so many intervening years since that have altered the city), and I am more interested in the idea that there are people out there who will have known the city before it had buildings destroyed and removed, to leave these gaps. And, people wondering what could have been behind the brandmauer...


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Internationale Kartoffelküche

lost in translation

Despite not being able to read German, I was still on the lookout for Cartography/Topography-related books. I saw this particular title that looked rather promising at the time... it said "Internationale Kartoffelküche" on the spine, and it seemed reasonable to expect that anything starting with Karto- might be the german equivalent for the cartography-related terms.

Unfortunately, that was when I learnt that Kartoffel meant potato.

"WHAT? ITS A BOOK ABOUT INTERNATIONAL POTATO DISHES?? NOT AN INTERNATIONAL MAP BOOK???"

Critical Cities - Erase, Stretch, Relinquish

I picked up this book at the Whitechapel Gallery bookstore the other day. Still reading it but find it pretty fascinating as a number of the points of discussion are focused on the rapid developments in Dalston area as Hackney is one of the host boroughs for the Olympics next year. Admittedly I am biased towards it as I have a particular fondness about Dalston, having once lived on Shacklewell Lane in the past.

"149, to, Edmonton green"

That said, I was glad this time around to see that Dalston still generally looks pretty much the same to me after two years of not being there. And the new tube line is most excellent, taking us to South London in a jiffy! When I saw that advertisements were selling the studio apartments near Dalston Square were even being advertised back in Singapore on the Straits Times, it was obvious that these new properties were built only as investment options rather than actually expecting people/investors to move there and live in it. Which made me wonder if it was being irrevocably changed...

One of the interesting recurring phrases used in the book is: "Erase, stretch, relinquish" - which describes the sad phenomena of how completely "erasing" a site is often easier than trying to work out a solution which can accommodate all the parties in the decision-making process. After "erasing" the site, the main prerogative of developers would then be to maximise or "stretch" all the aspects of the site, whether it be plot ratio or programming, in order to "stretch" profit margins for all investors involved. Finally, when all the people have made their money and the profit has been rung dry from the land, everyone and the council struggles to explain why everything went pear-shaped but nothing can be done anymore and eventually people in the community "relinquish" or "resign themselves to the fact that their neighbourhood will never be what it could have been."

When I was first in London back in 2007 I was actually excited about having seemingly moved to A REAL CITY, and to be honest, this is also what started my interest in cities, built environments, psychogeography, etc. Not that singapore is any less of an urban city, but, there the buildings are demolished and rebuilt with such alarming rapidity, and the slate is wiped clean so often that any attempts to leave traces or signs in the city prove completely pointless...

Sometime in 2008 I went mad one late night and walked down Kingsland Road leaving little signs of Hulk Dash all along Kingsland Road. A friend found a picture of one of the funny signs I had made (photographed by another user on flickr), and sent it to me.

About three years later, traces of it can still be seen. Aw bless. It is almost like the city still remembers...

Lines

Recently while at a friend's house in London, I read parts of Tim Ingold's book about the anthropology of the line. One of the works featured in the book was Richard Long's A Line Made By Walking (1967), which consisted of the artist walking back and forth in the grass in a straight line in the English countryside, which eventually left behind a path.

Richard Long - A Line Made by Walking

Another thing I saw in the book was the Chutchi map of the underworld, which consisted of interesting swirly wormholes indicating where souls entered the underworld and apparently wandered constricted by the lines which they could not see - thus forming some manner of an invisible hell that one could not escape.

(Right page) "Chutchee maps representing paths in the world of the dead"

I like this idea of lines that cannot be seen which still define our travels through spaces or across territories. And this is where this project begins.

dream syntax / dream maps

From 2008-2010 I was collecting my dreams in the form of hastily scrawled maps (replete with lines indicating the path of motion within the dream space), with the idea that I would one day piece together a massive interconnected map of these maps to form a giant dreamscape. A dream world.

As dreams are highly visual, I felt that the only way to adequately document my dreams would be to draw maps of the spaces. At the time when I began the project I was inspired by Bill Hillier's theories on "space syntax", which suggested that the navigability of a space and its isovists (the field of view from any one point) had direct affect over social behaviour within those spaces. Since humans spend about a third of their lives sleeping and presumably dreaming (whether or not we remember our dreams), I believe that the dream spaces we experience may also play a significant role in shaping our behaviour in waking life.

Earlier this year, a friend who grew up in Cornwall noted that all my maps had buildings in them, which was also a reflection of how all my dreams had buildings in them. They could only have buildings in them because I had always lived in a big city. And it could also be said that my maps were less like maps and more like floor plans. My dream maps were focused on the imagined spaces within the imagined buildings, even though I sometimes traced out a line which indicated my passage through that imaginary space.

But what if there were no buildings? One could still navigate through space, through dream territories all the same. But how would I map it then?

Difference between Journey Maps and Floor Maps

Another thing was that I realised that I didn't draw the same types of maps sketches for daily navigation - I just drew lines to indicate the path I would have to take. The use of daily maps was for me to get to a destination, and while interior building maps were fine and good for illustrating spaces, they were not that useful for navigating with. It was as if the spaces did not exist without the buildings - but very many paths and roads do exist without the crutch of buildings around them.

Kynance Cove, Cornwall.



Lengerich, North Rhine-Westphalia.

Travelling between city and countryside within the UK (London/Cornwall) and Germany, (Berlin/North Rhine-Westphalia), I thought it might be a good time to collect maps and explore the handdrawn map-making process.

More on that in the posts to come...