life as dream as art as life - Lee Wen:Lucid Dreams in the Reverie of the Real

From Plato’s Cave to Zhuangzi’s Butterfly Dream, there has always been suspicion that our normal state of consciousness or senses does not fully grasp reality. With Descartes, the Cartesian Doubt continued the Socratic tradition in posing dialectical questions with philosophical skepticism in order to get closer to the hidden reality beneath our dream like state of reality deceptively constructed by our naïve inadequate if not underutilized senses.

The process of making art in order to confront and express the contradictions and conflicts may be extended to manifest graphically our individual doubts and queries into a common shared social experience for enjoyment, embellishment, evaluation if not enhancement of our humanity. It is with utter apprehension that I approach this grand opportunity to offer my ill-disciplined attempt as I lay out a humble selection of my clumsy plethora.

From the beginning I have shown a dire lack of interest in polish or skill as in the drawings and words to retell the dream argument of reality in personal experiences, such as my earliest public offering of A Waking Dream –published by Select Books in 1981. In 2007- Freedom to Daydream, Mothers of Imagination, solo exhibition at Your Mother Gallery, a short story, entitled Republic of Daydreams was published revealing a surrealistic twisted satiric tale of the art world with various references to Singapore’s context and international contemporary art trends.

Stories guided me from when I could remember. My mother told and retold her life of woe in spirited words between other stories of the streets of her friends, relatives and people in her milieu.  Being a toddler of 4 years I went wherever she was even when she worked as janitor in a primary school or did her rounds collecting bets for the ‘chap ji kee’ [i]mafia. The same stories were repeated but her telling gave diverse renditions when I heard in silence sometimes pretending not to listen as I played solitaire games for distraction. Her real emotions sometimes ending in tears and other times swallowing her bitterness gave sermonic accounts of messianic authority. When my ‘genius’ dad (according to mom) passed away leaving no assets I found one treasure amongst the few books mostly in Chinese or Malay that my illiterate mother kept besides the family photo albums. The book had no cover, double the size of a jotter book and had smooth pages mostly filled with colourful children’s paintings. We lost this when we relocated after mom got a stall selling drinks in a vocational school canteen and could afford a better home.

There is some truth in that old Jesuit adage: “Give me the child until he is seven and I’ll give you the man”. The treasured book was probably a UNESCO publication of another forgettable international exhibition of children’s paintings. But it was a special magical book of influence and revealed a kaleidoscopic world of diversity of dreams, stories and adventures. As our lives got spoiled by wealth and excess, in my memory this book remain the holiest rationale for my damn idiotic idealism, in my pathetic struggle of producing shadows of poetic visions in my ill-disciplined claims of art making. Even without it's physical presence all the more its memory alone is enough to hold on to and keep faith in those secrets of spiritual possibilities. It has driven me on foolhardily to regain if not to re-invent or even celebrate and proclaim my readiness to accept in good faith every s views of humankind no matter how alien; they deserve a place in fraternity of harmonious co-existence.

Looking back at the time I published “A Waking Dream”, up to “The Republic Of Daydreams” and now getting this privilege of showing my works at the Singapore Art Museum with “Lucid Dreams in the Reverie of the Real”, they seem to mark my journey as ambivalent points between arrivals and departures fraught with ever more anxieties than that of triumphant success. “A Waking Dream”[ii] was drawings and words of pure sincerity making my absurd dream public based on a broken hearted first love that never really was.

I went on cold calls knocking on doors of publishers of local and regional literature. After various rejections I decided to call the clinic of Dr.Goh Poh Seng whose poems and novels, I followed with affinity to his closer to home narratives and their familiar characters. Goh Poh Seng’s small but respectable output were published by his own company. He received me in kind words of encouragement, more out of sympathy to a fellow artist’s desperate plight for audience than on appreciative empathy towards my lines and doodles. However he did introduced me to his friends, William Lim and Lena Lim who did like my work and willing to publish them through Select Books; the only bookshop in Singapore publishing risky works based on their genuine love and dedication towards local culture. It was a small print edition but it was a breakthrough for me and possibly for Singapore too. However sales was not very encouraging, and my heart broke a second time to hear they threw away the remaining stocks when they needed desperately to make storage space. They did try reaching to give them to me but I was living in London away for more than 2 years without much contact to Singapore. [iii]

The production costs for the publication of “The Republic of Daydreams” [iv] was fully covered by the grant for having been awarded the Cultural Medallion in 2005. I was offering the novella as a gift and in less time than I know it have distributed all hard copies, and I have decided to put it up for free viewing, reading or download on the internet. It was a tongue in cheek telling a surreal take on the art world. I got good responses from foreign readers who often came back to me asking for more copies to give them to friends. Very little feedback came from Singapore, I suspect either they don’t dig it or probably not many bother to read them. .

My mother is now 88 years; she is reasonably healthy at her age and still very lively and independent but has dementia. She remembers the past in much more detail than she can recall recent occurrences, even that which trespasses a few minutes ago. Hence it must be a curse I live under that my twist of fate arrived too late for my satisfaction to at least make her proud of her son again. Mom still sees me as a novice in what I have been doing more than twenty years ago when I left my day job. If mom’s dementia results in her repetitious diatribe at my youthful folly for going against the grain is tolerable as they show that she is still in good health, the responses to my turn of fortune is somewhat perplexing if not disappointing. Perhaps we are more forgiving to one’s old mother who had never been educated formally but learnt barely enough arithmetic and literacy to keep daily accounts and telephone numbers to run her small business in order to bring up a family of five children single handedly. However in addressing ruptures in society one needs to maintain an attitude of equanimity in the face of misunderstanding, rejection and sometimes even ostracism.

Art is a manifestation of human consciousness and the artist seeks ways to realize them in forms that expresses outwardly so that it may be shared and communicated to her milieu, kin, and society. Over time our consciousness change and inevitably require the renewal of its manifestation through the efforts of artists who are sensitive to the changes and usually suffer a discomfort or alienation from the prevalent status quo that may serve in stabilizing our relationships harmoniously until our consciousness in growth realizes discrepancies of freedom, justice, happiness that threaten our existence, evolution and aspiration for eternalness. Discrepancies that we experience as opposing contradiction of conflicting values requiring reconciliation in order to shift our paradigm of pain and suffering into one that gives redemption if not salvation.

The manifestations of longer historically continuous culture, having found acceptance and lived by those who subscribed to them, will find difficulty in shifts and changes that interrupts and subverts the status quo. Hence traditions such as those we find in ethnic racial categories in Singapore such as Chinese, Malay and Indian (risking oversimplification but just to mention the main ones) with their centuries old historical past tend to be more rigid if not intolerant to deviant propositions that threaten their continuity.

Deviance is manifested at the initial crossing of the threshold from a status quo that harbors apparent stability but always hiding potential crises that artists and other agents of change in response, administer, actualize and advocate them by focused inquiries, recommending syntheses and reconciliations of contradictory situations or possible solutions. We must allow openness and freedom for impossible dreams as ours is an odyssey that changes over time, confronting many complex oceans, familiar yet unknown that require constant review, remake and renewal of our social ethos, like the Argo, if we are ever to survive the doomsday soothsayers.

yes i am happy mother nagged me

for two hours maybe three
an earful how my life had been a string of mistakes.

leaving my day job
selling my home to live alone

moving from place to place
like an itinerant beggar

dear mother sweet to hear in my daydreams of freedom
your nagging like songs of Sisyphus
yes your scolding's were sad
only to those who know not love
let me hear you more please
you who forget now and remember the past
when we were young and strong with our foolish hearts
live on live on
on and on
let me hear your songs
dear mom...:)

For lucidity does not overcome it being still a dream
and reality is what one finds after awakening from reverie.

Reference:

Campbell, Joseph: Primitive Mythology, Occidental Mythology, Oriental Mythology, Creative Mythology (Masks of God) Pengiun, (re-issued 1991)

Chaim Potok: My Name is Asher Lev, Fawcett Crest New York First Fawcett Crest Edition, April 1973

Ellwood, Robert: The Politics of Myth: A Study of C. G. Jung, Mircea Eliade, and Joseph Campbell Suny Series, 1999 Ben-Ami Scharfstein: Of Birds, Beasts, and Other Artists: An Essay on the Universality of Art (9780814779156): ]

Smedley, Audrey : "Science and the Idea of Race," in, Race and Intelligence: Separating Science from Myth, edited by Jefferson M. Fish London: Lawrence Erlbaum Associates, 2002.

Turner, Victor: The Ritual Process: Structure and Anti-structure, Chicago 1969

Vinograd, Richard Ellism, Boundaries of the Self: Chinese Portraits, 1600-1900, Cambridge University Press, New York, 1992.

“Open Ends” – A documentation exhibition of performance art in Singapore, 2001, The Substation

 

[i] chap ji ki literally means ‘12 units’ in Hokkien which is a type of lottery whereby bets are made on a combination of two numbers from one to 12, in either a vertical or horizontal format. It is banned in Singapore but still goes on today. http://www.singapedia.com.sg/entries/c/chap_ji_ki.html

[ii] Lee Wen (1981) A Waking Dream - drawings and poetry, Singapore: Select Books

[iii] I left Singapore in 1990 September to participate and work in Portland Sculpture & Quarry Trust, Sculpture Symposium at the invitation of Hanna Sofaer, who had been participating in the Arts Festival at the recommendation of Tang Da Wu. Sofaer then invited me together with Han Sai Por, Amanda Heng and S. Chandarasekrwan. After the symposium I stayed on by registering in an art school partly out of wanting to experience the scene in London but it was almost a self-imposed exile to heal my broken heart after the Artists Village lost its original venue in old Sembawang.

[iv]   Published in conjunction with “Freedom of daydreams, Mothers of imagination”, solo exhibition by Lee Wen, Your Mother Gallery,11 September to 11 November 2007