Ode To Strangers

I fall in love with strangers all the time - not in literal sense, but I guess in a more metaphorical sense. They are the ideal source of inspiration; embodying mystery, intrigue, and everything that you don't know about them.

As this dancer spun in circles of bright lights and glowing fabric, her every move kept me still and frozen in step. I took a lot of pictures of this woman and was kept in a trance as she inched along with her dancing entourage through the parade, mesmerizing passers by with their intricate costumes, resplendent through their movement and rhythmic beat.

My interest does not purely lie on the surface. My interest is in the story I give to the person; using the stencil of their image to create a narrative that can only exist in a parallel universe. Nothing I imagine can be close to the truth, nor should I want it to be. They are all stories from somewhere I know, applied to someone I don't know - like a vessel. In other words, this is what we call fantasy. And I fantasize a lot, it would seem.

These can last for fleeting moments, or days, or even months. I can stare at the same picture of someone's face for weeks on a daily basis. I build a mental shrine to them. I create my muses. I do not need to go out looking for the real thing. It's all in the way I build up a fantasy, or even damage one, that can place complete strangers on pedestals. But in them, there is always me. It is a little disturbing to think that in all this I am idolizing myself in the end. But maybe idolizing is the wrong word; maybe in the end, all that I am is what I need to know.

The things we see . . . . are the same things that are within us. There is no reality except the one contained within us. That is why so many people live such an unreal life. They take the images outside them for reality and never allow the world within to assert itself.

-from the novel "Demian" by Hermann Hesse (1919)

City For The Rich

Back to Basics

High School Piece

This is a piece I completed for my finals as an International Baccalaureate (I.B.) high school student at the age of 17.

Liminal Bodies, A Realm of Pure Possibilities

The concept of liminality has stuck with me since my days as a sociology student at university. My academic obsession with identity and culture kept this fascination alive as I struggled with my own identity and the degree to which I could somehow apply what I was learning to myself - like a kind of therapy or self analysis. Of course, i was never able to convince myself of any of it, because I felt that none of it really truly applied to me (how sanctimonious of me to think it would!). Maybe bits of one idea and another personally resonated with me, but never the full accounts of "otherness" that were in books about race and culture in modern society. As much as I wanted to fit into those books, I simply did not.

It wasn't until my second year when I came across the concept of liminal bodies, first from anthropology, and later from readings that linked many disciplines together. The idea of never quite fitting into anything structural felt more real to me, than the idea that I belonged exclusively to a class, a race, a gender, an archetype - or even a mixture of one or two of these modalities. And what struck me even more was that I realized nobody belonged entirely within this space either. That identity is fluid, and unique in ways that can only be discovered through the gaps or fissures between states of being, as oppose to some proximity to any of them that, let's face it, are man-made ideological constructs anyway -- and therefore, non-binding. I was 20 at the time; young, impressionable and ready to take on the world with the limited tools I had at my disposal. I was obnoxious. It was this revelation that, in the end, provided me with the kind of education (about myself and the world) that I was really after. It felt liberating.

This was also the connection and the foundation that I needed to have in order to push my painting further. Liminality is the state of the in-between; the state of being stateless (what an oxymoron). Was this not what I had been creating on canvas all along? It may just be a word, but one which helped me articulate my creative process at the time. It was a useful guide - just another tool.

I would choose to abandon the world of ideas in order to indiscriminately slosh and mix paint around until I saw some organic evolution in process: the layers affecting the texture; the colours changing the mood; and my brush strokes evoking movement and (mis)direction. Everywhere on my paintings reflected this state of statelessness; the process of "becoming" and never quite of "being". In fact, people have told me before that my paintings can feel unfinished, in transition, or still in process; that an idea (an archetype maybe?) is trapped in utero, waiting to find its place on the surface. That pretty much summed me up back then, and I have not stopped moving forward since.

“Liminality may perhaps be regarded as the Nay to all positive structural assertions, but as in some sense the source of them all, and, more than that, as a realm of pure possibility whence novel configurations of ideas and relations may arise”. -Victor Turner (1967: 97)