Chapter 1
Delft to Powder Blue
Feeling blue—the feeling of blue. Where it might take us, from room to room, memory to memory. The affective range is staggering, and we become vulnerable, allow ourselves an equal fragility, in an effort to empathise.
There's a childlike wonder, honest and curious. We are sung to, with song and lyric. Our own Little Girl Blue or Little Boy Blue.
We arrive at Euginia Tan’s “patio” and Benedicta's allegorical “house in a city”. Or Ow Yeong Wai Kit’s school gone quiet, when “the world is an open sky”. In her exquisite lyric, Karen Rigby intimates these fine lines: “Easy to confuse the black chinoiserie with feathers // torn from ashes, twin halves for a childhood fear: / you were never loved. You could surrender // to the hammer or the flame but no one would come.”
We find ourselves at Dylan Randall Wong’s 1945, the brutality of the Kempeitai in Singapore. We arrive at Jerrold Yam’s 2016, the grim sense of the gunman at the Pulse nightclub in Orlando.
Then, there's the cinema in “I Start Crying During the Best Part of the Film”. Here, we are confronted with Topaz Winters in all her introspection, “still sad & looking for answers”.
Dylan Randall Wong // Ow Yeong Wai Kit
