I have been working my butt off for the last few months since I've arrived in S'pore. But I can't complain, cuz I'm a workaholic, and i seriously do enjoy my work even if it doesn't pay much. Yes, I'm a full-time artist now. I donch understand why pple insist that I'm a freelance artist. Singaporeans can't comprehend that there is such a career and in other parts of the world, some people actually do art for a living. Yes, please get off your slow boat from China.



Here are some pictures I took with my new Canon Digital SLR 350D. I love my new camera!



I'm working with Benny on a performance art/multimedia thingy this December. Look out for it! I love working with Benny cuz he's like the HongKongers; works quickly fast and efficient, especially when it comes to making creative decisions. We did this photoshoot in 10 mins at his place in Chinatown.



Publicity shots for my upcoming exhibition at the Esplanade Tunnel.


Do come and support it, it'll open on the 23 this month at 7pm, but I'll have no reception cuz Esplanade say cannot cater ourselves and must use Oriental which costs freaking $2,500 for 1 hour's worth of soft drinks for a hundred people. Siao! So please bring your own drinks and curry puff and we can all hang out and chill in the tunnel and mebbe check out the break dancers when we're bored. They're pretty good.


Paper toys I'm working on, and a film shoot I did in MacPherson Secondary for the multimedia.




Joe and his colonial master.


Me and my colonial master.


Joe and Brian with their Nippon masters.


Alfian on his birthday, and he gave me a book on Sophie Calle, which I am totally crazy about now.



Francis Ng's monolithic statement. So nice! I'm in love with it, and part of my upcoming exhibition will have one section inspired by it.





I went to visit Victor Tan's Telok Kurau studio. He is bloody brilliant.



Andree Weschler at txtrapolis. She did this performance art thingy where she filled her mouth with black ink and screamed silently for 5 minutes.



Digital paintings from my exhibition. If you have extra money to burn, please buy them so that I can live. Keke!


A short film I did with my cousins and JH for the multimedia segment of my exhibition. I shot it with my new Sony HDV camera which I am also very much in love with besides my Canon 350D. I'm such a techno-geek. Ah! The orgasmic pleasure of shooting in 1080i High Definition!

Hello everybody! I've decided to do a mega-jumbo-supersized image-filled update of my life for the past 6 months. I was contemplating for a long time whether to show pictures of my private life, because there are so many things out there that can happen. But I've realised that by showing people how I live, maybe perhaps somehow I can inspire a single soul out there that there is hope in whatever life you choose. And I think my life is pretty decent and stable so far, and that with the right attitude, hardwork, sense of responsibility and lots of courage, it is possible to lead a very happy life. So enjoy!

DECEMBER 2005: Joe visits me in LA!









Joe came to LA to visit me (and so did JH). As you can see, Big Balls gets to meet Joe for the first time, and it was so cold, a little bird froze and dropped dead onto my hand from a tree.











Images of the season changing outside my dorm. So beautiful....if only S'pore has seasons besides Shopping and Monsoon.











We went to the usual tourist places like Disneyland and Hollywood, and on the bottom, my best fwen Miaovin poses behind both of us.











JH arrives from Buckingham-BreakfastTea-and-Scones Land.











Grandma's place in Walnut City (yes, where squirrels like me really live), the Queen Mary at Long Beach and a nice Hotel in Oakland.











At Palm Springs, where I tried to make a snow angel, but it ended up looking like a snow flying cockrach. We made a snowman in 5mins.....just kidding. It was just there made by an angmoh kid whose name I forgot liao.











Yosemite National Park, SF bay, Hotel and Hearst Castle.











Yes, the Golden Gate Bridge. The most romantic place in the world with the most romantic couple. keke!











Protest against the war in Westwood. Very drama, had helicopters flying all over us and policemen everywhere. At Grand Central Station and Hollywood.




CalArts' The Fashion SHow Party
Here are some images from a typical CalArts party that are held every Thursday nite throughout the whole year. As you can see, it does get pretty wild, and they're usually filled with beautiful, talented artists that know how to be glamorous, fun and controversial. People like me who don't really know to be fun, glamorous and controversial end up taking beautiful pictures of them instead.



































Graduation
Finally! After 2 years in art school, I've managed to complete it without too much problems. I tell you, the ceremony was crazy, some people dressed up as robots, bunnies, one came as Wonder Woman, and 2 guys even received their certificate totally naked onstage infront of thousands of people. My grandma was pretty cool about it, she said "Naked is too easy...I can do something even more creative than that." Har har!




























1st Year Anniversary
Joe and I celebrated our first year anniversary, and we stayed in a Premier Suite at the Ritz Carlton. I tell you, it has the best view in S'pore, and the bathtub was so fantastic. We also had access to the Club Lounge on the 32nd Storey where 5 culinary presentations were served throughout the whole day.















































In the morning, while my Commando buddy was shaving, I saw my best fwen row by in his bak zhang festival boat.




Tsunami Project, Esplanade with Artists and my screening in Hollywood!









































Don't Let Sleeping Androids Lie
A small installation now running at SSQ, with some help from David and A LOT of help from Nicholas Li, Architect Extraodinaire.















At Suntec City's Marche, post-production dinner. And the last pic is of Sinmin, the most under-rated and the most hardworking artist in S'pore. You must see all his intense landscapes of S'pore. So feeling-feeling can die. He's now into calligraphy and chinese ink paintings, and I tell you, he's better than Liu Kang and Tan Swie Hian combined.

This message has no subject. Select OK to send anyway.
(Don't show me this again.)

tired
pain
sad
lonely

"Are you sure ur 25?"
"yes"
"What's ur secret?"
"Every morning I do the Shaolin Virgin Boy exercise."
"Oh my god! You've been to the Shaolin Temple?!!"
"Yes, i told u before, Singapore is part of China."



dream entry: tsunami washed away my family. woke up in tears.

THE STORY OF US
Love you. hate you. Miss you.I'm sorry. Really, I am. goodbye.

To ponder a possible parallel between the happiness of birds and that of men.


Childhood:
When I was 14, I told my parents that I wanted to be an artist. They roared in laughter. My mother later told me not to be stupid.

Saw Ed Ruscha's work at MoCA. It was so, like, yeah, you know....whatever.

" !"
" ?"
" !!!!"
" "

Life is beautiful, but meaningless.


1. I've always dreamed impossible dreams.
2. All that remains are wishes and desires, unfulfilled.

Just a quick update, I've been bogged down with work lately, and when I say bogged down, i really mean it. I've almost finished my final 3D CG film, which I submitted to the experimental animation commitee for a review, and they've chosen it to be showcased this year at the Academy Of Television Arts and Sciences in Hollywood. So I'm pretty glad, but the film isn't really great lah, I really think I need a good sound designer to make a good soundtrack for it. SO right now, I'm on the lookout for music people.

I've also been writing a computer program for the tsunami project with the necessary stage, and also my installation at sculpture square in June and it's turning out pretty well. You know, I've been such a geek of late, spending hours on the computer hacking and writing code, and assembling the program. But you know what I realised? Computer programmers are the people with real power in this world. I kid you not!! Now I know why Bill Gates is the richest man in the world. It's really all about control and mastery. I think all artists should learn programming to balance the power distribution, or else all these businessmen will rule the world.

Well, my time in LA is ending really soon, and I'm beginning to miss it already. I've learnt so much here! I'm really thankful I was given the opportunity to even come here, just a few years ago I remember I was stuck in Amoy Quee Camp in Yio Chu Kang doing guard duty late at night, and thinking of going to America to study and make a short film, and voila! It's all been done, and now it's time to plan for the future...should I try to get a job in one of the big studios here and earn a decent income but produce commercial stuff? Or should I go to New York and become an art star? Or should I go back home and contribute meaningfully to society and create a better future for everyone?

I feel I know what I need to do in life, and it's really about empowering people It can't all just be about me. But the question is how? I'm glad I'm in the arts because it's one of the most direct ways, but then again, art in S'pore generally has a kind of elitist quality about it, I mean I'd really like to connect with people on a large scale like cinema does, something like jack neo I guess, but with more critical edge.

I've been fascinated with Paris Hilton of late, and the Gastineau girls, cuz these people really are symptoms of our society. You know, it seems everyone wants to be an Idol, or to be discovered, and live the MTV life of Jessica Simpson, and it's really bothering me why no one gets bored by it. This culture of narcissism is so prevalent, and I think it'll be the subject of my next piece of work. I want to create a spectacle through an invented persona, and create things that are deliberately skin-deep, shallow and loud. Even Oprah bothers me a lot. I guess living in LA where the Oscars and the grammies are part and parcel of life, and you know people who know people, really makes one question what all this means.

So anyway, I'm arriving in S'pore on 30th April for the Tsunami Project, and I'm pretty excited to meet all my beautiful friends I miss so much. The thought of home with good food makes me feel warm all over, although I do not look forward to the weather. When you live in a place with perfect weather, it's really hard to re-adjust to something sticky and suffocating. Lee Kuan Yew is partially right in a way, in colder climates, your brain does work optimally for a longer period of time...but it's weird cuz there are stupid pple like Bush around. Well, that's all for now!

Suddenly, I have this urge to write in my blurty; I realise I have been too caught up with tying loose ends here that I have lost sight of doing things that are meaningful to me.

I've also been caught up working on multimedia projects like Boxing Day: The Tsunami Project, a collaborative piece with TNS. It's really tough to do online overseas projects cuz i have totally no connection to the actors onstage. It's quite interesting at the same time cuz it gets me reflecting on how I deal with human tragedy through the media. How do we come to terms with feelings of loss that we can barely articulate? How do we articulate that in the first place? Is there such thing as global grief?

I'm also working on an installation, tentatively titled inter/meta/trans, which will be part of a group show in Sculpture Square for the S'pore Arts Festival in June. It'll be an interactive immersive environment that will reconfigure the body in the age of contextless and unethical objects, which basically is a reaction to the emails me and Weng Choy have been exchanging over the past month or so about aesthetics and choices in contemporary art practice. Before you roll your eyeballs about how pseudo-intellectual/over-theoretical elitism art crap it is starting to sound like, let me assure you, it's actually going to be quite fun and feeling-feeling, if I carry it out successfully that is. I'm actually installing a poor man's version of it here in CalArts for my Max/MSP/Jitter programming class, before transporting all my new found techno-utopic toys back to our tiny little island. Well, it is fun trying to make technology ridiculous.

I've just completed a print/new media project with Carmen Ng and Hoy Cheong from KL. I've never met them in my life before, but they have been so kind and nice to me. Here's the entry I sent to them (hehe! inspired by Kiang Siew's work) which Carmen said Hoy Cheong really liked:



I promised Carmen that I'll go to KL and buy her coffee when I'm back, and I can't wait! Afterall, Alfian, Miaovin, Jason Wee and Yish have all been waxing lyrical about KL, I need to see and experience the vibe of that city myself.

I'm starting to hate it here in LA. I've stopped talking to my friends, except those in the film library where I work, and I hardly go out anymore because I'm saving up money to buy new equipment. Which reminds me, Carol brought me to a Singaporean/Malasian restaurant and I tell you, I nearly cried when I was gulping my teh peng and gorging on my roti prata because I missed home so much. Food just brings back so many memories of my life back in S'pore which I miss so much.... hanging out with my frens in Maxwell at 3am, eating with Joe in Chomp Chomp, drinking Coke Light with Henry at Jalan Kayu, which I heard burnt down to the ground, and chasing cats with Julin in her neighbourhood that is filled with hunky sherpas and droolsome yak-herders from Nepal, swimming at TP, walking to the Esplanade through City Link and eating a firefloss bun.....the list goes on.

I also miss my mother, who my sister said has lost so much weight that I'll hardly recognise her, and yes, I do miss my father who nags on me constantly about how my brother has a girlfriend and I don't have one yet. Of course I don't! I'm gay! Gawd! Some pple are still so deep in denial. But like what we used to say in an acting class in NYP "Denial is the first sign of acceptance." I guess the old man just needs some time before it sinks into him that it doesn't matter who we choose to love, and that God created gay penguins too.

You know, I've only just started watching Queer As Folk recently, and I realised, it's such a bloody good series! Of course their lifestyles are a bit stereotyped lah, but the acting, cinematography and the issues they explore are so bloody rivetting. And I've also been catching up on my films, and I've seen really great stuff. I know I'm a bit late, but The Piano Teacher was so good and perverse! That's what happens when mothers abuse their own children, and treat them as their replacement husbands; their daughters become psychotic and do stuff like pee in drive-in movies, watch porn in booths, put broken glass in students' pockets, stab themselves in the chest and yes, play beautiful Chopin all at the same time. Why doesn't Hollywood make these type of films???! I could write a whole psychoanalytical essay on Isabelle Huppert's character alone for my "Sexuality, Gender and Destruction in Cinema" class.

Okay, I've ranted enough. See u guys really soon!

[Intro and Carbohydrates]
Happy Chinese New Year everyone! I know I haven't updated for a while, but I've been so caught up with my projects, writing emails and exercising. You know, cutting down ones's carbohydrate intake does wonders; I've lost 2kg liao in two weeks without starving myself and running extra miles. I've realised how important my health is to me after reading a few books which I borrowed from the library.

[Prayer]
Anyway, I was feeling spiritually empty the last few weeks, maybe it's because I haven't gone to church for the longest time. But then again, I'm so over with the puritanical teachings of the church. I have a lot of problems with their concept of sin and redemption; I prefer the Eastern concept of illusion and enlightenment. The weird thing is, I do pray often and use bible quotations in my prayer cuz I've been ingrained since birth to do it the Christian way. But from my experience, I guarantee you that prayer does help and makes you a happier person. My mother always told me to thank god first before anything else, and it forces me to realise that, well, I'm quite blessed and lead a rather charmed life. hehe!

[Imaginary Things]
Which reminds me, Mel was talking to me about Constantine and the scenes of hell and demons and satan, things that I used to believe existed, just like Santa Claus and the Tooth Fairy. I hardly watch scary movies cuz they scare the shit out of me, and I do have a photographic memory, which really doesn't help. But nevertheless, the idea of demons lurking around is not so unbelievable, esp. if you meet some of the people here in Hollywood.

[8 Steps to a Happy Life!]
1. Count your blessings.

2. Practice acts of kindness, both random and systematic.

3. Savour life's joys; pay close attention to momentary pleasures and wonders.

4. Thank a mentor; express appreciation to someone whom you owe a debt of gratitude.

5. Learn to forgive, let go of anger and resentment.

6. Invest time and energy in friends and family.

7. Take care of your body.

8. Develop strategies for coping with stress and hardships.


[5 Random Entries from My Dream Journal (which will one day be made into short films)]
1. I was a beetle and I had a good friend who was an ant and he wanted to disturb the scorpions. So I had to rescue him and fly him off to safety.

2. Ma accused me of buying mayonnaise sandwich spread, saying I was so rich and I got really angry but in the end everything was okay.

3. Met Joe at the road crossing with his friend who was accompanied by his boyfriend, both from commando. I wanted to go and fix my broken specs. Ended up in a bookshop that was like NTUC and had all these screaming kids.

4. Uncle Jacob had a son with no legs. Papa was telling me about Ah Ma who took out her uterus. Uncle Jacob was massaging my right arm and I was feeling very uncomfortable, cuz it had sexual undertones.

5. I was in a car late at night with Joe, Alf and mel and was telling them about the tsunami project and why I wanted to do it. We parked the car along Katong and went to eat in a really quaint restaurant that Alf really liked cuz they had nice western food. Before that, when crossing the road I saw many of my Tao Nan friends.

[Imaging Culture]
I just finished updating my website. I have a love/hate relationship with images. Sometimes the only way I can express myself is through them, and yet I know these images will last longer than me, and people will look at them and say that they knew me. That explains why sometimes I carry a camera and take millions of photos, and sometimes, I just refuse to snap a single picture, preferring to keep it in my memory.

Signs, omens and relics of faith

LAX
Planes lining up to take off and land. Hare Krishna devotees selling books with surreal illustrations of men with cow heads and cows with human faces. A metaphor for life, arrival and departures. What differences are there? An endless turning of the wheel.

Dormitory
White walls, unstable electrical supply, luggage used as dining table, heater put to 70 degrees F, mountain of blankets on the floor. A climate made to provide a sense of home.

Theme Parks
Lines and lines of smiling people, little shops with chocolate, keychains, magnets and machines that flatten coins. Over-priced burgers and salads. Safari, Alpine mountains, Magic Castles and gothic mansions, this is the architecture of reassurance.

Freeways
Life begins when everything is mobile. Movement, positions and relationships. Scenery flow past like TV channels sliding sideways: oceans, mountains, snow, desert, strip malls. All exist on the same plane, the spirituality of LA.

Malls
The exchange of money for a bit of happiness. It is not so much the goods that matter, they are just excuses for us to show our affection for each other. If only they could see it differently, capitalism is not about consuming but about giving, its foundation is partly built on love.

Room
This bed holds memories and secrets. This bottle of soap represents cleansing and intimacy. This picture is a reminder of what isn't there. Objects take on a meaning that betray their appearance. Is that window crying or a sign that the things we see are really much bigger than their frames? I really wish you were here with me.

For some reason, I can't sleep tonight. My mind is running non-stop again. I hate it when it happens because nothing productive comes out of it.

Anyway, winter is here and it's getting pretty cold with the Alaskan winds blowing down. Talking about Alaska, I met my sister-in-law's friend who is from there while they were in town for a seminar. She told me that in Alaska, bears are very sacred, and women are not allowed to touch them, so if u give an Alaskan girl a teddy bear for Christmas, be it a polar bear plush or a care bear, it'll be considered really rude. If they celebrate christmas that is.

Joe is arriving here on Saturday and I'm pretty excited. It's been so long since I last saw him. I hope he'll still recognise me at the airport. I've been preparing stuff for his arrival, like buying tickets for the Universal Studios tour, planning nice places to go for dinner and cleaning my room for once. hehe! Ever since I started living in a single-room, I've become a pig.

I've been missing home pretty badly for the last few days, I was thinking about all my friends and how caught up and busy I've been with my work when I was back in June and I felt soooo guilty. I promise when I come back next year, I'll throw a nice big party at home. Anyway, by then the LRT will be up so it'll be easier to come over.

I've been working on my thesis film for the longest time, and I just finished pitching my storyboard to my mentor, Maureen Selwood, today. She liked it very much and she said it'll go far. Sounds promising yah? Well, it'll be an upward struggle from here. I wanted to post some images but I thought it's still a bit too early. And I'm lazy too. Well, next time then.

The film class which I've been a teaching assistant is finally coming to an end. I tell you, helping 12 pple on their film is hell! But now I know the Bolex and Arri-s cameras so well, I probably can open a 16mm film school if i get bored in S"pore and teach film-making. My students are really interesting too, and I've learnt so much from them. There's this blonde LA girl called Cara Elizabeth and she is so damn funny yet frustrating, cuz she never listens to instructions!!! yet I find her creativity outstanding, and secretly I wish I could work like her. And there are really meticulous students like Nancy from Germany, and Pablo from Mexico who dun need help at all; u just tell them once and they get it. U know, I can really see who are the pple who can go far in life just by the way they create. It's amazing.

I feel like I'm coming to a cross-road in my life again. I'm deciding whether to go down a more fine-arts route, which in my opinion has more meaning but less money and stability, or go down the commercial way, which has more money but less freedom to explore my real voice. Both are equally valid routes though, and I have no preference right now cuz both are equally difficult. If i go down the fine-arts way, the prospect of me begging museums and galleries to give me a space to exhibit really makes me go sick in the stomach. It seems like I've been negotiating all my artisitc life. I think at the end of the day, I just want to communicate with my audience and the pple around me, namely my friends and family. I realise I'm just driven by the desire to gain acceptance, attention and respect from the pple I love. Isn't that weird??? All this just so that my mommy can say to me:"You are a Clever Boy! Mommy loves you!"

I was in my grandma's place last weekend for Thanksgiving and I was watching some family home videos with my family. I realised that my relatives back in Cebu are so rich, it's amazing. They're one of those typical chinese merchants families, not unlike those Indonesian businessmen that we always see in S'pore, dealing everything from copra, to shipping. Nahs and I used to daydream that the driveways to our future homes will be so big that 747's can take off and land, well, my relatives back there have made it come true. One thing in the video did disturb me though, while my 10yr old cousins were playing golf, they were served by 8 to 14yr old boys, squatting beside them to make mounds of dirt for the golfball so that my cousins can destroy them swing after swing. Such is the inequality of life. I'm glad in S'pore we don't have that...I hope. Hmmmm...anyway, i should really go back to my hometown and ask for my relatives to finance my future films. hehehehehehe! I'm so opportunistic.

Tomorrow I'm meeting my collaborator, Joy from the theatre school, to work on our interactive performance/installation piece and I have to figure out a program in Director MX to make the whole damn thing work. But if it's successful, I'll use it in my future works in S'pore. Feeling tired now, better go off liao. Till then!

i've got class in an hour's time but I've decided to update my blurty just for fun. Anyway, I'd just like to talk about myself today cuz I know people are always curious about other people's inner lives.

Today, I'd like to talk about my little-known psychic talents. Yes, I do have them, it's something I inherited from my mother. I know for most Singaporeans, who are logical and practical, it's quite hard to believe or accept, but it's okay, u don't have to. All of us humans have a natural ability to be psychic, but like most things like artistic talent, or the ability to understand and repair computers, or have the discipline to go to gym 3 times a week, some are more pre-disposed to it than others. But it can be cultivated if u really want to.

As most of my close friends know, I have a weird and strange mother who used to train me when I was young to develop my special abilities through altering my state of consciousness and visualizing stuff, and do other experiments like levitating our arms, etc (which I used to do during recess in primary school to amuse my friends, and I'm sure to Julin, miaovin and the rest when they came to my house and I just wanted to impress them). Anyway, one of my innate talents is of course telepathy. I can send, or receive images to the minds of people who are close to me. Of course, although these "powers" that I seem to possess, seem like I can misuse it easily and scare off people, well, rest assured, I don't, and like my mother said, if I used it for negative personal gain, it will backfire three times back. And frankly, I kind of know what that means. heh heh! Actually, telepathy is very much like the ordinary dreams we have, and I observe, that all of us experience it without knowing it. I guess it's just a matter of education, reading the right books to know what u are experiencing.

My latest telepathic image I got was from my dearie. A little known fact: telepathy doesn't diminish with distance and is not like radio waves that get cut off when u go into the MRT tunnel. It came to me when I was lying in bed in the afternoon and I distinctively know it wasn't me dreaming these images cuz they were a bit alien and certainly not of my own. The images were simple though, Joe and I were eating in a restaurant in LA, although the LA in my telepathic image looked suspiciously like Singapore. It was nice knowing that my rabbit was dreaming of me and of LA, cuz I checked S'pore's time and it was 4am, so I guessed he was sleeping. Well, I just wanted to illustrate how ordinary and simple telepathy can be, and not some kind of bionic, X-ray vision super power that most people perceive it as. I could go on with other examples but well, I'm too lazy and my class is going to start soon.

I'm pretty sure people are skeptical about these things and will say it's my imagination, but I think I just have a very different image of man. As Dr. Krippner of the Division of Parapsychology and Psychophysics in the Maimonides Medical Center once said:" At present, psychology views each person as an alienated man, cut off from his surroundings. He is basically alone. Telepathy may teach us that in the basic fabric of life everything and everyone is linked, that man is continuously enmeshed, that he is always integral part of all life on the face of the earth."

If u still don't believe, I can always ask my mother to show you how she can stop the rain for 5mins so that you can cross the road without getting wet.

I had a dream last night in which I could predict the future so accurately that people would come up to me and ask for answers. LKY asked me about Singapore and I told him: "Singapore will become so great that you can't even imagine it. It will become the city of cities. But I also see the destruction of Singapore in 300 hundred years time, it will be over so fast that people can't even imagine that there was this great city that stood in the middle of south east asia." And then LKY looked at me and asked whether we could prevent it's destruction, and I said "Don't be naive, all great civilizations have a beginning, middle and an end."

It was a pretty funny dream because I imagined a future that was just so startling but yet so real, I even saw students studying history about us, like Alvin Tan, Kuo Pao Kun were the Rebel generation, and Alfian and our group were the Dreaming generation, and the geniuses that rose after us that were so unbelievable. And we were like seen as some kind of legend cuz we were living post sept11 and we still had ridiculous censorship laws yet we still could create marvelous works. Then i saw this history tour at a site they dug up and the guide saying, " This used to be Maxwell Market, where Alfian, Brian, Alex, Melbaby, Miaovin and their group of unbelievably cute and intelligent boys use to spend Saturday nights talking and dreaming of a better Singapore." And I was rolling my eyes cuz I knew we were there just to drink cheap 70 cents teh, talk cock and cruise pple. Hehehehehehe!

I think I've been reading too much Calvino.

Okie guys! Here are the pics I promised to take of my furry friend!




Okie, it's proven. Squirrels and merlions get along very well. Wait, or issit just the walnuts...whatever.


Now u know why i named him that.


A hot and lazy afternoon with Carol, Reto (carol's swedish photographer beau), and David (Carol's childhood friend).

Well, I can breathe at last for a while cuz I just finished the multimedia for godeatgod. I spent the whole of Sunday lazing around and feeding my squirrel whom I haven't seen for almost a week because the October rains are here. Hmm...I remember my best friend Ridhuan in Tao Nan used to like this Guns and Roses song called November Rain. He was a real mat rocker, always singing G&R and Bon Jovi songs on bus 31 when we went home together. We were so poor that when we went to MacDonald's in tamp interchange, we used to order plain water and chilli sauce. Really!!! Well, those were the days when I used to play soccer and chase after pretty chinese girls. My my, how times have changed.

Anyway, I do have real friends here in CalArts lah, like Young-min from Korea, Jiang Xuan from Beijing who is teaching me how to speak Beijing mandarin, Asami,the red-headed girl who acted in my neo-feminist film, now her hair is blue-green, and Yoni, the guy who told Brad Bird at the exclusive preview screening of the Incredibles, that his film was typical Hollywood fluff and it's subtext supported Bush's schizophrenic administration. Hehe! U should have seen how Brad reacted, he tried to waive him off, but it was so obvious that his ego was hurt. But it IS Hollywood fluff and it does support Bush in the way it portrays villains, although I must say that rendering and animation-wise, it's perfect. And I was so in love with the Edna character. And all that sub-surface scattering and hair simlulation!!! And the daughter too, although I really hated how she wore a hairband in the end. Yux. So lame.

My friend Josie worked in Pixar during the hols and she told how great a place it was. I was soooooo green with envy. But well, I've decided that I should do Meaningful Work in my short lifetime. I saw the clips for the next pixar movie Cars and it looked really really bad. I think they'll start going down after that. I mean not that they won't produce great entertaining stuff, but they'll stick to the tried and tested hollywood formula. The idea of it just puts me off. I'd rather do my own stuff and build a great empire where children can run free and gay couples can get married and squirrels will have walnuts to eat everyday.

Anyway, I read this line from Straits times interactive and I laughed so hard:"Lasik treatment is popular in Singapore as the country has the dubious honour of being the world's myopia capital, with four in five people having difficulty seeing things at a distance." I guess there are Singaporean reporters that still have a sense of humour. Well, maybe it's just me. Har har.

It's 4am in the morning and I can't get back to sleep. I woke up an hour ago cuz i was so damn hungry and my mind was running non-stop thinking about my projects and stuff. I've been feeling kind of stuck lately, i feel like I need to do work every single minute and it's kind of eating me up. Just this month alone I've borrowed about 25 books from the library, and I read almost all of Italo Calvino's books. He's my inspiration now, I really really loved his Cosmicomics. In that book, he captures the way I used to think about the nature of the universe when I was young, albeit with more wit and intelligence. I tell you, he has this encyclopediac knowledge about the world which just makes me go into cerebral orgasms.

I've been really anti-social here in CalArts, I spend most of my time in my room or the library. I made friends with a squirrel called Big Balls though. I've been collecting acorns for him and he comes by my window every morning at around 10.30am. I should take a picture of him especially when he rests. He's kinda like me when I'm exhausted. It's weird that he's my only friend now. I remember telling julin that the pace of life in LA is so slow that you actually have time to notice nature and slowly learn its language. I notice strange birds that appear, and conclude that the north is turning cold. Big Balls has been busy of late hiding the acorns instead of eating them. You know, the squirrels here in LA are much more polite and hardworking and shy than those big rude ones in NYC that demand walnuts from you. And they demand it cuz they didn't do their work in autumn. Well, I could learn a thing or two from my new furry friend. Especially when I don't have any life savings of my own.

I miss S'pore very badly. I wish I was with Joe eating Yakun kaya toast. On the brighter side, the thought of him coming here on Dec 4 turns me from a worm into a dragon (hehe! a commando term i learnt from him). I feel really fortunate to have met someone like him who cares for me so much despite my tendency to go cuckoo once in a while (artistic license!). Of course we do have shouting matches now and then, because when you live with somebody who is as strong-headed and stubborn and spoilt as both of us, it's inevitable. But we always say sorry and cyber kiss and make up. heh heh!

Besides squirrels and rabbits that turn into dragons, i've also been talking to jh about our future (and carcinogenics). We both realise that we have the same goal, to be rich, successful and live a meaningful life (mebbe not in that order). He's gonna help me learn how to be more financially saavy, and he said when he's rich (and I believe him), he'll invest in my film/media company. Isn't that great?! Alfian, maybe our dream of walking down the red carpet in Cannes may come true in our lifetime! I'm so going to put my heart and soul into Optic trilogy next year.

Election fever is in the air here, I was watching the debates last night, and what really impresses me most about americans is that they really are a democratic society. There are so many talk shows in which people can just air their views. And it's really interesting to analyse their situation and use it for my semiotics class. I've been reading Saussure (or So-Sure as one of my class mates call him) and learning aboout langue, parole, synchronic, diachronic, syntagmatic, paradigmatic and all that stuff which are very complex terms for very simple concepts. GOD! why are french theorists so luosuo?!

Oh, which reminds me, besides Christopher Reeve, Derrida also passed away recently. I shall end this entry with a nice tribute to him which my lecturer sent me just now:

What Derrida Really Meant
By MARK C. TAYLOR

Along with Ludwig Wittgenstein and Martin Heidegger, Jacques Derrida, who died last week in Paris at the age of 74, will be remembered as one of the three most important philosophers of the 20th century. No thinker in the last 100 years had a greater impact than he did on people in more fields and different disciplines. Philosophers, theologians, literary and art critics, psychologists, historians, writers, artists, legal scholars and even architects have found in his writings resources for insights that have led to an extraordinary revival of the arts and humanities during the past four decades. And no thinker has been more deeply misunderstood.

To people addicted to sound bites and overnight polls, Mr. Derrida's works seem hopelessly obscure. It is undeniable that they cannot be easily summarized or reduced to one-liners. The obscurity of his writing, however, does not conceal a code that can be cracked, but reflects the density and complexity characteristic of all great works of philosophy, literature and art. Like good French wine, his works age well. The more one lingers with them, the more they reveal about our world and ourselves.

What makes Mr. Derrida's work so significant is the way he brought insights of major philosophers, writers, artists and theologians to bear on problems of urgent contemporary interest. Most of his infamously demanding texts consist of careful interpretations of canonical writers in the Western philosophical, literary and artistic traditions - from Plato to Joyce. By reading familiar works against the grain, he disclosed concealed meanings that created new possibilities for imaginative expression.

Mr. Derrida's name is most closely associated with the often cited but rarely understood term "deconstruction." Initially formulated to define a strategy for interpreting sophisticated written and visual works, deconstruction has entered everyday language. When responsibly understood, the implications of deconstruction are quite different from the misleading clichés often used to describe a process of dismantling or taking things apart. The guiding insight of deconstruction is that every structure - be it literary, psychological, social, economic, political or religious - that organizes our experience is constituted and maintained through acts of exclusion. In the process of creating something, something else inevitably gets left out.

These exclusive structures can become repressive - and that repression comes with consequences. In a manner reminiscent of Freud, Mr. Derrida insists that what is repressed does not disappear but always returns to unsettle every construction, no matter how secure it seems. As an Algerian Jew writing in France during the postwar years in the wake of totalitarianism on the right (fascism) as well as the left (Stalinism), Mr. Derrida understood all too well the danger of beliefs and ideologies that divide the world into diametrical opposites: right or left, red or blue, good or evil, for us or against us. He showed how these repressive structures, which grew directly out of the Western intellectual and cultural tradition, threatened to return with devastating consequences. By struggling to find ways to overcome patterns that exclude the differences that make life worth living, he developed a vision that is consistently ethical.

And yet, supporters on the left and critics on the right have misunderstood this vision. Many of Mr. Derrida's most influential followers appropriated his analyses of marginal writers, works and cultures as well as his emphasis on the importance of preserving differences and respecting others to forge an identity politics that divides the world between the very oppositions that it was Mr. Derrida's mission to undo: black and white, men and women, gay and straight. Betraying Mr. Derrida's insights by creating a culture of political correctness, his self-styled supporters fueled the culture wars that have been raging for more than two decades and continue to frame political debate.

To his critics, Mr. Derrida appeared to be a pernicious nihilist who threatened the very foundation of Western society and culture. By insisting that truth and absolute value cannot be known with certainty, his detractors argue, he undercut the very possibility of moral judgment. To follow Mr. Derrida, they maintain, is to start down the slippery slope of skepticism and relativism that inevitably leaves us powerless to act responsibly.

This is an important criticism that requires a careful response. Like Kant, Kierkegaard and Nietzsche, Mr. Derrida does argue that transparent truth and absolute values elude our grasp. This does not mean, however, that we must forsake the cognitive categories and moral principles without which we cannot live: equality and justice, generosity and friendship. Rather, it is necessary to recognize the unavoidable limitations and inherent contradictions in the ideas and norms that guide our actions, and do so in a way that keeps them open to constant questioning and continual revision. There can be no ethical action without critical reflection.

During the last decade of his life, Mr. Derrida became preoccupied with religion and it is in this area that his contribution might well be most significant for our time. He understood that religion is impossible without uncertainty. Whether conceived of as Yahweh, as the father of Jesus Christ, or as Allah, God can never be fully known or adequately represented by imperfect human beings.

And yet, we live in an age when major conflicts are shaped by people who claim to know, for certain, that God is on their side. Mr. Derrida reminded us that religion does not always give clear meaning, purpose and certainty by providing secure foundations. To the contrary, the great religious traditions are profoundly disturbing because they all call certainty and security into question. Belief not tempered by doubt poses a mortal danger.

As the process of globalization draws us ever closer in networks of communication and exchange, there is an understandable longing for simplicity, clarity and certainty. This desire is responsible, in large measure, for the rise of cultural conservatism and religious fundamentalism - in this country and around the world. True believers of every stripe - Muslim, Jewish and Christian - cling to beliefs that, Mr. Derrida warns, threaten to tear apart our world.

Fortunately, he also taught us that the alternative to blind belief is not simply unbelief but a different kind of belief - one that embraces uncertainty and enables us to respect others whom we do not understand. In a complex world, wisdom is knowing what we don't know so that we can keep the future open.

In the two decades I knew Mr. Derrida, we had many meetings and exchanges. In conversation, he listened carefully and responded helpfully to questions whether posed by undergraduates or colleagues. As a teacher, he gave freely of his time to several generations of students.

But small things are the measure of the man. In 1986, my family and I were in Paris and Mr. Derrida invited us to dinner at his house in the suburbs 20 miles away. He insisted on picking us up at our hotel, and when we arrived at his home he presented our children with carnival masks. At 2 a.m., he drove us back to the city. In later years, when my son and daughter were writing college papers on his work, he sent them letters and postcards of encouragement as well as signed copies of several of his books. Jacques Derrida wrote eloquently about the gift of friendship but in these quiet gestures - gestures that served to forge connections among individuals across their differences - we see deconstruction in action.

Mark C. Taylor, a professor of the humanities at Williams College and a visiting professor of architecture and religion at Columbia, is the author, most recently, of "Confidence Games: Money and Markets in a World Without Redemption."

It's a miracle I've managed to convince myself to update today. It's hard to write when all you want to do is just lie down after a hard day's work. I thought I could rest for a while when I reached LA, but because of greed, I took up two jobs, teaching English (again) and also took up a teaching assistant position for a 16mm film class. Actually, it's not that tough lah cuz I only took 4 subjects this year compared to 10 last year cuz I just want to concentrate on my final film. So now I only have lessons on tuesday evenings and wed. The money is really good and I'll be able to fly my dearie on SIA this Dec and we can even go to Las Vegas or SF if time allows. kekekekeke! I'm really looking forward to that! Even if we dun go to those places, I'll definitely bring Joe to the Happiest Place on Earth aka Disneyland, and we'll take all the rides until we fall from exhaustion or puke from dizziness, whichever comes first.

Anyway, this term I've decided to take an in-depth semiotics class, and I was reading Barthes' Mythologies the whole day. Okay, I lied. Half a day, I fell asleep the other half. We're supposed to use his theories and compare it to the up-coming elections, u know, with all that political rhetoric going on in the media. I'm also taking another photography/film theory class on montage and I've been watching Trinh T. Min Ha again, whom I think is so decon-passe and Vertov (brilliant Russian filmmaker!). U know, political stuff really bore me to death. Why can't everyone just take a cue from the Dalai Lama. I'm so happy that PAP is doing such a fine job governing our country, I mean back in the Philippines, it was total chaos. We had to govern our government instead and make sure they weren't stealing from us. It was so painfully obvious that the filipinos were being cheated by Marcos when they raided Imelda's shoe cupboard and discovered that she had every brand of shoe from Gucci, Pucci, Prada, Cavalli, Kenneth Cole, Nike, Reebok, LA Gear, Hush Puppies to Bata, all in high-heel design. I was there. I saw it, every single one of them in the basement of Malacanan palace when I was 5.

On the personal side, my life has been pretty tumultuous, with friends changing spots, turning into old leaves and back to their new selves. Quite traumatic for a stable-loving cancerian like me. Why can't everything just freeze frame and remain like that forever? Remember Day After Tomorrow, where NYC freezes over? Wasn't it gorgeous? Okie, I'm being facetious here. But seriously, I was quite in a rut for a few days, until my myoplex smurf called me and cheered me up.

I miss home terribly esp. my friends like miaovin (old) and Nick (new) just to name a few. U know who u are. I can't believe it, I was home for 4 months and I only saw nahs 4 times. And she lives 1mm away from me!! Well, on the bright side, this will be the last time I'll be away for so long. And I won't do overly-ambitious big projects again. Unless the price is right of course. Heh heh. Which reminds me, I do have a few commissions coming up, but so far no news of $$$. I'm sorry, but an artist gotta live! Worst comes to worst, I'll just join LucasFilms and do cornflakes commercials and earn thousands of dollars a week. Not a bad prospect considering I want to settle down in a huge bungalow in 6th Avenue, which will be designed by Rem Koolhaas, engineered by Foster and constructed by upper-caste Bangladesh workers in 10 years time with my NTU hubby.

Okie, enuff rubbish. I'm going back to work, I just received a FedEx package from tns and I'm re-doing some of the multimedia for godeatgod. Heh heh! More $$$!! God, I really need help, i dunno why I've become so practical.


This was my first painting I've ever sold! I'm so proud of it! I kind of miss it though. Hopefully when I'm rich enough, I'll search for the guy who bought it and I'll pay 10 times the amount he paid for it.


On the set of TOB. That's my trusty Canon XL1 on the left. It has brought me much joy. And money.


Of happier times. At Chomp Chomp with Miaovin, Andrew and Rabbit.


I couldn't help it. This advertising in Dhoby Ghaut mrt was just too clever and well-executed. It's the closest to good public art in S'pore, at least compared to the mosaic trash they have just one floor down.


Hypersurface. Lovely X'mas lights.


Reflecting room in Hypersurface. Lovely multimedia. (*puke*)


The Void in Hypersurface. Lovely strings.


Part of the multimedia from the exhibition. Yes, u didn't imagine it, there WAS a subliminal merlion, actually there were 3 of them, but what the hell, u'll never see them unless u can blink 25 times a second, and store each image separately in different compartments in ur brain so that u can review it at a later time at ur own leisure. Actually, there are some animators here in CalArts who can do it pretty well and say things like "You know, ur character's fingers on the 6th frame kind of changes volume, and pops right back on the 9th frame, but other than that, it's great!". Freaks.


School picnic, with my Taiwanese and Chinese friends. Isn't it nice that they can get along so well here?

I know I haven't been updating regularly....it's been hard. I know a lot of people have been really disappointed with my course of action I've taken recently with regards to my relationship. I could try to explain myself until I turn blue in the face but I'll just cut straight to the heart of the matter; no more metaphors, no more subtexts, no more stories: The truth is I'm not perfect, and I wish you could understand that I tried my best.

Today, I met up with choonie at sculpture square, and I was really scared because I know I've hurt him a lot with my sudden departure. We had a long talk and we tried to have some closure to our relationship. I tried to explain as much as I could but it really pained me to see in his eyes the pain I caused him. We later met joe at tamp mall, and it was such an awkward moment for me. At that point of time I wished I was under the wheel of an SBS bus....okie...i dun think i can write anymore about this...

Choonie and I will still be working together for Hypersurface, and life will go on.

Friends:Forgive me.

Here are pics that I owe all of you all these months...

I'm very much happy with joe, although we just recently started out. I know there is a lot of skepticism to whether we can last or not...I ask of you, please give us a chance. Sometimes in life, you have to make hard decisions without knowing whether you are wrong or right, without knowing what will happen in the future. I hope you will give us your blessings.


New York subway


rockefeller


rockefeller


jfk


empire state


lobby of empire state


barnard


barnard gym


nyc street..forgot which one liao


prada shop


columbia


st patrick's cathedral


dinner break with paerin, rajesh, hossan and rody vera in parkway


punggol during black out


present from gerald and ben, used as an emergency light during the blackout


carol and brian's feeling-feeling video shoot in LA


more images from our wong kar wai-inspired film..hehe! we were playing faye wong's buliu throughout the whole shoot.


my bus stop at night


when I came back from LA my friends came to my house...thanks! all the way to punggol some more...


HK airport..in transit


LA..went to the academy of film and tv for the calarts animation producer's show.


publicity images for hypersurface


nahs and alvin chua...my willing guinea pigs...keke!


cartoon for utterly and fridae


dead cat


st james powerhouse with michael, doing documentation


wedding rehearsal


my sister and karnan


joe, nahs and julin at the wedding. feeling-feeling pics at s11.


joe and me at national library b4 it gets torn down

There are only two important people from S'pore: Lee Kuan Yew and his binary opposite, Annabel Chong.

Relationships are like movies: they have a beginning, a middle and an end, maybe just not in that order.

Truth and lies are the same thing, they are both illusions.

When you buy joy, you get sorrow for free. When you buy sorrow, you get joy for free. There is no other option.

...................................................................................................................................................................................................................................................................................................................................................................................................................................................................................................................................................................................................................................................................................................................................................................................................................................................................................................................................................................................................................................................................................................................................i..........................................................................................................................................................................................................................................................miss.........................................................................................................................................................................................................................................................................................................................................................................................................................................................................................................................................................................................................................................................................................................................................................................................................................................................................................................................u.....................................................................................................................................................................................................
love u
eeyur
miss u
muacks
:)
:(
:P
see ya
byez
morning dear
okie
yup
yup
yup
siaoz
miaoz
ciaoz
liaoz
kaoz
maoz
laoz
fuckz
muckz
bois
tois
nois
boo hoo
u dun love me anymore

God, give me something to believe in. i really don't know what's true anymore.

Well....it's been one week and three days since I'm back and I'm still too lazy to update my journal regularly. I went to Sim Lim today to buy a DVD burner, and I needed to buy an external box so that I can bring it around with my laptop but the service there was so bad that I decided that I should just get it from Challenger in Funan or one of those shops there.

It's been a busy week meeting friends, listening to problems, trying to suggest solutions but probably not making it better or making things worst, going to alfie's workshop and meeting new nice pple, going out with Sam and miaovin last minute for dinner, meeting benny and his cats.

I think my best fwen hates me now cuz he thinks I'm judging him again...seriously, I don't judge anyone especially not him! and I try to be as neutral as I can. Boo hoo! Now he doesn't want to talk to me and never even say bye on the mrt. Sooooo sad...dun worry, my plane will crash into the Pacific Ocean when I go back to LA then miaovin will be happy because no more irritating brian.

Okie, tomorrow I'll be having a busy day running around again. I'll be meeting Alvin Chua this Friday, And Nahs this Saturday, and we'll be having a photoshoot for my exhibition's publicity. My sister suggested a few good ideas to me but dunno whether I can carry them out or not.

The pace of life here is soooo fast There's no time to sit back and contemplate your actions. I kinda miss the more laid back culture of LA. Well, I'll never be happy, when I'm there, I complain, when I'm here I also complain...what's the matter with me?!

I miss my choonie very badly, and I wish he was back here. We've been seeing so little of each other cuz i'm much more busy here than LA, and my computer is in the living room, so cannot webcam. When he's finally back here, we'll go to Pulau Ubin and cycle. Or we can go to Tampines Mall and eat Jap food at the basement. We'll also go swimming and get nice tans like every Singaporean boi i see on the street.

By the way, I have yet to do serious work...I've been gallivanting and sight-seeing for the past few days. I realised I get so distracted here. I think S'pore is hyper-commodified....everywhere I go is just shops and more shops, and churches and libraries are springing up in shopping malls and even in bars, not that it's a bad thing, it's just a symptom of post-industrial economics. I wish they'd invest more in building museums like the Met in NYC, or even like the Tate Modern, which was so crowded when I went there, instead of nonsensical Hello Kitty shops and Bread Talk. Humph....there is a serious imbalance. Actually, the Esplanade was actually quite busy when I went there...okie lah..slowly slowly....things will get better. Shouldn't complain.

Rambled enough. Will update with pictures soon...I hope....I think....really. Heh heh! I will lah...when I finish the publicity images.

Hi guys! Sorry for the long break. Ever since i came back from New York, I've been crazily busy. New York was FUN!!!!! I promise to post up pictures soon, apart from meeting Ellen Degeneres in a Wooster play (I got to go backstage and meet the Wooster Group too! Alvin Tan will be envious), and going to Mario Sorentti's gallery opening (he did the Kate Moss CK Eternity pics) and eating dinner with him in a posh Jap restaurant at Madison Ave, I most importantly met up with Choonie, and Yisheng and Qianxi.

I've been busy working on a commercial for the REDCAT theater, and writing and reading essays as usual. Term just came to an end last friday, so this week we are having screenings of our works. I've been getting good reviews for my short films and lecturers have been coming up to me to talk to me. Which is great, cuz the whole year i've been a nobody in CalArts, and now, I'm still a nobody but at least a few bodies are starting to notice my works. Of course I plan to blow them away with my final senior project film but you never know, it might suck big time. But who cares!

You know, I might want to work in one of the big studios next year, just for the experience before i come back to S'pore. I don't know if i'm selling out though. Hmmmm....decisions, decisions...

On a brighter note, I'll be arriving in S'pore this Sunday at 4:05pm, and guess what, my mother wants me to invite me friends over for dinner. You know, I'm really quite embarrassed when my mother plans these kind of things cuz i'm like so old already, but this time I thought what the hell, it'll be a great time to meet all my friends at one go, so any of you who are reading this and can go, please ICQ(3187383) me, or email me, so I can tell my mom how many people can make it. My emails rebel2000ad@hotmail.com, or you can call me last minute at my home. It doesn't matter! Or call miaovin and tell him so he can tell me. It'll probably start from5-6pm. The more the merrier! And Mr H., hope u can make it as well.

it has been a great year at CalArts, I've learnt so many things, met so many friends like Omar, Gwenaelle, Lauren, Devin and my beautiful dah-ling Carol, been to so many Gallery openings, which by the way, are so crazy, esp. when u meet pple on LSD.

I've also been working in the film library, so i have access to close to 10,000 films from Lynch, to Brakhage, to Jodorowsky, to Hou Hsiao Hsien, endless lah, and everytime I work there (friday nites) there are so little people so I end up watching all these weird and wacky art films, and video documentaries of artists, i've been so inspired that I swore to myself if NAC gives me a budget, I will set up a really good film library in S'pore (better then the mediocre one we have at esplanade). We need one. Now. Or we'll never move up.

Besides that, I'm working on a feature film with Carol, and well, needless to say, it's going to be our baby for the next 3-5 years. LA has been kind to me. But I miss home and I need to eat chicken rice. See you guys really soon!!!

I know I haven't been updating my blurty and I have a good explanation. You see, I've been doing a lot of reflection the past few months especially on my own ability as an artist. I think most people think I have a lot of talent and I've been fortunate enough (ever since I've got more exposure from the press and the internet) to get emails from people telling me so and asking for advice, or just asking me to be friends, which is great cuz my social circle, until recently has been very limited. I've known some very nice people like a nice friendly dissident who sends me great articles to read sunray, a junior from VS and a few others who just tell me how good i am as an artist and how inspired they feel. The problem started when I realized that i began believing in it. But I've woken up ever since and here's my confession, I'm actually not a very good artist. I leech on people's ideas and I'm terribly, terribly lazy. Okie, I've got that off my chest.

Other than that, I've managed to resolve that problem by accepting that while I'm not a really genuine artist like say Sinmin, who really tries to find his voice in his craft, I do have some strengths. Not many, but at least some. And I realise I can get by with them. My calculated moves do make up for my lack of talent and get me where I want, and make my parents, my loved ones and friends happy and in turn love me. Sigh...I do have issues, just like Madonna, not very talented but just plain cunning.

Wasn't that egoistic?! Writing two whole paragraphs on my neurotic ways.

It just turned spring here in CalArts and I must say that it is really beautiful when the season changes. Flowers bloom, birds sing and skies become bluer than blue. I've been seduced by the weather here in LA. I'm going to New York 2 weeks time to see my choonie, who will be there for his class field trip. It's just a short trip and after that I'll be preparing to fly home liao. Can u imagine? One school year is finally coming to an end. I've been working really hard improving my brain this semester and took more critical studies than practical work, and I don't regret it although I have to write so many bloody essays and read so many bloody books. But I've been working on my thesis film, tentatively titled "Sublime Monsters and Virtual Children" which is gonna be an anime-musical-arthouse-pseudointellectual hybrid MTV. I was deciding not to put any pictures because I thought they were all pretty shabby and still work-in-progress, but what the hell! This journal is not an outlet to feed my ego, but to inform my friends that I'm still alive and haven't been lured and swallowed by the tempations offered in Lalaland.




The following few are pictures of my impossibly good-looking classmates, as you can see, I'm in love with Lauren, a hunkalicious butch with Frida-Kahlo ambitions and a fetish for Dolly Parton. Too bad she's taken by Gwenaelle (not shown here yet), another impossibly babelicous, icy-cool french girl whom I'm also secretly in love with.






Rafiq- DJ extraodinaire


A word from my sponsor.






A gift from SuicideLabbit. Thank you! I love it so much!


Carol walking to the carpark. So feeling-feeling yah?




Carol's luscious long legs.







The following 3D images are stills from my short tests I've been doing for "Sublime Monsters and Virtual Children". I've been experimenting with crowd simulations and hair collision tests. They look much better in motion though.











My obsession with cats, especially fat ones. heh heh!

I celebrated reunion dinner alone in my dorm room eating rice and pork floss. How depressing can my Chinese New Year get?!! Luckily, my sister sent me an email and she drew a monkey in Microsoft Paint just for me! Here:


She's quite an artist, yah?

It's my year after all, and Miaovin's too since we are both born 24 years ago. Omigod! I'm so old liao....I used to look up at people at that age and think I'll be more successful than them and I'll blossom into a 1.86m tall hunkalicious beachboy-cum-model. Looks like it's never gonna come true.

I did make a few progress the last few months though, esp. issues concerning my sexuality. I've moved beyond gay and beyond queer. Yup, i'm post-queer liao. Ever since I met choonie, I've realised that I'm growing old already and it's time to stop fooling around and drool over boys like Nigel and Takeshi kaneshiro. And stop thinking whether I still like girls or not. Such irrelevant questions now! I'm more concerned with what Henry has always been talking about. I tell you, he has figured out life way ahead of all of us. It's really all about how you relate to one another. Everything else is movement. There are no objective things and there are no subjective minds. Everything is relational

I'm tired of society, it's just a phallocentric and panoptic (in the Foucaltian sense) structure that will collapse in time to come. I'm tired of sexuality, it's just gender performance and a fourth order simulation which means it's dead. I'm tired of life, because it's an illusion and it's full of sadness and fleeting beauty. I remember watching a Wooster performance in UCLA and I couldn't understand the last line of the play until now, and that shall be my motto for the year: Give me something to believe in.

Oh! How I miss London! I miss Leicester Square where I watched LOTR in Roxy with you. I miss Trafalgar Square where there were so many fat pidgeons flying around us. I miss Euston Station where we ate Burger King for the last time. I miss the Saatchi Gallery where we contemplated Damien Hirst's sharky and smelled Tracy Emin's used tampon beside her bed. I miss Camden Town where we ate japanese food until we nearly burst. I miss Bedford Square, where we will walk from AA to Waterstones and spend the whole evening reading architecture books and understanding Zaha Hadid's vision of a metapolis. I miss riding the tube from Chalk Farm and deciding whether we are supposed to be on the Charing Cross line, or Picadilly Line or the whatever line. I miss walking beside you with our breaths vaporising in front of our eyes. I miss Soho where we saw all those gay boys who look like all the gay boys we see in all the cities around the world. I miss Chinatown and that restaurant where we ate duck noodles. I miss Oxford St. which reminded me of a decaying version of Orchard Road. I miss the cold mornings where you would make me breakfast which consisted of bread, sugar and butter, and my nescafe coffee mixed with cocoa. Above all, I really miss you. Please stay with me for life. It's really quite a short journey, but I'll be really glad if you were beside me.

Hello everyone! Sorry for the long disappearance. I'm back in Lalaland liao, and suffering from depression. My trip to London was great and I had such a good time with Choonie and friends like David and JH.

I don't really know what to say cuz my head's full of rubbish from the lecture I had yesterday on philosophy. I'm starting to think in terms of binary opposites and I can't help but superstructuralize every situation I'm in. My tutor is great, he says things like "Dialecticians will all fail!" and "Sept. 11 was a violent encounter with the Real when the whole America realized 'Oh my God! They don't like us!'"

Besides that, choonie and I are working on a project with Sculpture Square this year in late Aug-early Sept if funding goes thru titled: "The Concrete Existence of the Ephemeral State: hypersurfaces from the floating world". It's pretty Zaha hadid-inspired with hopefully (if have enuff moolah from NAC) very interactive multimedia hybrid architecture thingy. If not, it will be just nice structures with entertaining multimedia in an immersive environment installation. Gee..sounds like Heavenly Cakes except that I didn't have very nice structures. Why do artists repeat themselves? No lah, don't worry. It's gonna be entirely original and I've developed a lot, and choonie too, ever since we started university life. I can't wait to test out the ideas and technology I've acquired here.

I know AB vol.2 is going to happen soon, and i really wish I can fly back to S'pore since so many of my beautiful friends are acting in it, including my own best fwen Miaovin. It's funny when I think of it, that miaovin is gonna play a hyper-miaovin, esp. the miaovin that the general public sees is already not the miaovin that we personally know. A simulacra of a simulation. Baudrillard will be very happy.

JH is doing really well in London, aside for the fact that he wants to become a chicken rice seller when he finishes 3rd year. Please don't. Not that I look down on people who sell chicken rice, but I think we need more contemporary architects to re-design our ugly-Modernist-failure HDB flats.

David is also doing very well. He turned his room into a hotel suite with a bit of paint and a lot of creativity. He's always so good at these type of things. And he cooked us curry chicken and gave me a Madonna single just before I flew off. Sigh.....I'm so blessed with friends like David.

Oh, Cedric came down for Christmas and we went to Oxford Street together and to the LOTR exhibition at the Science Museum. He also sent us the last 2 episodes of Yami No Matsuei that was missing from the DVD that Gary burnt for me which we spent a whole weekend watching. It's really nice that anime. U must try to see it if u can get hold of it.

Mingjie lives in the swanky South Kensington area, and his apartment is so bloody Buckingham palace lor. He cooked us dinner too (pork chops with expensive mushrooms, butter rice, finished off with a port-like wine which he bought from France where he went skiing for the weekend). Yes, some people live like that, while the rest of us mortals eat Maggi-mee from styrofoam cups. But he was really sweet and humble, like he always is. Hmmmm... Is there a relationship between being nice and having lots of $$$? Not that money is important, but we live in an economically-driven reality that control the way we live so it's always good to have more of it..hehe!

I will update more often so that I won't write so much crap within one entry.

Miss u all! (henry, Julin, nahsie, alfie and gang, etc) I'm missing Singapore terribly! And London too, for apparent reasons. I promise I'll never go away for too long again in my whole life....unless if I can bring all my friends along.

And Keke, u'll always be in my heart. missing ur furry existence.