In my first day or two in Singapore I kept mulling over this latent desire to be in fashion. After a bottle of sake to myself I watched shows and movies about fashion, hungering over what I don’t want to miss out on in my life. But today, looking at art, buying a new pen and some special watercolor paper, I remember that with art I can do many of the other things I long to do.

I see artists using illustration and animation to make fine art with powerful messages. I see them using patterns and textures to make something even more interesting to me than fabric. I see them telling me that if I just let myself get better and try to open myself up, I can fulfill those latent desires.



The art housed in the Singapore Art Museum (SAM) is filling me (once again) with the power of art to be political, to bring awareness, to look critically across time and space. There is a series of photographs and a short film called “Bomb Ponds” by Vandy Rattana, which appears at first to be everyday nature scenes in Cambodia, until you read the description and find that these are ponds created by bombs dropped by the US on neutral Cambodia – this was particularly poignant to me after having recently being there, and knowing that the signs must have been all around us.

In the next room at SAM there is an incredible mural - “Baston ni Kabunian, Bilang Pero di Mabilang” by Rodel Tapaya - that depicts greed and folly through stories originating in 300 years of Spanish colonial rule of Philippines.



Another series “Needling Whisper, Needle Country/Embroidery Project” from the South Korean artist Kyungah Ham, was so moving that I had trouble standing. This is a series of large embroidered pieces created through sending coded instructions and digitally composed images on a 1:1 scale by third-party couriers (to avoid detection by the authorities). The images and instructions were sent to North Korea where they the pieces were embroidered in extraordinary detail. In the process some of the pieces were confiscated, and several were under suspicion of their messages.

One of the missing links in bridging my art and my academic work is my difficulty in allowing myself the time necessary to establish a style and enough freedom to be political in my art. The walls that inhibit me artistically are certainly self-made.

I have been putting my related hopes into one of my job applications in particular, in the Critical Studies program at California College of the Arts. Telling myself that if I get that job, I will create the space to live this art and academic life together. But as the weeks pass and I do not hear from them, I realize I need to find a way to make this happen wherever we end up. I don’t just want this; I need it. The image of one of my early graduate school advisors comes into me head: pushing me, telling me that the only way to do this, to really do academia, is to put everything else aside. I did that. I put my art aside. I put my creativity aside. This is making me tear up just to write it. Towards the end of graduate school, I brought some of this back, I made time to volunteer, and very importantly, I worked on a (forthcoming!) graphic novel about jellyfish with a friend, I started to draw a little more.

In India last fall I let the people around me see my work, I tried to draw as often as possible, to make it a habit again, to call myself an artist. As we have traveled in Fiji and South East Asia, I have done some drawings and paintings, but not yet as much as I had hoped. My goal, for the coming months, as Sage and I continue our travels, is to create the space to really dive into my art, whether it is through working on the graphic novel about my field research or through other projects, it doesn’t matter.



Sage told me a few months ago about how a friend of ours in San Francisco got together with a group of people to work on comic books – they holed themselves up for 24 hours, and each drew 24 pages. It’s hard to explain how this made me feel. I want that! I want that group of people around me; I want that time; I want to try it! Which of course means prioritizing it. There is a part of me that is absolutely desperate to begin the struggle that will be finding myself as an artist.

Over the next few weeks, as I interview for jobs, I will try to keep this in my mind. How can I make the space in my academic life to fully explore my artistic life?