Jason Wee (b. 1979)
CRITICAL INTRODUCTION
Written by Shawn Lim
Dated 1 March 2023
Weaving together his expansive endeavours as artist and writer, Jason Wee’s skein of work coheres in a practice that resists simple definition. His poetry debuted with The Monsters Between Us (2013), followed by An Epic of Durable Departures (2018), which was shortlisted for the 2020 Singapore Literature Prize. His latest collection, In Short, Future Now (2020), garnered critical attention as a finalist for the Gaudy Boy Poetry Book Prize. His work has also emerged variously in Lambda Literary, Cha: An Asian Literary Journal, Fence, SAND Berlin, Cordite and other local poetry anthologies. He is an editor at Softblow journal and numbers Ng Yi-Sheng’s SQ 21: Singapore Queers in the 21st Century (2006) and Lee Wen’s Boring Donkey Songs (2017) among his editorial contributions.
Delving into Wee’s poetic career necessarily begins with recognising how his writing and art are mutually constitutive, one informing the other in a dynamic circuit. Like his poetic corpus, his art spans various media, locales, and defies disciplinary boundaries. As his artist’s biography states, Wee seeks to contend with “sources of singular authority in favour of polyphony and difference,” transforming “histories and spaces” into material that opens towards heterotopia (“Jason Wee”). These articulations on space parallel his establishment of Grey Projects in 2008. At a time when several artist-run spaces were closing, Wee founded the place to facilitate artistic exchange beyond the ambit of state-run cultural institutions. Even now, its alternating uses as a library, gallery, studio and residency elude the dictum of purpose or function. Wee argues for the importance of such heterogeneous cultural spaces in a 2013 essay, “Reading Spaces, Spaces for Reading,” which argues that the development of our local “cultural ecology” is subject to a “unique set of operating principles” created in response to Singapore’s perceived vulnerability. Under such constraints, art emerges in a “winnowed” cultural landscape, pruned and groomed by the state as it sees fit (Wee, “Reading Spaces, Spaces for Reading”). Grey Projects eschews such limitations by existing as a non-institutional agora made available for artists, writers, and readers, offering a “chance to grow culture, rather than have it, sort of, pumped in” (Whittaker, “In Conversation with Jason Wee”).
Wee’s poetry reflects this commitment in its attempts to write counter-spaces into being. The Monsters Between Us (2013) begins by employing the mythopoeic as a means of exploring alterity and its attendant experiences. Opening with “Monsters (I),” readers are introduced to a curious “continent of one-leggers” that inhabit the tropical south of Beatus de Liébana’s medieval atlas. These monopedal “monsters,” as it turns out, are written into Singapore’s mythic past: their graves now dot the urban landscape of the post-colony, rising “storeys high / stacked with occupants”. Assuming genealogical connections with these “monsters,” the poem’s writing and rewriting of their myths register as defiance against epistemological authority, symbolised by the Beatus map. Allowing othered voices, both past and present, to emerge, the poem becomes its own map unveiling a new-old world:
I plot both directions on my atlas of lost cities,
watch the lines converge on
an archipelago of marks,
guttations where the pencil rested.
Even as the stanza begins to explore an imagined geography, the reader’s attention is drawn to the material conditions that allow for poetry to happen. Hand on pencil on paper, the reminder of writing as a material process momentarily bridges textual and physical space. Wee’s curation of Lines Fall Where They May, a 2021 exhibition held at the STPI Gallery, similarly understands the artistic process as one of “mark-making,” inviting viewers to consider how marks—lines, brushstrokes, words on canvas and paper—exist as extensions of the artist’s being, traces that open the present to “stories” and “worlds apart from our own” (“Lines Fall Where They May”). Returning to Monsters, such phenomenological sensitivity suffuses the page with intimacy even as the poems wrestle with authority, attesting to Lawrence Ypil’s estimation of Wee’s poetry as “carefully constructed spaces of feeling” (Wee, An Epic of Durable Departures). And so the speaker of “Quills” finds in the eponymous instrument of writing a window to a past life “clasped in the inkwell of skin, / writ[ing] lines that pulsed from heart to wind-torn breast” (Monsters).
Elsewhere in Monsters, this awareness of other states of being becomes a vehicle to reflect on our own. The collection boasts a veritable bestiary in pieces such as “Preparing a Crab,” “The Ant,” “The Cockroach,” among others. As Wee elaborates in a 2019 interview, these creatures are remarkable for they have “evolved protective covers,” which are nevertheless “incredibly vulnerable”. The exoskeletal becomes a “very good metaphor for how it is to live in [Singapore],” under the state’s near-paranoic gaze (Chow, Huiru et al., “Paradox, Passings and Other Unpractical Things”). This anxiety over the country’s successes, acts for Wee as a “sign that all is not shell,” failing to “hide / the soft heart from the blade” even if outsized displays of force have been marshalled to shore up the country’s apparent delicacy (Monsters).
Such forces justify Wee’s concerns about the “winnowing” of voices in our cultural ecology, exemplified in Monsters with the poetic sequence “Unreliable Evidence”. Shaped by his conversations with Vincent Cheng, a detainee under Operation Spectrum, or the ‘Marxist Conspiracy’ of 1987, the series invites readers to consider the veracity of proffered narratives. The poems are composed of lines taken from redacted state documents, testimonies, and transcripts, arranged with line breaks marking redacted parts. Emily Chow comments that the result moves to “mock the artificiality and fragmentation of ‘the truth’ offered by the Singaporean government,” a process by which “a stable signifier [becomes] an unreliable monster which can freely undergo metamorphosis” (“The Dreams and the Monsters”). Hence the cutting irony in the lines:
On 21 May , the Department
arrested persons involved in
the
existing political , using
tactics to establish a state.
Part of the plan was lawful
(“III”)
. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . .
The Internal Department has also
aged under Section
of the Act
Indeed, mimicry serves to reproduce state discourse as almost the same, but not quite, registering the impact of Operation Spectrum on the cultural landscape even as the consequent slippages offer voices to be heard, voices hitherto lost in the gaps of history.
Crucially, the poems do not pretend to write over history, but hold space within which differing truths are contrasted, where established narratives are reconstituted, yet disavowed. This is evident in the abutting voices present in “1990”:
May I first of all congratulate you
handing over my possessions for inspection
have taken the road towards a gracious
I tore up my drawings.
Festival of Arts is now a regular feature
The cell without pictures, I feel sorry to see
them bare.
Intertwined in the lines are the juxtaposing voices of state authority and political detainee, with the poignant destruction of art in the confines of a prison cell baldly challenging the announcement of state initiatives promoting artistic expression. The limits on physical freedom mirror those imposed on cultural spaces, bringing Wee’s concerns over artistic production to the fore.
Emily Chow suggests that language terrorises as the “unreliable monster” in the sequence. Certainly, by destabilising signification, the poems index ‘monsters’ not as the vilified others whose voices were forcibly suppressed, but also the apparatus that gags and silences. This is perhaps why in “Monsters (III),” after hearing Vincent Cheng’s harrowing accounts of political detention, ordinary street sights and sounds meld into a “rumble” for the speaker, as he recognises that they are always already swallowed up in “the belly / of some beast [...] eaten alive”. Even so, despite its subject matter, the sequence never devolves into diatribe. Included among it are deeply autobiographical pieces by Wee on growing up in the 80s and mourning the death of his great-grandmother in 1987, poems that help yoke together the private and public, the personal and the political. This interplay of voices in Monsters reads as both strategic and humanistic, standing as a fine example of Wee’s polyphonous practice.
If polyphony can be understood as a form of conversation without being unduly reductive, then Wee’s suggestion of conversation as a space that allows for “simultaneous, overlapping threads and claims without anyone enforcing direction, limits or rules” is instructive (Lee, “A Conversation in Saitama”). The above cites a 2013 conversation Wee had with the late performance artist Lee Wen, a document that informs a different conversation found in Wee’s second collection, An Epic of Durable Departures, published in 2018. Standing as a record of friendship between the two artists, Epic is a conversation with no explicit aims or goals, an exercise in communicating with the self, with Lee, and with a future grief to come in light of the latter’s worsening Parkinson’s.
Wee’s proleptic view on future grief explains his choice to structure the collection in “reverse time,” beginning with “Epilogue”. Cyril Wong notes how this decision “pre-shadow[s]” subsequent poems, the memories they describe “mitigating the absolute tragedy of the inevitable through analeptic imprints on a future [...] contemplation about past love” (“An Epic of Durable Departures by Jason Wee”). With past and future upended, the repudiation of linear time is for Lindsay Shen a demonstration of how the “stages of grief are unstageable,” arriving before the end that marks its beginning (Shen, “[REVIEW]”). Wee desires in “Epilogue” to know “how to arrive at a time other than one feared / the way the albizia folds the night in”. Knowing grief seems to bring an assurance that eclipses the waiting and fear of grief; “after all, isn’t it a kindness when knowing better / anticipates the rejection to come”?
Wee’s contemplation of impending grief sees the inclusion of Lee’s voice, facilitated by his play on the haiku and renga as dialogic forms and so emphasising his understanding of poetry as opening space for conversation and collaboration. The collection is thus mostly written in three-lined stanzas, with some pieces reminiscent of earlier works like “1990,” in which voices are alternated across each line. Other poems yield entirely to Lee’s voice, mediated only by Wee’s arrangement. At times immediate and at others distant, Lee’s presence flickers throughout Epic, shadowed always by mortality.
Although Epic is movingly elegiac, it is most striking in moments when Wee struggles with “the body, repulsive” (“Epilogue”). His frequent documentation of Lee’s disease-ravaged body in brusque “description[s] / past the look-away point” marks the body’s intractability in Wee’s relationship with Lee. Describing with poetic exactitude the “incontinent / red black brown,” such lines evoke a deep poignancy for the artist feted for using his body as social critique (“Lining the Pants”):
[...] the two-seater
that, pulled out, forms his bed,
blue except for
a brown aurora (“The Foolish Knows”)
Even so, if bodily “facts [are] poetry enough” to trace Lee’s difficult journey, Wee equally reaches for “abstraction–metaphor, echoes–[as] poetry’s facts” to express Lee’s resistance against the dying body (“Lining the Pants”):
Sputum seeps, greets the humid
air. The stones inch out
of their cavities. (“A Building Tests its Walls”)
Here, the abject is reclaimed as an impulse to escape a body caged in itself, as elsewhere, “the blood, the ocean [...] still crests and crashes / inside you,” even when “today we admit / drawing is gone” (The Sunset’s a Sour Peach”). This spatial-architectural metaphor finds consummation in “Where Your Archive Is,” which offers a proleptic vision of a house that no longer exists. The titular archive references Lee’s now-defunct Independent Archive, a site that represented freedom “from regulation and another authority” (Lee). Read as such, the body that exceeds its bounds, the “dream house that stands no ground,” signifies ambivalently of relief, release, even if for the grieving it means only absence and loss: “sorrow is a postcard home. / Where do I address it”? Perhaps, a final address is impossible for a grief forever still to come, in a poetry that writes the past into the future, mirrored formally with a “beginning / the exact shape as the end” (“Where Your Archive Is”). This elliptical trajectory through time guides the closing poem, “Will Be Epic,” and explains its allusions to the “circling” journeys of Odysseus and Orpheus. Consequently, Epic ends–or begins–in elliptical fashion, suspending its conversation in private time with “much, yet unsaid” between the two artists.
Prima facie, Wee’s latest offering In Short, Future Now (2020), marks a departure from the intimacies and human spaces of his previous collections. The work is a culmination of PostSuperFutureAsia, a series of experimental writing workshops hosted by Wee’s Grey Projects, in which participants were invited to imagine hyper, radically futuristic versions of Asia. According to the write-up for its latest iteration, the workshop’s hypothesis is an understanding of the future territory as an “aggregation of discrete histories, ideologies and phenomenon,” an archipelago networking “islands of thoughts,” yet unmoored from “constraints of its geopolitical coordinates” (“PostSuperFutureAsia”). In Short professes a similarly archipelagic thinking, with a sequence that moves and shifts along a trajectory exploring an Asia written as “event, a post-authoritarian territory, a body in the aftermath of new pathologies and surveillances”. Returning to spaces, places, cartographies, bodies and polyphonic vectors of thought, In Short, despite appearances, circles familiar territories trod in Wee’s previous writing, charged as ever with a persistent impulse to chart counter-spaces, even futural ones.
As the ‘future now,’ In Short performs its archipelagic thinking by assembling different temporalities in defamiliarising configurations. This is readily exemplified in Wee’s almost exclusive use of three-lined stanzas for the sequence, with continued variations of the haiku and renga. The dialogic and collaborative nature of these forms prompts the inclusion of multiple epigraphs and quotes by authors hailing from diverse places and periods, resulting in a structure that Dr May Ee Wong suggests “relates a pluralistic notion of ‘Asia’ that is disorientating but also potentially liberating” (“Visualising ‘Asia as Future’”). Certainly, In Short articulates a vision unbound by strict measures of time, for even as “the present / borrows from the future,” its conceptions of the future are lensed through the present, its past. The post-apocalypse is thus one in which children inquire on the computing protocols of the soul and Dyson spheres are produced thin as soap bubbles, but also a terrain delimited by the past:
Recovery no longer
means replace or
restart but salvage
The past is continually dredged up as if the future is made possible only with it. On a trek through landfill beaches, the speaker hears recordings of “twentieth-century / children in ball pits,” describing them as sounds “so alien” in a world now devoid of “diving / of exposed skin, floating” due to climate change. Such “alien” sounds then become similes for imagining the future: “will the plastic sea / have spume that sounds / like a child swimming in a ball pit?” Asia’s future is pockmarked by the past, with corpses piled on Mount Everest becoming a new display as “Pompeii on ice,” and declarations heralding the “era of science” begin with astrology and feng shui. Disturbing the lines between the ‘classical’ and the ‘contemporary,’ the ‘primitive’ and the ‘modern,’ these temporalities are all at home in the future:
Evacuate the
architecture of time
so we can live in it.
For the Singapore Biennale 2019, Wee wrote the libretto for Quora Fora – a Rehearsal, a performance inspired by the manuscript he was then preparing for In Short. A version of the libretto is appended at the back of the book, containing an endless stream of a line taken from the sequence: “but how do you spell authoritarianism without asia?” In an interview on Quora Fora, Wee explains how his conceptions of future Asia were strongly motivated by the state of politics then, summed up as “Asia’s fascination with strongman regimes” spanning the Indonesian elections to the Hong Kong riots (Bakchormeeboy, “Singapore Biennale 2019”). Hence in In Short states of ubiquitous control hold referendums for citizens to vote between “this system of surveillance / and two others” and queries of political urgency are met with apathy “among the blossoms / in an about-to-burn field”. Resistance is thwarted in the future with threats of violin interrogation, familiar scenes in which the speaker wryly notes that:
If it weren’t for history
I’d leave the rest
to your imagination.
Thus, even as In Short functions to bring the ‘future now’ as a “critical response to the boosterish trope of ‘Asia as Future’,” it reminds us that the ‘future’ may also very well be ‘now’ (Wong, May Ee). Throughout shifting configurations of temporalities, the collection remains grounded in its reiteration of the questions Wee asks in Quora Fora: what steps can the demos take to achieve true democracy? How can it work to realise an Asia unrestricted in episteme, geography or time, an archipelago in thought and in form?
Wee affirms poetry for its “contradictory capacity,” for its “power and intensity [ . . . ] in its paradox,” a conviction that manifests in his poetry’s ability to offer counter-spaces that unsettle boundaries and queer conventions of thought. This partly accounts for its difficulty, its resistance against the readerly desire to bend language into meaning, underscoring how contingent and precarious any reading, such as this one, necessarily is. While broad themes may be dimly discerned, it is ultimately the interpretative caprice of Wee’s poetry that allows it to outline intervening spaces for surprising lines of escape. To this end, one may read the following lines from In Short as a callback to Epic and its motif of address and addresses, but also a concluding demonstration of the rhizomatic passage of Wee’s writing:
memory but the end
of the message arriving
too late, and the first
word never at all,
but a delay, perpetual
Works cited
Bakchormeeboy. “Singapore Biennale 2019: Quora Fora – A Rehearsal by Jason Wee”. Bakchormeeboy. January 23, 2020. Web.
Chow, Emily. “The Dreams and the Monsters: Ocean Vuong’s No and Jason Wee’s The Monsters Between Us”. Cha: An Asian Literary Journal 26 (2014). Web.
Chow, Huiru, et al. “Paradox, Passings and Other Unpractical Things: an interview with Jason Wee”. yale-nus intro to poetry writing. November 20, 2019. Web.
“Jason Wee”. Yavuz Gallery. Web.
Lee, Wen. “A Conversation in Saitama”. leewen.republicofdaydreams. Web.
“PostSuperFutureAsia – The Travelling Writing Workshop (The Southeast Asia Edition) 2020”. Grey Projects. August 25, 2020. Web.
Shen, Lindsay. “[REVIEW] ‘Jason Wee’s An Epic of Durable Departures’ by Lindsay Shen”. Cha Journal. May 27, 2019. Web.
Tang, Aileen. “Interview with Jason Wee and Li-Chuan Chong for Quora Fora: A Rehearsal”. The Flying Inkpot. March 12, 2020. Web.
“The Lines Fall Where They May”. STPI. Web.
Wee, Jason. An Epic of Durable Departures. Singapore: Math Paper Press, 2018.
———. In Short, Future Now. Shanghai: Rockbund Art Museum and Sternberg Press, 2020.
———. “Reading Spaces, Spaces for Reading”. Guggenheim Museum. January 14, 2014. Web.
———. The Monsters Between Us. Singapore: Math Paper Press, 2013.
Wee, Jason, Patrick Sun and Anne Samat. “CoBo Perspectives: LGBTQ Art”. CoBo Social. May 22, 2019. Web.
Whittaker, Iona. “In Conversation with Jason Wee”. Iona Whittaker. Web.
Wong, Cyril. “An Epic of Durable Departures by Jason Wee”. BooksActually. March 19, 2020. Web.
Wong, May Ee. “Visualising ‘Asia as Future’ through speculative Southeast Asian aesthetic urban futures”. ARIscope. August 25, 2022. Web.
