This text is presented alongside the exhibition Red Bean Soup facilitated by Adrian Jing Song + Phương Lê as part of the Seventh Gallery Emerging Writers’ Program 2024.

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… These days

the lyric’s sentiment floats

away from me. Like a river someone

forgets to bless. Memory, to memory,

to the dirt path opening

again in a dream. I have not been back

for so many years. I walk the distance

in my mind, the margins flowing by

like so much foreign water.

—Wendy Xu

An identity is wrestled out of a set of circumstances.

~ Habit, ritual, recipes, shrines, borders, pathways

~ The grain pattern on the wooden dinner table

~ A set of curtains, sheer, white

~ The scents of oils, soaps, powders

~ A bundle of inherited clothes.

A combination of light and shadow becomes a mode of access. It becomes speculative. A face, overexposed to the point of obscurity, becomes nothing and/or everything.

You whisper something into your grandfather’s ear. Or to someone in the shape of your grandfather. A figure on the beach points solemnly in your direction. You think they might be trying to tell you something, foretelling a future that, in the cool dusk, no longer seems possible. Maybe they’re just blocking your view of the waves.

Your memories are claimed, translated, repeated. They carve out narratives of their own, seemingly separate from you.

*

You’re tired from a flight; during the car ride from the airport, you rest your eyes. You can picture the journey anyway. Your body sways with the familiar warp and weft of the road. You don’t need to look at the water running parallel to the thoroughfare. You know it’s there. You arrive just in time for dinner, take your place around a nourishing centre. You watch the frenzy of hands—some of them smooth, some deeply lined—as they slice, stir, and spoon into each other’s bowls. You question this tenderness: either it must be false, or it must be everything you want—which is almost too much to bear.

*

There are the messages you scatter in the street, notes for loved ones, morsels of common and uncommon phrases. Think of return: your childhood bedroom and the scrawl on its walls. Your mother’s face, never clearer in your mind than when you’re looking at your own. Together, you organise offerings for the dead. Fold them in half for good luck. Find the right angle to help the fire catch. You watch each other through the smoky haze, wondering how you’ll memorialise the moment later. Turn the words over in your mouth, let them tumble out in imperfect clusters. Preserve the traces of light and colour in a jar of brine.

*

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I am looking through a circle in a circle of looks.¹

*

You cannot remember who took the photo, only how the air changed afterward. The subject doesn’t know what happens next, but you do. Knowing inevitably creates rupture. You see a row of sequins on a dress, sliding off a broken thread, one after the other. You see the garment unravelling in its entirety. A bare shoulder, lower back, a thigh. You see the person in the photograph trying to turn away. You move on to the next one, out of respect.

*

You imagine a cascading, overlapping structure, like icicles on the roof of a cave. The surface of an icicle is an evolving topography of fluid and air, but its frozen ripples always inherit the same pattern. No matter the conditions, the ripples will be one centimetre away from each other. If the warps are profound enough, you can run your thumb over them, counting to keep track. As the climate warms, the icicles crowning the mouth of the cave melt and reassemble on the ground below you. You peer into the strange new puddles, meeting your own reflection. You watch it shift in and out of cohesion. You look for a stone to fracture the surface with.

*

Try toying with fantasy.The delicate ridges of a spine, exposed to the touch of an anonymous lover. Clasp your hands together. Apologise to your belief for knowing desire too well. Imagine yourself through another’s gaze—are they longing, ambivalent, detached? Imagine yourself through the eye of an old video camera, flitting within the static. Take the camera in your hands like a pact. Apologise for nothing.

*

[P]hotographs, in themselves, are fragmentary and incomplete utterances. […] The archive meaning exists in a state that is both residual and potential.²

How is historical and social memory preserved, transformed, restricted and obliterated by photographs? What futures are promised; what futures are forgotten?³

*

Without speech, you act; without movement, you hold. You recall a leather couch and a sweaty back, at odds with the buttery material. A voice warbling an old pop song. The pangs of something forgotten, the crackle of poor reception. You try asking about the song later, but no one remembers it the way you do. The question folds back on itself. The memory stops mid-bloom.

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*

Every absence is accompanied by the urge to fill it. A silence, an unfurnished space, an empty frame.

Tend to your appetite with fruit segments, fresh bread, warm soup.

Cling to colour and texture. The sturdy fact of an object, a familiar face, a reliable hum.

Slide in and out of these certainties. Make a game of it.

An absence declares / its blunt self, begins Wendy Xu’s poem, ‘Writing Home’⁴

Try sharpening the edges of it. Try letting the call ring out.

*

In a movie you watch⁵, a man returns to his old street after 16 years to find it underwater. While searching for his estranged wife and daughter, he bides his time by helping demolish old buildings, making way for a new dam. But all the man finds of his daughter is images: in the first, her face is one among a class of her school peers; in the second, she smiles alone. He hovers between the coming and going worlds, displaced from histories both real and imagined.

*

You survey the gaps between figures in a family photo—the familiar clutches, the arrangement of mouths, chests, shoulders. As if looking alone could tell you what they mean to each other.

You consider the language of recording, capturing as though to possess. Most archives are defined by the ownership and exclusion of certain truths, but you long for an archival practice that perpetually unfolds, inviting spillage and transfer, saying something of how the personal is never just that.

*

The body archive is an attunement, a hopeful gathering, an act of love against the foreclosures of reason. It is a way of knowing the body-self as a becoming and unbecoming thing, of scrambling time and matter, of turning toward rather than against oneself. And vitally, it is a way of thinking-feeling the body’s unbounded relation to other bodies.⁶

*

Something is beautiful and lost. The loss is harsh to begin with but transmutes into something else overtime. Clearer, duller; it flows in and out of you in new ways. You find yourself on one side of a river, looking for flat, sturdy rocks to help you cross to the other bank. You think you smell something cooking over there. You think it’s been simmering for a while.