Dear friends and colleagues

After writing my last missive I did not in fact go, as I said I would, to see Arin Dwihartanto and ask him about his expereience at Mecca. In fact, I had to go to a meeting at Sunaryo’s Wot Batu to discuss the monograph on the sculpture garden with Sunaryo, the writer Agung Hujatnikajennong and a book designer. As is so often the case, we spent most of the time...

Dear friends and colleagues

I have always been fascinated by them. How could I not be when my father was a priest and a medieval historian to boot? I have seen them in airports and on the sides of long, dusty roads, but I have never joined them. Yet, always, I am envious of their commitment, their purposeful passion, striding out, their smiling faces....

Dear friends and colleagues

I want to talk about trees.

I have been asked to write the catalogue for Geraldine Javier’s show that I talked about last week. Her work for it was very influenced, indeed was about, the house and garden she is building on an old fruit farm in the countryside two hours south of Manila. Next to it is an...

Dear friends and colleagues

We live in a global world. One effect of this is that we may see something we think peculiar to an area only to see the same thing somewhere else and realise that it is in fact a recent phenomenon that exists worldwide. The world changes so quickly

For example, Union Jacks. About three years ago I became...

Dear friends and colleagues,

It’s the last picture show.

Gary Ross Pastrana

This will the last exhibition at Equator Art Projects, Singapore where I am curator. The gallery will close at end of May. However, we will carry on in Jogja making...

Dear friends and colleagues

Void deck funerals and crooked paths.

It may often be described as boring but in reality Singapore is a strange and interesting place. As one expert on utopias said to me, ‘how could one not be interested in Singapore?’ If an intelligently planned environment, economy and society are the quintessence of...

Dear friends and colleagues

It was nice to hear from your responses to my rhetorical question, “when did you last read a poem?” how many committed poetry readers I have on my mailing list! As always, I welcome all comments and questions.

I have known the painter Ian Woo since I first came to Singapore in 2008. As there are very...

Dear friends and colleagues

When did you last read a poem?

I have always been interested in visual art, an interest encouraged by an older brother who was an artist and later an art historian, but I studied literature at University and have always seen myself as first and foremost a writer. I gave up writing poetry in my early...

I went to my bank last Wednesday to use the ATM and noticed on both sides of the bank there were long snaking queues of people waiting in the sun. You can see in my photo that the queue carries on along the other side of the river. People were dutifully waiting in their thousands for up to ten hours to file past the coffin of Lee Kuan Yew.

Fernando Botero. Bird. 1990. Between UOB bank and...

This morning when I got up, turned my laptop on and, as I normally do, began my day at BBC News I learned that Lee Kuan Yew had died a few hours earlier.

He was very old and had been ill for some time, so this was no great shock though it will lead to much eulogising and reflection in Singapore, the city-state he effectively...