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Recurring Dreams: Hotel, 25 x 32 cm, 25th April 2019
Somewhere in the midst of the dream-hotel, a fountain gushes endlessly in a deserted courtyard. But where does the water come from? Where? I'd like to ask but the right person would never be there for me to talk to.
A Stream Full of Stars, 17th March 2026
When Aliya first saw the silver starfish pendant hanging from my neck (four years ago now ...), she told me that a starfish will grow its lost limbs back without the hindrance of a brain or its rationalising faculties. I think about this from time to time and wondered if I could ever learn to bow down to the wind when it takes a fragment of my life away from me. I'm still not sure ... so I sat down one day and painted this story because I wanted to let the starfish take me away, whisk me through the portals of space and time, because I too must keep going without spending all day worrying about what I'd lose along the way!
16th July 2026
Woke up this morning to a wave washing over the shores of my heart (and mind) again, the water eroding the edges of that secret land. I'm plagued by helplessness today because I'm feeling like the drops of water dripping down the roof of a cave or the moss clinging to the underside of a rock. Question: What if nobody ever finds me here? What if the sunlight forgets all about me? What if the stories in my heart never makes it out in time for the one to hear them? Or God forbid, what if nobody even wants to hear them? Nothing around me seems to be moving these days and yet, when the world falls silent, I can feel an incognizable force shaping the landscape of my river.
Endriade from Dino Buzzati's The Singularity (truthfully though, I don't think this novel will ever measure up to his short stories but I'll save this discussion for another day) appears to remind me of this: "Think of a river in the Karst, subsiding into a sinkhole and then reappearing a few miles farther on; what the water did while underground no one is able to know." Yes, no one knows precisely because no one sees but an absence of the roving gaze could never stop the river from flowing. So I must have faith in the movement of the water, even if it disappears out of sight, because the river knows where it's carrying me. In fact, I am the river subsiding into a sinkhole, waiting one day for a crack in the earth to appear so that I can finally flow, flow, flow out into the sun.
Argh! But when I will stop writing about the river? Perhaps not for a very long time to come.
Postcard Paintings: Estranged Aliens on a Happy Voyage, November 2021
I was so happy painting these, just thinking about a postcard full of cryptic messages landing on the roof of this building one day. An extraterrestrial being reaching out from another galactic space? Or a secret signal waiting to be received by a faceless being? Anything felt possible to me then and I think it still does!
The Twelve Houses: The First/Seventh House, 29.7 x 21 cm, 17th January 2018
During my year in Falmouth, I made up a story about a melancholy house that couldn't stop itself from recalling the past over and over again. Because the house had fallen in love with the stories of its previous inhabitants, it'd let those old stories seep through the walls and the floorboards until they became the stories of the new inhabitant.
But whenever I tried imagining the front door of this house, I'd see billions of moss and green grass growing all over the railroad tracks leading to its secret entryway. Oh, well. I guess only those who knows how to decipher the messages of the wild flowers will ever find their way in.
Recurring Dreams: Hotel, 30 x 21 cm, 24th July 2019
An abandoned room in the dream-hotel, inhabited now by a number of residents from the forest. But still, a careless creature had left the lights on after checking out of the hotel!
Needlework: Tote Bag, September - October 2020
The sun could be setting or rising on the days when I was painting on this bag but it doesn't matter either way because this peninsula will never know anything but a single, humid summer that stretches on and on forever.
3rd June 2026
I came across a paragraph in Deleuze's Cinema II: The Time-Image that reminded me of something María Kodama said to Borges when he once asked her about love. Deleuze, on writing about uncovering clichés in what he calls a "purely optical and sound situation", describes visions and revelations as such: "Nevertheless, are there not equal amounts of fantasy and dreaming in what we claim to see as there are of objective apprehending? Moreover, do we not have a subjective sympathy for the unbearable, an empathy which permeates what we see? But this means that the unbearable itself is inseparable from a revelation or an illumination, as from a third eye." An illumination! Oh, but of course! Of course the unbearable should be inseparable from illumination! Why else would María Kodama have said: "There can be no illumination without faith. And faith is like love: either you feel it or you don't."
Because it is unbearable, love with all its grandeur promises of revelations. I mean, it is unbearable because I know that I want to spend the rest of my life painting and writing for the trillions of trees breathing alongside me but I can also see what the light of this love is illuminating for me: a made-up world in which the hours I spend bringing colours to life are considered nonfunctional or frivolous (I sometimes imagine myself talking to my favourite painter, Odilon Redon, about the forests in my paintings but our conversations will never progress beyond my tear-filled confessions of guilt for loving what I love and doing what I do). It is unbearable because I'm also possessed by a freedom-loving spirit, a spirit that a lot of people at home would call "irresponsible" or "immature", but all I want to do is stretch far and wide across this earth with my soulmate (and only my soulmate, please!) without ever settling down anywhere. Look, I don't know if a spirit like mine could ever be loved, especially when the light above is illuminating the path ahead of me, but it is my chosen destiny and it is still unbearable! So forgive me for asking the wind for the googolplex time this month whether somebody out there believes in the same love I believe in because this is driving me crazy. I mean, does anybody else see this? This love that glows within my heart? This love that refuses to be contained within a white picket fence because it is strolling endlessly along an eternal river? Hello?! Oh my god, Deleuze, I think the subjective sympathies I feel for the unbearable love in my life is going to drown me ... but I won't let it. I have to be brave enough to jump into the river of my own spirit one day and when I do, I promise to do it with a song in my heart and the entire forest cheering for me.
But for now, I'll stay in the center of the maṇḍala and repeat María Kodama's words like a secret mantra: there can be no illumination without faith ... there can be no illumination without faith ... there can be no illumination without faith ... there can be no illumination without faith ...
Recurring Dreams: Hotel, September 2019
In the "Recurring Dreams: Hotel" story, two anonymous figures sit in a hotel room day after day, waiting for somebody to arrive without knowing that the hotel has been abandoned for years ... maybe I was thinking of Beckett's play when I wrote this story, maybe I was, but I don't recall any of it now ... all I know is, I still can't get rid of the feeling that I'm waiting for somebody ...
16th March 2026
I don't know why I waited eight years before taking Steve's advice of outlining my leaves green! So now my forest is green and I think it could heal my broken heart too? But could anything ever heal a broken heart? I don't know, I'll go and ask Doctor's sapodilla tree, my secret shrine in this universe. But if somebody out there hears me, please pray for me because even painting feels impossible these days.
Mountain Visitor, 21 x 14.8 cm, 3rd May 2019
Whenever I look out of the bedroom window, the range of mountains in the distance pulls me in with their unflinching gazes. So I trace the outlines of the mountain peaks over and over again until one day, I notice a tiny figure clambering up the slopes of the mountain. Oh, but that must be the Mountain Visitor of my imagination, I think that must be him! Look, I think he's trying to find his way back into the heart of the Mountain Kingdom again!
家安夢遊大觀園, 1st August 2025
𓊡 : A river winding through a mangrove forest in Sarawak
The boatman was humming a tune to himself as he rowed the boat forwards but my ears were filled with the songs of the cicadas and the movement of the water. The river reminded me of a story I wrote a few years ago, "Green River Myth", in which a twenty foot long Channa Striata haunted the depths of a river called the Green River. I was thinking of this story again because I thought I felt a strange presence in the water, trailing after us as the boatman led us further and further into the forest.
鼠年賀卡, October - November 2019
... and what did happen to me that year? The year when the rat finally made its way back to the first day of the calendar. I don't know, I suppose I was waiting for it to hold a light up for me and to tell me that the path ahead is clear! You're safe if you walk down this road! But was it?
Recurring Dreams: Hotel, 25 x 32 cm, 23rd April 2019
When I was about ten or eleven years old, I used to dream about the same labyrinthine hotel whenever I fell asleep in my grandmother's house. The hotel in my dreams stood at the top of a hill crawling with emerald-green grass, a small, rounded hill that would dissolve into a vast expanse of field at the foot and then stretch on for infinite miles in all directions. The first time I saw the hotel there, I climbed up the hill on my own and wondered whether the breeze could be blowing in from the south.
[ ?? ] October 2021
I made a book out of scrap paper and brown wrapping paper so that my friends and I could write stories to each other when the ocean held us apart. But the book got lost in one of our letterboxes and never found its way back to me again ...
Research Journal, August 2019 - July 2020
A long time ago, back when I was still in school, I used to dream about the same hotel whenever I fell asleep on Saturday afternoons. This recurring dream would persist for about a month and within the span of that time, I'd walked alongside twenty or so people along the corridors of the hotel.
Years later, a memory came along to create a tidal wave that washed over the surface of my mind to reveal the dream-hotel lying beneath my consciousness. How could I have forgotten all about it? I tried finding my way back into the hotel after that but it no longer exists anywhere within the accumulated layers of time within my mind ... and so I started searching for it again by collecting articles after articles on dreams, fantastic doubles and the mirror-world.
20th October 2025
傳說中，東邊的那座山上住著一隻熱心於圓夢事業的蝴蝶神。蝴蝶神有雙長達兩百八十一公分的翅膀，顏色有點像外婆家後院種的深橘色假向日葵。有人曾經告訴過我說，蝴蝶神喜歡在潮濕的五月至八月夜間出沒，將所有睡夢中的山林動植物驚醒。但我始終沒辦法逃出自己的夢境，因為蝴蝶神未曾把我的夢给圓一圓。