Tham Yoke Theng // Hong Kah Secondary School // Mixed Media // 15 cm by 15 cm
The work is a response to local poet and educator Chen Wei Biao’s debut poetry collection “The Sea Diary” 《航海纪事》Chen teaches Chinese Literature at Nan Chiau High School. Each poem encapsulates a memory of a place travelled. The poetic spaces created from my readings are at times isolated -a train of thought or a tangential idea, often in a bustle of background noises or retold stories.
Google maps and physical maps from old books were used to represent the physical locations in Chen’s poems. Chen sees these random moments of solitude as important magical surprises. I have tried to represent them using the process of decoding and recoding through colours. The works do not aim to be faithful representations of the actual maps, but rather the variety of experiences and rhythms we can gather in this world.
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