Bryen Chen | Nanyang Technological University (original) (raw)

Poetry Collections by Bryen Chen

Through the extensive use of figuration, measured rhythm, and judicious alliteration, the aesthet... more Through the extensive use of figuration, measured rhythm, and judicious alliteration, the aesthetic use of language and lyrical engine driving this poetry collection becomes a way to reinvent, resuscitate and reshape ordinary experiences and provide new ways of seeing. Yet, the poems in You Will Make A Ritual Out Of Me also tend to be tinged with traumatic imprints; weaving in themes of torture, intimate violence, sudden death, and human suffering. This begs the question: is conflating the subject of pain with poetic pleasure a form of contamination? Is it unethical, parasitical and exploitative? I argue that my compulsive use of the lyric as a form when delineating troubling or traumatic events does not aim to exploit, but is born out of a necessity: beauty is infused into emotionally challenging material as a means of hearing the fragmentary language of pain, coaxing it into clarity, and interpreting it.

A life informed by cycles of holding on and letting go, "I Miss You Like Tomorrow" is an attempt ... more A life informed by cycles of holding on and letting go, "I Miss You Like Tomorrow" is an attempt to lionize lost loves as a therapeutic shield against immobilizing grief. In this poetry collection, I contend with personal loss, the meaning of family and the value of joy in a perenially fractured childhood spirit.

Red seeks to explore concepts of sensation, be it pain, pleasure or the liminal space within—thro... more Red seeks to explore concepts of sensation, be it pain, pleasure or the liminal space within—through the incorporation of red objects and elements. From a rash on the skin and roses to pomegranates and other red fruits, the poems move beyond the mundanity of human experiences and delve into universal truths about the human condition.

Academic Essays by Bryen Chen

In her graphic memoir Can’t We Talk About Something More Pleasant (2014), cartoonist Roz Chast ch... more In her graphic memoir Can’t We Talk About Something More Pleasant (2014), cartoonist Roz Chast chronicles the experience of bearing witness to her parents’ decline, as she takes care of their increasing physical and cognitive debilitation, and the little indignities scattered along the way. From “failing organ functions to the forfeiture of mental acuity”, the relentless brutal forward march of time is intoned in no uncertain terms, yet this discussion of impending death is a topic all three family members wilfully evade (Oksman 326). While Chast’s narrative of journeying a loved one towards death’s finality is certainly universal, the way she presents it via various formal and stylistic experimentations is unique. She draws from a “heterogeneous mix of [mediums]”, working across different categories of creative labour, like comics, photographs, sketches, and even an embedment of her mother’s poetry (Wang 106). While some of these myriad art forms are meant to memorialise and mourn her parents’ demise, others—like Chast’s archive of childhood photographs—look back to a distant place in time, and mourn an “irreversible pastness and irretrievability” (Hirsch 20). By engineering this dichotomous past/present contrast, readers will not only be privy to the changes within her parents but also those occurring in Chast herself, as she transitions from only child to caregiver, dependent to decision-maker, and moving out to returning to her family. In doing so, this intermedial assemblage reveals the complex scaffold of mourning, a process not merely of parting with the beloved familial member but grieving the agential loss of self, an invisibilised aspect of care work that this kaleidoscopic graphic novel seeks to fix. Chast’s memoir ultimately serves to “offer a [...] resonant model” for readers “meditating on such bereavement”, by showing how the dysphoric feelings that attend the act of caregiving are normal and have universality (Bollinger 656).

In Félix González-Torres’s “Untitled” (Perfect Lovers), a pair of identical white-rimmed clocks a... more In Félix González-Torres’s “Untitled” (Perfect Lovers), a pair of identical white-rimmed clocks are placed adjacent to each other and hung against a muted blue-coloured wall. Although they are initially set to the same time, they gradually fall out of sync over the exhibition, due to the different rates at which the clocks’ battery life falls. Such a minimalistic use of objects that resist straightforward analysis has encouraged critics to read the work biographically. As the work coincides with the height of the AIDS pandemic and his partner’s HIV sickness, the clocks are “surrogates for the [...] artist and his dying lover”, or a substitute for queer bodies. Here, González-Torres’s (a)synchronous clocks bear a symbolic message, where to love is to be a custodian of another’s decline; to hold that person’s hand, walk towards the end, and live. Yet, instead of viewing the work as being allegorical of human relations, this paper is concerned with the literal narratives of object romance between these two circular beings. By tracing the language of intimacy within the inanimate, a radical vision of love “beyond [human] coupledom” can be imagined—one that proves genderless, egalitarian, and ultimately liberating.

A retrospective look at China’s past reveals the devastating impact that the Cultural Revolution ... more A retrospective look at China’s past reveals the devastating impact that the Cultural Revolution (1967-1977) had on the nation’s collective psyche. Led by Chairman Mao Zedong, the Great Proletarian Cultural Revolution aimed to purge all aspects of traditional capitalist culture and replace them with Mao’s radical communist ideals, so as to consolidate his own power within the Chinese Communist Party. Under Mao’s banner of influence, those perceived to be part of the bourgeoisie elite were persecuted, while “many historical sites, antiquities and anything else that represented or celebrated traditional Chinese culture” ceased to exist. Along with “state-sponsored cycles of violence” directed towards anyone suspected of being unaligned with Mao’s vision, this epochal scale of change proved to be grossly traumatic. Yet, even after many years have passed, the difficulty in testifying to that unspeakable, dark decade of the Cultural Revolution is still palpable. Beyond the challenge of distilling pain into words, the government’s strict imposition of censorship meant that “individual publications of the Cultural Revolution [were] restricted”, “public debates [were] discouraged and departures from officially sanctioned interpretation [would] bring reprisals”. Unlike the “openness of Germany and other European governments that have encouraged examination of the legacy of Nazi terror”, the thick veil of silence in China shrouds many of its political issues in secrecy. How then do Chinese authors, academics and more specifically artists, voice their criticisms of the state in a region where free speech is not often guaranteed? Intriguingly, contemporary Chinese artists like Zhang Xiaogang and Yue Minjun frequently allude to the civilisational rupture of the Cultural Revolution in their works. They make use of strange figures, surrealist symbols and aspects of the fantastic, as their paintings place the viewers in densely unknown worlds. These fantastical pieces—defined here as art that “contain[s] a substantial and irreducible element of [the] supernatural or impossible”—may seem opaque and even nonsensical initially, but it belies a hidden, covert lexicon that blends imagination with critique. It is only by reading between the lines that viewers may understand the artists’ implicit expression of cynicism and contempt for Mao’s regime. Thus, through this Sinocentric prism of analysis, we see how conventions of the fantastic have been deployed as a mobilising tool against authoritarianism, and how such a genre can acquire the subversive potential for political polemic.

In tracing the shifting coordinates of the British visual arts, academic Aidan While identifies t... more In tracing the shifting coordinates of the British visual arts, academic Aidan While identifies the Young British Artists (YBAs) as radical pioneers who helped bring shape and definition to the country’s contemporary movement. The YBAs produced art that was often transgressive and incendiary in nature, and their repeated use of “shock tactics” has led to accusations that these works—at their fundamental core—were primarily motivated by a hunger for headlines. Such sensational pieces, however, also shifted the discourses surrounding art criticism: aspects like a painting’s aesthetic merit or a sculpture’s technical execution became perfunctory affairs, while new questions that began to surface included whether an artwork was ethical or even morally right. Curiously, a peculiar number of these works by the YBAs that were deemed to disturb or violate deeply held notions of morality feature egregious depictions of children. The Chapman brothers’ F*ckface (1994) reveal an erotic regime of child mannequins that are poised in compromising sexual positions with human genitalia on their faces, while Marcus Harvey’s monochromatic portrait of the child serial killer Myra (1995) is composed using the recurring motif of a tiny infant’s palm. This thesis shall then argue that, through the use of differing formal and stylistic choices, both artists provoke outrage by creating a jarring juxtaposition between the “innocent and unadulterated” childhood universe of play, and the perverse or depraved character of adults. In so doing, both Harvey and the Chapman brothers inadvertently spotlight their young subjects’ vulnerabilities, as they show how a child’s purity is constantly under threat by the violence, sex and consumerist exploitation that has become synonymous with the late 20th-century era.

An initial inquiry into Clarice Lispector’s short stories reveals a tendency to privilege epistem... more An initial inquiry into Clarice Lispector’s short stories reveals a tendency to privilege epistemological and ontological concerns over the complexities of the plot or the elaborateness of the narrative. In “Love”, the protagonist Ana, who is well-settled into domestic life and insulated from the broader world, has an encounter with a blind man chewing gum, that fundamentally alters her perceptions of reality. Meanwhile, “A Chicken” is focalised through the perspective of the titular animal, who after laying an egg, is no longer treated as an object of consumption but seen as a highly adored and valued treasure by her human family. In contrast, “The Buffalo” follows an unnamed female character who mourns the immobilising pain of unrequited love, but through her interactions with a buffalo at the zoo, she achieves a certain catharsis. All three stories adhere to a similar trajectorial arc: that is, as the human figures witness an uncanny sight both foreign yet familiar, or mundane yet extraordinary, they are compelled to contemplate their lives anew with a freshly acquired and profound sensitivity. By further applying a perspectivist and posthuman theoretical lens to Lispector’s writings, this essay will argue that the epiphanic encounters between humans and their environment bring about revelation and rebirth, as pre-established rhythms of everyday existence are altogether ruptured in favour of a recalibrated relationship to life and knowledge. In highlighting the productive exchanges between humans and the world, Lispector thus marks a paradigm shift away from an anthropocentric viewpoint which is flawed, as she acknowledges that the human subject is not the central locus of understanding, but can only come into being as part of a larger, interspecies dialogue.

Born out of his visit to Rwanda, Philip Gourevitch’s non-fictional work, We Wish to Inform You Th... more Born out of his visit to Rwanda, Philip Gourevitch’s non-fictional work, We Wish to Inform You That Tomorrow We Will Be Killed With Our Families, is a journalistic report that chronicles the developments of Rwanda’s genocidal carnage. Relations between the Hutus and Tutsis had devolved into an apartheid-like regime, and the latter had been targeted for extirpation from the national body. With the magnitude of massacres taking place and a primordial bloodlust pumping through a country thrown into political disarray, feelings of overwhelming fear—unaccounted for by normal psychic parameters—come to dominate. In investigating the pivotal role and representation of fear in Gourevitch’s text, I argue that fear is depicted as a mobile emotion that rapidly circulates, as it travels from body to body and place to place. Such depictions of contagion also challenge the idea that fear is a private emotion “contained within the contours of a subject”, given how it manifests in a genocide of widespread and far-reaching damage. Not only does fear spread throughout the social landscape of Rwanda, but it also intriguingly infects and inflects the testimonies that are being produced. Although the first-hand survivor accounts that Gourevitch compiles come from a string of disparate sources, they are still united by elements of paranoia, hypervigilance, the intrusion of haunting memories and similar distressed psychological attitudes. Furthermore, this insurmountable fear is internalised at the level of the book’s formal structure, where the storytelling itself becomes mobile, stretching beyond the immediate context of Rwanda and traversing back and forth between different textualities. By highlighting how the tentacles of fear influence everything it touches, from the Rwandese population and their testimonial accounts to the writer’s compositional strategies, this emotion is transformed into something pathological—one that demands necessary treatment and healing.

A preliminary perusal of Sam Selvon, Bernadine Evaristo and Hanif Kureishi’s written works reveal... more A preliminary perusal of Sam Selvon, Bernadine Evaristo and Hanif Kureishi’s written works reveals a conscientious attempt to engage with the experiences of marginalised identities. Such a shared emphasis on making visible the stories of persecution faced by minoritarian demographics becomes a politically charged move, aimed at carving out a space for those previously excluded groups in the canonical mainstream. Beyond pushing representations of otherness to the foreground by articulating the experiences of those located on the periphery, it is also critical to understand how these writers “dissolve considerations of content into those of form” and convey otherness through the use of unorthodox or non-conforming formal, structural and stylistic strategies. While cultural theorist Isabel Waidner suggests that “[h]istorically, sociopolitical marginalisation and avant-garde aesthetics have not come together in British literature, [with many writers] counterintuitively divorcing outsider experience and formal innovation”, I argue that Selvon, Evaristo and Kureishi strive to achieve the complete opposite. Their oeuvres often explode with a radical manipulation of syntax and grammar, fuse vernaculars with standard English, and adopt an experimental attitude towards conceiving how architectural space on a page fits. Along with a multiplicity of other techniques that resist easy categorisation, such diverse literary codes become arsenals of resistance to challenge the monolithic majority culture and deconstruct the semantics of language that underpins eurocentric/phallocentric/heterocentric epistemological privilege. In so doing, these writers who go against the grain—or revolutionise it—help to imagine a more inclusive and progressive future in the British body politic.

Situated during India’s state of emergency, Rohinton Mistry’s A Fine Balance (1995) presents a pa... more Situated during India’s state of emergency, Rohinton Mistry’s A Fine Balance (1995) presents a panoramic view of the nascent nation under Prime Minister Indira Gandhi’s regime. A political system designed to deliver pain at every juncture, there is no room for human compassion in this autocratic and callous machinery. Psychological tactics of torture and humiliation, in particular, are employed by the state as a form of disciplinary control to subdue its citizens to a level of submission. And as historian Ute Frevert writes, “[b]y bringing people to their knees in front of others, [those who humiliate] also emphatically assert their superior, more powerful position” (3). These humiliating apparatuses of public punishments that reinforce existing hierarchies are not only prevalent at the political level but are also perpetuated throughout the legacies of caste and within the intimate spheres of home. In turn, feelings of shame achieve an indisputable affective ubiquity as they run rampant among the principal protagonists in the novel. While Dina and the tailors navigate experiences of humiliation by creating a safe sanctuary for themselves and banding together in solidarity, Maneck’s decision to commit suicide reveals a poignant attempt to extricate himself from a powerless predicament that has paralysed him. By highlighting how these various individuals respond to the onslaught of humiliating atrocities that plague their everyday lives, readers are thus given a glimpse into the human psyche under duress, as the characters are instinctively driven to find—within these systems of degradation—any modicum of hope and dignity.

Defined by John Grierson as the “creative treatment of actuality”, documentaries typically record... more Defined by John Grierson as the “creative treatment of actuality”, documentaries typically record lived experiences and organise those perceptions into film. Whether or not it intends to instruct, educate, or entertain, documentaries still have a baseline preoccupation with compiling evidence and maintaining an image of truth. However, the concept of documentaries as a straightforward and accessible window into reality has been challenged by the rise of experimental documentary films, which employ unorthodox aesthetic strategies like non-verbal storytelling, nonlinear narratives and elliptical editing that disrupt the audience’s ability to make sense of what they view. In other words, such experimental cinematic techniques make the documentaries opaque and resistant to comprehension, leaving viewers frustrated, disorientated and confused. But as I will explore in this essay, through the case study of Helen Levitt’s “In the Street” (1948), Bruce Conner’s “Report” (1967) and Jonathan Caouette’s “Tarnation” (2003), making these documentaries resistant to comprehension is a deliberate and calculated move. These three documentaries, which revolve around highly complex and sometimes emotionally challenging material like street poverty, John F Kennedy’s assassination, and a man’s traumatic struggle with his mother’s mental illness, are difficult to represent through conventional means. Hence, instead of trying to give an all-encompassing, totalising account of these experiences, experimental documentaries ultimately highlight the ways in which viewers can never fully grasp or understand the inarticulable complexities embedded within these scenes.

Ghosts are, as Bosman argues, liminal entities. They blur ontological boundaries by embodying bot... more Ghosts are, as Bosman argues, liminal entities. They blur ontological boundaries by embodying both “absence” and “presence” (4). Though these spirits do not reside in the physical world, they still occupy a substantial portion of the narrative. By underscoring the “indeterminacies associated with spectres”, the liminal status of our unnamed first-person narrator in The Sympathizer is also “emphasised” (4). Our undercover spy narrator must delicately tread between his dual political allegiances to both the Viet Cong and American-backed South Vietnam, while having to occupy an interstitial space of being both an “aggressor” and “victim” (10). Essentially, although the narrator commits acts of assassination in the novel (aggressor), he is also a pawn or puppet carrying out the orders of powerful authorities (victim). Building on Bosman’s article, I argue that the intrusion of these “liminal” spirits that torment the narrator repeatedly—manifested in the form of the crapulent major and Sonny’s ghosts—represents the psychological toll of “playing both sides”. In doing so, readers witness the complications of the narrator’s fractured self, where inhabiting these dual, sometimes contradictory identities becomes less an asset and more a haunting liability.

Upon entering Nam June Paik’s exhibit entitled Sistine Chapel, viewers are confronted by a toweri... more Upon entering Nam June Paik’s exhibit entitled Sistine Chapel, viewers are confronted by a towering metal scaffolding structure which has a multitude of white projectors affixed to it. The architectural space is then transformed into a bewildering simultaneity of colour and movement, as these projectors cast a dizzying array of bright lights and flickering images onto the ceiling. Coupled with the riot of high-frequency sounds reverberating from within, this sensory assault parallels the overwhelming feeling we get when visiting the monumental Sistine Chapel in the Vatican City. While Paik had named his installation after the Vatican Catholic Chapel—to invoke our memory of the building’s spiritual grandeur and the religious frescoes painted by Michaelangelo that decorate it—he replaces the divine with the digital, focalising our experience of the sublime through the use of technology. As literary critic Leo Marx writes, natural elements like “alpine scener[ies] and an embattled ocean” are not the only wonders that “deepen contemplation and give their own sublimity”. Technological systems too, with their “vastness and magnificence”, can also “induce this ideal state of [being]”. As such, Paik breaks away from the mundane ubiquity of video and tape recordings by manipulating visual-audio footage to the plateaus of high imagination, to ultimately manufacture a sublime ineffability.

Set within the magical town of Macondo, Gabriel García Márquez's One Hundred Years of Solitude (1... more Set within the magical town of Macondo, Gabriel García Márquez's One Hundred Years of Solitude (1967) chronicles the lives of seven generations of the Buendía family, along with their fluctuating fortunes and eventual effacement from the world. As the narrative unfurls, the characters experience episodes of déjà vu, which is defined as the uncanny feeling elicited when one has seen or been in the same place before. Readers too, experience this psychological phenomenon when they journey through the concatenation of character names, personality traits and biological trajectories that repeat themselves ad infinitum. This sense of déjà vu becomes ubiquitous, and its overwhelming presence can be attributed to Garry Trompf’s theory of historical recurrence. As Trompf argues, “[h]istory repeat[s] itself because certain enduring factors governing group behaviour continually reassert[s] themselves. Human nature does not change, even if its historical expressions [are different]” (190). Indeed, the immutability of human nature that perpetuates this feeling of déjà vu is evinced in the Buendía household. The family innately shares the same affinity for knowledge, is animated by the same desire for power, and possesses the same propensity for incestuous lust that leads to genealogical failure. Hence, by foregrounding human nature as unchanging or reduced to an easily predicted pattern, the characters are revealed to be incarcerated by existential inevitability and ultimately suspended in the tragic orbit of an eternal return.

From the very outset of Geoffrey Chaucer’s epic poem, one can discern a palpable sense of sorrow ... more From the very outset of Geoffrey Chaucer’s epic poem, one can discern a palpable sense of sorrow that undergirds the narrative. As our principal character Troilus catches sight of Criseyde, he becomes consumed by an extreme desire for her and clings to deferred hope that she will reciprocate. Troilus’s tormented emotions can be conceived here as a form of “lovesickness”, as it manifests itself in “bodily symptoms” that possess a distinct aetiology (Wack 5). From copious amounts of crying and general malaise to melodramatic fits of fainting, this sickly, melancholic experience of love is also mirrored in the other protagonists. Yet, it is the incessant behaviour of weeping and the physical production of tears which interest me most, and which this essay will bring under scrutiny. Indeed, I argue that such tears shed privately by Troilus are genuine signs of his sorrow that reveal his vulnerable state of being. But as Pandarus later instructs, Troilus must deceptively stain the love letters he sends to Criseyde with tears to secure the affection of his lady. In contrast, Criseyde’s inscrutable tears reflect her non-committal position towards Troilus’s advances, as she ultimately puts love aside to prioritise her own survival and safety. As such, the characters are shown to be conscious in wielding their tears to either persuade others or protect themselves, as Chaucer foregrounds this rhetorical device as a necessary tool to negotiate power on the battlefield of love strategically.

In Wilkie Collins’s sensational novel, The Moonstone (1868), the titular jewel that was previousl... more In Wilkie Collins’s sensational novel, The Moonstone (1868), the titular jewel that was previously plundered from a sacred Indian shrine and is later inherited by Rachel Verinder, goes missing during her eighteenth birthday celebration. As a reaction to the prospects of theft, an investigative frenzy ensues, leading the detectives recruited to utilise a myriad of methods to identify the culprit behind the diamond’s disappearance. From sifting through a series of divergent eyewitness accounts to making logical and objective deductions, there is an initial emphasis on unravelling the mystery through tangible or ocular-based evidence. Nevertheless, these findings merely feed into the narrative’s dilatory and digressive impulse, leaving the principal characters on a trail of red herrings as they fail to achieve any proper resolution. It is only after examining the subjective states of the characters’ interiorities, like Rosanna’s suppressed love for Franklin or the latter’s abnormal sleep-walking activity, that the truth of The Moonstone is revealed. By locating the key to solving the crime in the nebulous depths of the individual being, Collins privileges the human mind—replete with secrets and inconsistencies—as the greatest site of mystery. In doing so, we witness an epistemological shift in the Victorian justice system, one that views a person’s inner world as a vital tool to understand and quarantine criminality.

As anthropologist Rachel Engmann writes, colonised women were often reduced to “titillating [...]... more As anthropologist Rachel Engmann writes, colonised women were often reduced to “titillating [...] caricatures” to fulfil a “phallocentric fantasy”. In other words, beneath the scientific or administrative disguise of colonial photography, portraits of women—which inhabited an erotic nature—were captured and circulated within the empire to satiate the “omnipotent, colonial, male gaze [that] sees but is never seen”. In particular, the 19th Century photograph taken by Kassian Cephas, of an Indonesian woman delousing another lady’s luscious hair, can be said to be fetishistic. These women are young and attractive, and their close physical contact with each other hints at the possibility of a homoerotic attraction that becomes a site of intrigue. However, such images merely feed into the problematic and reductive trope that Southeast Asian women are sexualised objects, whose only source of power is contingent on their exotic beauty. In rejecting the archetypal discourse surrounding these indigenous women, Malaysian contemporary artist Yee I-Lann borrows Cephas’s archival images and reimagines the Southeast Asian women depicted into powerful mythological figures or even vengeful, monstrous beings. By drawing upon the folklore, myths and oral histories of her nation and interpolating them into her art, Yee offers a counter-narrative that celebrates these women without eroticising them, while further dismantling the hierarchical positioning between the colonial male gaze and the colonised female body.

In analysing the trajectory of Modern art, American critic Clement Greenberg contends that modern... more In analysing the trajectory of Modern art, American critic Clement Greenberg contends that modernist painters found themselves producing a pattern of “flatness”. From Manet and Cézanne to Kandinsky and Mondrian, their works presented a gradual departure from the three-dimensional pictorial illusion of realism and an emerging interest to experiment with new simplified forms and colours. By further eliminating additional elements like a work’s narrative or subject matter, these artists “eventuated in a kind of painting flatter than anything in Western art, [...] so flat indeed that it could hardly contain any recognisable images”. I argue that this tendency towards abstraction, in particular, is figured prominently in paintings of war and violence. Beset by the first two international wars and other civil conflicts rippling through nations like Korea, Spain and Vietnam, the 20th Century was perceived as a tumultuous time of relentless socio-political movements. However, it was also a period defined by its harrowing death toll, as innocent lives were conveniently discarded in their positions as pawns amidst a power struggle. Instead of mimetically replicating the realities of such horrific loss in their art, modernist painters slowly realised that such an approach was unethical and merely (re)traumatises spectators and survivors. As such, abstraction becomes a visual genre most suited to render images of catastrophic events: not only does its non-representational nature mirror the unspeakability of trauma, but it also creates a critical and necessary emotional distance for the audience to witness the painter’s art.

In Pearl, a man grapples with the death of his infant daughter, as he meets her in his dream and ... more In Pearl, a man grapples with the death of his infant daughter, as he meets her in his dream and navigates a fantastical world. Although his daughter—personified by a heavenly pearl maiden—repeatedly instructs him to take consolation in the doctrines of Christ, he flickers in and out of understanding and eventually refuses to take her advice. For example, the maiden mandates that the dreamer cannot be with her, but may only see the city which she inhabits "from the outside" (22). By doing so, she establishes a clear boundary between them, one that he must abide by. Despite knowing that her instructions are divinely "ordained", the dreamer "spr[ings]" across the river towards her in a fit of desperation (26). Yet, such paroxysmal movement catapults him out of sleep, where he laments, "[n]ow may all be to that Prince's satisfaction" (26). Thus, the dreamer struggles with his faith till the poem's end, as he finds the divine will both difficult to accept and even incompatible with his desire at times.

In Egon Schiele’s “The Embrace”, we are afforded a bird’s eye view into the private, tender world... more In Egon Schiele’s “The Embrace”, we are afforded a bird’s eye view into the private, tender world of an unidentified lovers’ union. Here, the couple’s nude bodies have been inserted diagonally into the composition and are nestled between the undulating folds of crumpled bed sheets. While this moment captured—post-coitus—is characterised by a gentle intimacy, the way that Schiele has applied his paint is undeniably jarring. From the distorted anatomies of the figures which are delineated by bold black lines, to the mottled and muddy palette used to fill in what is behind, Schiele’s artwork has acquired an expressiveness that has surpassed all naturalistic categories. As Austrian art historian Werner Hofmann writes, Schiele exhibited a desire to “know the flesh [rather] than [to] polish it.” In other words, he wanted to expose the raw psychological states of his models and project the subjects’ uninhibited urges onto the canvas without beautification or varnish. Hence, it is only through endowing these sensual tender bodies with the raw grotesque style that he paints with, that Schiele can reveal lovers at their most vulnerable, and love at its most authentic.

Yee I-Lann’s Study of Lamprey’s Malayan Male I & II features black-and-white snapshots of an indi... more Yee I-Lann’s Study of Lamprey’s Malayan Male I & II features black-and-white snapshots of an indigenous man standing on a pedestal as he is left completely in the nude. This portrait of the Malayan was seized from a reservoir of colonial archives, which perpetuate the image of the Southeast Asian natives as fascinating exoticas to be documented and consumed. Yet, as photographer Allan Sekula writes, such portraits are “repressive” by nature, as they were intended to “establish and delimit the terrain of the other, [or] to define [...] the typology” of whoever was caught on film. In other words, colonial photography was employed to create an ethnographic encyclopaedia that classified the natives into stereotypes that were harmful or untrue. In Yee’s work, however, she digitally alters these archival materials by editing in an unglamorous image of herself and cropping the Malayan man out from the photo. By doing so, she reimagines the prism of her nation’s historical memory and articulates—on behalf of the generations of Malayans who came before her—a refusal to be exoticised for European fantasy or rule.

In Evette Dionne’s “Intersectionality and the Black Lives Matter Movement” (2019), a sustained th... more In Evette Dionne’s “Intersectionality and the Black Lives Matter Movement” (2019), a sustained thread of police brutality against the Black community in the U.S. has become a rallying point for protests and campaigns of various permutations. A plea to secure the right to life for all Americans, these movements speak on behalf of innocent Black voices that have been historically discarded in the name of justice. While news of unlawfully shot Black men have saturated the representational plane of the nation’s social discourse, Dionne observes that Black women, Black disabled and Black queer lives with similar experiences are typically ignored. The disparities in whose deaths we privilege and ultimately commit to memory hence highlight our human tendency to disregard intersectional identities, or those who face additional, hybrid forms of oppression. When viewed through Peter Elbow’s “Binary Thinking”, we see how binarized prescriptions of being fail to account for the multifaceted nature of identity. Though Black women, Black disabled and Black queer lives are represented on the basis of their race, they are excluded on the account of other identity markers. In the process, intersectional identities become outsiders of the very communities that claim them, and the vast continuum of prejudice they face is left buried. Hence, it is only by decentering the binary that we may unearth the voices that have been eclipsed or erased, and retrieve the stories that exist between the margins of what dominant ideology has written.