welcome (except to you, lizards)

Just as I finished repainting the door and gate to my flat on 1 May 2020, I searched blogspot for all our previous attempts to paint this door....starting with this > 4 Sep 2006 , 2 weeks before J formally registered ampulets studio as a business.
This 25 Dec 2011 blogpost recorded the last time we customised the door with a new text - "Love One Another" using a thin sheet of plywood. This was the design we lived with from 2011 till I repainted it yesterday. In that blogpost, there are links to all the other designs from 2006-2010 - my favourite was 2008's - "God is Love x Christmas".

I decided that the door would just remain white and not carry any designs. It was hard to imagine what design would replace those 2 kids on the door and the memories they represented. Instead, I painted on the white square panel of the gate where the unit number would typically be displayed.

Because the panel on the gate is a square, I remembered this square Lightbox that J made for the last ampulets studio project we did together; 'You can take a break'.

In this project, J re-imagined Kidnap Bob (a character that I've drawn since maybe 2005) as a caregiver robot called V8 instead. The Lightbox was part of the 'You can take a break' installation for a travelling exhibition on caregiving in Singapore that Objectifs organised, supported by the Lien Foundation.  On one side of the Lightbox is the head of the robot Kidnap Bob or V8, and on the other side is a cat. I'll be shameless. It was the cutest thing. I therefore decided to recreate its design on the square panel of the gate.

J had wanted to keep the Lightbox at the end of the exhibition and install it at home. But with all that happened at the end of 2018 and early 2019, we never got round to getting back the Lightbox.The photo below is the only record I have of the Lightbox, from J's IG photo.



I took the chance to paint a "Knock' instruction above the button for the doorbell. With "CircuitBreaker" and the number of deliveries coming by, I can imagine their frustration waiting while pressing on that defunct doorbell.

Since I had some more black paint left, I left another instruction for the more literate lizards. (Lizards, if you are reading this blog: I hate you, so please go away or face my wrath.)

So there. A new ampulets welcome. I am pretty happy with it.


Comments

Post a Comment

Popular posts from this blog

miracle man

Image
I can never quite tell if Ma J is asleep or just pretending The old lady in the bed next to Ma J's is in hospital because of a second stroke. When we were visiting Ma J this afternoon, the old lady's middle-aged son was also there. He was in his usual round-neck tee tucked into a pair of blue jeans with a belt made of buffalo hide. His limbs are slim, but his belly is round. His bald head, too, is round and abnormally large for his small frame. Let's call him Ah Biao , or if you prefer an English name, you can think of him as Bill (after his buffalo hide belt). When J and I walked out of the ward, Ah Biao or Bill followed us. Three of us stood around the counter by the nurses' work area. J and I were quiet, enjoying the break. Then Ah Biao wanted to show us something special. "Eh, I show you something." Ah Biao unzipped his black waist pouch and took out a small yellow cloth pouch. He untied the colourful string that secured the opening of the pouch. He weigh
Read the rest of this post

on a Hou Hsiao Hsien movie set

Image
By the tracks of the Jiji Station, the oldest train station in Taiwan OK, not quite. We did not even manage to go all the way south to Hou Hsiao Hsien's KaoShiung or even Tainan, but we did venture out from Taipei for 3 days to Taichung. But the real takeaway was actually this supposed feature of Hou Hsiao Hsien's films - trains! Trains are about the best thing about traveling. Unlike cars and taxis, trains are a social mode of transport. Train stations allow for reunions and departures, points to assess and affirm relationships. I admit that all this fades away when you are tired or in a great hurry (or both). But seriously, cars (oh, 4-wheelers!) have only brought about pollution and wasteful consumption, traffic jams, asphalt, mindless obsession with speed and countless quarrels in the stressful, enclosed interiors of cars. Friends, take it slow. Take the train. Read a book. Hold your partner's hand. Be there with the people around you. With Taiwan's highspeed rail
Read the rest of this post

fear not history

Image
Fiction on this island has never quite flourished. Perhaps because we've never quite made peace with our histories. But two genres of fiction hold special place in Singapore as a result. Ghost stories - the art of unresolved pasts. And that even stranger fruit of fact-as-fiction/fiction-as-history. Part speculative history. Part documentary fiction. A romance of obscurity. The Lan Fang Chronicles , Choy Ka Fai's work supported by the Arts Council's Arts Creation Fund and commissioned for this year's Arts Festival, is maybe of this latter genre. Choy Ka Fai chances upon the Lan Fang Republic, supposedly the first democratic republic in SEAsia, set up by the Hakka Chinese in West Borneo. His research in West Borneo, China and Holland takes him through archival material, abandoned sites, photocopied photographs, a supposed descendent of Luo Fang Bo (founder of Lan Fang) and accounts of Dutch missionaries and colonists. These materials allow him to re-construct a sk
Read the rest of this post