Folks who follow my IG account would have seen the many photographs of the view I have taken from my living room balcony since I first moved into my flat in April 2021. In May 2025, when the Singapore Art Book Fair dates were released, I thought I'll make a project that has been in my head.
One project in my head is to make a small but chunky book. I didn't yet know the content but I always wanted to try making a book that is awkwardly, unnaturally, inelegantly thick.
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In almost every culture, 7 is a magical number. 7 is lucky. It is among the special few, indivisible except by itself. In 7 days God made the world, which included time to rest. 7 is completeness, it is perfection. In the Gospels, when Jesus was asked how often should one forgive one’s brother, his answer was 70 times 7. I think he means to say forgiveness has no limits – forgive until forgiveness is complete and perfect – and for all eternity.
Can our human minds fully grasp perfection and eternity? We know the idea, we give it names, definitions, symbols, even numbers. But it is not a knowledge from experience. A number is, paradoxically, our substitute for what is immeasurable.
Some years ago I came across this song “七天” (“7 days”) by Taiwanese singer-songwriter Bobby Chen. In the song he asks: if he had 7 days to do as he will, what should he be doing? On one hand, 7 days is like a metaphor for an infinite amount of freedom. On the other, if 7 days were all one had to live, it is not a lot of time. The singer runs through the possibilities. He could read a book, speak with a cloud, ride a boat to an imaginary world, plant a tree…and concludes, in the vast field of human experiences, he would like to lie beside his beloved. The song is a paean to freedom. It is a love song to being alive, and a way of saying goodbye.
7 days is but 168 hours, 10800 minutes, or simply 604800 seconds? I would like to be able to say goodbye like Bobby Chen.
When I bought my flat in 2020, I was drawn to the amazing view from its balcony. In the distance is a nature reserve, a water reservoir and the tallest hill in our otherwise flat little island. The expansive skies seem within reach. But across the road, between my flat and the view, is a large empty plot of land. No such land will be left idle for long. So every time a friend visits the flat and exclaims at the beautiful view, I would reply resolutely: “It won’t last. It will be gone in a few years’ time when new flats come up across the road.” I say this lest I forget that it is not mine to hold.
Just how lovely is the view?
Often when I look up from whatever I was doing and a new scene presents itself by my balcony, it literally takes my breath away. It’s a cliché, I know. For that briefest of moments, a gasp, time stops.
Then the moment passes.
Returning into time, I will reach immediately for my phone camera.
In this book is a selection of 490 images from thousands taken from the balcony, arranged chronologically and time stamped. They date from April 2021 in the midst of the pandemic to June 2025. You can say the images are a record of these 50 months, as are the gaps or weeks when no images exist. Reviewing them, I notice patterns across the year –of the sun, the skies, the weather, my perception, life’s rhythms… Maybe you will also sense the deja-vu with some scenes – but of course, nothing is ever exactly the same. The variations seem endless. As I started preparing this book and after the official state announcement on the development of that empty plot of land, the frequency of the photographs increased. More, more, always more – oh that it would not end!
Sontag has written most eloquently about this compulsion in her now-classic On Photography. She describes it as a compulsion to acquire, to collect, to know, to still, to hold, to capture, to make a witness… All of this she calls an “imaginary possession”. How true. Even I could seize and freeze all these innumerable moments of beauty within the finite frame of the image, the skies above us are not bound, we cannot will time to stop, or that our lives extend into eternity. We possess neither the past nor the future.
The creatures that come by my balcony live entirely in their present. This is their freedom.
Besides the resident spiders and some wayward lizards, a sunbird will occasionally visit. It flutters into my balcony, express its nonchalance, proceeds to make its dalliance with the foliage and flowers, and leaves when it finds my balcony to be wanting. The next day the sunbird may return, having forgotten its disappointment.
From November and sometimes into the new year, Pacific swallows appear and criss-cross the skies before my balcony. Their swoops and dives are most spectacular. At certain points in this evening aerial show, they can fly so close it feels as if they are headed straight into my flat! No matter how fast they are, you will not miss their distinct curved wingspans and split tails - those Ninja shurikens. When they catch the surf and ride the wind, they slow so much you can even spot the blues and yellows on their bodies. In the distance the reservoir is silver and the air is fluffy with mist. Something is saying farewell to the earth and returning to the atmosphere. In honour of this, the swallows are compelled to dance.
The view at my balcony is most beautiful at dusk.
During those months when the Pacific swallows visit and the sun sets furthest from my balcony, there are seldom dramatic peaches, shocking pinks, and angry reds. Indigo marks the close of day until the sky sinks into the midnight’s deep.
Indigo. A sort of secret dye, protected in the valleys.
“Keep your heart indigo,” a friend said to me once. Of course, those were not her exact words, she had said – “guard your heart”. A secret dye. Guard it.
We all have in us a truth, a hunger for the sacred. We all want to believe that there is – somewhere out there – something more beautiful than beauty, truer than true, bluer than blue. Indigo.
We are not likely to find this on earth; not with humans or in manmade things. Whatever we can hold is not perfection, and not for eternity. The dye fades. It stains another. It achieves shades inconsistent. But we still try. On each other’s stained hands we glimpse it. And this alone should be enough.
This is a prayer for looking up:
Under the same sky
let us not count the clouds or
dispute the names of shades
But with urgency
learn the signs of destruction:
forewarn your neighbour
if in their path the storms tend
Raise your hands to catch
the falling flowers and rain -
of these offerings
imagine what you can
At night survey the stars -
know that they burn before you are
and burn
when you return to dust
Consider the distance
between you and that above
as a measure of what you do not know
And so — make peace with the ground
on which you stand
and will
one day
lie.
May 17th 2025, on the front page of the newspapers, I read the announcement about the development of that empty plot.
I reached home early that evening. The wooden deck of the balcony was wet. The afternoon’s rain was still making its return to the sky.
Bukit Timah in the distance was shrouded in a veil that forms when water rises and night falls. I was drawn to that hazy distance the moment I lifted the blinds on the balcony – lines and forms fading – a reliance on memory for what is there – memories fading – the blurred lines and forms as they are – as they are; as they are they are enough. Looking out from the edge of my balcony, the skies open up. The waters of MacRitchie reservoir shimmer. The headlights and streetlights and houselights twinkle as we busy ourselves prepping for night. Above us, the skies are also rearranging themselves. Clouds stir like swathes of sound. Their movements are unhurried, free and in concert with each other. I tell myself it is because they have been doing this for centuries and millennia that they need neither score nor map. Train your eyes on every bit of that sky, always a new scene is unfolding. And when there is that final darkening, you have not watched the time. You have so much else of the world to watch that there is no need to say goodbye.
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