AAWAA's 20th Anniversary Show, SOMArts, San Francisco, September 2009
Cynthia Tom has been encouraing visual/verbal collaborations between member artists and writers, so I asked Genny Lim and Nellie Wong to work with me to create pieces for this show.
My artist statement: One or two lifetimes ago, when I was an art director working on major corporate accounts, I used to sit around in a glossy office in the Embarcadero Center tossing ideas around with my copywriter. Sometimes he thought of a headline and I came up with a visual; sometimes it was the other way around. Brainstorming and teamwork were my favorite parts of the job. It was so much fun I could almost forget that we were selling people products they didn't need.
What an honor to be collaborating today with two gifted poets of conscience: Genny Lim and Nellie Wong. We are selling nothing—except the notion that it is vitally important to keep seeing and feeling and thinking.
A closet photographer with a good eye and a shaky hand can find redemption of sorts in digital photography. Cropping and adjusting images is no substitute for technical expertise, but I love to carry my point-and-shoot and squeeze off random shots on my daily walks. And I am lucky enough to have a partner that actually sees when I say, “Lookit, lookit!”
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Aung San Suu Kyi, 2009. 14" x 20". Mixed media-poem by Genny Lim, etching by Shizue Seigel, paper, thread, nails on foamcore.
Genny Lim's poem, “Aung San Suu Kyi,” captures both the beauty and tragedy of the eternal struggle for justice. Suu Kyi endures with a clear-eyed serenity that gives her nation—indeed the world—hope. The image of the lady who “disappears behind the clouds” reminded me of my etching “The Moon Remembers.” I love the dark, yet luminous quality of mezzotints. My moon was originally a masculine moon with a Roman nose in a European landscape; now it peeks from behind Genny’s verbal Asian imagery, suspended by thin red threads. Is it still the man in the moon or the rabbit they see in Japan? The same moon hangs in everyone's sky, by turns pensive and accusatory, yearning and yet complete, imbued with meaning as personal as a night secret and as universal as the turning of the earth.
AUNG SAN SUU KYI
The Lady in the house
disappears like the moon behind clouds
No one has seen her in many years
except in photographs or dreams
Who knows if she’s real anymore or just a ghost?
Like all the ones vanished along the Irrawaddy?
The sad-eyed Lady with the flower in her hair
whose name, Suu Kyi, is whispered
on the lips of school children
now floating on the river like dropped petals
The Lady of the house who drifts through
the fetid rice crops washed up for the gods
prays among the wounded
who wear the clothes of the dead
She digs in the mud of imperfection
and weeps among graves like Llorona
Daughter of Aung San, the Liberator
who sleeps inside the cage of her captors’ fears
She waits for the long night to end so that morning
may open the petals of forgiveness in her heart
May 9, 2008
by Genny Lim
poem@2008 by Genny Lim/mixed media piece&etching ©2009 by Shizue Seigel
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Making Music, 2009. 8" x 10". Photograph with poem by Nellie Wong, visual by Shizue Seigel.
Nellie's poem “Making Music” reminded me of a window on Clement Street. The family that lives behind it blocks the glances of the curious by pasting up cheap frosted vinyl—bamboo to remind them of home and of a softer landscape than the stucco, concrete and parking meters outside. I snuck a peek inside one evening. I glimpsed a barely furnished room, a Formica dining table, a young mother serving soup.
The wind smacks its lips against the window pane
Cold air seeps through the cracks
Fingers dance across the keyboard
As tires screech on the street in early spring
Whoosh whoosh whoooosh!
Cries the wind colliding
Against the fertile plains of your heart
Your mouth salivates at oil sizzling in the wok,
Garlic, baby dragons, snap and crackle in heat
Whistling snakes through the walls,
Footsteps tap-dance above your head.
Your consciousness hangs
Out to dry on the laundry line
Snap snap whoosh whoosh snap whoosh snap
Then rumba to Begin the Beguine in La Habana
Songs of exile, songs of home echo
Through clusters of villages
Millions of migrants return from Beijing and Shanghai
To find work, scour the countryside for hope
Human voices rise from the street outside your window
The heater hesitates, silences the stardust hiding
In the crescent of a white moon
Now your fingers rest
Now your fingers listen
In the galaxy of reverie
Nellie Wong
poem © 2009 Nellie Wong/photo © 2009 Shizue Seigel
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Rivulets into Rivers” called to mind a favorite shot of Ocean Beach, early on a grey morning, the receding tide leaving behind hard-packed sand marked only the tracks of the beach patrol and a few early risers “revolving in joy away from machines.” The westerly wind blows in three-week old soot from China and the sea lions are returning to Seal Rocks.
Rivulets to Rivers
Rivulets into rivers, memories noisy
As the wind blowing through the garden
Calling me, soft and tender as a newborn
Hail the storms, the sand dunes, the torrents
Evolving and shaping love,
Love uncontained
Somnambulant, when energy sleeps, when it rises
Tall as the pyramids of Teotihuacan
Eve’s existence debated
In the distillery of the galaxy
Nimbus clouds, those that form dragons or tadpoles
Burrowing furiously through the mind as
Education, even research or physical contact,
Intimacy, the smile of a girl showing her first tooth
Sleekness of young greyhounds on Chenery Street
Summer in the city as I round the corner from Diamond
Ever present this day in my neighborhood Glen Park
Revolving in joy away from machines
Nellie Wong
June 6, 2009
Poem ©2009 Nellie Wong/photo ©2009 Shizue Seigel
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“I Also Sing of Myself.” Sing through the night, Nellie! Halfway ’round the world in Bali, I greet the dawn in silence from the white tile verandah of Genny Lim’s Saraswati Retreat. But in my heart I sing to Ganesha and Rama and Krishna, I sing of the wheeling stars and the gardener who loves his trees by cutting off their limbs, just so.
I Also Sing of Myself
I celebrate myself, I sing
Walt Whitman
I sing deep into the night
After midnight I awake a hummingbird,
Sometimes a toucan or a nightingale.
The skies enter my ears.
The moon hides behind the curtain
Of a star-strewn sky.
The voice. I cannot command it.
I cannot censor it.
I sing, sing of myself
The self is a thief,
A reveler, a student,
A jester, a fly, a dancer of tango.
Voices of the self gather
In fields of sunflowers.
My selves merge, then split
As atoms.
Particles of silver adorn
My body.
Slivers of light shower
The universe of aloneness,
The gratitude of breath.
Nellie Wong
poem © 2009 Nellie Wong/photo ©2009 Shizue Seigel
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“Consumed.” Will somebody tell me who started the fad for stuffed animals stuck on workmen's trucks? Jammed under roof racks, lashed to radiator grills, Tweeties and Donald Ducks turn dingy, then grimy, then moldy. Like the hearts of men too tough to ask for a hug? Too cool to show that their hearts are quietly bleeding?
Consumed
Long Island, New York
Wal-Mart employee
34 years old, an African American man
A temporary worker
Stampeded to death at 5:00 A.M.
By 200 shoppers on Black
Friday, day after Thanksgiving.
Who’s to blame?
Wal-Mart’s lack of security?
Many waiting all night
For doors to open
At the crack of dawn?
Wal-Mart’s statement
Through unseen suits
Sends their prayers
Who’s to blame?
The economic crisis?
People whose homes are
being foreclosed?
People who don’t know
if their next paycheck
may be the last?
People in frenzy to buy
That flat-screen TV
That Nintendo game
That I-Pod, that Blackberry
That barbeque that will cook for hundreds
That Northface jacket
That rocking horse
That Armani knock-off
That pair of Nikes priced
At inflated dollars?
Who’s to blame?
Who’s to blame?
Who’s to blame?
The Dow down 680 points
The official U.S. in recession
The terrorists in Mumbai
The stores opening up at 5:00 AM
Thanksgiving?
Nellie Wong
Poem ©2009 Nellie Wong/photo ©2009 Shizue Seigel
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“Breakfast Lunch Dinner” sings of green chopsticks and pho and the spirit of the food goddess glistening through the grease on a cheap plastic platter. We wolf down chow fun with green pepper and black beans and stare out of the hard fluorescent light into the neon stream of traffic at closing time on a Saturday night.
BREAKFAST LUNCH DINNER
Breakfast
The night before, I place the turkey carcass
in the huge pot, turn the water to boiling
I fill a rice bowl with raw rice,
sprinkle a pinch of salt and dip two teaspoons of
vegetable oil to prepare the rice
Two hours later, the turkey meat falls
off the bones,
the work of the carcass completed
Next I pour the rice into the pot, let it
boil, then simmer
Now for breakfast, I ladle faw gai jook
into a bowl impressed with the shape
of kernels of rice,
with chopped scallion and shreds of turkey meat
Before I eat, I inhale the fragrance
of love, then begin to swallow
the faw gai jook
as if it’s my last meal
Lunch
The waitress places a square white plate
before me. I hold my green chopsticks, ready.
My eyes take in a pyramid
of green papaya, match-stick thin,
with slivered carrots in a dressing
of lime juice, fish sauce and bird’s eye pepper
Coins of daikon and carrot decorate
the four corners of the plate,
white and orange moons convening the four seasons
Picking up the soy-sauce dish of chopped peanuts,
I shower the salad, my eyes flirting
with the next customer’s bowl of pho
Intoxicated now with the deep-fried onion strips,
mint and basil leaves crowning my lunch,
I guide the salad into my mouth.
Dinner
Bah Bah steams the gee ngook beng
topped with hom ngui
Salted fish preserved for the soul
Ma tosses slices of fuzzy squash
into the wok as they dance in concert
with garlic and onion
Bowls of steamed eggs and ow fu
grace the table. And, yes, the bowl of soup
with sliced lotus root, a knob of ginger root
and fresh green onions floating on top.
The soup, translucent and fragrant, steaming,
heralds the sit-down dinner
the family has once a week
on our Wednesday night off
from six days of work at The Great China Restaurant
Nellie Wong
Poem ©2009 Nellie Wong/photo ©2009 Shizue Seigel
