Preservation - Skewed Desire : a zine on display in the 25x25 exhibition at SMU de Suantio Gallery during the 2025 Arts Fest
This is a pdf capture of the zine created by Arvin Tay for the 2025 Arts Fest 25x25 exhibition which contains a poetry inspired by Chua Ek Kay’s artwork "Wall Of History" (2006).
"I wrote Preservation-Skewed Desire to be didactic and easy to understand, expecting that people coming to this exhibit will only read our works just once, so I hope they could get something out of this from just one read.
I was looking at Chua Ek Kay’s Wall Of History (2006) and, in my head, trying to find meaning in all of its abstractness, then I caught myself over-obsessing with how my work would be perceived by you now (in the future). Then there was a lot contemplation about being an artist and making art, and eventually when my train of thought led to the painting itself, I thought about how the wildness of the painting and its untamed style manifested exactly what I needed to take away, the lesson of not being skewed by worries about the result and embracing a good amount of uncertainty.
So I felt it was perfect that my piece could try to break down our desires for preservation and to also be a reminder to live in the moment. I wrote the last stanza first; it reads faster (more clauses per line) to get the exciting euphoric feeling of revelation across. Then I wrote the first 2 stanzas after as I painstakingly dug through my mind for the root causes of these desires.
I hope you guys managed to take away something from this :3, hopefully it was an opportunity to know ourselves a little better and live life a little better" - Arvin Tay, Year 2, School of Computing and Information Systems
"I wrote Preservation-Skewed Desire to be didactic and easy to understand, expecting that people coming to this exhibit will only read our works just once, so I hope they could get something out of this from just one read.
I was looking at Chua Ek Kay’s Wall Of History (2006) and, in my head, trying to find meaning in all of its abstractness, then I caught myself over-obsessing with how my work would be perceived by you now (in the future). Then there was a lot contemplation about being an artist and making art, and eventually when my train of thought led to the painting itself, I thought about how the wildness of the painting and its untamed style manifested exactly what I needed to take away, the lesson of not being skewed by worries about the result and embracing a good amount of uncertainty.
So I felt it was perfect that my piece could try to break down our desires for preservation and to also be a reminder to live in the moment. I wrote the last stanza first; it reads faster (more clauses per line) to get the exciting euphoric feeling of revelation across. Then I wrote the first 2 stanzas after as I painstakingly dug through my mind for the root causes of these desires.
I hope you guys managed to take away something from this :3, hopefully it was an opportunity to know ourselves a little better and live life a little better" - Arvin Tay, Year 2, School of Computing and Information Systems