Many of the people I met in Singapore in recent days, on my ten-day tour out that way to review art shows and write about them here (supposedly, I didn’t see tooooo much worth remarking upon and was frankly disappointed by the Art SG experience which was a little too commercial and you saw that when you were there and I even asked this guy from New York about it and said, what about experimental stuff and stopped myself and said ohyoudontcareyoujustwannasellstuff and he was like, yeah, we’re a commercial gallery.’)
Uh. ‘Cause I’m, like, this:
QUICK SHIFTS. After being smacked verbally for ‘leaving your zines around’ (untrue), and also forwarded seven times when asked where the press room is (no one wanted to say I have no idea what you are talking about, they wanted to say, better you ask someone else), I decided to leave. Just because it looks good on paper doesn’t mean it’s fun to experience in real life. I had that sinking feeling that I had been… duped.
Moving on. Right. Yeah. Must regroup, put this to the side, and not let it get to me. So I moved on. Literally.
‘Cause when you find out that what you see is not what you get, you have to move on quickly in the interest of making the best use of your time, so I went to a meeting that I had thought I couldn’t make, where I met a bunch of technical people talking about how they could make more money. This was, frankly, a relief, because the space was airy, there was food, drink, and importantly water, and more importantly, a place to sit.
PRINT. Next day, I moved on to things like a ‘print symposium’ (really nicely organized, nice people, but the presentations I went to were three parallel lines and felt like being in college where you have to endure everything… my eyes glazed over… that said the hallway and food buffet conversations were much more fascinating and approachable people were there, so that was far more exciting and unexpected… New York networking was way more stuffy, I recall, but the on-stage dialogues and audience participation pieces were more intriguing than SG’s… if I had to choose, I suppose I really liked finding out there is a different way to do that, where you choose to opt-in and participate as you wish. Met a lot of people). Should I talk here about my gallery tours in New York, back in the day? Nah, that was too long ago. Obsolete. But galleries can be a little bit stuffy and hard to access and I began to remember that I stay away from them for those two reasons. I am all about accessibility, and approachability. That’s why DK is all bright and colorful and stuff.
I did go to see some of the nice events that were going on at Singapore Art Week and met the most people that were somewhere between art and not-art at the events about AI, which were, again, somewhat static. But after-discussion moments were quite light and enjoyable. People really open up, when they’re not on stage. I won’t talk about the very intrusive photographer, who got up in my business with a too-long lens at the Art x Tech events, because it would be too silly to go into all the reasons why surveillance is just not OK with me being someone who didn’t grow up with it and doesn’t take it as a given that it’s OK to shove a long lens at someone’s private notes. And not apologize when called on it, and not asking consent and being all higher than thou about it. So sad. Glad I’m not trying to get my kicks by irritating people who come from out of town to attend nerdy discussions that can be frighteningly dull. But yeah. The afters were magic.
Journalism meetup was fun, too.
SOUTHEAST ASIA FASHION MAG. Anyway! today I am looking at how to make a digital magazine so that those who were interested in participating in ‘making a fashion magazine’ could do so easily from various parts of… earth? I don’t know how its going to go, but I will invite people to a new track of Cojournal to try it, from 4 March. Let us see. Design Kompany will take the lead to design and manage it. The focus may be, for one circle, Khmer aesthetics. Because those were what caught my eye, and made me say, ‘Let’s explore this!, let’s stay a while…’ That was April 2014. So yeah. Shall we try things? Let’s make a fashion magazine. One Cojournal starts next on the 4th. A circle of this cohort, pending application interests in this, may focus on Khmer Aesthetics.