In the exhibition I showed Invasion (was Almost Cut when still in progress), Great Wallpaper No. 211/1940, Great Wallpaper No. 12/2602, Great Wallpaper No. 470/I/Sbki/67, (Re)Collection of Togetherness – Stage 2 which included Pulang (was Sobron Sehari-hari until the most recent draft – this is also still in progress), and Study for Wanton.

I am getting ready for Europe.

Gees. Well, a friend told me about the daughter of a friend, who, when she was 3, talked about how she had three other pair of parents before her current parents. Now that was scary. She also talked in her sleep about other weird visions. That story (besides my partner-hopeless disease) often made me think six, even seven times about having kids. Hehe. I’m such a scaredycat really.

But “seeing” is always an interesting topic. Even as adults we often translate undiscernible patterns to figures that are familiar to us. That’s how we see the man on the moon and the pack of those smiling cats on those moldy walls. When we face unfamiliar figures, physical or non-physical (meaning, just an energy, or just a breeze of anything), we feel the need to translate those figures into something that’s more familiar to us. When we can’t do it, that’s when things get a bit weird – and feelings a bit, er, challenged.

As adults, though, I think we’re trained by our society to leave them alone. I think people with Paranoid Personality Disorder might be ones who keep struggling with this habit (of needing to clearly perceive everything and leaving nothing in the dark) in their minds.

Remember that story about how an indigenous tribe failed to see a foreign ship that was coming on shore, because that particular shape of the ship was simply not in their visual vocabulary? That makes a lot of sense. Our perception is doomed to be biased.

Imagine being The Other, though. Those figures that people try to see, but just can’t discern. That’s like, almost, the story of my life.

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One day I was queuing in a bank in Jamaica Plain, MA. I was the only Asian-looking in the line of the all latin-american neighborhood. There was this young mother with her little girl playing around in front of me.

Wanting to be considered ever-friendly-to-children, I made the effort to attract this little girl with my smile (you know how it is; I am nice by nature). She never responded – she just kept looking at me with her straight face before starting to run away and play around again. After a few minutes of my doing this stupid smile to that straight face, finally the little girl walked back to her mom hesitantly, and said “Mummy,” pointing at me, “What is that?”

What, my dearest brothers and sisters. Not who. I thought, yeah right. What am I.

Ask me again. Please. That’s like, almost, The Question of my life.

I was hoping that it was just a glitch in god’s videorecording of the whole scene. Or that – oh please let this be – that the little girl was pointing at an attractive pimple on my nose … and that she has never seen such an attractive pimple before.

Unfortunately for me, though, I had no pimple.

She didn’t have any birth certificate.

What she had was a acknowledgment of birth letter made in Batavia in 1940, signed by the Assistent-Resident of the Dutch India government of Batavia.

It says:
dat Tan Tjit Nio voornoemd niet in het bezit is van een geboorte-acte, sangezien er tijdens haar geboorte neg geen Burgerlijke stand voor Chineezen bestond[.]

When we went to the Ngasem pet market to look for some sand to put in the kite pots, Ratna saw this baby mosquitoes for fish food. She immediately and excitedly asked me whether I still was collecting mosquitoes. I said yes, bought one plastic bag of those baby mosquitoes and brought them back to my studio.

The next day I could see some mosquitoes in the plastic bag already. I thought I could put them in transparent jars and just put surveillance camera in front of them.

I also continued sewing the books for the passport.

I still have some unedited covers. This is such a lot of work. But it’s fun. And funny too.

Rani gave me back my Maneki Neko. I found at Tita’s place a dead dragonfly and brought it back as well.

Caught some local mosquitoes with my electric racket. Krijn realized today that sometimes the racket would only give them an electric shock and after a while they will just fly around again. I knew this – it has happened to me quite a lot.

Joselina showed me her passport – it’s valid for travel all around the world except for Iraq.

I also met a lot of other people who told me they could send me more passport. I wish for more passport cover for Christmas.

And I started to experiment with the watercolor mural – the first thing I tried was a simple passport-size photograph taken from my mother’s proof of citizenship card.

And so on. ]]> http://tintinwulia.com/?feed=rss2&p=274 0 http://tintinwulia.com/?p=262 http://tintinwulia.com/?p=262#comments Sat, 08 Dec 2007 01:58:51 +0000 Tintin Wulia http://tintinwulia.com/?p=262 I tried the razorblade/kite setup in the small window between the kitchen and the meeting room in Cemeti studio. The doors to both end of the kitchen were always open, and thus the setup was just very unstable.

I wonder how it would manage to keep stature in the gallery – Cemeti Art House is designed very well as a tropical building – with lots of opening and lots of winds.

Maybe I should just do a video of the whole setup?

Around the alun-alun they have installed new public fitness furnitures in the colours of McDonalds – not dissimilar to the sticks at the end of Tullamarine freeways just a few minutes from my place in Melbourne. The colours made Krijn very happy because he has thought about putting Ronald McDonalds around the city.

After my usual half hour routine, I tried out using these fitness tools. After a while, I felt that my left fingers were sticking to the grip and I thought somewhere between madness and amazement, Gees, these things are new and people stuck chewing gum on it already?

I pulled my hand and looked at my fingers. I realized I’ve just got a souvenir. Later, from Dilan’s mother, who was coming earlier than usual to wait on her toys under one of the big trees (they’re selling them, not playing with them) because her husband was going to the bank, I learned that these things were freshly painted – they were painted yesterday.   One of these fitness thingies was broken already. Krijn said that they’re exact copies of a very popular line of public furnitures made by a UK company which then was exactly copied by the Chinese.

Some of the women I met were regulars – they would go to alun-alun to do their morning walk every morning. I saw someone with 3 dogs – a small black one, a big patchy brown one, and a medium brown one. One of them was named Timo – I think the medium brown one. They live very close to the alun-alun.

When we went back, Rodney was there and he asked me whether we were the only Westerners there. It was quite an interesting moment as I was trying to discern whether I was a Westerner. That reminded me to the moment a bum in Boston called me, derogatorily or so it was supposed to be, and Indian.

Some of the ladies in the alun-alun said they thought I was Japanese. So boring (but well, just wait until they hear my name). Not Dilan’s mother, though. She was bringing Dilan around to try out the fitness tools. She just took it for granted that I speak Indonesian extremely fluently despite my looks, and immediately started discussing about living costs and the expensive school fees with me.

It was interesting that I couldn’t make out what her accent sounded like. She was originally from Cianjur, and her husband was from Jogja. They have lived for a few years in Makassar until the tsunami hit Aceh and people were starting to be afraid that it will hit Sulawesi (where Makassar is) as well. So they decided to move back to Jogja, right before the earthquake hit Jogja. Their house, however, because it is in the North, wasn’t affected at all.

Dilan was 5. He looked taller than an average 5 y.o. but he couldn’t speak his name clearly yet, his mom said.

A bike passed by – it was painted with those quite brand-ish colours resembling the fitness tools – and Ron McD. I thought the owner might have been one of the people hired to paint the fitness tools. ]]> http://tintinwulia.com/?feed=rss2&p=255 0 http://tintinwulia.com/?p=254 http://tintinwulia.com/?p=254#comments Wed, 05 Dec 2007 16:00:34 +0000 Tintin Wulia http://tintinwulia.com/?p=254 Questions:

If you were to be reborn, which country would you want to be born in for your next life?

Why?

If you could change the place where you were born, which country would you want to belong in?

Why?

If you could choose any country to live in now, which one would you choose?

Why?

If you could choose the country where you would like to die in, which country would you want to die in?

Why?

If you could choose to have any and any number of passports, which one(s) would you pick, and why?