Event recap of Art from the Streets exhibition at the ArtScience Museum, Singapore.

Another year. While stepping into my 27th year of walking on this earth, holding 26 years of days in my skin, I wander. I reflect on the love and support I’ve received, and I am grateful. I consider my achievements and failures, my work and my rest, and I am full. I forget the things so ordinary they have settled like silt, yet become the bedrock of me. I catch a glimpse of the monsters I’ve befriended, the demons still sullen, the stories I am sitting with, waiting on language for. I decide on how to be reliable and unpredictable at the same time: to hold trust to receive another life with integrity and grace to defy easy definition to shed expectations like dead skin to prevent the labels from boxing me in to remain a complete universe to surprise and wonder those looking for the ends and the means to wonder at the ends and the means to remember to pause at the bridge and catch the evening shadow of trees to walk the …

I’ve started a music blog with my friend, Mirae to talk about our love of Korean and Chinese music. Here in Toronto, I feel like I’m always battling a tenuous connection to the music industry in Asia. I spend a lot of my down time listening to old music, chasing new music, researching discographies, cross-referencing composers, lyricists and production companies. I copy lyrics out into notebooks, chase their etymologies, figure out their metaphorical structures, attempt a translation or two. Before I started writing poetry, I wrote songs. These were my first attempts at form, at structure, at evocative mood and strong affect. All my current fruit and growth in my poetry is traceable back to my love for music. I like to think of my poems as imprints of songs; not in form but in presence. Last year, I tried an experimental creative nonfiction piece, 9 Meditations on Mandopop and Poetry, using music as a starting point to write poetic paragraphs. It was the beginning of a new possibility. Blending inspirational sources I never imagined compatible. I have …