Buangkok Mall Life Club
Artist residency at Buangkok Square, Sept 2020 to Jan 2021
Part of the Community Arts Residency initiative by the National Arts Council in collaboration with the Housing Development Board.
Documentation at instagram.com/buangkok.mall.life.club
Buangkok Mall Life Club is an art space exploring the potential of intimacy, connection and alternative economy in a Singaporean mall. Led by Buangkok Square Artist-in-Residence Salty Xi Jie Ng in collaboration with Buangkok residents and a creative team, the space ran from September to December 2020. It featured various components that together asked, what is mall life?
Buangkok Exchange Department studied human-object relationships and how value is ascribed, eventually transforming to a free store where customers used object residues to make sculptures. Heartbreak Altar invited people to let go of objects from past relationships. Interviews with mall workers were conducted to make visible their labour and narratives, in hopes of humanising transactional relationships between mall workers and consumers. In Other News, a series of collaborative text-based paintings, featured statements about recent happenings in people’s lives. Visitors spent time in a cosy community space that functioned as an antithesis to a sterile mall.
The closing exhibition is a documentation and transformation of what came to pass in the space. An online publication archives the project and shares reflections by the creative team.
#malllife #objectrelations
Part of the Community Arts Residency initiative by the National Arts Council in collaboration with the Housing Development Board.
Documentation at instagram.com/buangkok.mall.life.club
Buangkok Mall Life Club is an art space exploring the potential of intimacy, connection and alternative economy in a Singaporean mall. Led by Buangkok Square Artist-in-Residence Salty Xi Jie Ng in collaboration with Buangkok residents and a creative team, the space ran from September to December 2020. It featured various components that together asked, what is mall life?
Buangkok Exchange Department studied human-object relationships and how value is ascribed, eventually transforming to a free store where customers used object residues to make sculptures. Heartbreak Altar invited people to let go of objects from past relationships. Interviews with mall workers were conducted to make visible their labour and narratives, in hopes of humanising transactional relationships between mall workers and consumers. In Other News, a series of collaborative text-based paintings, featured statements about recent happenings in people’s lives. Visitors spent time in a cosy community space that functioned as an antithesis to a sterile mall.
The closing exhibition is a documentation and transformation of what came to pass in the space. An online publication archives the project and shares reflections by the creative team.
#malllife #objectrelations
Legendary Customers Tay Nguang Nai Nancy and Ya Mei with Salty Xi Jie Ng
Legendary Customers Sabtu and Linda with their catch from the Buangkok Exchange Department
Team members Crystal Ng and alex t. as live models at Buangkok Mall Life Club
Artist-in-Residence: Salty Xi Jie Ng
Creative Team: alex t., ants chua aka The Receipt Overlord, Ajriani Asrul, Crystal Ng, Elyssa Goh, Evangeline Goh
Retail Consultant: Diana Low
Resident Shop Assistant:Jing Wen
Resident Painters: Jolin Wong, Shaaravatman, Tvharita
Exhibition Setup & Volunteers: Shaaravatman, Tvharita, Jing Wen, Lim Chwee Hua, Alan, Collin, Sally, Bee Lan, Linda, R. Hema Malini, Yvonne, Mohan
Resource Panelist: Jalyn Han
Special Thanks: All Buangkok residents and customers, especially Legendary Customers and Beloved Customers; Buangkok Square management team Raj Elamaran and Tan Yong Rui; Buangkok Square maintenance staff Siva, Kawser, Karu, Uncle Foo and Khairul; Blue Moon Letters; Jalyn Han; Chew Kuek; Christine Tan; Liang Ying Ying; Shoshana Gugenheim; Amrith; Grace Chong; Roast & Toast team; Selffix DIY; Kim Able Household; Valu$; Bread Junction; Fishy People
Creative Team: alex t., ants chua aka The Receipt Overlord, Ajriani Asrul, Crystal Ng, Elyssa Goh, Evangeline Goh
Retail Consultant: Diana Low
Resident Shop Assistant:Jing Wen
Resident Painters: Jolin Wong, Shaaravatman, Tvharita
Exhibition Setup & Volunteers: Shaaravatman, Tvharita, Jing Wen, Lim Chwee Hua, Alan, Collin, Sally, Bee Lan, Linda, R. Hema Malini, Yvonne, Mohan
Resource Panelist: Jalyn Han
Special Thanks: All Buangkok residents and customers, especially Legendary Customers and Beloved Customers; Buangkok Square management team Raj Elamaran and Tan Yong Rui; Buangkok Square maintenance staff Siva, Kawser, Karu, Uncle Foo and Khairul; Blue Moon Letters; Jalyn Han; Chew Kuek; Christine Tan; Liang Ying Ying; Shoshana Gugenheim; Amrith; Grace Chong; Roast & Toast team; Selffix DIY; Kim Able Household; Valu$; Bread Junction; Fishy People
Life in Exchanges at Buangkok Square by Jill J. Tan
A piece of participatory criticism from a Buangkok Mall Life Club “customer” and occasional magpie, ruminating on alternative economies, material relations to objects, and socially engaged art.
As the last weekend of Buangkok Mall Life Club’s operation approaches, lead artist Salty Xi Jie Ng is feeling “an immense amount of guilt about letting our customers down and [wondering] whether they will miss hanging out in the space.” While there are always feelings of wistfulness when an art show moves out of an exhibition space, or when a pop-up shutters, Xi Jie’s feelings seem to run deeper in accordance with the nature of the space. Buangkok Mall Life Club (BMLC) is an art project but is embedded in its setting in such a way that it could never be just that alone; it has never been billed as a pop-up store, but rather a community clubhouse in which to gather.
From mid-September to early December 2020, unit #01-05 of Buangkok Square was the only “store” in the mall where money never changed hands for goods. Within the roughly 60sqm space, the Exchange Department was a major draw for patrons of the space, who were invited to bring and take home items on a one-for-one quantity exchange, regardless of market value. Someone brought in a near brand-new vacuum cleaner and left with a ceramic piggy bank. Another brought in what she called a piece of raw amber, which Xi Jie said was clearly a plastic shard that had broken off from something such as a hair clip. Customer item credits were recorded fastidiously in a ledger. Despite the fact that BMLC was only open three days a week over the weekend, and for three to four hours each time, it became a destination for many visiting Buangkok Square. The exchange of goods might have been what gained BMLC a loyal following of repeat clientele, but Xi Jie wonders if the fact that no money changed hands in the space altered and softened the way people moved through and interacted with it as something other than a retail space. BMLC also took place in the midst of the Covid-19 epidemic, and I reflected how, safe-distancing and sanitation regulations of the space aside, it required some internal reconciliation of our newly pandemic-calibrated hygiene boundaries in order for us to consider and covet used objects brought in by strangers. And yet consider and covet we did. As a customer of the space who went through a complicated parting with an object, and in return collected four small Hello Kitty purses for my nieces over several visits, I learned that BMLC prompted both a typical thrill elicited by bargain-bin shopping, and an atypical reflection on material objects given up and taken home.
Other features of BMLC included a wall of canvases on which patrons could paint text telling of what personal “news” they had to report that day; a Heartbreak Altar on which people left relationship relics along with a short commentary tag about their relationships that had ended. The space also grew according to the community which came through, with additions such as a mural wall painted by an art student who imagines Buangkok Square as the only mall amidst a sea of kampungs in a flip of reality, as well as Xi Jie’s own experience of spending time as a shopkeeper in the space: a hidden side wall was for a time filled up with diaristic scratchings, and a wall feature on which she attempted to document the objects exchanged. Xi Jie also worked with a team who played both creative and shopkeeping roles, and they too took ownership of aspects of the space such as making floral sculptures out of receipts the team had started to collect, and performing live window displays. Xi Jie was interested in engaging with people who worked at Buangkok Square as well as visitors to the mall, but found that even with keeping BMLC open after hours for them, it was difficult for many to come by. Their presence is still apparent in BMLC, however, as Xi Jie and team sought them out for interviews, which along with photos line one of the walls of the space. As those more familiar with the daily ins-and-outs of Buangkok Square, their perspectives on the mall ranged from “it's so boring, so small” to “it's like a family here, feels like home,” per Xi Jie’s recall.
In January 2021, BMLC will reopen as an art showcase which reconfigures the objects collected within the space into sculptures, and transforms elements like the Heartbreak Sculpture and wall paintings into other mediums. When Xi Jie wonders aloud about how much of a revamp would benefit the space, I ask who the evolution of the space is meant for, bearing in mind that some might only be visiting the space for the first time in January. It’s for the conceptual development of the work, she says, but also for it to draw and hold renewed interest for those who return that have already spent so much time in the space’s former iterations. Though the showcase will attract new audiences, those who populated and helped build BMLC will be most able to savor how it has taken on new forms and meanings, building in a sense of local knowledge through the fact that change is only perceptible for some, and crafted with them in mind.
Buangkok Mall Life Club is more obviously designed as a disruption of expectations of a mall store, but in many ways it is also an extension of Singaporean mall-based sociality. The term “mall rat,” a North Americanism for youths who hang out in malls, has never made it into Singaporean parlance as far as I know, but it is often how my college friends who grew up in suburban America viewed, with mystification and dismay, my expressed fondness for Singaporean malls. I would sometimes laughingly tell them that malls were an air-conditioned respite from heat and humidity in Singapore—in fact, Xi Jie mentions this as one of the reasons why having access to BMLC was appealing for some of the patrons. For about three months, BMLC served as a meeting place, in both senses of encountering others and spending time, for several members of the Buangkok community. Once BMLC’s lease ends in January, will such interactions continue in other physical and virtual spaces, and what might those be?
It might not be the place of any of us who worked on BMLC to speculate on this at all, in the end. After all, given that many forms of sociality amongst residents of Buangkok who passed through BMLC also pre-dated it. Despite how the space is intended and designed during the duration of its lease, claims as to what comes next may lie outside the scope of what such a project can and should do. BMLC is also distinct from many of Xi Jie’s previous projects, which have centered around the production of cultural forms such as a variety show or collaborative publication. It is a different way of being together, for Xi Jie. Here, while the space has fostered activities such as exchange and daily activity reporting, a big part of what BMLC is seeking to construct, ultimately, is pockets of sociality and life. The art showcase in January may be a tangible cultural output, but it is hardly the culmination of all that was made within the walls of BMLC.
***
At the helm of the BMLC Exchange Department, Xi Jie developed what she referred to as a “老板 (boss) persona.” This was marked by a uniform: a powder blue dress with the words “Buangkok Mall Life Club” painted on. Xi Jie performed this persona through developing a bustling rapport with customers: recommending items which would suit, discussing what they’d exchanged, and engaging them on their everyday lives as well as stories behind objects in the space. Of the five or so times I visited BMLC, Xi Jie was always in the midst of an interaction with a customer. When otherwise engaged, she would sometimes divert customers seeking her attention, but seemed to always be ably holding court. It occurs to me that the constantly peopled nature of running a store with customers holds many similarities to an element of socially engaged art spelled out in its name but seldom discussed explicitly: the artist constantly has to be “on” in orienting themselves towards holding up the energy of the space and those who have come to participate in it. The persona that Xi Jie exudes in order to run BMLC, she says, is an entirely natural side of her. “A big part of my energy when doing such a project is remembering everyone's names by heart as much as I can, and their faces, and anything that they've ever told me,” she says.
As she sits at her desk in the middle of BMLC, Xi Jie consults her ledger, chatting with customers, remarking upon and evidently remembering exchanges with a granularity that surprises me, sometimes listing out items that a particular customer had brought in over a number of dates, and what they’d then be taking home in exchange. Xi Jie professes that this tracking of items was born out of interest in customers’ relationships with objects, transcending the ledger as a book-keeping exercise and furnishing the significance of BMLC as a cultural space. Xi Jie also began keeping a map of exchanges on a wall as a way of studying how value is ascribed to things. The objects in circulation were items that had passed through BMLC, but their documented relation were acts of speculation and fabulation by Xi Jie.
Semi-fictionality, or plays with the make believe, abound in BMLC and the lore around it. Among this was Xi Jie’s transformation into the “Buangkok Fairy” through a makeover done by one of BMLC’s Legendary Customers—a makeup artist and occasional getai performer—which saw her dressed in a sparkly green Tinkerbell-esque lycra costume and matching make up. “I do feel partly that the space is held up by my performative charisma as a shopkeeper,” Xi Jie says. Given this, I ask if she has ever thought of opening the space without her being present, and Xi Jie responds that she has not envisioned that. In spite of the principles of co-forging work through engaging with a community of socially-engaged practice, it is also important and unavoidable to acknowledge the often central place of the lead artist in the course of such projects. Xi Jie told me that “being welcoming and caring is also a form of emotional labor, but one that I gladly put in” to BMLC as well as her other projects. A few days after we have this talk Xi Jie ends up not being able to be present at BMLC for its closing weekend, due to a family death. While this was previously not something they planned for, Xi Jie’s team and the BMLC regulars nonetheless ushered in the closure of the space, its energies transformed by her absence but still flowing. On the above that now feels like a prescient rumination on indispensability, I have been thinking since then about how it is both a reality and a story told by the creative leads of projects to themselves, about themselves. Xi Jie adds that this also speaks to the neurotic anxieties of artists as well as the huge responsibility of managing a space. That life at BMLC went on when Xi Jie needed to be present elsewhere in her life seems true to how and what the space has been built to hold.
The creation of semi-fictional paradigms is an integral part of Xi Jie’s practice, and in the case of BMLC, this entails the space straddling its manifestations as a utilitarian shop space and an art space, at once a place grounded in the material and real, as well as one where the fantastical is entirely plausible. I asked Xi Jie how this balance was experienced by her customers, as well as for her team working in the space. This raises another question about participatory art works—do people who engage in different forms of interaction with the project all need to have the same understanding and experience of it? For instance, Xi Jie refers to some of her customers as “Legendary Customers” and “Beloved Customers,” both in anecdotes and on BMLC’s social media. She has a list; she has also awarded physical certificates to said customers. What separates the Legendary and the Beloved? Legendary Customers are, by Xi Jie’s observation, in possession of idiosyncratic traits or behaviors, or would have interacted with the space in highly unusual ways, and she could tell you about each one at length. Meanwhile, Beloved customers are warm and loyal, traits all Legendary Customers also have. When I ask Xi Jie if the customers know why they are bestowed these honorifics or if she’s told them, she pauses before musing that she’s always thought they would hold an innate self-knowledge of their legendariness once it was invoked.
As for other aspects of the project that might elicit various levels of understanding, one of my first memories of encountering the space was reading a banner announcing “Buangkok Mall Life Club–A new free art space that needs your participation” that stands at the store front: what exactly does this entail? A member of Xi Jie’s team is also often there to explain the space to enquiring passers-by. Yet in all likelihood, the art space’s conceptual underpinnings in alternative economies is not easily laid out in passing speech. Most of the scholarship on alternative economies questions their “alternativeness” (Kirwan 2004; Whatmore et al. 2003; Fuller et al. 2010), and whether the politics and spaces created by alternative economic movements can resist assimilation and cooptation by capitalism and the corporate mainstream. This is something that I wondered myself when I first learned that this project was supported by the Housing Development Board (HDB), in addition to the National Arts Council. After all, as urbanist Gavin Shatkin writes: “In Singapore, a city state in which urban development is synonymous with national development, the PAP has combined a commercial interest in property development and economic development, actualized through its central role in property markets and the corporate economy, with an interest in maintaining political control through economic development and the hegemonic control of space. The resulting model of urban planning has transformed the nation essentially into one massive mega project.” (Shatkin 2014). BMLC’s exertions and instantiations are certainly posing a critique as a cashless store in a mall, and one where communities gather and linger. And expressed elements such as the muralist’s vision for Buangkok Square being the only mall amidst a kampungs that subverts hyper-development are more explicitly critiquing the state mega-project. Yet the question of the project’s “alternativeness” breaking through amidst the context of Singaporean real estate development remain.
The work of feminist geographers Gibson-Graham provides an alternative framework from which we might understand alternative economies, and specifically BMLC. They point to a “language politics” that reconfigures “the economy” as the result of “performative effects.” Their proposal for techniques of rereading and ontological reframing aim to foster a “new economic language” in which “enactments of economic diversity...might stop circulating around capitalism, stop being evaluated with respect to capitalism, and stop being seen as deviant or exotic or eccentric departures from the norm” (Gibson-Graham 2006). Given the physical situation of BMLC in unit #01-05 of Buangkok Square, breaking out of capitalist circulation might seem a challenge. But it is also arguably the contrast to its surroundings in which BMLC provides an emphatic alternative to life in a neighborhood mall. In the everyday-ness of how regulars came through, hung out, brought and took home goods without ever using any money over the span of three months, this regularity of visiting an “alternative” mall store broke down what might have seemed like “eccentric departures” from capitalistic norms.
This, of course, is the fantasy, the conceptual heart, and also one of the lived realities of this project. Speaking as a customer of the space, being surrounded with objects rife for exchanging still brought out a certain bargain-bin frenzy in me that I consider consonant with rather than counteractive of capitalist consumerism. I was disgruntled at my own affective response to the space—it wasn’t necessarily where I wanted to position myself in the writing of this project. On my second and most extended visit to the space, I intended to conduct participant-observation research by helping out with store-keeping duties, so I helped to fold clothes that were brought in, sort piles of toys, answer queries from customers like how to open an umbrella, and rock a rocking chair seated with what was surely more than the advisable amount of child occupants. Over the four hours, though, I found myself constantly abuzz with an awareness of the objects in the space and what might be mine to find. As Xi Jie would tell me, Mdm L, one of the Legendary Customers described a similar feeling within herself as: “很想拥有的感觉,” or a very deep longing to possess, though perhaps Mdm Lim is describing an attachment to possessing specific objects she has set her sights on, while my fixation was really on the possibility of discovering resonance with any of the objects in the space. This feeling returned whenever I came to observe the space; in fact, without the explicit focus on participating in shop duties, it was amplified. I felt very much like a customer first and a researcher second.
I was initially attracted to write about this project because of my not-insignificant attachment to Singaporean malls, from the feeling of home I get walking through the malls in Bukit Panjang where I’ve lived since I was born, to the consumerist buzz spawned somewhat against my will by the Orchard Road strip. What I had not anticipated was that this same sensation would overwhelmingly define my experience of and relation to BMLC. The clarion call of the renewing objects effectively shut down my interest in a lot of other elements of the space, and while at first I thought it was blunting my observational capacities, I became interested in staying with this feeling and writing about BMLC from the point of view of a customer, hapless consumerist, and recalcitrant magpie.
Or perhaps I am more like Mdm L, who Xi Jie describes as a “citizen scholar of objects” (I did after all write a paean in a magazine entitled “An Ode to Stuff” when I was 19). Xi Jie notices that Mdm L “takes a lot of time and pleasure in observing objects,” having once found her squatting over a toy bin and examining every single toy for over a half hour. Mdm L told Xi Jie that she spends a lot of time at home appreciating her own belongings, but had had little time to do so since the opening of BMLC as she was spending so much time there instead. Xi Jie and her team often found that Mdm L found appreciation for objects others might not; she also took objects that were unexpected to them, like a Secondary 3 math assessment book which Xi Jie assumed would be of use to a student, but which Mdm L wanted to take home to reminisce her school days with, or a special edition of a Captain Underpants novel because she was drawn to its holographic cover.
I suppose it was a compliment, then, that Mdm L seized a photo frame I had brought in to exchange almost immediately after I placed it on a mat on the ground. This A4-sized photo frame had individual holes labeled from Kindergarten 1 to Primary 6. It had held my childhood photos until very recently (there was the same photo in Primary 5 and 6 because I was so busy studying for the PSLE, Singapore’s national standardized examination, in Primary 6 that I didn’t have a single photo taken of me), when my mother, a famous object squirrel-er of colorful straws and bottles herself, had decided to purge our living room shelves in anticipation of a renovation with uncharacteristic decisiveness. I’d wanted to give the frame to my niece who is just starting primary school, but my mother felt the frame was too old to pass on. Reluctantly, I’d taken it to BMLC along with some other frames, reasoning that I’d be really happy if it brought meaning to a child to have their years displayed in this unusual way. Now Mdm L was asking me, repeatedly, what this object was, and if she could place photos of herself as an adult in it. I did not want to say no—after all, I understood the social contract of the exchange and I was no longer in control of the destiny of the frame, despite admittedly having quite a fixed idea of what sort of person I wanted it to go to. I realized, also, that not wanting to relinquish this frame to a possibly childless person didn’t sit quite right with me either. Why should she not be able to have it? Mdm L took the frame, along with several others from my home, including one with clay figurines of a pink unitard and rollerblades. I started furiously writing down my feelings about this in my field-notes that I was taking live, my discomfort mounting. I wrote that I really wanted my niece to have this frame, even though “it would not mean the same thing to her aesthetically or sentimentally” as it does to me. I could not remember the last time an object elicited such strong emotions in me.
I squirmed, pen still scratching at my notebook, as Mdm L took my childhood frame to the counter for Xi Jie to write down in the ledger. It turned out Mdm L was short on exchange credits, and Xi Jie put aside some objects out of the pile she had claimed for her to take in future, including my frame. In the moment, I found myself pulling Xi Jie aside and telling her that I’d made a mistake, that I wasn’t ready to give up this frame if I was having such strong feelings about who should or should not take it home. I knew it wasn’t cool to do this, I told Xi Jie, but I was really wondering if I could tell Mdm L that I had decided not to exchange this frame after all. Xi Jie agreed, and so I went up to Mdm L to explain. Mdm L was accepting after I apologized that I had changed my mind, though she did come back to me after further browsing to check once more that the frame was really not up for exchange. I told her I was very sorry, but I was taking it home.
Afterwards, Xi Jie told me that something in her gut was also telling her to put the frame aside rather than let Mdm L take it. I feel a deep gratefulness for this shared, unspoken instinct of Xi Jie’s, as I look at the frame now back on my living room shelf. I haven’t yet filled it with photos of my niece, but I will soon. This encounter, and my emotional and material relation to this object, has shaped how I’ve thought about what I gave up in lieu of money when I participated in this space. It’s defined how I thought about myself as a participant in this space whose items brought people pleasure, and whose reclaiming of one also deprived someone of something they desired. It has also stripped bare for me my motivations and realities of writing about this project over several months, and how many of my professed anti-capitalist politics are in shambles at the promise of acquiring stuff. In the semi-fictional paradigm that is BMLC, and in my own, I live out the realities of the consumer overcome with lustful curiosity towards the ever-refilling repository of objects, a consumer who simultaneously reads and writes critiques of alternative economies. In the end, along with a rectangular hamburger lunchbox with layers segmented by bun, patty, and lettuce, my favorite object I took home from BMLC was one that I had brought with me in the first place.
Jill J. Tan is a Singaporean writer, artist, and researcher committed to collaborative practice and multimodal exploration through games, performance, and poetics. As a PhD student in Anthropology at Yale, Jill studies death and dying in Singapore and works with the funeral profession. Elsewhere, she researches agency in children's dance, is making an interactive workshop on parasitism and mutualism, and co-runs Little Study Zine. Her work has appeared in Guernica, Ghost Proposal, Palimpsest, Mynah, Brack, soft/WALL/studs' “Recirculations,” City and Society, the Yamagata International Documentary Film Festival anthology Film Criticism Collective Volume II (2017), and Resistant Hybridities: Tibetan Narratives in Exile (Lexington 2020). Find her at jilljtan.com.
A piece of participatory criticism from a Buangkok Mall Life Club “customer” and occasional magpie, ruminating on alternative economies, material relations to objects, and socially engaged art.
As the last weekend of Buangkok Mall Life Club’s operation approaches, lead artist Salty Xi Jie Ng is feeling “an immense amount of guilt about letting our customers down and [wondering] whether they will miss hanging out in the space.” While there are always feelings of wistfulness when an art show moves out of an exhibition space, or when a pop-up shutters, Xi Jie’s feelings seem to run deeper in accordance with the nature of the space. Buangkok Mall Life Club (BMLC) is an art project but is embedded in its setting in such a way that it could never be just that alone; it has never been billed as a pop-up store, but rather a community clubhouse in which to gather.
From mid-September to early December 2020, unit #01-05 of Buangkok Square was the only “store” in the mall where money never changed hands for goods. Within the roughly 60sqm space, the Exchange Department was a major draw for patrons of the space, who were invited to bring and take home items on a one-for-one quantity exchange, regardless of market value. Someone brought in a near brand-new vacuum cleaner and left with a ceramic piggy bank. Another brought in what she called a piece of raw amber, which Xi Jie said was clearly a plastic shard that had broken off from something such as a hair clip. Customer item credits were recorded fastidiously in a ledger. Despite the fact that BMLC was only open three days a week over the weekend, and for three to four hours each time, it became a destination for many visiting Buangkok Square. The exchange of goods might have been what gained BMLC a loyal following of repeat clientele, but Xi Jie wonders if the fact that no money changed hands in the space altered and softened the way people moved through and interacted with it as something other than a retail space. BMLC also took place in the midst of the Covid-19 epidemic, and I reflected how, safe-distancing and sanitation regulations of the space aside, it required some internal reconciliation of our newly pandemic-calibrated hygiene boundaries in order for us to consider and covet used objects brought in by strangers. And yet consider and covet we did. As a customer of the space who went through a complicated parting with an object, and in return collected four small Hello Kitty purses for my nieces over several visits, I learned that BMLC prompted both a typical thrill elicited by bargain-bin shopping, and an atypical reflection on material objects given up and taken home.
Other features of BMLC included a wall of canvases on which patrons could paint text telling of what personal “news” they had to report that day; a Heartbreak Altar on which people left relationship relics along with a short commentary tag about their relationships that had ended. The space also grew according to the community which came through, with additions such as a mural wall painted by an art student who imagines Buangkok Square as the only mall amidst a sea of kampungs in a flip of reality, as well as Xi Jie’s own experience of spending time as a shopkeeper in the space: a hidden side wall was for a time filled up with diaristic scratchings, and a wall feature on which she attempted to document the objects exchanged. Xi Jie also worked with a team who played both creative and shopkeeping roles, and they too took ownership of aspects of the space such as making floral sculptures out of receipts the team had started to collect, and performing live window displays. Xi Jie was interested in engaging with people who worked at Buangkok Square as well as visitors to the mall, but found that even with keeping BMLC open after hours for them, it was difficult for many to come by. Their presence is still apparent in BMLC, however, as Xi Jie and team sought them out for interviews, which along with photos line one of the walls of the space. As those more familiar with the daily ins-and-outs of Buangkok Square, their perspectives on the mall ranged from “it's so boring, so small” to “it's like a family here, feels like home,” per Xi Jie’s recall.
In January 2021, BMLC will reopen as an art showcase which reconfigures the objects collected within the space into sculptures, and transforms elements like the Heartbreak Sculpture and wall paintings into other mediums. When Xi Jie wonders aloud about how much of a revamp would benefit the space, I ask who the evolution of the space is meant for, bearing in mind that some might only be visiting the space for the first time in January. It’s for the conceptual development of the work, she says, but also for it to draw and hold renewed interest for those who return that have already spent so much time in the space’s former iterations. Though the showcase will attract new audiences, those who populated and helped build BMLC will be most able to savor how it has taken on new forms and meanings, building in a sense of local knowledge through the fact that change is only perceptible for some, and crafted with them in mind.
Buangkok Mall Life Club is more obviously designed as a disruption of expectations of a mall store, but in many ways it is also an extension of Singaporean mall-based sociality. The term “mall rat,” a North Americanism for youths who hang out in malls, has never made it into Singaporean parlance as far as I know, but it is often how my college friends who grew up in suburban America viewed, with mystification and dismay, my expressed fondness for Singaporean malls. I would sometimes laughingly tell them that malls were an air-conditioned respite from heat and humidity in Singapore—in fact, Xi Jie mentions this as one of the reasons why having access to BMLC was appealing for some of the patrons. For about three months, BMLC served as a meeting place, in both senses of encountering others and spending time, for several members of the Buangkok community. Once BMLC’s lease ends in January, will such interactions continue in other physical and virtual spaces, and what might those be?
It might not be the place of any of us who worked on BMLC to speculate on this at all, in the end. After all, given that many forms of sociality amongst residents of Buangkok who passed through BMLC also pre-dated it. Despite how the space is intended and designed during the duration of its lease, claims as to what comes next may lie outside the scope of what such a project can and should do. BMLC is also distinct from many of Xi Jie’s previous projects, which have centered around the production of cultural forms such as a variety show or collaborative publication. It is a different way of being together, for Xi Jie. Here, while the space has fostered activities such as exchange and daily activity reporting, a big part of what BMLC is seeking to construct, ultimately, is pockets of sociality and life. The art showcase in January may be a tangible cultural output, but it is hardly the culmination of all that was made within the walls of BMLC.
***
At the helm of the BMLC Exchange Department, Xi Jie developed what she referred to as a “老板 (boss) persona.” This was marked by a uniform: a powder blue dress with the words “Buangkok Mall Life Club” painted on. Xi Jie performed this persona through developing a bustling rapport with customers: recommending items which would suit, discussing what they’d exchanged, and engaging them on their everyday lives as well as stories behind objects in the space. Of the five or so times I visited BMLC, Xi Jie was always in the midst of an interaction with a customer. When otherwise engaged, she would sometimes divert customers seeking her attention, but seemed to always be ably holding court. It occurs to me that the constantly peopled nature of running a store with customers holds many similarities to an element of socially engaged art spelled out in its name but seldom discussed explicitly: the artist constantly has to be “on” in orienting themselves towards holding up the energy of the space and those who have come to participate in it. The persona that Xi Jie exudes in order to run BMLC, she says, is an entirely natural side of her. “A big part of my energy when doing such a project is remembering everyone's names by heart as much as I can, and their faces, and anything that they've ever told me,” she says.
As she sits at her desk in the middle of BMLC, Xi Jie consults her ledger, chatting with customers, remarking upon and evidently remembering exchanges with a granularity that surprises me, sometimes listing out items that a particular customer had brought in over a number of dates, and what they’d then be taking home in exchange. Xi Jie professes that this tracking of items was born out of interest in customers’ relationships with objects, transcending the ledger as a book-keeping exercise and furnishing the significance of BMLC as a cultural space. Xi Jie also began keeping a map of exchanges on a wall as a way of studying how value is ascribed to things. The objects in circulation were items that had passed through BMLC, but their documented relation were acts of speculation and fabulation by Xi Jie.
Semi-fictionality, or plays with the make believe, abound in BMLC and the lore around it. Among this was Xi Jie’s transformation into the “Buangkok Fairy” through a makeover done by one of BMLC’s Legendary Customers—a makeup artist and occasional getai performer—which saw her dressed in a sparkly green Tinkerbell-esque lycra costume and matching make up. “I do feel partly that the space is held up by my performative charisma as a shopkeeper,” Xi Jie says. Given this, I ask if she has ever thought of opening the space without her being present, and Xi Jie responds that she has not envisioned that. In spite of the principles of co-forging work through engaging with a community of socially-engaged practice, it is also important and unavoidable to acknowledge the often central place of the lead artist in the course of such projects. Xi Jie told me that “being welcoming and caring is also a form of emotional labor, but one that I gladly put in” to BMLC as well as her other projects. A few days after we have this talk Xi Jie ends up not being able to be present at BMLC for its closing weekend, due to a family death. While this was previously not something they planned for, Xi Jie’s team and the BMLC regulars nonetheless ushered in the closure of the space, its energies transformed by her absence but still flowing. On the above that now feels like a prescient rumination on indispensability, I have been thinking since then about how it is both a reality and a story told by the creative leads of projects to themselves, about themselves. Xi Jie adds that this also speaks to the neurotic anxieties of artists as well as the huge responsibility of managing a space. That life at BMLC went on when Xi Jie needed to be present elsewhere in her life seems true to how and what the space has been built to hold.
The creation of semi-fictional paradigms is an integral part of Xi Jie’s practice, and in the case of BMLC, this entails the space straddling its manifestations as a utilitarian shop space and an art space, at once a place grounded in the material and real, as well as one where the fantastical is entirely plausible. I asked Xi Jie how this balance was experienced by her customers, as well as for her team working in the space. This raises another question about participatory art works—do people who engage in different forms of interaction with the project all need to have the same understanding and experience of it? For instance, Xi Jie refers to some of her customers as “Legendary Customers” and “Beloved Customers,” both in anecdotes and on BMLC’s social media. She has a list; she has also awarded physical certificates to said customers. What separates the Legendary and the Beloved? Legendary Customers are, by Xi Jie’s observation, in possession of idiosyncratic traits or behaviors, or would have interacted with the space in highly unusual ways, and she could tell you about each one at length. Meanwhile, Beloved customers are warm and loyal, traits all Legendary Customers also have. When I ask Xi Jie if the customers know why they are bestowed these honorifics or if she’s told them, she pauses before musing that she’s always thought they would hold an innate self-knowledge of their legendariness once it was invoked.
As for other aspects of the project that might elicit various levels of understanding, one of my first memories of encountering the space was reading a banner announcing “Buangkok Mall Life Club–A new free art space that needs your participation” that stands at the store front: what exactly does this entail? A member of Xi Jie’s team is also often there to explain the space to enquiring passers-by. Yet in all likelihood, the art space’s conceptual underpinnings in alternative economies is not easily laid out in passing speech. Most of the scholarship on alternative economies questions their “alternativeness” (Kirwan 2004; Whatmore et al. 2003; Fuller et al. 2010), and whether the politics and spaces created by alternative economic movements can resist assimilation and cooptation by capitalism and the corporate mainstream. This is something that I wondered myself when I first learned that this project was supported by the Housing Development Board (HDB), in addition to the National Arts Council. After all, as urbanist Gavin Shatkin writes: “In Singapore, a city state in which urban development is synonymous with national development, the PAP has combined a commercial interest in property development and economic development, actualized through its central role in property markets and the corporate economy, with an interest in maintaining political control through economic development and the hegemonic control of space. The resulting model of urban planning has transformed the nation essentially into one massive mega project.” (Shatkin 2014). BMLC’s exertions and instantiations are certainly posing a critique as a cashless store in a mall, and one where communities gather and linger. And expressed elements such as the muralist’s vision for Buangkok Square being the only mall amidst a kampungs that subverts hyper-development are more explicitly critiquing the state mega-project. Yet the question of the project’s “alternativeness” breaking through amidst the context of Singaporean real estate development remain.
The work of feminist geographers Gibson-Graham provides an alternative framework from which we might understand alternative economies, and specifically BMLC. They point to a “language politics” that reconfigures “the economy” as the result of “performative effects.” Their proposal for techniques of rereading and ontological reframing aim to foster a “new economic language” in which “enactments of economic diversity...might stop circulating around capitalism, stop being evaluated with respect to capitalism, and stop being seen as deviant or exotic or eccentric departures from the norm” (Gibson-Graham 2006). Given the physical situation of BMLC in unit #01-05 of Buangkok Square, breaking out of capitalist circulation might seem a challenge. But it is also arguably the contrast to its surroundings in which BMLC provides an emphatic alternative to life in a neighborhood mall. In the everyday-ness of how regulars came through, hung out, brought and took home goods without ever using any money over the span of three months, this regularity of visiting an “alternative” mall store broke down what might have seemed like “eccentric departures” from capitalistic norms.
This, of course, is the fantasy, the conceptual heart, and also one of the lived realities of this project. Speaking as a customer of the space, being surrounded with objects rife for exchanging still brought out a certain bargain-bin frenzy in me that I consider consonant with rather than counteractive of capitalist consumerism. I was disgruntled at my own affective response to the space—it wasn’t necessarily where I wanted to position myself in the writing of this project. On my second and most extended visit to the space, I intended to conduct participant-observation research by helping out with store-keeping duties, so I helped to fold clothes that were brought in, sort piles of toys, answer queries from customers like how to open an umbrella, and rock a rocking chair seated with what was surely more than the advisable amount of child occupants. Over the four hours, though, I found myself constantly abuzz with an awareness of the objects in the space and what might be mine to find. As Xi Jie would tell me, Mdm L, one of the Legendary Customers described a similar feeling within herself as: “很想拥有的感觉,” or a very deep longing to possess, though perhaps Mdm Lim is describing an attachment to possessing specific objects she has set her sights on, while my fixation was really on the possibility of discovering resonance with any of the objects in the space. This feeling returned whenever I came to observe the space; in fact, without the explicit focus on participating in shop duties, it was amplified. I felt very much like a customer first and a researcher second.
I was initially attracted to write about this project because of my not-insignificant attachment to Singaporean malls, from the feeling of home I get walking through the malls in Bukit Panjang where I’ve lived since I was born, to the consumerist buzz spawned somewhat against my will by the Orchard Road strip. What I had not anticipated was that this same sensation would overwhelmingly define my experience of and relation to BMLC. The clarion call of the renewing objects effectively shut down my interest in a lot of other elements of the space, and while at first I thought it was blunting my observational capacities, I became interested in staying with this feeling and writing about BMLC from the point of view of a customer, hapless consumerist, and recalcitrant magpie.
Or perhaps I am more like Mdm L, who Xi Jie describes as a “citizen scholar of objects” (I did after all write a paean in a magazine entitled “An Ode to Stuff” when I was 19). Xi Jie notices that Mdm L “takes a lot of time and pleasure in observing objects,” having once found her squatting over a toy bin and examining every single toy for over a half hour. Mdm L told Xi Jie that she spends a lot of time at home appreciating her own belongings, but had had little time to do so since the opening of BMLC as she was spending so much time there instead. Xi Jie and her team often found that Mdm L found appreciation for objects others might not; she also took objects that were unexpected to them, like a Secondary 3 math assessment book which Xi Jie assumed would be of use to a student, but which Mdm L wanted to take home to reminisce her school days with, or a special edition of a Captain Underpants novel because she was drawn to its holographic cover.
I suppose it was a compliment, then, that Mdm L seized a photo frame I had brought in to exchange almost immediately after I placed it on a mat on the ground. This A4-sized photo frame had individual holes labeled from Kindergarten 1 to Primary 6. It had held my childhood photos until very recently (there was the same photo in Primary 5 and 6 because I was so busy studying for the PSLE, Singapore’s national standardized examination, in Primary 6 that I didn’t have a single photo taken of me), when my mother, a famous object squirrel-er of colorful straws and bottles herself, had decided to purge our living room shelves in anticipation of a renovation with uncharacteristic decisiveness. I’d wanted to give the frame to my niece who is just starting primary school, but my mother felt the frame was too old to pass on. Reluctantly, I’d taken it to BMLC along with some other frames, reasoning that I’d be really happy if it brought meaning to a child to have their years displayed in this unusual way. Now Mdm L was asking me, repeatedly, what this object was, and if she could place photos of herself as an adult in it. I did not want to say no—after all, I understood the social contract of the exchange and I was no longer in control of the destiny of the frame, despite admittedly having quite a fixed idea of what sort of person I wanted it to go to. I realized, also, that not wanting to relinquish this frame to a possibly childless person didn’t sit quite right with me either. Why should she not be able to have it? Mdm L took the frame, along with several others from my home, including one with clay figurines of a pink unitard and rollerblades. I started furiously writing down my feelings about this in my field-notes that I was taking live, my discomfort mounting. I wrote that I really wanted my niece to have this frame, even though “it would not mean the same thing to her aesthetically or sentimentally” as it does to me. I could not remember the last time an object elicited such strong emotions in me.
I squirmed, pen still scratching at my notebook, as Mdm L took my childhood frame to the counter for Xi Jie to write down in the ledger. It turned out Mdm L was short on exchange credits, and Xi Jie put aside some objects out of the pile she had claimed for her to take in future, including my frame. In the moment, I found myself pulling Xi Jie aside and telling her that I’d made a mistake, that I wasn’t ready to give up this frame if I was having such strong feelings about who should or should not take it home. I knew it wasn’t cool to do this, I told Xi Jie, but I was really wondering if I could tell Mdm L that I had decided not to exchange this frame after all. Xi Jie agreed, and so I went up to Mdm L to explain. Mdm L was accepting after I apologized that I had changed my mind, though she did come back to me after further browsing to check once more that the frame was really not up for exchange. I told her I was very sorry, but I was taking it home.
Afterwards, Xi Jie told me that something in her gut was also telling her to put the frame aside rather than let Mdm L take it. I feel a deep gratefulness for this shared, unspoken instinct of Xi Jie’s, as I look at the frame now back on my living room shelf. I haven’t yet filled it with photos of my niece, but I will soon. This encounter, and my emotional and material relation to this object, has shaped how I’ve thought about what I gave up in lieu of money when I participated in this space. It’s defined how I thought about myself as a participant in this space whose items brought people pleasure, and whose reclaiming of one also deprived someone of something they desired. It has also stripped bare for me my motivations and realities of writing about this project over several months, and how many of my professed anti-capitalist politics are in shambles at the promise of acquiring stuff. In the semi-fictional paradigm that is BMLC, and in my own, I live out the realities of the consumer overcome with lustful curiosity towards the ever-refilling repository of objects, a consumer who simultaneously reads and writes critiques of alternative economies. In the end, along with a rectangular hamburger lunchbox with layers segmented by bun, patty, and lettuce, my favorite object I took home from BMLC was one that I had brought with me in the first place.
Jill J. Tan is a Singaporean writer, artist, and researcher committed to collaborative practice and multimodal exploration through games, performance, and poetics. As a PhD student in Anthropology at Yale, Jill studies death and dying in Singapore and works with the funeral profession. Elsewhere, she researches agency in children's dance, is making an interactive workshop on parasitism and mutualism, and co-runs Little Study Zine. Her work has appeared in Guernica, Ghost Proposal, Palimpsest, Mynah, Brack, soft/WALL/studs' “Recirculations,” City and Society, the Yamagata International Documentary Film Festival anthology Film Criticism Collective Volume II (2017), and Resistant Hybridities: Tibetan Narratives in Exile (Lexington 2020). Find her at jilljtan.com.
On the topic of objects
By Crystal Ng
The guided meditation* that Xi Jie organised for team members introduced me to a new way of connecting with objects that I had never imagined to be possible before. With eyes closed, guided only by my own sense of smell, touch, and hearing, the most visceral sensation I could remember was the musty smell that surrounded us, and the sudden realisation that malls were very brightly lit. When I picked up a baby pink pre-tied ribbon from the pile of object residues for sculpture making, Xi Jie's voice probed me to think about where this ribbon came from. Did it use to wrap a bouquet of flowers? How long has this ribbon been separated from what it was tied to? Whose hands tied this ribbon? Were they the same hands who made the fabric?
At one point, the shop unit was overflowing with objects—new and worn bras that each had their own personalities, an endless sea of clothing that seemed to unravel themselves despite how much we tried to fold them, erupting mountains of soft toys, baby sharks and Pokémon dolls... We were absolutely drowning in a sea of objects that threatened to swallow us whole. During this time, I found myself utterly spent. It was less from the physical and emotional labour I performed (acts of folding clothes, interacting with customers), but rather, I was overwhelmed by the sheer number of objects that I was sharing the space with. With every person that came into the store, new items were unloaded, and each object that I touched slipped me into a mini trance state, reminiscent of the guided meditation that Xi Jie did with us. Mentally, I was struggling to manage the visceral urge to puke—at the sheer number of items being produced at an alarming rate, in order to generate this amount of excess objects that are still in relatively good condition.
I was also imagining the amount of work we had to do as a society if we wanted to dissolve this sea of excess. Ads stalk you from the moment you open a website, down to interrupting your social media experience. Conversations you have in real life about a new baby stroller seem to miraculously attract baby stroller ads onto your Google search bars ("OMG! It's a sign that I should get it!") Magazines also sell monthly fantasies of a dream life—except, it's not really your dream life, it's the dream life that is most profitable to the companies advertising with these magazines
When I thought about how each and every one of us living on this Earth is being marinated in an environment of excessive consumption, I felt exhausted and defeated—partly because drowning in objects that were not "mine" gave me a chance to reflect objectively on my own unhealthy consumption habits, and to confront the disgust and shame at myself for participating in perpetuating the excess. In this headspace, I could not imagine any possible way of creating a new world where we would not consume endlessly, and where the production of objects could actually be ethical at every step of the process, not just something disingenuously reflected on marketing collaterals and press releases.
When thoughts became too dizzying to think through, the rattan rocking chair in the unit always provided a spot for solace and comfort. I suspect it is because rocking chairs innately induce grandmotherly tendencies of slowing down and catching your breath, which lets you clear your mind. Informal team dinners were also equally healing—the fish soup at Fishy People (now closed down) was the best fish soup to ever exist in Singapore. A beyond generous serving of spinach and a bottomless pit of fish, beehoon, and warm soup are best enjoyed after a long shift with a group of friends (also so that you can share the spinach cos confirm cannot finish one.)
Buangkok Mall Life Club is an experience that changed me on a personal level. It redefined the boundaries of what I thought socially engaged art could be, and made me realise how essential and precious artists are to this world. Because artists can be a little chaotic and a little mischievous, they tend to sweep you up in their eccentric whirlwinds of ideas with a very raw, giddy kind of excitement that you just cannot seem to say no to. Even customers who were unwilling to participate in any of the sections in our little club at first seemed to end up having more fun than they expected to have, either by hunting the latest dropoffs in the Exchange Department, tinkering with their creativity by making sculptures, or contributing to wall murals to leave their mark.
Once you've experienced that burst of serotonin, you cannot escape it any longer. The fun-seeking energy just clings onto you, and you quickly find that laughter, play and creating is the only way you can get it to stop—and even then, it never really leaves you. Laughter was the dis-ease that made me realise that I could both agonise and imagine new ways of being in the world, while also engaging in acts of pleasure with a group of people who liked hanging out together. I recognise this to be an act of privilege, as the labourers who bear the brunt of capitalistic standards of production (who give us access to excess) are often exhausted beyond measure to engage in acts of dreaming and imagining.
In my current state, I do not have solutions for my agonising. But Buangkok Mall Life Club has inspired me to engage in acts of defiance towards this state of constant consumption, which I would like to share below in case anyone would like to be defiant together:
(i) learning skills of repair (sewing & stitching, tech repairs): practicing repairing the broken, over buying something new (inspired by an uncle who came by weekly and told me about cassette tapes)
(ii) buying second-hand (Carousell also counts; it's just not as cool as popular IG thrift stores with their hip branding) because you are not creating a supply and demand chain, you are offsetting excess, (iii) carving out time to engage in Xi Jie's guided meditation in my own personal life for things that I buy, so that I can learn about each of them and cherish them for longer.
The team behind Buangkok Mall Life Club and the new friends I made here will always be special to me. A warm and hearty thank you to everyone who came down and made this experience the way that it was—I hope your time spent here was fulfilling to you in your own way.
*Xi Jie organised a guided meditation for team members to prepare for facilitating object sculpture making with customers before shifts.
Crystal is a third-year Arts Management student at LASALLE College of the Arts, with an interest in socially engaged arts.
By Crystal Ng
The guided meditation* that Xi Jie organised for team members introduced me to a new way of connecting with objects that I had never imagined to be possible before. With eyes closed, guided only by my own sense of smell, touch, and hearing, the most visceral sensation I could remember was the musty smell that surrounded us, and the sudden realisation that malls were very brightly lit. When I picked up a baby pink pre-tied ribbon from the pile of object residues for sculpture making, Xi Jie's voice probed me to think about where this ribbon came from. Did it use to wrap a bouquet of flowers? How long has this ribbon been separated from what it was tied to? Whose hands tied this ribbon? Were they the same hands who made the fabric?
At one point, the shop unit was overflowing with objects—new and worn bras that each had their own personalities, an endless sea of clothing that seemed to unravel themselves despite how much we tried to fold them, erupting mountains of soft toys, baby sharks and Pokémon dolls... We were absolutely drowning in a sea of objects that threatened to swallow us whole. During this time, I found myself utterly spent. It was less from the physical and emotional labour I performed (acts of folding clothes, interacting with customers), but rather, I was overwhelmed by the sheer number of objects that I was sharing the space with. With every person that came into the store, new items were unloaded, and each object that I touched slipped me into a mini trance state, reminiscent of the guided meditation that Xi Jie did with us. Mentally, I was struggling to manage the visceral urge to puke—at the sheer number of items being produced at an alarming rate, in order to generate this amount of excess objects that are still in relatively good condition.
I was also imagining the amount of work we had to do as a society if we wanted to dissolve this sea of excess. Ads stalk you from the moment you open a website, down to interrupting your social media experience. Conversations you have in real life about a new baby stroller seem to miraculously attract baby stroller ads onto your Google search bars ("OMG! It's a sign that I should get it!") Magazines also sell monthly fantasies of a dream life—except, it's not really your dream life, it's the dream life that is most profitable to the companies advertising with these magazines
When I thought about how each and every one of us living on this Earth is being marinated in an environment of excessive consumption, I felt exhausted and defeated—partly because drowning in objects that were not "mine" gave me a chance to reflect objectively on my own unhealthy consumption habits, and to confront the disgust and shame at myself for participating in perpetuating the excess. In this headspace, I could not imagine any possible way of creating a new world where we would not consume endlessly, and where the production of objects could actually be ethical at every step of the process, not just something disingenuously reflected on marketing collaterals and press releases.
When thoughts became too dizzying to think through, the rattan rocking chair in the unit always provided a spot for solace and comfort. I suspect it is because rocking chairs innately induce grandmotherly tendencies of slowing down and catching your breath, which lets you clear your mind. Informal team dinners were also equally healing—the fish soup at Fishy People (now closed down) was the best fish soup to ever exist in Singapore. A beyond generous serving of spinach and a bottomless pit of fish, beehoon, and warm soup are best enjoyed after a long shift with a group of friends (also so that you can share the spinach cos confirm cannot finish one.)
Buangkok Mall Life Club is an experience that changed me on a personal level. It redefined the boundaries of what I thought socially engaged art could be, and made me realise how essential and precious artists are to this world. Because artists can be a little chaotic and a little mischievous, they tend to sweep you up in their eccentric whirlwinds of ideas with a very raw, giddy kind of excitement that you just cannot seem to say no to. Even customers who were unwilling to participate in any of the sections in our little club at first seemed to end up having more fun than they expected to have, either by hunting the latest dropoffs in the Exchange Department, tinkering with their creativity by making sculptures, or contributing to wall murals to leave their mark.
Once you've experienced that burst of serotonin, you cannot escape it any longer. The fun-seeking energy just clings onto you, and you quickly find that laughter, play and creating is the only way you can get it to stop—and even then, it never really leaves you. Laughter was the dis-ease that made me realise that I could both agonise and imagine new ways of being in the world, while also engaging in acts of pleasure with a group of people who liked hanging out together. I recognise this to be an act of privilege, as the labourers who bear the brunt of capitalistic standards of production (who give us access to excess) are often exhausted beyond measure to engage in acts of dreaming and imagining.
In my current state, I do not have solutions for my agonising. But Buangkok Mall Life Club has inspired me to engage in acts of defiance towards this state of constant consumption, which I would like to share below in case anyone would like to be defiant together:
(i) learning skills of repair (sewing & stitching, tech repairs): practicing repairing the broken, over buying something new (inspired by an uncle who came by weekly and told me about cassette tapes)
(ii) buying second-hand (Carousell also counts; it's just not as cool as popular IG thrift stores with their hip branding) because you are not creating a supply and demand chain, you are offsetting excess, (iii) carving out time to engage in Xi Jie's guided meditation in my own personal life for things that I buy, so that I can learn about each of them and cherish them for longer.
The team behind Buangkok Mall Life Club and the new friends I made here will always be special to me. A warm and hearty thank you to everyone who came down and made this experience the way that it was—I hope your time spent here was fulfilling to you in your own way.
*Xi Jie organised a guided meditation for team members to prepare for facilitating object sculpture making with customers before shifts.
Crystal is a third-year Arts Management student at LASALLE College of the Arts, with an interest in socially engaged arts.
~ a correspondence ~
alex:
dear ants,
is there a dominant colour, texture or sensation in your mind, when you look back on the past few months at buangkok? i'm thinking of the things that people delivered to us—unexpected small kindnesses, like apple's sweet potato soup or diana’s leftover catered food. in my head the space of these memories has shrunk somehow; its proportions have changed. dim orange light continues to suffuse its air. a warm core stands at the centre, uniting and containing its energy. i wonder if it's because – as objects were taken to be used, placed in bags, displayed on shelves, and otherwise reincarnated – the gradually emptying space felt like it was bleeding into the mall, merging with the body of it. if the threshold were a line delineated in chalk, it would probably be erased by now by the number of times it has been crossed and recrossed— everything coming and going, carried in and out. there's something so transitory and spectral about it, like a hotel or a train station. whatever becomes of the space, i like to think that our presence has diffused into other houses. if the residents who met in our store walk by each other and decide to wave, we might be there in the glint of familiarity passing between them. maybe all this is to say that i'm thinking of exchanges; the marks we leave or don't leave. the photographs that mdm lim loved so much to see herself in, that it felt like she was witnessing something we couldn't be privy to.
ants:
dear alex,
the time at buangkok reminds me most of the artificial smoothness of mall spaces. the glass windows, the tiled floors, the flat walls. as for colours and sensations, frankly i mostly remember the overwhelming auditory experience of being in a mall—different people talking to you at once, different music playing from different shops, and all the while the undercurrent of other peoples' conversation. but of course i've been given to too. i distinctly remember when shaa left the shop space to buy a drink, and returned with a large bottle of 100PLUS and cups for all of us to share. and when diana bought bubble tea for all of us.
the space will remain long after we have left but what i will take with me is the feeling of fruition after planting seeds. being recognised by grace at the adjacent mr bean stall, and the people who do the safe-entry check-ins. when collin and alan saw me squatting on the floor and encouraged me to sit down so i would feel less tired. when mr sabtu waved to me as i was buying coffee from roast and toast. what a lovely thing—to be recognised. which is to say, working at the mall has also marked me.
now that i think about it, the time at buangkok evokes a memory of smell for me too. so many clothes! from so many homes! some mouldy and discarded. some fresh, ironed, plastic-wrapped. so many different detergents. oh and the smell of the tea from roast and toast. a customer once told me that she comes to buangkok square mall just for the tea. i said, the gula melaka tea? and she said, no, just the regular tea. it's better than the kopitiam near her house.
alex:
yes we've been marked, so much—it's difficult to describe our role in the space to friends and people who haven't visited. the work we did —which i think consists mostly in populating and constructing the ambience of the space, something we made up as we went along— is not a form of labour that i would've seen myself getting paid for, a few months ago. maybe we're there as witnesses, companions; we've been present insofar as we've allowed ourselves to be marked by our encounters. sally and her children alan and collin too, how they ran around chasing each other and claiming their territory and —fast-forward several weeks— began to be so used to our being there that collin felt comfortable coming up to me to ask for chocolate. jing wen, who made her own buangkok club nametag and took it upon herself to promote the space to mall visitors. diana breezing in and taking charge of reorganising the space: the children's toys must go there, in the same corner, and clothes must be divided into men's, women's, children's, tops and bottoms.
i really do feel privileged to have been with the space and the team through its evolutions and its amorphousness, from exchange department to free store to multi-purpose space where people came to hang out and make found object sculptures. and in the background, xi jie’s vinyl record player incongruously blasting chinese new year songs. we’ve been shaped and added to and marked by anyone who felt like they had something to give. so many people donated old unwanted objects without taking anything in return. perhaps they only sought to lay down what they had been carrying, and all they needed was the peace of that lightness.
ants:
facilitators? co-creators? i struggle to find a word that de-centers us without dismissing the emotional, social work we performed in the space to shape it into a welcoming one. i seek for something that de-centers us because i feel certain that we were merely holding space. offering a container for friendships to ferment? fermenters?
even writing to you feels like i am doing the experience a disservice, despite knowing that you have shared in it too. somehow every time i try and articulate it, all i come up with are laundry lists of memories, people, items. how do i describe the constellatory feeling of it? the way that all of us, buangkok residents and visitors alike, orbited around the space, sometimes interacting with each other, sometimes apart but forming meanings in the spaces between them. i remember the last weekend we had, when xi jie was absent, and it felt like we were all drifting—a centre of gravity lost.
it's funny - i saw myself as a buangkok visitor when i started but i feel much more like a resident now. i feel like the space has seen me grow up! and the mall will always hold the same kind of sentimental value as an old stuffed toy from when i was a child, having witnessed me struggle with myself as i came into being.
ants (after alex was unresponsive):
I’m writing to you from the airport where I’m sending my brother off. It’s an oddly dead space, made for many more people than it’s holding. I’m going to Buangkok after this, to our little space which seems like it was made for less than what it has become. It feels markedly different than the first shift I worked. I remember sitting on the floor and eating dinner with xi jie, feeling like the space needed something but not knowing what it was. It’s quite marvellous, how it has become filled with the energies of everyone who’s come and stayed awhile.
The Mall Life Club feels so distant from the rest of my life —literally (it’s a 1.5 hour commute) and emotionally. Not in a bad way, though—I just feel like the space allows me to tap into a different energy of mine. And every visit feels like quite an event that often takes a full day to prepare for and then recharge from. How does your body feel in Buangkok? How does your body feel after? How does it relate to the rest of your life?
Anyway, I’m taking lots of photos with my brother as he leaves, and I was thinking about all the photos we’ve snapped in Buangkok, and all that we didn’t or couldn’t photograph. Like the long commute there, the too-cold aircon, the paint stains in the sinks of the toilet behind Mr Bean, and the way we go into the mall while it’s day and leave when it’s night, with no sense of the way the sun moves between our entry and departure, except that it has set. Sometimes when I’m taking a break from the work I take a quick walk around the upper level and look out the glass doors near the 7-11, just to see what the weather is like.
alex:
thank you for this gentle email-prod! i needed it. you talking about how your body feels made me think about the time that xi jie got us to be live models, mannequins standing in the shop window. we threw on random assemblages of clothing and jewellery—the wilder the better— and tried to keep as still as possible for intervals of 15-20 minutes. i did my modelling with crystal and you did yours alone. you wore diana's pieces (mainly brooches but also necklaces?) so well that they were all but gone by the end of that day. and the way you wrapped the scarf and pinned it with one of the brooches was so haute couture!
i remember feeling so liberated, actually, from the usual constraints of gender presentation. i consider it a success that we managed to draw a crowd, and that people had to inspect us more closely to find out whether we were ‘real’ ‘or ‘fake’. collin and alan even tried to poke us and wave their hands in front of our faces while we kept resolutely still and tried our hardest not to laugh. xi jie once told me, during an extended conversation we had in the space after hours, that she loves it when her art gives people the chance to openly display their eccentricities. the live-modelling was one such defining moment for me. i simultaneously felt in my body and out of it, floating slightly above, observing my stillness dispassionately. grounded, at peace; giving myself over to a visibility with which i would usually not know how to be comfortable. in the rest of my life, i think i'm still searching for a semblance —in my body, in my gender— of that fleeting joy. wondering how to make it last. i'm interested to hear how you felt about your modelling too, and in what form (if at all) the experience has stayed with you.
ants:
a similar feeling for me was when I was queuing up for tea @ roast and toast and i saw the older woman (who must be in her 70s at least) who calls everyone else "auntie", including the roast and toast guys!!! i feel somehow that being at the buangkok space has allowed me to begin connecting with people outside of my age range in a more meaningful way —shaa, rita, hema, madam lim, linda...and that's been informing how i approach my family too.
modelling was a great time. i loved making eye contact with people and then waving, or winking —some laughed, some got a shock and careened backward a little as they realised i was a fake mannequin / real person. i loved the drama of posing in a highly visible space —a kind of more intense presence that comes with any sort of performance— and the puzzle of putting together outfits, figuring out ways to make items harmonise or clash in interesting ways. Jing wen made a series of badges/brooches for me out of small plastic items (with a safety pin taped to the back) after seeing the brooch-laden outfit from the week before. the base of the "couture" outfit (as we refer to it) was made out of a pair of baggy, dropped-crotch pants and a tulle skirt that i wore as a tube top. it felt like a treasure hunt to put outfits together, searching through things that i could somehow place on my body. in the last outfit, i took a plastic goblet and balanced it on top of my hat, and i told myself i'd stay at the window as long as i could balance!!! good times. posing also felt like very different work than the usual stuff we do —no one to really pay attention to except yourself. i've been thinking about that a lot today, how so much of the work is simply paying attention, and really really listening. sometimes jing wen repeats herself over and over again because she hasn't seen/heard anyone notice what she said. at the space today there were many instances where xi jie, crystal and i were splitting our attention between people. it’s easy to lose track of tasks that have to do with the actual shop-running because the most pressing task seems to be attending to customers, attending and furnishing the space with attention. the modelling was to catch the eyes of customers outside of the space, a way to get them to look closer rather than let their eyes sweep over every shop window in uninterrupted soft focus.
alex:
re: roast and toast —i thought of a recent time i visited buangkok square mall and was recognised by one of the staff there. they charged me only $1 for one cup of teh, the special price for "mall workers". i felt embarrassed, unworthy of the title and the benefits it conferred, and told him, "i don't come here every day". he waved it off, and keyed "1.00" into the cash register. that was very strangely moving, like i had passed some rite of initiation. i will miss their salted coffee. and the waffles in the adjacent bakery! i used to always get them plain until the day you got the one with cheese and converted me.
again the constellatory feeling you described of these disconnected moments, dots that we try to hone into shapes. but speaking of food, i thought too of the fish soup at prime mart. out of all the mall workers, i think the fish soup auntie was the person with whom i formed the strongest attachment. xi jie and i interviewed her and the uncle who also worked there for our wall of worker profiles, and she spoke of her love for cooking. the fish soup was so delicious and addictive —the vegetables and noodles so generously apportioned— that i found myself returning to the mall on non-shift days, driving my grandma there so she could sample it too, or buying bowls and bowls of it back for my family. and when we found out they were going to close down in november, it suddenly became all the more urgent to eat as much of it as we could, as if to stockpile the taste. that soup, close to scalding, has been one of the cores of warmth around which i've orbited —threading our disparate days, hours, conversations over dinner. it makes me wonder what food can unlock in us, and between us. if the soup weren't that precise degree of salty and spicy, and if the bowl weren't as bottomless as it felt while we were savouring every spoon of it, would we still have shared as much with one another? though i of course wish for the store's (and auntie's!) eventual return —or rebirth in a separate location— i'm also struck by the poignancy of how its timeline coincided with ours, and ceased a little too prematurely. while it lasted, it kept us constellating in communion.
ants chua (aka ‘The Receipt Overlord’), team member and cheese waffle enthusiast. when not wrangling receipts into flowers, they write, direct, and perform. they are an Associate Artist with Checkpoint Theatre.
alex t., team member, loves writing, not writing, and drinking fish soup.
alex:
dear ants,
is there a dominant colour, texture or sensation in your mind, when you look back on the past few months at buangkok? i'm thinking of the things that people delivered to us—unexpected small kindnesses, like apple's sweet potato soup or diana’s leftover catered food. in my head the space of these memories has shrunk somehow; its proportions have changed. dim orange light continues to suffuse its air. a warm core stands at the centre, uniting and containing its energy. i wonder if it's because – as objects were taken to be used, placed in bags, displayed on shelves, and otherwise reincarnated – the gradually emptying space felt like it was bleeding into the mall, merging with the body of it. if the threshold were a line delineated in chalk, it would probably be erased by now by the number of times it has been crossed and recrossed— everything coming and going, carried in and out. there's something so transitory and spectral about it, like a hotel or a train station. whatever becomes of the space, i like to think that our presence has diffused into other houses. if the residents who met in our store walk by each other and decide to wave, we might be there in the glint of familiarity passing between them. maybe all this is to say that i'm thinking of exchanges; the marks we leave or don't leave. the photographs that mdm lim loved so much to see herself in, that it felt like she was witnessing something we couldn't be privy to.
ants:
dear alex,
the time at buangkok reminds me most of the artificial smoothness of mall spaces. the glass windows, the tiled floors, the flat walls. as for colours and sensations, frankly i mostly remember the overwhelming auditory experience of being in a mall—different people talking to you at once, different music playing from different shops, and all the while the undercurrent of other peoples' conversation. but of course i've been given to too. i distinctly remember when shaa left the shop space to buy a drink, and returned with a large bottle of 100PLUS and cups for all of us to share. and when diana bought bubble tea for all of us.
the space will remain long after we have left but what i will take with me is the feeling of fruition after planting seeds. being recognised by grace at the adjacent mr bean stall, and the people who do the safe-entry check-ins. when collin and alan saw me squatting on the floor and encouraged me to sit down so i would feel less tired. when mr sabtu waved to me as i was buying coffee from roast and toast. what a lovely thing—to be recognised. which is to say, working at the mall has also marked me.
now that i think about it, the time at buangkok evokes a memory of smell for me too. so many clothes! from so many homes! some mouldy and discarded. some fresh, ironed, plastic-wrapped. so many different detergents. oh and the smell of the tea from roast and toast. a customer once told me that she comes to buangkok square mall just for the tea. i said, the gula melaka tea? and she said, no, just the regular tea. it's better than the kopitiam near her house.
alex:
yes we've been marked, so much—it's difficult to describe our role in the space to friends and people who haven't visited. the work we did —which i think consists mostly in populating and constructing the ambience of the space, something we made up as we went along— is not a form of labour that i would've seen myself getting paid for, a few months ago. maybe we're there as witnesses, companions; we've been present insofar as we've allowed ourselves to be marked by our encounters. sally and her children alan and collin too, how they ran around chasing each other and claiming their territory and —fast-forward several weeks— began to be so used to our being there that collin felt comfortable coming up to me to ask for chocolate. jing wen, who made her own buangkok club nametag and took it upon herself to promote the space to mall visitors. diana breezing in and taking charge of reorganising the space: the children's toys must go there, in the same corner, and clothes must be divided into men's, women's, children's, tops and bottoms.
i really do feel privileged to have been with the space and the team through its evolutions and its amorphousness, from exchange department to free store to multi-purpose space where people came to hang out and make found object sculptures. and in the background, xi jie’s vinyl record player incongruously blasting chinese new year songs. we’ve been shaped and added to and marked by anyone who felt like they had something to give. so many people donated old unwanted objects without taking anything in return. perhaps they only sought to lay down what they had been carrying, and all they needed was the peace of that lightness.
ants:
facilitators? co-creators? i struggle to find a word that de-centers us without dismissing the emotional, social work we performed in the space to shape it into a welcoming one. i seek for something that de-centers us because i feel certain that we were merely holding space. offering a container for friendships to ferment? fermenters?
even writing to you feels like i am doing the experience a disservice, despite knowing that you have shared in it too. somehow every time i try and articulate it, all i come up with are laundry lists of memories, people, items. how do i describe the constellatory feeling of it? the way that all of us, buangkok residents and visitors alike, orbited around the space, sometimes interacting with each other, sometimes apart but forming meanings in the spaces between them. i remember the last weekend we had, when xi jie was absent, and it felt like we were all drifting—a centre of gravity lost.
it's funny - i saw myself as a buangkok visitor when i started but i feel much more like a resident now. i feel like the space has seen me grow up! and the mall will always hold the same kind of sentimental value as an old stuffed toy from when i was a child, having witnessed me struggle with myself as i came into being.
ants (after alex was unresponsive):
I’m writing to you from the airport where I’m sending my brother off. It’s an oddly dead space, made for many more people than it’s holding. I’m going to Buangkok after this, to our little space which seems like it was made for less than what it has become. It feels markedly different than the first shift I worked. I remember sitting on the floor and eating dinner with xi jie, feeling like the space needed something but not knowing what it was. It’s quite marvellous, how it has become filled with the energies of everyone who’s come and stayed awhile.
The Mall Life Club feels so distant from the rest of my life —literally (it’s a 1.5 hour commute) and emotionally. Not in a bad way, though—I just feel like the space allows me to tap into a different energy of mine. And every visit feels like quite an event that often takes a full day to prepare for and then recharge from. How does your body feel in Buangkok? How does your body feel after? How does it relate to the rest of your life?
Anyway, I’m taking lots of photos with my brother as he leaves, and I was thinking about all the photos we’ve snapped in Buangkok, and all that we didn’t or couldn’t photograph. Like the long commute there, the too-cold aircon, the paint stains in the sinks of the toilet behind Mr Bean, and the way we go into the mall while it’s day and leave when it’s night, with no sense of the way the sun moves between our entry and departure, except that it has set. Sometimes when I’m taking a break from the work I take a quick walk around the upper level and look out the glass doors near the 7-11, just to see what the weather is like.
alex:
thank you for this gentle email-prod! i needed it. you talking about how your body feels made me think about the time that xi jie got us to be live models, mannequins standing in the shop window. we threw on random assemblages of clothing and jewellery—the wilder the better— and tried to keep as still as possible for intervals of 15-20 minutes. i did my modelling with crystal and you did yours alone. you wore diana's pieces (mainly brooches but also necklaces?) so well that they were all but gone by the end of that day. and the way you wrapped the scarf and pinned it with one of the brooches was so haute couture!
i remember feeling so liberated, actually, from the usual constraints of gender presentation. i consider it a success that we managed to draw a crowd, and that people had to inspect us more closely to find out whether we were ‘real’ ‘or ‘fake’. collin and alan even tried to poke us and wave their hands in front of our faces while we kept resolutely still and tried our hardest not to laugh. xi jie once told me, during an extended conversation we had in the space after hours, that she loves it when her art gives people the chance to openly display their eccentricities. the live-modelling was one such defining moment for me. i simultaneously felt in my body and out of it, floating slightly above, observing my stillness dispassionately. grounded, at peace; giving myself over to a visibility with which i would usually not know how to be comfortable. in the rest of my life, i think i'm still searching for a semblance —in my body, in my gender— of that fleeting joy. wondering how to make it last. i'm interested to hear how you felt about your modelling too, and in what form (if at all) the experience has stayed with you.
ants:
a similar feeling for me was when I was queuing up for tea @ roast and toast and i saw the older woman (who must be in her 70s at least) who calls everyone else "auntie", including the roast and toast guys!!! i feel somehow that being at the buangkok space has allowed me to begin connecting with people outside of my age range in a more meaningful way —shaa, rita, hema, madam lim, linda...and that's been informing how i approach my family too.
modelling was a great time. i loved making eye contact with people and then waving, or winking —some laughed, some got a shock and careened backward a little as they realised i was a fake mannequin / real person. i loved the drama of posing in a highly visible space —a kind of more intense presence that comes with any sort of performance— and the puzzle of putting together outfits, figuring out ways to make items harmonise or clash in interesting ways. Jing wen made a series of badges/brooches for me out of small plastic items (with a safety pin taped to the back) after seeing the brooch-laden outfit from the week before. the base of the "couture" outfit (as we refer to it) was made out of a pair of baggy, dropped-crotch pants and a tulle skirt that i wore as a tube top. it felt like a treasure hunt to put outfits together, searching through things that i could somehow place on my body. in the last outfit, i took a plastic goblet and balanced it on top of my hat, and i told myself i'd stay at the window as long as i could balance!!! good times. posing also felt like very different work than the usual stuff we do —no one to really pay attention to except yourself. i've been thinking about that a lot today, how so much of the work is simply paying attention, and really really listening. sometimes jing wen repeats herself over and over again because she hasn't seen/heard anyone notice what she said. at the space today there were many instances where xi jie, crystal and i were splitting our attention between people. it’s easy to lose track of tasks that have to do with the actual shop-running because the most pressing task seems to be attending to customers, attending and furnishing the space with attention. the modelling was to catch the eyes of customers outside of the space, a way to get them to look closer rather than let their eyes sweep over every shop window in uninterrupted soft focus.
alex:
re: roast and toast —i thought of a recent time i visited buangkok square mall and was recognised by one of the staff there. they charged me only $1 for one cup of teh, the special price for "mall workers". i felt embarrassed, unworthy of the title and the benefits it conferred, and told him, "i don't come here every day". he waved it off, and keyed "1.00" into the cash register. that was very strangely moving, like i had passed some rite of initiation. i will miss their salted coffee. and the waffles in the adjacent bakery! i used to always get them plain until the day you got the one with cheese and converted me.
again the constellatory feeling you described of these disconnected moments, dots that we try to hone into shapes. but speaking of food, i thought too of the fish soup at prime mart. out of all the mall workers, i think the fish soup auntie was the person with whom i formed the strongest attachment. xi jie and i interviewed her and the uncle who also worked there for our wall of worker profiles, and she spoke of her love for cooking. the fish soup was so delicious and addictive —the vegetables and noodles so generously apportioned— that i found myself returning to the mall on non-shift days, driving my grandma there so she could sample it too, or buying bowls and bowls of it back for my family. and when we found out they were going to close down in november, it suddenly became all the more urgent to eat as much of it as we could, as if to stockpile the taste. that soup, close to scalding, has been one of the cores of warmth around which i've orbited —threading our disparate days, hours, conversations over dinner. it makes me wonder what food can unlock in us, and between us. if the soup weren't that precise degree of salty and spicy, and if the bowl weren't as bottomless as it felt while we were savouring every spoon of it, would we still have shared as much with one another? though i of course wish for the store's (and auntie's!) eventual return —or rebirth in a separate location— i'm also struck by the poignancy of how its timeline coincided with ours, and ceased a little too prematurely. while it lasted, it kept us constellating in communion.
ants chua (aka ‘The Receipt Overlord’), team member and cheese waffle enthusiast. when not wrangling receipts into flowers, they write, direct, and perform. they are an Associate Artist with Checkpoint Theatre.
alex t., team member, loves writing, not writing, and drinking fish soup.