Self-Invention / ‘guang say is prep pills’
Two bare mattresses in the centre. Strewn all over them are symbolic objects assembled from the artist’s restless existence: flaccid white bolsters and slumped pillows, tubs of protein powder and bottles of PrEP pills, Kafka on the Shore and Blind Willow, Sleeping Woman. And propped against a tall block, forming a steep diagonal, is a bed frame stripped of any and all cloth, its wooden planks resembling ribs. The scene is set as though there had been a tempest—the howl of the ego ripping sheets and overturning bottles—a rebellion in a bedroom into which we have stumbled^been welcome into. Commanding our attention, nestled amongst this mess, is a hefty box television looping moments from the artist’s life: shopping for Gillette shavers, lifting barbells, viewing caged birds… and more you may interpolate. Watch the video again and again and you will know what scene comes after the other, and eventually the entire sequence. You might even be struck by the familiarity of the narrative on display—it is not just display; it is exemplar:
Siew (or Guang, as █ calls him) gyms; and reads Murakami.
He fucks; and makes art.
The white bolsters are bedroom plants are rhizomes are ropes of cum. I could have curated and created2 as well, but did not. Circling the bed like a motel keeper after a couple has checked out, I keep returning to Tracey Emin’s My Bed3, to how an afterthought transformed coitus to corpus, magnum condoms to magnum opus.
With the body, it feels even more fatalistic. I am the ribcage of the bed frame; and the wrinkled sheet of skin pulled over it. Toss every bed frame in the world away and there will still be mattresses with abs for sex and sleep. And mattress can be stacked on mattress, mattress on frame, but frame on frame?
█ was and is probably not into t—4. This homosexual obsession with m*scle must needs be studied further. Until the diagnosis and treatment options are available, I fear that at the centre of all my desire will remain a mattress into whose chest my body sinks, and from which my dreams of flesh and skin slowly rise, away from a skeleton I have wished to leave behind for an eternal night, only for the day’s first shaft of sunlight to illumine the falling dust that eventually clings to my eyes, pricking them apart as I get up and the bed frame creaks and I glimpse myself in the mirror by routine accident.
1 Idiot.
2 Devadason, Andrew. Glass Vase Cello Case. ‘Queer curation is queer creation.’
3 You sent him a picture of Emin’s bed once, although he most likely does not remember it. He also probably does not remember calling you a ‘pussy’ before you sat down next to him, on one of the mattresses as if you, too, were one of Siew’s friends.
4 DocLightning. June 13, 2004. Urban Dictionary. ‘Twink is a shortening of the name for the famous “TWINKIE” snack cake: a tasty, cream-filled snack with no nutritional value. The phallic shape of the “TWINKIE” snack cake should not escape the reader's attention. “I don't like going to that club because it's nothing but a bunch of twinks.”’