Barges at all hours waiting their turn to pass through the Singapore Strait, stretching out to the horizon like a floating city. Barges and their predecessors and their predecessors’ contents in the Asian Civilizations Museum. Commercial bowls that were popular in the 1580s when a new type of blue-and-white glazing technique was invented by the Jingdezhen kilns. Different mass-produced bowls that were popular in the 1650s when Japan became the major exporter to Europe. Color combinations you’ve never seen on porcelain because they were popular among Asian civilizations and not Western ones: oranges on reds on golds on blues on pinks on greens. A label for each piece of cookware with its workshop of origin. Chinese inkstones and Middle-Eastern amphorae and Srivijayan coins and dice for gambling on board found together on one deck of a shipwreck. Objects organized within a hundred different time periods and subcultures and religions within northern Vietnam. A picture of a young Karo Batak woman wearing a traditional sertali layang-layang kitik who has your too-tapered eyes and too-wide rounded shoulders and too-soft upper arms. A painting of a deity of Hinduism with your form. The universe as a human form, mapped by distances expressed in units of rajju, the distance a flying god travels in six months–the crescent moon is a fraction of one rajju away from you and rises in the center of the horizon, pointing upward, a symmetric “u” the width of two barges. Barges sitting on the purple Pacific Ocean with people who look like you and people who don’t. Barges and their predecessors that have waited over those same trenches for a thousand years for people who look like you and people who don’t.
(2025-04-10)
Zoe Pian 