Pooja Nansi Responds to Lim Cheng Hoe

What might a female writer born in 1981 in Baroda, India have in common with a landscape water colourist born in 1912 in Amoy, China? This is the question Singaporean poet Pooja Nansi asked herself when we invited her to create an artistic response to the exhibition Lim Cheng Hoe: Painting Singapore in early 2018.

At the time, Nansi was spending six months in Oxford, where she prepared her response to the exhibition. Growing up in the city of Singapore, she never realised how enjoyable nature and being outdoors could be. In Oxford, she went for walks in the nearby countryside, took pictures and read Lim’s diaries. When she returned to Singapore and visited the exhibition, she was stunned to discover that her pictures bore striking resemblances to Lim’s watercolour paintings.

In September 2018, she debuted “That Craving Within Me to Express Myself,” a phrase she borrowed from one of Lim’s diary entries. In a 30-minute reading walking through the exhibition galleries, she shared with visitors her life experiences that ran parallel to Lim’s. Weaving personal contemplations with Lim’s words, Nansi touched on issues from colonial history and its legacies, including a lack of role models in Singapore for contemporary writers and artists from minority or marginalised communities. How one navigates such complex dynamics in society as an artist is a question that remains relevant today.

The city was a prominent shared experience for Nansi and Lim, as both struggled with living in a Singapore that was changing too rapidly for their liking. Lim’s paintings captured the loss and pain of the disappearing sights in Singapore that today no longer exist. In her own writing, Nansi had always steadfastly resolved not “to write another poem about the Merlion, an ode to the raintrees or another tired sonnet about a hawker centre.” These fed into the grand and impersonal narrative of Singapore, which did not resonate with her personal memories and stories of the city. Walking with Lim however made her realise, in the words of local poet Simon Tay, “if you cannot learn to love / (yes love) this city / you have no other.”

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Editor's Note: Pooja Nansi will be presenting "That Craving Within Me To Express Myself" again on 1 and 2 June 2019, before the exhibition closes on 25 August 2019. Click here for more details.