M a r k C h a n 's
P h o t o p o e m s
“Windows into the Secret - Exposing the Spiritual in the Everyday"
Excerpts:
Mark Chan, one of Singapore’s premier composers, was also concurrently trained in the visual arts, specifically painting in oils, crayons and pastels, from the early age of 5. He won his first gold medal in 1966 not in music but in the Asia-wide Tokyo Festival of Child Art and was chosen to represent Singapore at the UNICEF Child Art Festival held in Mexico city in conjunction with the 1968 Mexico Olympics.
Throughout his musical training and career, Mark has chosen to practise the visual arts as a much-needed retreat from and reinvention of his prolific creative musical output.
In conjunction with the release of his immensely popular album ‘China Blue’ in Singapore in 1991 he held his first one-man exhibition at the Substation Gallery on the invitation of the late Koh Pau Kun while giving a concert every night in the adjoining Guinness Theatre for a full 9 days. The exhibition was entitled “Painting the Music, Singing the Dream” and was in Chinese ink on paper. The works displayed a juxtaposition of surprisingly modern and traditional styles with the subjects ranging from bamboo to pines reinterpreted and monochromatic abstracts depicting the internal landscapes of a composer/ singer / flautist.
Mark’s explorations into the visual arts have always mirrored and questioned his own music. Just as his music seeks to make sense of being Singaporean, Asian, Chinese and yet having and using English as his main language although fluent in both Malay and Mandarin; just as his music demands that the ancient Chinese, Indian, Indonesian, Japanese and other Asian instruments be given a valid place and space in our modern world; just as his music seeks to bridge and heal the deep divides in our modern psyches and religious divides (individually and collectively). So does his visual art.
Mark firmly believes that beneath the skin of our seemingly mundane everyday lives throbs the heartbeat of many secrets, all interlinked and intertwined, like a spider’s web, like an ascending and descending staircase between heavenly and earthly spheres.
“All my work, whether in music or in words or in images is to somehow make these secrets apparent, clear, tangible and effable to others. Exposing the Spiritual in the Everyday you could say!”
Mark discovered photography at the age of 21. But it was really only 6 years ago in 1999 that he seriously decided to do something with his eye for “seeing the cracks in the painting of life…. stopping moments in the everyday and opening windows into the secret.”
He began his first Photo-Poem: “Meeting Buddha On the Road” a surprisingly simple and ingenuous idea of combining his own still photography with music and specifically written poetic, terse, lapidary text to describe, reinterpret, and re-calculate the balances of our modern lives. In one swoop, he wanted to re-introduce stillness into his own and into other people’s lives.
In his own words:
“We are a world too much taken up with action and reaction, with instant gratification, with speed and super-sizing… I’m trying to remind myself and others that there is deep inimitable beauty in the captured still image. That frozen moments speak volumes in a way that fast-moving video can only vaguely imitate.
I want to cross over a threshold that holds us fast and makes us slow down and see that the more we struggle and move the less we will ever know or experience.”
To quote one of his much loved Sufi mystics:
A mind that is fast is sick
A mind that is slow is sound
A mind that is still is divine..... Meher Baba (Sufi mystic)
Reflections on War
&
Reflections on Peace
Specifically commissioned by the National Heritage Board for the permanent exhibition at the War Museum at Bukit Chandu (the scene of the last battle against the invading Japanese before the total surrender of Singapore in the 2nd World War) they combine 2 wonderfully lyrical and yet moving pieces of specifically composed music with Mark’s own pictures as in “Meeting Buddha On The Road” and also stock photos from various archival sources of Singapore and Malaya during those turbulent times.
But there is a 3rd element to these Photo-Poems that is uniquely Mark Chan as well.
Known only to the closest of his intimate collaborators, the reason Mark turned to music and song-writing was that he was disappointed with the music written for his lyrics while in still in high school. To him, the divide between poetry/verse and music is a matter of degree of vibration and the ability or inability to release one’s intellectualization.
7 critically acclaimed solo albums released through his long career testify to his lyric-writing ability. This talent for crystallizing and capturing the zeitgeist of a certain period or the ups and downs of intense personal love and also the longing for a missing spirituality takes on a more detached, philosophical turn in these Photo-Poems.
But still the words, like the images and the music, retain a startling immediacy, clarity and disarming simplicity that belie the depth of the passion and deep feeling that are Mark’s motives for making these Photo-Poems:
“These are not simple times, these have never been simple times. The artist, the common man and the philosopher stand more and more frequently in the same spot, in the same shoes. The questions all three ask are often answered by the art created by the artist or by the wisdom uncovered by the philosopher or in the reality lived out by the common man. Sometimes it happens that all these questions and answers coincide. It is precisely then that art stops being art for its own sake but finds its dialogue with the rest of the world.”
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