lovers' tears

Tsai Chin in《青梅竹馬》(Taipei Story; 1985) by Edward Yang

because i'd rather give folks flowers while they're still around, here's celebrating 蔡琴 Tsai Chin, the legendary Taiwanese songstress and sometimes actress. my favourite film role of hers is in《青梅竹馬》(Taipei Story; 1985) by the late 楊德昌 Edward Yang, who she married soon after its filming. in this overlooked, atmospheric portrait of a childhood romance crumbling amidst capitalism, Tsai plays the quintessential career woman, held back by her past while forging ahead in the brave new world of New Taipei (and New Taiwanese Cinema). her perfectly coiffed, wavy hairdo threatening to come undone in the rooftop wind, those '80s sunglasses and spectacles alternately obscuring and highlighting her bad-luck mole, that disaffected look on her face, suppressing horrible fears, as she stares out of another office window...perfection.

today i got hung up on one of Tsai Chin's classic songs,《情人的眼泪》(Lovers' Tears), particularly the live version above. from at least 14 years ago, she prefaces it by sharing that this song still evokes deep emotions in her, so much so that she often skips performing it. but the feeling from singing it is addictive.

it's a deceptively simple number, as so many of the best songs go. just three verses, four lines each, with a coda, repeated twice, like a distilled, haunting poem.《情人的眼泪》, of course, is about the end of love, like most sentimental Chinese music. but what makes it stand out is the special resonance and vibrato in her voice (cinematically best captured in that scene in Infernal Affairs): she possesses a rare range of voice that could go up to Teresa Teng–like high sweetness, but blossoms in the lower contralto region, where she extends Chinese vowels (韵母) and makes them sing, plumbing the depths of sorrow.

in each verse, "Lovers' Tears" employs the rhetorical question: from "为什么要对你掉眼泪?" (Why should I shed tears for you?), repeated twice, to "你怎舍得说再会?" (How could you bear to say goodbye?), the latter even more pitying as parting comes when "Spring flowers are in bloom" (春花正开). the answer to each question is so painfully obvious, the departed lover's obliviousness, blindness, uncaringness stings: respectively, "你难道不明白为了爱?" (Don't you understand it's for love?) and, finally, a plea: "你不要忘了我情深深如海" (Don't forget my deep love, as deep as the sea).

it's funny typing out the English translations of the lyrics: they seem so trite, so sappy. but maybe that's one of the marks of a great singer: selling sap, making it true. (there's also an overwhelmingly sentimental quality to modern Chinese-language creations that's all but unavoidable.) i also love how, unlike many singers who'd rather hide these "flaws", Tsai uses the scraping, guttural quality of her bottom register and the ragged sound of her breath (around the 5'39" mark) for further emotional resonance.

listening to Tsai Chin on and off over the years, i treasure most her quality of singing as if holding back tears. in her pregnant pauses, artful vibrato, and her high, climatic drama, her voice—beautifully aged over the years—reminds me that, like this song, "只有那有情人眼泪最珍贵 / 一颗颗眼泪都是爱都是爱" (Only a lover's tears are precious / Every single tear is love, all love).

the possibility of seeing: Wolfgang Tillmans at the Pompidou

non, je ne regrette going to Paris just to visit—well, my family and friends, of course—the Wolfgang Tillmans retrospective at the Centre Pompidou (until 22 September), before the building by Renzo Piano (whose portrait is featured) and Richard Rogers is closed for five whole years (oh France!) to clear it of asbestos (!!).

having grown up on the West German photographer's anti-fashion fotos in magazines like i-D, where his oh-so casual snaps of friends and lovers hanging out or raving preceded and bested the selfie era in their ostensible immediacy and honesty, it's been heartening to follow Tillmans's ever-curious growth from forthright queerness and subjects like free-body and other subcultures to astronomy, ecology, technology, and sheer abstraction (the highlight being his Freischwimmer series of exposed photo paper), as well as his broadening activism-as-art (anti-Brexit; immigrant, PLHIV & LGBT rights; Berghain), "blurring the line between party and protest", as Matthew Anderson frames it.

Lutz & Alex sitting in the trees, 1992

in retrospect, over four decades, this evolution was always there: “Growing up in the ’80s,” Tillmans shares, “questions of style and music and youth culture all seemed inherently political. . . . I was so excited about the connection between our private lives and politics.” this intersectionality—which Nan Goldin, Tracey Emin, et al broke ground of—informs part of the retrospective's title, Nothing could have prepared us — Everything could have prepared us, reading variously as a epistemological conundrum, Instagram inspo-caption, rebuke, spur, dirge.

like a last party/funeral, Tillmans transforms the museum's public library (BPI–Bibliothèque publique d’information) into a staging ground of discovery, keeping a few shelves of books (Psychology, Religion), video booths, study tables, and the photocopy room while inserting a lot of his own inspirations, paraphernalia, and of course works. in keeping with Piano & Rogers's philosophy, he turns things inside out: the library's older, purple carpet was cut to lay the grey one around bookshelves, and now that it's all exposed, he hangs his work in funny correspondence with this palimpsest/shadow negatives.

The State We're In, A, 2015

coming face-to-face with his works in full print, it's fun to spot details like the Christian Dior boutique Russian soldiers march by way back in 2005 ["Army (Moscow 2005)," 2008] or, in "Frank, in the shower" (2015), the ring that Frank Ocean was wearing (reading "Oxford 2007") before it was photoshopped out of his Blond/e album cover. it also felt like i was seeing a formative version of myself, when i came across those fotos in magazine/catalogue pages or screens, or in his inspirations like Dennis Cooper's novel The Sluts (2004), which i smuggled in from some smutty Paris bookstore back in the day.

Army (Moscow 2005), 2008

while the retrospective takes in Tillmans's video and sound installations, i'm by far more drawn to his fotos. somehow in their pointed conceptualism, his vast and epic landscapes videos and aural pieces like "I want to make a film" (2018), a room in which he tells you how he wants to go about doing just that, lose his original edge, making him seem like just another contemporary artist.

this distinction was made clearest to me when i went to the toilet and took a pic of one of the Pompidou's beautiful bowls, which i will miss, and emerged to be happily bested by Tillmans's "33 1/3 years later (Stinson Beach)" [2023], a throwback foto if any of the tip of a urinal, with the tips its sodden-purple urinal pad waving like a live organism. its title references his previous trip to the San Franciscan beach, where he picked up a flyer splicing together a Bruce Conner image with text. Tillmans made this collage into a T-shirt and featured it in the Lutz & Alex spread in i-D, his 1992 breakthrough. "they don't destroy their selves [sic]," the flyer's text reads, "they aim to destroy me and you...the freedom we seek to live / to love / to do / FUCK MEN! / FUCK MALE DOMINATION".

Clockwise from top left: another of my toilet shots; “33 1/3 years later (Stinson Beach)”, 2023; “Fuck Men”, 1992

while, in the preceding time of iPhones, the “distinctiveness of Tillmans’ medium itself” has been lost, as Jackie Wullschläger puts it in the FT, his explosion of banal-as-grand imagery was always, “in fact meticulously choreographed”, separated by quality, not quantity; the lens, not views. if one thing matters, everything matters, the title of his Tate retrospective went. here, as a last if temporary hurrah of the Pompidou (or humanities? humanity?)—after all that destruction in just four decades—i guess we can only resign and anger ourselves to the impossibility of Nothing could have prepared us — Everything could have prepared us.

in memory of Sirin Yeoh

Credits of Stranger Eyes (2024), a film by Yeo Siew Hua

we had just finished shooting Stranger Eyes. it was a very bad time at home for me. Sirin and i had been living together for 2 years, after being friends/colleagues for more than 5. in the last year, she had been going from bad to worse: a break-up, manic-depressive self-hatred, combined with flings, drugs, and drink. we all tried to help her (we really, really did); nothing, obviously, worked.

the nite before she killed herself and arranged for me to find her body, i thought she had turned a corner. there she was, back on the couch (no more crying in her room, no more suicide attempts), typing away furiously—at overdue schoolwork, she told me when i asked (it was her suicide note). we talked about our relationships, difficult families, music. i thought she had returned. she wished me well with my relationship; i went to bed. i heard her outside cleaning the house, listening to Blink-182.

All the small things / True care, truth brings / I'll take one lift / Your ride, best trip / Always, I know / You'll be at my show / Watching, waiting / Commiserating

as a fellow film worker, before she transitioned into social work, Sirin worked as an art and production assistant on films like: A Land Imagined (Yeo Siew Hua, 2018), Apprentice (Boo Junfeng, 2016), Ilo Ilo (Anthony Chen, 2013). as a producer, she collaborated with the ad companies Lioncat Films, Short Term Girlfriend, and TMRRW. and as a line producer, she worked extensively with photographer Shane Mitchell, especially on his book Far Afield (2016). all this in her short 30 years.

after more than a year and a half, i'm ready to say that i've finished crying. maybe even lessened hurting. i think i've learnt to respect her choice, as horrible as it was; a permanent solution to a temporary problem. i know that she lives because i remember her. i believe that she's in a happier place, with lesser or no pain. i shall still love her in my own way.

Stranger Eyes is dedicated to her. she wanted to return to filmmaking for it; schedules and her chaotic life then did not align. i like to think of a few audience members, like dedicated ghosts, sticking around to the end of the credits, seeing her name and maybe even speaking it out loud. before darkness how she'd cackle, to be spoken of in remaining cinemas around the world; her name flickering, for a while, like the shadows of a furious flame that snuffed itself out.

Sirin Yeoh (formerly Sirin Thongudomporn)