CreativeClubSG

Another day, another call with Sodeep. With him, conversation never begins gently; it bursts in laughing, swearing, tumbling over itself. That familiar rhythm again — fucker, fuck — not as aggression, but as punctuation. Commas and full stops in his spoken language. A way of keeping things light, friendly, alive. His exuberance is almost suspicious in a world where so many around him seem weighed down. He told me the whole day had been consumed by errands. Family matters. Both his sisters live in landed property now — secure, respectable, the visible markers of having “done well” in Singapore. Their sons, he said, studied well, even went to elite schools. A perfect script, the kind the nation loves to repeat. And then, almost casually, he added that both brothers-in-law suffer from depression. Another depression case. He said it without judgement, more with puzzlement. How could men who had followed the rules so carefully end up hollowed out inside? The contrast was striking. Here was ...

Life’s Twists and Turns  by Hamamoto Satoshi and Choo Meng Foo Walking has always felt to me like a form of thinking with the body. It clears the mind, loosens the joints of thought, and somehow makes conversation flow more honestly. When two people walk side by side, there is no table between them, no fixed posture to defend. Sharing deepens without effort. Words arrive at their own pace. Yesterday, I walked 4.2 kilometres—from Buddha Tooth Relic Temple to City Square Mall . A simple route. A simple act. Yet walking, for me, has never been merely about distance. It is about discovery: new streets, new ideas, new perspectives, new understandings, sometimes even new opportunities. Walking welcomes the world in, and in doing so, opens oneself. Life, too, moves this way—through twists and turns that only make sense when we look back while still in motion. As we walked, Siew shared a story from a time when he was the General Manager of a  Hall . It was a story about a Pakist...

  Transition A Life Formed Too Early, Briefly Met, Then Lost in Transition Loon grew up poor. Not in the way poverty is later retold—cleaned, sharpened, moralised—but in the way that compresses time. Childhood shortened. Adulthood arrived without invitation. Curiosity was not guided; it was simply exposed. The Singapore of his youth—late 1960s into the 1970s—was a country tightening itself into order. Independence was recent. Industrialisation accelerated. Housing blocks rose. Factories multiplied. Discipline, productivity, and survival were the virtues taught openly. Private life lagged behind. Parents worked long hours. Oversight thinned. Childhood protection was assumed rather than designed. The language of safeguarding had not yet caught up with the speed of modernisation. At the same time, a quiet revolution entered homes. In the mid-1970s, video cassette recorders arrived. First Betamax, then VHS. The format war mattered less than the effect: moving images left cinemas and en...

This morning began in the most ordinary way—my body unwell, my head clouded, my nose blocked by the small humiliations of flu. Sneezing comes with a strange vulnerability; it reduces thought to reflex. I decided to take a bath, hoping the heat might loosen not only the congestion but the mind itself. Water has always felt like a quiet reset button—steam rising, thoughts softening, a temporary return to something elemental. As with every morning, my body followed its own ancient schedule. There are things we do not negotiate with. It was there, in that private, unguarded moment, that death arrived—not with ceremony, not with preparation, but as an attachment on WhatsApp. A photograph. A short line of text. Chen Yi Quan is dead. My first instinct was disbelief. It felt absurd, almost offensive, to accept it immediately. A scam, perhaps. A cruel mistake. After all, I had spoken to him only days ago. He had apologised for the delay in returning my painting from Bangkok. He explained his si...

 Flowing There is a moment near the end of 冯友兰 ’s History of Chinese Philosophy where the voice softens. After centuries of schools, arguments, sages, wars, reforms, dynasties rising and collapsing, he does not end with triumph or doctrine. He ends with a description of how a human being may live. Four ways, he suggests—not as ladders to climb, but as modes of inhabiting the same world. What startled me when I first encountered this was how little changes on the surface. A person at the beginning and a person at the end may look identical. They wake, work, eat, speak, age. And yet inwardly, they are living in different universes. In the earliest way of being, life simply happens. One is born into conditions, customs, needs. Hunger dictates action, fear shapes choices, desire pulls the body forward. History has always been full of such lives. Think of peasants during the Han dynasty or medieval Europe, whose entire cosmos was weather, soil, tax collectors, and ritual. They did not...

  Nothing but Memories, Nothing Even of That Today I called Sodeep. Another story. He never ceases to amaze me. He laughed immediately and asked, almost theatrically, “Do you want the good news or the bad news?” Of course—both. He told me he has had a good six days since the New Year. I suspected the main companion of that goodness even before he said it: alcohol. New Year’s Eve, he said, was the best night of his life. Four friends. All born in 1964—January, March, September, September again, and December—now sixty-two years old, still swinging. Fourteen bottles. A 25-year Chivas. Thirty-five thousand spent on one great night, paid by two remisiers who decided that money, that night, should turn into sound, sweat, and memory. The place was the Powerhouse . Powerhouse is not merely a club. For an older generation, it is a time capsule. Born of Clarke Quay’s revival in the 1990s, Powerhouse carried an industrial, muscular energy—cavernous interiors, bodies packed close, music ...

  Two Ways of Being Seek arrived quietly, as he always does. He brought his own sake and a small ceramic cup—nothing ornate, nothing symbolic in an obvious way, yet everything about it spoke of intention. He knows what he needs, and he carries it without excess. I had brought my own plain water. I had taken an antihistamine the night before and decided not to drink. It was not a moral decision, just attentiveness. Antihistamines already slow the nervous system; alcohol would only blur the edges further. At this stage of life, wisdom often announces itself as restraint rather than indulgence. I was comfortable with that. Watching Seek drink his sake was enough. We sat with our backs against the waterfalling glass screen. The water fell endlessly behind us, indifferent to our stories, generous in its constancy. It felt like the right backdrop—something moving, dissolving, repeating. Seek spoke of Paris. Not the Paris of postcards or cinema, but a city he found dirty and unkempt....

Today I waited at the NTUC bar with a glass of Glenfiddich 12 years, wondering for a moment whether my friend had lost his way. Whisky does that—it slows time enough for old doubts to surface. I sat there quietly, the glass warming in my hand, thinking about how friendships stretch across decades, sometimes thinning, sometimes returning with an unexpected density. We were students of one of the greater schools in Singapore, yet we were neighbourhood children first—products of a very particular time. The late 1970s. Singapore was modernising rapidly, but what we absorbed then was not modernity itself—it was the shadow of Western hegemony . We did not yet understand the world; we only sensed that something powerful lay beyond us, somewhere behind English accents, television screens, and imported songs. I grew up poor. There was no television at first, and when black-and-white TV finally arrived, it was precious—encased in a wooden cabinet, with a lock. It heated up when left on too lon...

    When I met Sodeep again, the sensation that washed over me was oddly familiar — as if time had folded in on itself and placed us back into one of those afternoons at Chinatown, when I still kept a studio there. I remember watching him from a distance in those days: the way he would sneak across from the Subordinate Courts, slip into Block 23, and retrieve his whisky from an old cupboard like a monk tending to a secret altar. He would take a quiet drink, settle himself, and let the world’s weight soften into an afternoon nap. He reminded me then — and still does — of the drunken swordsman in old tales, or the Tang poet who believed clarity arrived only after the world began to blur. There was always something romantic, even mythical, in the way he approached life: half in rebellion, half in surrender, always moving between pleasure and philosophy as though they were two doors opening into the same room. Years passed — years in which both of us walked our separate paths, min...