Drawing it as if it has already been seen

☉ Level 2, The BookBridge

This section features a map-drawing to navigate a forgotten intertidal imaginary by Wong Zihao and Liu Diancong.

Spanning the full-length windows of the BookBridge, this commissioned piece is a speculative response to the “meditative visualisation” practices of samananita described in anthropologist Gene Ammarell’s Bugis Navigation. Ammarell recounts, in the words of Haji Sima, how a spiritual process of visualisation was made in preparation for a journey to a distant land, even if the place was one where the navigator has not travelled to before. The prospective journey and destination was first navigated in the “mind’s eye”, by recalling and creatively substituting familiar and similar places to formulate a mental geography before the navigator embarked on the actual journey—“visualising the entire journey and, especially, the cities, villages, and people one expects to encounter along the way and at the final destination.” What Haji Sima explains as “making it as if it has always been seen” is explored here as a method for drawing a map—which the title of the artwork “drawing it as it has already been seen” alludes to—to navigate our imaginary inhabitations to Singapore’s forgotten tidal places.

Side Notes: About the BookBridge

The BookBridge holds the NUS Libraries' rare collections dating back to the 15^th century. Access is restricted to ensure the room temperature and humidity is constantly controlled. Curious what's inside? Take a virtual tour here.

"...a ship’s departure and, in some cases, the course of the ship, are finally set by an important if not highly visible practice in which the captain carries out a form of meditative visualisation. A young Bugis scholar described the process as lettu' memengi nappo lao ‘arrived assured, then depart’, a form of meditation commonly practiced by the Bugis which one surrenders both one’s material and spiritual self to a higher power."

Gene Ammarell, Bugis Navigation, vol. no. 48, monograph 48 (New Haven, Conn: Yale University, Southeast Asian Studies, 1999), 181-2.

Excerpts from the Artwork

"Sir Henry Keppel upon arrival in 1842 on a mission to eradicate rampant piracy in the region, initiated a hydrographic survey of the “New Harbour”—arguably the first measured drawing to be made of the seabed of Singapore’s southwestern maritime gateway, when it was completed in 1849.."

- New Harbour

"In the centre of the place are to be found many graves, and there is some long-forgotten story of death and cruelty which makes the place haunted by the spirits of these unfortunate people, so that it is but seldom visited by the Malays, and then only to collect the ripe coconuts, which are the property of a man on the next island, to which one can wade at very low tides..."

- Watery Graves

"...an enormous hole in the bed of the ocean in which a giant crab lives. The crab is a home-lover but twice a day has to sally forth in search of food. This removes a stopper from the hole allowing the waters of the oceans to flow through it and escape into the underworld."..."

- Pusat Tasek

Curious About the Book Mentioned? Check it out below.

Ammarell, Gene.
Bugis Navigation
New Haven: Yale University, Southeast Asia Studies, Monograph 48, 1999.