Independent Archive: Spirits Out of Time

Bruce Quek

In 2012, the late artist Lee Wen founded the Independent Archive (IA) with the mission of documenting contemporary visual art, focusing on performance and other ephemeral practices in Singapore. For seven years, IA’s shophouse space on Aliwal Street served not just as a library and repository, but also as a site of continuous encounter, and a space for experimentation and collaboration. In 2019, as we grieved his passing, a number of us had another question to face: what would become of IA, to which he had devoted so much of the last years of his life?

To simplify the tangled events of those first few weeks, I took charge of a portion of the Archive’s memory, in the form of boxes filled with hard drives, optical discs and tape cassettes of various types, alongside documents, posters and other printed matter, photographs, negatives, slides, and so on. Transporting these materials to the offices of the NTU Centre for Contemporary Art (NTU CCA) was an inflection point in a tendency that had been growing gradually over the past few years. For much of my time at IA, digitisation was but one amongst many of my responsibilities. From this point onward, it grew to become my overriding concern.

Secondly, the materials that did not depart westward in a delivery van then formed the framework of what we might call the embodied Archive. After a brief respite at IA’s original premises of 67 Aliwal Street, which was made possible by an anonymous donor, the embodied Archive found safe harbour at the studio of collective Ichinen Sekai, which counts IA communications manager Jireh Koh as a member. Here, we reconstituted a portion of the Archive’s library, a seed of the performative encounters characteristic of IA.

New programmes and events were devised by co-directors Kai Lam and Shaiful Risan, working alongside the artists, musicians, and other creatives I think of as IA’s extended family. The scene may have changed — a flatted factory instead of a shophouse with an inexplicable collection of chairs, and the occasional cat — but much of IA’s energy found itself renewed.

Kai Lam performing at 67 Aliwal Street. Image courtesy of Bruce Quek.

Similarly, the materials in my care found themselves in a quiet corner of the NTU CCA offices, likewise dislocated from their original context. Several months of painstaking digitisation and annotation followed, during which these fragments of memory came to seem like a digital ghost being teased forth from a physical substrate, ever-growing in size and complexity. I imagined it as a monument both enduring and ephemeral, and I rather fancied the idea of Lee Wen as the most exhaustively documented artist in Singapore.

In Asia Art Archive’s online journal ‘Ideas’, I wrote previously about the curious sensation of catching glimpses of Lee Wen’s thoughts, practice, and personality through some of the more oddball titles in IA’s library. Sifting through the thirty thousand or so documents in this project’s history to date, however, has been markedly stranger.

Much of the material is, of course, precisely what one might expect to be part of the Lee Wen Archive: photos and videos of his performances, some amount of his correspondence, his sketchbooks and notebooks, reviews and other texts related to his work, and so on. Other documents trace, in a relatively straightforward fashion, the way he moved amongst people and places: postcards from the world around, flyers and catalogues for one festival or another, and snapshots of street life interspersed with performance documentation.

IA's temporarily reconstituted library at Ichinen Sekai. Image courtesy of Bruce Quek.

Beyond this, demarcations and boundaries became increasingly blurry, and the information grew increasingly fragmented. Among the most affecting finds, to me, are a handful of photo albums, where all we may be certain of is their order in a given roll of film. One such album begins with the sea shore. Waves roll in; boats sit idle in the sand. Lee Wen sits in a single image, sharing beers with two men. The sequence continues with scenes of domesticity: children in a home, closeups of windows. One has a typewritten admonition, asking, in German, that the back door be kept closed. Thereafter, there are scenes of a train platform, some red flowers, and a close-up shot of a street sign depicting a woman and child. Another sequence consists mostly of barely legible snapshots of a CRT television screen, and a frog.

Individually, such unknown images could be reduced to one-off oddities. The film strip, however, strings them along a timeline, and brings to mind the sense of momentarily sharing the photographer’s perspective as the shutter opens and closes, with no other point of reference, engendering a feeling somewhere between camaraderie and voyeurism.

This sense of communing with spirits imaginary and electronic was in some sense amplified by the circuit breaker period and the months that followed, as I joined thousands who found themselves abruptly siloed, communicating with other drifting black boxes with squawks of digital noise. The energy that had accumulated in IA’s temporary home also faced this same obstacle, as plans and programmes were detained at the pandemic’s pleasure. To my mind, the flatlining of almost all social life during the circuit breaker period brought about mass discombobulation on an unprecedented scale. Even as restrictions gradually eased, the shock still reverberated, seeming to distort the very perception of time itself.

A collective fugue has settled over the year unmoored from time. It has not quite ended and might not do so entirely. There are few certainties to be had in the wake of such a perturbation. In tending to this digital ghost, however, two such stand out: one is that the digital Archive will be, to some extent, open-ended for some time to come. Perhaps someone will come along with the story of the television and the frog. The second is that while this free-floating informational ghost is a resource of considerable depth, it truly comes into its own through the interaction and interrelation with IA as a living, working space.