Hock Meng Lee, my father passed away when i was 4 years old. i only knew him from the family album. My mother Mee Lan Lee was born in Teochew province and came to Singapore by ship when she was 15. She never went to school. My father was born in Ipoh, Hakka, only went to primary school in Medan, Sarawak. He was good in learning languages well, and was a wanderer. He ended in Singapore a court translator, met my mother while she was going through divorce proceedings and translating for her in court. They married. He became a journalist for the Chinese daily, Sin Chew Jit Poh and wrote about indigenous Malay and Indonesia culture for the Chinese readers.

Later he edited a tri lingual malay, Chinese, English dictionary one of the first in Singapore. He died of brain haemorage after having been stricken with high blood pressure for some time. My mother blamed it on his drinking habit and his over driven work ethics that he could not stop against medical advice. I was the youngest and although he requested that i should be enrolled in a Chinese school, my mother gave in to peer pressure put me through English schooling. I cannot read the books and articles we inherited after his death.

The stories I know are based on images from old photographs and tales overheard while my mother told vividly without knowing I was listening. I face a similar divide with my 12 years old son today as he only knows Japanese. Through my musings, my drawings, my songs, my dances, my daily life I attempt to link the past with the present, touching on language, culture, art as a descendent of diaspora, a citizen of dystopia, a  by searching  for equilibrium between the conflicts of a post colonial past and a globalized future.

As part of a new series first performed in "Future of Imagination 6", Sculpture Square, Singapore, April 2010 and during “Negotiating Home, History and Nation: Two Decades of Contemporary Art from Southeast Asia, 1991 – 2010”, Singapore Art Museum, Singapore, 28 May 2011, I have made a drawing based on photographs from the albums left to us by my father and will also make a performance.