'Multiple Arborealities: Tracing Tales of Teak'

Multiple Arborealities: Tracing Tales of Teak

LUCY DAVIS

This photograph (Figure 1)depicts a teak bed that hasbeen my main partner in sixyears of visual-artisticresearch, under the auspices ofthe Migrant EcologiesProject1. The research tracedhistoric, material, genetic andpoetic stories of this bed,from a Singapore junk store,where it was found, back to apossible location of theoriginal tree using DNA-tracking technology.

Visual culture is often moremultivalent than language.And so much contemporaryart practice involves openingspace for visual-semioticpossibility rather than straining for communicative equivalence. Indeed,multiple possibilities for meaning-making have arisen on this particularMigrant Ecologies journey. However, during this process I have tried toremain loyal not to an originary word or sign but to a material object –that one teak bed.

What I will do here is to transcribe into writing a series of ‘tracings’,‘transplantings’, ‘divinings’, ‘recastings’, ‘reconstructions’, ‘interpretations’and ‘imprintings’ and articulate the ways such approaches were ‘workedthrough’ in art practice via woodprint collage, an animated film,photography and shadow play – the outcomes of our research. Theexhibition series that evolved from these investigations was launched atthe Royal Botanic Gardens, Edinburgh (March-July 2013), and a laterincarnation installed at the National University of Singapore (NUS)

Translating Southeast Asia16

Museum (June 2013-February 2014).A recurring theme encircles how a forest product like a teak bed might

make its presence felt, get a hold on the story, take one outside of oneselfand one’s language. Perhaps it is this loyalty to the bed, and the journeyit has taken me on, that might permit the resulting, unruly assemblage oftales to be productively read as translation.

Working-through historical formsOne starting point for this project was a fascination with the mid-twentieth-century Malayan modern woodcut and a question about howI might, as an art practitioner, work through the micro-gestures of thismovement in a contemporary macro-ecological context of ‘cuttings ofwood’ or regional deforestation. A series of woodblock prints are foundin the NUS Museum collection. Two in particular have rooted themselvesin the process: Nanyang University by Lee Kee Boon depicts theconstruction in 1955 of the university popularly known as Nantah.(Figure 2 below) Although this independent institution was funded bydiverse migrant Chinese communities, it was resolutely located in‘Nanyang’ – a Chinese term for South Seas.2.3.4 However, the visions thatNantah faculty and students translated into Malayan life were regardedwith suspicion by both colonial and post-independence authorities.5

Nantah was closed in 1979 and merged with the National University ofSingapore. In 1982, an engineering institution appeared on the site, finallymetamorphosizing into Nanyang Technological University (NTU) –where I currently teach.

The Nanyang University print presents a splintered dance between a raw,

moving worlds 15.1 17

porous grain and the construction of a modern that was not to be.Concrete dreams of a modernizing China, transplanted onto a plot ofequatorial-orange soil and carved out of jungly plantation in northwestSingapore, are inscribed with much intensity – indeed, much labour –into a woodblock.6 In a fragile demarcation of wood-in-wood, theuniversity building, this ‘work-in-progress’, is supported by a nervousexoskeleton of wooden scaffolding (possibly bakau mangrove fromarchipelago coastlines). Today, the Nantah building still stands, but hasbeen rebranded as NTU’s Chinese Heritage Centre, an attempt to co-optdisorderly historic material into ‘Heritage’.7.8.

But there are also other dreams inscribed in Malayan modernwoodblocks. And one often finds a tree not far from the frame ...

In Persuading, 1958, by Tan Tee Chie (Figure 3 below), a frangipanisurrounds two men on a wooden bench. The older man taps the thigh ofthe youth with his fingertips, a gesture the latter does not appear toreciprocate. What is actually being ‘persuaded’ is unclear. Is this a ‘guidancesession’ where the older man is counselling a reluctant youth. Or issomething more shady being proposed?9

Another invocation of wood-in-wood, the frangipani appears first asanthropomorphic mirror of the older man, winding around the pair,heavy with flowers. A leafy rosette, a third spherical centre, opens to theleft of the men’s heads. Splayed-leaves to the right mirror the older man’sgesticulating fingers.10 But what I find more persuasive is the way thistree, carved from a Chinese huang yang [boxwood] block, slowly outgrowsthe subject matter of the print. Its branches stretch beyond and forwardtowards the viewer, disrupting both the composition and easy


interpretation. The path beneath also slopes vertiginously out of the rightcorner of the image, evoking subterranean activity that contrasts with thecontrolled, modern construction in the space behind.11

There are a lot of things that humans do to nature in our region.Contemporary Southeast Asia suffers the world’s most rapid rate ofdeforestation and is a global centre of the illegal wildlife trade. But, in thecase of Tan’s frangipani and the teak bed that has been the heart of myresearch, I’m equally interested in things that nature, and by extensionnatural materials, persuade us to do ... and the tales they entice us to tell.

Tracing migrations How does one trace in a forest product the stories of its migration? Howmight these be translated into visual art? From 2006 to 2009, I lived in aquarter officially known as Little India, famous for its congregations ofSouth Asian migrant workers. But the quarter also hosts a plethora ofdiscarded ‘migrant objects’, such as electrical items, cardboard, and tin-cans. A ‘nocturnal economy’ or ‘ecology’ occurs where these objects arecollected at night and trolleyed to a central recycling point. I noticedhowever that timber had not yet been integrated into this nocturnalecology and began to venture out at night collecting wooden planks anddiscarded furniture.

Once home, each new addition to my collection was inspected by mycats, such as the four-legged stool found on the corner of KampongKapor Road (Figure 4 right). Thisphotograph documents a momentthat reinforced my inter-speciesapproach: Is a wood-cat ‘interpretive-zone’ being constituted here wherethe stool has absorbed stories thatthe feline nose deciphers?12

For modern humans, moretechnical deciphering methods arerequired. An early collaboration with Singapore startup DoubleHelixTracking Technologies,13 involved cell tests to discern from which treespecies my objects derived. Following this, I undertook a series ofpilgrimages to living tree specimens, either in the Singapore BotanicGardens or Bukit Timah Nature Reserve, Singapore’s last primary forest.14

Figure 5 (next page) depicts a terentang (campnosperma auriculatum), the treefrom which the four-legged stool might have originated.


Collage reconstructionsThe next challenge involved translating speculative stories of plantmigration into art practice. I originally intended to make my collectionof discarded timber into woodblocks in the spirit of the 1950s and 1960s,inscribing factual and fictive migration stories into their grain. However,

once these objects had spent time inmy studio, I found I had begun arelationship with them. And withthat relationship went an ethics.Although the trees had already beencut into pieces by unknowncarpenters, I found I could not dofurther violence by reducing theseobjects to my stories. Instead I


developed a woodprint-collage method, making two sets of print collagesfor each object: the first, a ‘natural history’ print of the object, depicted allconstituent parts; the second involved cutting these prints into fragmentsand cut-and-pasting stories of wood back ‘together again’ humpty-dumpty style, from chopped-up prints of the wood, such as the TerentangFour-legged Stool Tree (Figures 6-8 previous page).

As I was working backwards in this process from a tangible object to animagined tree, my ‘interpretive bias’ became as much towards a ‘four-legged-stool-ness’ of the tree, the spirit of the object in a tree, as it wastowards the spirit of the tree in an object. The resulting collages did notposit a pristine, romantic source but rather something that was becomingout of stories of migrant forest products.

I also attempted to learn the Malay names of my collection. In so doingI was performatively channelling attempts by colonial natural historiansto learn local names of specimens, as well as efforts by Chinese migrantsto acquire a more ‘permanent residence’ in the region by learning Malay.Although the centrality of Malay in Singapore has waned today, in the late1950s, as depicted in this famouspainting by Chua Mia Tee (Figure 9right), Malay was both nationallanguage and lingua franca.15 Artistsand intellectuals such as Chua’scontemporaries (members of theleftist Equator Art Society), soughtto ‘naturalize’ their status in Malayavia language and depictions ofregional life forms.

Plant-genetic interpretationsIn 2010 I was awarded a grant to extract, in collaboration withDoubleHelix, DNA from one specific teak bed, and to travel to whereverthe DNA suggested the timber originated. This research collaborationalso included photographer Shannon Lee Castleman, plant biologist DrShawn Lum, musicians Zai Kuning and Zai Tang, and ten student andgraduate assistants from NTU.

Each individual tree has a unique DNA identity, termed with someanthropomorphic arrogance a ‘fingerprint’. DoubleHelix uses thistechnology to certify the legal plantation origins of timber. In this instancewe were challenging DoubleHelix to move backwards through a supplychain, interpreting degraded wood from a mid-twentieth-century bed


made around the same time as the woodblock movement. This was notan exact process as complete genographic archives for teak do not exist.However, DoubleHelix collaborators were excited when preliminary testssuggested a connection between DNA from our bed and teak in southeastSulawesi. There was a theory that teak, imported to Indonesia forcenturies, had ‘naturalized’ in southeast Sulawesi and that this might beevident in its genetic structure. So a Migrant Ecologies team travelled toMuna in southeast Sulawesi, an island with a reputation for the best teakin Indonesia, in search of stories.

The uncertainty of our DNA explorations contrasts with the positivistmanner, as Judith Roof has argued, that DNA figures in the mass mediaand popular imagination.16 There is a spirit of the nineteenth century inthese popular projections: a ‘Journey to The Source’ along ‘The Barcodeof Life’, charting new territories through science, only today with thevalue-added barcode-poetics of capital. I am grateful for the journey thatDNA timber-tracking has taken us on, and am persuaded of the macro-ecological potential of genetic certification. However, there are tensionsin this endeavour. Firstly, contemporary artists like to think they cancritique modern orders of things, including science. Secondly, I wasinterested in teasing out multiple stories of wood, an endeavourcontrasting with the definitive ambit and ecological utility of DNAcertification.

Tracing micro-ecologiesWe didn’t completely grasp before visiting Muna how teak has historicallyhad the same impact as contemporary palm oil in some parts of Indonesia.Teak, originating from Burma, India or Laos was, according to localhistorian and philologist, Mr La Ode Sirad Imbo, introduced to Munamore than 500 years ago.17 Legend has it that teak seeds were gifts fromJavan royalty to the King of Muna. Initially only the King could plantteak, with severe penalties for those caught smuggling seeds. Later,intensive cultivation was the purview of the Dutch, who carried out mostof the large-scale deforestation, and then, briefly, the Japanese. Afterindependence, plantations were controlled by the Indonesian state.

A saying we heard on the island was politik Muna adalah politik kayu –‘Muna politics is a politics of wood’.18 Today, virtually no original forestremains. The 1950s to the 1980s were timber boom years where demandexceeded supply and sawmills lined the harbour of the main town, Raha.Today the sawmills still standing are overrun with weeds. There are nolonger large amounts of timber for sale and forest destruction has


significantly affected the water table. But alongside stories of macro-ecological change, our research is about

drawing out micro-gestures. And here, things get complicated. Whilesubsistence farms produce food for local consumption and there is fishingalong the coasts, the mainstay of the Muna economy is overwhelminglyteak. Until the year 2000, islanders were only permitted to fell trees fordomestic use.19 This meant that if one were to survive one had to dothings considered ‘illegal’ according to the discourse of DNA certification.Villagers cut more teak than they needed and built houses with doublewalls, keeping extra stock underneath their homes for ‘repairs’. After thefall of President Suharto in 1997, villagers were finally permitted to planttheir own trees. But teak trees can only be harvested after twenty to thirtyyears, making trees in the smallholder plantations too young to harvest.Illegal logging of recently established konservasi forests (plantationsawarded conservation status in order to protect groundwater) iswidespread. Indeed the only konservasi forests left untouched bywoodcutters are those considered to be haunted.

Divining trees

In this snapshot by Shannon LeeCastleman (Figure 10 above), we arestanding around the largest teak treewe found in Muna in a hutan-hantuor haunted forest. It was estimated tobe over a century old. In thesehutan-hantu, strange battles ensuebetween remaining teak trees and

banyan/beringen or strangling-figs (Figure 11 left). The banyan seed is inmost instances dispersed in the canopy by a bird or a bat. The parasite


puts out aerial roots which, whenthey reach the ground, enforce acomplex ribcage-like architecture,often suffocating the host tree.Possibly because of the imposingway it ‘possesses’ other trees, thebanyan is regarded as having potentpowers throughout the archipelago.(Figure 12 right).

While Shannon Castleman wasphotographing this tree, we heardcockatoos in the canopy, perhapseating banyan figs. We can’t be surebut they resembled the critically-endangered lesser sulphur-crestedcockatoo.20This experience inspired

a scene in the animated stop-motionfilm that combined charcoaldrawings with animated woodprintfragments – again prints from theteak bed where a cockatoo serves asintercessor between the worlds ofthe teak bed, trees, and humans(Figures 13-15 left). A cockatoo fliesinto the animated film and shits abanyan seed. This starts a dancebetween the colonizing plantation-teak and the indigenous banyan,which in turn initiates a seconddance between southeast Sulawesitree-lore and modern genetics.

The ability to divine whether atree or piece of wood has spirits isthe purview of the dukun-dukun,traditional arborealists or wood-spirit shamans. A dukun is consultedon matters of healing and fortune-telling. They traditionally advisewhether a tree should be choppeddown and which kind of wood has


to be used in house construction,providing incantations for theprocess. In architecture in Muna, asin many places in Southeast Asia, theroot end of a plank must point tothe ground and the crown to thesky.21 For overhead beams, thecrown should point towards Mecca.The dukun-dukun claim to be able todiscern crown or root ends of apiece of wood just by holding thetimber.

We presented teak samples fromour bed to two dukun-dukun andasked them to tell us what theythought. The male dukun respondedthat our teak was jati-hitam [blackteak] of the lowest grade – used onlyfor the lavatory and back areas ofhouses. The female dukun was notconvinced by the DNA reading andasserted the wood was not fromSulawesi (Figures 16-17 right). Shealso told us stories of forest spiritsand by the end of our trip we hadquite a collection – domestic catsfound as road kill beside hutan-hantu that morphed into were-tigers whenthey were picked up; tree spirits with no heads but with eyes under theirarmpits.

These interviews met with resistance from our two Indonesiancollaborators, who dismissed this ‘animist magic’, declaring their ownIslamic and Catholic faiths to be more modern and scientific. However,an interesting discussion developed after I showed them an earlieranimation of Alfred Russel Wallace on my laptop and explained howWallace had formulated a theory of natural selection independently ofCharles Darwin. Although they were not familiar with Wallace, themention of Darwin sparked a negative response and both pronouncedthat they did not believe in evolution. They did, however, believe in DNA.

Another of our collaborators, the country project manager fromDoubleHelix, didn’t understand why we repeatedly asked about the


origins and possible journeys of the wood when we had got results fromthe DNA. His role in Muna was to collect samples with which to confirma match between our bed and Sulawesi teak. Although new samples didindeed match the profile from our bed, this information was inconclusiveas profiles from Muna and newer tests from our bed appeared equallyclose to profiles from Burma.

Such complexities informed the narrative of the animated film which,far from being a simple ‘journey to the source’ story guided by DNA,evolved into a tale of multiple-arborealities – competing historic andcontemporary, aerial and subterranean, root-systems of stories.

Recasting micro-gesturesHalfway through our fieldwork, we discovered what photographerShannon Castleman calls ‘tree-wounds’ – a moment whereby micro-gestures of Muna islanders came together with my initial interest inrecasting the modern woodcut in a contemporary ecological context.Shannon states:

We discovered these enormous tree-wounds on the edges of konservasi plantations.Mr La Ode Sirad Imbo explained that villagers would make cuts in the trees over aperiod of time on the side not facing the road until the tree eventually died. The treewas then removed as it is understood to have fallen on its own. 22

This process also enables the tree to dry out and the wood to becomeready for use while still standing.


These ‘tree-wound portraits’, shot outdoors with a black velvetbackdrop, are quite literally ‘woodcuts’: cut by the axe and cropped bythe camera in a space somewhere between life and death – between treeand wood. It is hard not to anthropomorphize but they resemblewounded limbs. And yet atremendous affective presencepervades – a presence whichcompelled Shannon to return sixmonths later to photograph themagain. Figure 18 (previous page) showsa tree-wound that Shannonphotographed in November 2010.Figure 19 (previous page) is the stumpof the same tree that shephotographed again in April 2011.Once these photographs were blownup, micro-ecologies appeared. Wefound grasshoppers, spiders, termitesand plants growing out of thesemonuments that Shannon had notoriginally noticed. (Figure 20 right).

Imprinting patriarchies Two woodprint-collages weremounted side by side in the NUSMuseum exhibition. One is areconstruction of an undatedphotograph of the late Alex Bermuli,sawmill-owner, in a plantation witha group of men gathered around atree, upon which he has placed hishand (Figure 21 left). His son, WalterT. Bermuli, told us his father hadmigrated to Muna in the 1950s.Walter, a retired sawmill engineer,allowed us to re-photograph hiscollection of snapshots dating fromthe time when one could walk onrivers of teak logs from the islandinterior all the way to the sea. Themen in Walter’s family had worked


with teak for three generations. His son is now a forest policeman. The photograph of Alex Bermuli is a kind of foreshadowing of the

earlier snapshot of our team standing around the large teak tree. A teasingquestion arises: Could it be the same tree? Like our snapshot from 2010,politik Muna adalah politik kayu, multiple politics of wood are suggested:politics of class, gender, age, ethnicity (the Bermulis being Christians fromManado regard themselves as having an ethnicity apart from Munaislanders). But there is also arboreal power. In both photos there is thatinescapable temptation for human beings to place the palm of their handon the trunk of a tree.

The second woodprint-collagereconstructs a photograph of SimonOei of Nature Wood Pte Ltd,Singapore, at around four or fiveyears old (Figure 22 left). His father,timber merchant Allen Oei, hadplaced him on top of a huge merantilog in the Danish-run timberyard inwhich he worked in the 1970s. LikeWalter Bermuli, Allen Oei, whosefamily migrated to Singapore fromSurabaya before the war, gave usaccess to his photo album alongsidea surprisingly frank series ofinterviews detailing his rags-to-riches journey from an itineranttimber-grader to influentialmerchant.23 Allen Oei had also beento Muna and confirmed that Muna

teak was superior to any other outside Burma.Allen Oei, by his son’s reckoning, controlled a significant proportion of

the (legal and illegal) teak trade passing through Singapore in the 1980sand 1990s. But Simon does not recall this childhood photograph beingtaken. As a young man Simon was repulsed by the sweaty, dirty gangster-like world of the sawmill. He studied computer science at university andworked for a series of multinationals before joining his father’s businessat the age of 28. When we interviewed Simon in 2014, he was poised totake over Nature Wood under Allen’s watchful eye, aware of the ecologicalcomplexities of his position while trying to find ways to defend it:‘Timber is of course an excellent way to contain carbon,’ he asserted.


And yet Singapore, like Muna, is now also an island after a timber boom.Where Muna was devastated during the boom years, Singapore was wherefortunes were made and where, as recently as the 1980s, ‘legal’ timber wasthe island’s fifth largest export. But the Chinese middlemen who oncedominated the trade are no longer required. International buyers nowcan go directly to Burma or Java. The Oei family have Burmeseconnections going back to the 1970s and maintain partnerships withBurmese timber companies. At the time of our interviews they receiveda shipment, claimed to be the last import of logs to Singapore after a banimposed on 31 March 2014 on whole-log export by the Burmesegovernment. A European buyer was already on hand.

While reconstructing bothwoodprint-collages, the protagonists,without my fully-intending, beganto seem like they were turning intowood. The hand that Alex Bermuliplaced on a sunspot on the treebecame dark, bark-like. So didSimon Oei’s features when I beganto layer them. These two works wereinstalled at NUS Museum at a rightangle with a third print-collage – areconstruction of the thumbprint ofDavid, the collector from RangoonRoad who originally gave us theteak bed. David’s thumbprint is thesame size as both of the portraits(Figure 23 right). Together all threeworks suggest modern desires tomake one’s mark – via wood-collecting, via timber-trading, via DNA-tracking, but the material doesnot submit so easily.

The title of the exhibition – When you get closer to the heart you may findcracks – was taken from something Allen Oei said. He meant this quiteliterally to be about the heartwood of a teak log, but the phrase migratedto our exhibit and took on another resonance to do with the productive-futility of our journeys to the source.

Teak translationsA final work for the 2014 exhibition attempted to translate that fragile


exo-skeleton of bakau scaffolding inLee Kee Boon’s Nanyang Universitywoodblock into a room-sizeinstallation piece (Figure 24 left).Inside a recycled mangrove scaffold‘slept’ wooden archival-boxes,evoking windows of the originalbuilding, but containing shadow-puppet-interpretations of modernwoodcut works. Other boxes housedscenes from the mid-1930s where abelated discovery of the originaladvertisement for our bed in TheStraits Times finally revealed its exactdate (Figure 25 left). The shadow-puppets, like everything else, weremade from woodprint-collage fromthe bed or from Allen Oei’s teaklogs. This room of shadows, slowlyanimated by swinging light-pendulums, was intended to conjurehalf-built, still-breathing dreams ofwood which seep into each other –the shadow of the last tiger killed inSingapore in 1937 in Choa ChuKang Village, merging into the teakbed advertisement from DiamondBedsteads of the same year (Figures26-27 left). Also inside thescaffolding and on the floor were sixboxes of assorted wood samples withMalay names of trees punched intoeach block (Figure 28 next page).They once belonged to NUS butare no longer used and were given

to me by the new Lee Kong Chian Natural History Museum, openingthis year, the 50th anniversary of Singapore’s independence. One wonderswhether the Malay names of these trees and their attendant stories will beremembered at all.

There are apparently multiple meanings of the Indonesian word for


teak or jati. Jati-diri and sejati are common words: Diri means ‘self ’ whilejati-diri is often taken to mean ‘identity’, ‘personality’, or, most accurately,‘the essence of self ’, and sejati is taken to mean ‘pure’, ‘true’, ‘authentic’,‘original’, ‘genuine’.24 Such translations of jati suggest an ironic, poeticlayering of our quest – returning our project to the efforts of colonialnatural historians and migrant Chinese artists alike to authenticate theirpresence in the archipelago via the adoption of languages, transcriptionof forms, and cuttings of wood. The singular, inward reverberations of jati,moreover, resonate with my own efforts to stay loyal to the wood, not inspite of but, more, because of the cracks at the heart.25

NOTES1. See <www.migrantecologies.org>.2. Nanyang is a historic Chinese designation meaning ‘South Seas’.3. Donors included clan associations, trishaw drivers, and dance hall hostesses. Kee

Pookong and Choi, A Pictorial History of Nantah, ed., Kwai Keong (Singapore: ChineseHeritage Centre, 2000).

4. [Nantah has] ‘good claim to being the first Southeast Asian university’. See AnthonyReid, ‘A Saucer Model of Southeast Asian Identity’, Southeast Asian Journal of SocialScience 27 (Singapore: 1999), p. 11.

5. The histories of mid-twentieth-century, left-leaning Malayan politics are contested.Official histories portray leftist members of migrant Chinese communities and schoolsas communists. Others argue that the socially-engaged culture of the Chinese inSingapore in mid-twentieth century had less to do with communism, more to dowith the May 4 Movement efforts to modernize China following Chinese territory


loss after the First World War. Yao Souchou, ‘All Quiet on Jurong Road: NanyangUniversity and Radical Vision in Singapore’, in Paths Not Taken: Political Pluralism inPostwar Singapore, eds, Michael D. Barr and Carl A. Trocki (Singapore: National U ofSingapore P, 2008), pp. 170-87.

6. Thanks to Paul Rae for pointing out the realist-expressive invocation of the labourof the worker in these woodblocks.

7. Singapore discourse on heritage often concerns a struggle over which entities areconsidered (grand) Heritage-worthy and which must make way for economic growth.

8. Nanyang University was created during the Malayan Emergency (1948–1960), whenthe Malayan Communist Party took up violent anti-colonial struggle in the Malayanjungle. There is currently considerable interest in mid-twentieth-century histories ofarchipelago Southeast Asia and in revisiting stories of the Cold War, formerly reducedto primitive binaries. A spectrum of political positions jostled for preeminence and thearts were one forum in the struggle over which of these modern visions would prevail.I first encountered the modern woodblocks in the first exhibition to revisit thecontent of these works, at the National Museum of Singapore in 1999, curated by KohNguang How and Joyce Fann.

9. In a 2008 presentation, oral historian Koh Nguang How connected this print withthe Chinese left’s ‘anti-yellow-culture movement’ against westernization, materialism,and vice. Tan himself was more vague about what was being ‘persuaded’. Tan Tee Chie,interview with the author, translated by Daniel Lim, Singapore, 29 May 2010.

10. Frangipanis, and especially the white-flowered Plumeria obtusa ‘Singapore’ (originatingnot from Singapore but Latin America), are associated with death by both Malay andChinese communities. To the former, the scent of frangipani (kemboja) at night is saidto mean that a pontianak [female vampire] is around. In colonial Singapore such treeswere only found alongside European buildings or Chinese cemeteries.

11. Tan intended to depict pretentious buildings going up in the background – a referenceto the dangers of urban materialism. Tan Tee Chie, interview 2010.

12. The idea that there are meaning-making processes outside of the human in which wemay be included, links to another thread in this project: Donna Haraway has pioneeredanalyses of impermanent, inter-species ‘contact zones’; different species ‘becomingwith’ each other or ‘making each other up in the flesh’, ‘full of the patterns of theirsometimes-joined sometimes-separate heritages’. Donna J. Haraway, When Species Meet(Minneapolis: U of Minnesota P, 2008), pp. 16-17 and p. 25.

13. See <www.doublehelixtracking.com>.14. This was with the assistance of Dr Shawn Lum, plant biologist and president of the

Nature Society of Singapore.15. Malay is still a national language, but it is less common as a lingua franca, used

somewhat tokenistically in official ceremonies.16. ‘DNA ... is not just another scientific fact. DNA’s overt connection to processes of

representation (the alphabet, the book, the map [one might add here, the imprintLD]) makes ... representations of DNA particularly rich sites for understanding theinterrelation of science, metaphor and narrative.’ Judith Roof, ‘The Epic Acid’, in ThePoetics of DNA (Minneapolis: U of Minnesota P 2007), p. 24.

17. See Andrew Lowe and Hugo Volkaerts, ‘The Evolutionary and Plantation Origin ofTeak’, in Jalan Jati, ed., Balasingamchow Yu-mei (Edinburgh and Singapore: RoyalBotanic Gardens Edinburgh/Migrant Ecologies Project, 2013) pp. 186-9.

18. Jennifer Gaynor who researched fisheries and maritime history in eastern Indonesiaincluding Muna in the late 1990s reiterated this saying. Email communication withthe author, 2011.


19. Muna Teak cultivation appears to have been more centralized than on the mainland.Omar Pidani from the Australian National University argues how smallholder teakproduction in mainland Konawe Selatan province has a longer history than in Munaand that large-scale over-harvesting only occurred after 1997, when state controlswere relaxed. In Muna we were informed that the main destruction which occurredwas during the boom years from the 1950s to the 1980s. See Omar Pidani, ‘WhatMotivates People to Plant Teak? A Case Study from Southeast Sulawesi,Indonesia’ (Canberra: unpublished research essay, Fenner School of Environment andSociety, Australian National University, 2008).

20. An anonymous birder associated with the Nature Society of Singapore suggested thatintroduced ‘migrant’ populations thrive in urban environments such as Hong Kong.

21. See for example Roxana Waterson, The Living House: An Anthropology of Architecture inSouth-East Asia (Singapore: Oxford UP, 1990).

22. Shannon Lee Castleman, verbal communication, January 2011. 23. Oei recounted for example how in the 1970s when local authorities discovered his

Indonesian colleague logging illegally in Riau forests for a French company, thecolleague burned down the whole forest area to cover their tracks. Allen Oei,interview April 2014 in Lucy Davis and Kee Ya Ting exhibition photobook, I am LikeA Karang Guni of Teak (Singapore: NUS Museum/Migrant Ecologies Project 2014),p. 11.

24. Email communication, Hera, Migrant Ecologies Designer, and Laksmi Pamuntjakwriter and translator November 2012.

25. Curator Shabbir Hussain Mustafa reminded us how in South Asia – and perhaps thereis a linguistic-genealogical link here, ‘jati’ has been used (and misused) as a referenceto exclusionary, essentialist social categories. Email communication, 1 November2012. See for example Partha Chatterjee, The Nation and Its Fragments: Colonialand Postcolonial Histories (Delhi: Oxford UP, 1997), p. 222.

ILLUSTRATIONSFigure 1: Lucy Davis, ‘Ranjang Jati: The Teak Bed that Got Four Humans from Singapore

to Travel to Muna Island, Southeast Sulawesi and Back Again,’ 2009–2012, WiltonClose, Singapore. Photograph by Shannon Lee Castleman.

Figure 2: Lee Kee Boon Nanyang University, 1955 (1999 print), woodblock print onpaper, 20cm x 31cm. Reproduced courtesy of the National University of SingaporeMuseum Collection.

Figure 3: Tan Tee Chie, Persuading, 1958, huang yang woodblock print on paper, 20.5cmx 31cm.

Reproduced courtesy of the National University of Singapore Museum Collection.Figure 4: Constitution of a cat–timber communication zone? Photograph by Lucy Davis.

2009.Figure 5:Terentang tree at Bukit Timah Nature Reserve. Photograph by Lucy Davis.Figure 6: Printing the four-legged stool. Photograph by Lucy Davis. 2009.Figure 7: Lucy Davis, Bangku terentang, 2009, print of terentang stool with mixed ink and

paper, 105cm x 75cm.Figure 8: Lucy Davis, ‘Terentang Stool Tree’ Terentang/Campnosperma Auriculata, 2009,

assembled prints of found terentang stool with mixed ink and paper, 150cm x 237cm.Figure 9: Chua Mia Tee, National Language Class, 1959, oil on canvas, 112cm x 153cm.

Reproduced courtesy of the Singapore Art Museum Collection, Gift of The EquatorSociety.

Figure 10: The Muna team around the largest teak tree in the hutan hantu (haunted forest)


with a local youths who led us to the tree. Laksana Pelawi, Indonesia Country ProjectOfficer for DoubleHelix (far left), and Adhya Yusof, our guide in Muna (far right). Inthe top left corner, we can see banyan roots beginning to grow up a teak tree.Photograph by Shannon Lee Castleman.

Figure 11:Banyan strangling fig takes over a teak tree. Photographs by Lucy Davis.Figure 12: Lucy Davis: Banyan and Teak, Muna, Southeast Sulawesi, 2010, woodprints

from a 1930s teak bed found in Singapore on paper, 240 cm x 150 cm, 2012.Figures 13-15: Lucy Davis, ‘A Bed Remembers an Island, an Island Remembers A Bird,’

2012, animated film stills from Jalan Jati Teak Road Animated film 2012. Wood-printsfrom a teak bed and charcoal.

Figures 16-17: Two dukun-dukun (traditional shamanic arborealists or ‘wood doctors’)examine a teak sample from our bed. Photographs by Shannon Lee Castleman.

Figures 18-20: Shannon Lee Castleman, ‘Tree Wounds in a Konservasi Forest,’ Scenes froman Island After a Timber Boom, 2010 (Fig. 25) and 2011 (Fig. 26), Muna Island,Southeast Sulawesi.

Figure 21: Lucy Davis. ‘Reproduction of a photograph of the Muna Island teak industryfrom the collection of Mr W. T. Bermuli, in woodprints from a 1930s teak bed foundin Singapore and charcoal on paper’, 240 cm x 150 cm, 2012.

Figure 22: Lucy Davis. ‘Reproduction of a photograph of timber merchant Simon Oei asa child in the 1970s standing in the grounds of P. Bork A/S International Kranji wherehis father Allen Oei was employed. Reproduced in prints of one of the last logs fromBurma to be imported to Singapore after a 31 March 2013 log export ban’. 220 x150cm, 2014.

Figure 23: Lucy Davis, Woodprint-collage reproduction of David’s thumbprint in printsof a 1930s teak bed found in Singapore, made on paper, 240 c, x 150 cm, 2012.

Figure 24: Lucy Davis, Balau scaffolding and woodprint shadow installation inspired bythe woodblock print Nanyang University by Lee Kee Boon, 1955. Photograph byNorman Ng, 2014.

Figure 25-27: Lucy Davis, Animated wooden boxes with shadow puppets made of wood-print fragments of a 1930s teak bed and 2014 Burmese logs. Photographs by NormanNg, 2014.

Figure 28: Box of timber-samples stamped with Malay names of trees. Formerly used inBotany department of the National University of Singapore. Photograph by NormanNg, 2014.


Date post:	26-Apr-2023
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'Multiple Arborealities: Tracing Tales of Teak'

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