A playlist for szn 1 on twenty-twenty-six

A playlist for szn 1 on twenty-twenty-six

I usually have set fields of obsessions. The field, like what one would usually imagine, a freshly trimmed lawn that is expansive, is set in the delimitation a field holds. I usually only watch chinese fourth new wave cinema. Or read contemporary japanese translated lit - I have very niche interests formed when younger. To create a more elastic mind and environment for research to thrive, I want to make four seasons of recommendations for 2026, to keep my curiosity in tact. I want to hold onto my curiosity for the world close again.

So for this season, as I traverse between Hong Kong and Malaysia, with a frequency that I never have before, I situate myself between cold and hot, humid and a simmering heat, winds of the monsoon and the

1 Potol

potol - a wonderful bengali gourd that a dear friend introduced me to. Its pointed, holds onto the toughness of the skin and is coated in ghee and mustard oil. I was fed this on a wintry night when we were both so tired from the year and doing adult chores. We went to masjid jamila, got m&s pastry and donuts, and flaked all the way back to her place to begin a three hour cooking process. It is tough on the outside, but truly, very taut on the inside.

2 Love in a f*cked up world

I am reading love in a f*cked up world - Dean Spade **to rethink how relationships can hold, when in my world it has been incredible intertwined, intimate and affective. Of course, I will fall for those who I collaborate with. In many ways more than one, work is intertwined with cultural, everyday practices. I hold labour to be:

To bring our principles more fully into our relationships, we need to:

1. Understand the cultural messages and conditioning that dictate our ideas of what relationships should be.
2. Take practical steps to deescalate our knee-jerk, or “conditioned” reactions, and move toward behavior that aligns with our beliefs about how we want to treat ourselves and others.
3. Identify the way those conditions and cultural “scripts” influence our own behavior and reactions.

An increase in the capacity to affect and be affected—joy—means being more in touch with a world that is bleeding, burning, screaming.… Freedom [is] not the absence of constraint or a do-what-you-like individualism but an emergent capacity to work on relationships, shift desires, and undo ingrained habits.

— Carla Bergman and Nick Montgomery, Joyful Militancy: Building Thriving Resistance in Toxic Times

3 Bak kut teh

For those who know me, I don’t eat a lot of meat. Sitting along sentul, staring at KLCC in the distance, on the last night in Kuala Lumpur for the next few months - I ate pork again, with a table full of food that I needn’t order so extensively. But gluttony got to me first. Why? I wanted to be held with the foods of this place and pull it back to Hong Kong with me.

4 Waves on the east coast

I’m obsessed. They are huge, layered, all encompassing if you really stare hard at the horizon. I love the sea, I have for many years of life, the waves are deeply affective. I have a ferry tattooed on my back, constructed and designed in Hong Kong, but used between Butterworth and Georgetown in Penang, Malaysia. But the affective quality of the sea in the East Coast are the monsoon winds that come with the curling waves that extend four, five, six, layers deeply into the sea. I don’t dare to enter the ocean, which is rare, as yearn to swim always. It was a cool 22-25C, just a touch too cold to enter the crushing waves.

Interlude about chi too

5 Wood element details on rumah kayu, bird cages, and boats

Histories of Queer Curating in Lina Bo Bardi’s building

Asexual peoples - thinking about legacies of abstraction as a different language,

The museum as an apparatus to support painting, sculptures -