By Yeow Kai Chai

Frustrated that her poetry manuscript was rejected by various publishers, Ang Kia Yee decided to take things into her own hands.

In 2020, she typeset and published her first collection, slow dream machine, a self-described "meandering collection of poems which traces my experiences as a vessel for writing" in which "by giving in to possession by a seemingly divine or ghostly impulse, transcendence becomes possible, moving me out of loss and alienation into love, into desire." With a limited run of 100 copies, with fewer than 10 copies left, the book was 80 pages long, with inner pages made of 100 percent recycled paper.

That characterisation is apropos: Ang, who also goes by the moniker kyatos, is a Singaporean writer and artist who is very attuned to the body, to the tactility/malleability of materiality and flesh and sounds. Invested in the human capacity for rupture and repair, her aesthetics is focused on text and performance, to expand imagination around how else we could live – with compassion, presence, and openness to difference.  

Her projects are guided by the logic of poetry – what Carl Phillips describes as patterned language and the meaningful interruption of those patterns. Spanning poetry, essays, short stories, plays, performances, audio walks, workshops, and video, she likes to make work that is mysterious, atmospheric, temporally-layered, and unknowing.

Her growing resume reveals her intriguing, interdisciplinary bent: She was a participating artist for Natasha, Singapore Biennale 2022; a selected participant for da:ns LAB 2023: IDIOSYNCRASIES at Esplanade – Theatres on the Bay; and a resident writer for Centre 42's New Scripts Residency 2021. In 2022, she wrote a long poem, 'A suite for damp rot,' for REFUSE, an intermedia exhibition about the band The Observatory, at the Singapore Art Museum.

From 2020 to 2024, she was the co-founder and company lead of Feelers, a research lab of artists and designers focused on the intersections of art and technology.

Ang graduated with a Bachelor of Arts (Honours) in English Literature and Creative Writing from the University of Warwick. 

1. What are you reading right now?
Animal Joy: A Book of Laughter and Resuscitation by Nuar Alsadir, an American poet and psychoanalyst.

2. If you were a famous literary character in a novel, play or poem, what would you be and why?
I don't particularly relate to its individual characters, but I've always felt a closeness to Macbeth in its totality. I find it coalesces several motifs and questions that persist in my subconscious mind, at times far beyond my conscious understanding. Each time I encounter the play, something deep is evoked and briefly illuminated, like how a dream reveals fragments of the unconscious.

3. What is the greatest misconception about you?
That I am an extrovert or a Pisces.

4. Name one living writer and one dead writer you most identify with, and tell us why.
Nick Cave, for the ways in which grief has shattered and reanimated his life. In my writing, as in life, I'm often trying to transmute pain and a sense of loss into something more expansive – which he does masterfully in simple and potent phrases. Like him, I think my art-making is also a search for ways to live and lose and live anyway.

I also love his song lyrics, which are saturated with symbolism, religious imagery, and a strong sense of fable. While not religious, I am very spiritual, and his lyrics speak to a part of my unconscious that I try to commune with in all that I do. I feel we are trying to touch a similar kind of transcendence.

Finally, like Nick Cave, I avoid sticking with any one voice, style, or form in my work, even when it seems to succeed by external metrics. His willingness to experiment and follow his creative suspicions (or what Peter Brook called "the formless hunch") is something I strive to constantly do.

Rainer Maria Rilke, primarily for the part of his imagination and humanity that is illuminated in The Notebooks of Malte Laurids Brigge. The text is couched as a novel but reads foremost as an experience. There is no plot, and Malte is less a character than, as translator Burton Pike says in an introduction, "an energy field crisscrossed and overrun by sensations and memories." I find the immediacy and episodic quality of the book true to how life is. I strive to be so true in how I live and write.

5. Do you believe in writer's block? If so, how do you overcome it?
I'm not sure I believe in writer's block. I think it happens when the writing is heavily dependent on an internal feeling or imagination. I find writer's block ceases to exist once the act of writing opens to the experiences, energies, and images that are constantly flowing in and out of our lives. If your imagination is sapped, tap on the imagination of others.

Adjacent to this, I believe everyone will experience at least one slump season in their life. The best response in those periods is to let the land lie fallow. It'll be time when it's time.

6.  What qualities do you most admire in a writer?
Devotion, discipline, a propensity for awe, and sustained attention. Sometimes a kind of selfishness that protects, prioritises, and fights for their vision.

7. What is one trait you most deplore in writing or writers?
Favouring emotional truthiness (not truthfulness) over risk, play, and experimentation. Especially when the truthiness strikes me as more an aesthetic choice in their self-representation rather than a genuine expression of spirit or imagination. (I have been guilty of this.)

8. Can you recite your favourite line from a literary work or a piece of advice from a writer?
What a painful question! I don't have favourites because I find it impossible to measure most things against each other. My memory also requires contextual stimuli for retrieval, so I don't recall things out of the blue very well.

This is what I've got:

"Attention is the beginning of devotion." (Mary Oliver)

9. Complete this sentence: Few people know this, but I...
I am not well-read – I am very picky, read sparsely and slowly, and consume more films and music than books.

10. At the movies, if you have to pick a comedy, a tragedy or an action thriller to watch, which would you go for?
Ordinarily, I would pick a tragedy. Right now, I would choose to watch a comedy, especially a romcom.

11. What is your favourite word, and what is your least favourite one?
Favourite: manoeuvre, or roam

Least favourite: marshmallow

12. Compose a rhyming couplet that includes the following words: Odissi, synthesizer, brat.

Don't let the synthesizer confuse you. A brat in motion
Is no different from an Odissi dancer: pure power and devotion.

13. What object is indispensable to you when you write?
If indoors, an open window. If outdoors, a black Muji 0.5 gel pen.

14. What is the best time of the day for writing?
I write best before I get too conscious, so right when I wake around 7am. But realistically, within 8am-12pm.

15. If you have a last supper, which three literary figures, real or fictional, would you invite to the soiree, and why?
I'd love to have Mary Oliver there. Her compassion and spirit would be a gift to the occasion. And if she would read some of her poems for us, I'd have a good last cry (I love crying) before I don't get to anymore.

I'd also invite Jiko, the Buddhist nun and grandmother of Naoko Yasutani in A Tale for the Time Being by Ruth Ozeki. I feel she would say all the things we'd need to hear.

Finally, I want Winnie-the-Pooh there, for his child-like silliness and wisdom. And the delight of giving him honey before I go.

16. You are among a new and exciting generation of writers who are working in the intersections of technology, intermedia, performance and poetry. What are some of the areas, causes or urgent concerns in the world you feel could be further explored and examined?
We need to make accessible an expanded view of the climate emergency that doesn't stop at challenging binaries like nature versus human beings and money versus morality. We need to replace them with more ecological and spiritual modes of seeing-feeling-thinking that open channels between realms and practices like urban place-making, co-creation with other species, dancing, factories, and even prayer. We need mutual intervention with creativity and compassion.

There are so many vital roles to be filled in such a project by all kinds of makers, writers, artists, engineers, spiritual leaders – especially to reignite our inherent interconnection with all that exists. Not as a logical thought, but as a felt, embodied awareness.

Another cause I care about is deepening and expanding our individual and collective skills, systems, and infrastructure for open conversation. Much of our vast potential to repair and build better in the world has been curtailed by the lack of education and incentive to hold good conversations. Meaning conversations that can manoeuvre conflict, failure, awkwardness, shame, anger, et cetera, with curiosity and willingness rather than a drive towards shutdown or enforced resolution.

Right now, I believe we can all benefit from picking up tools like Nonviolent Communication, and exploring spiritual or philosophical systems that remind us of the humanity of every person (without exception). This lies adjacent to understanding, of course, the ways in which our systems continue to reproduce inequality, and developing more loving rehabilitation programmes.

17. What would you write on your own tombstone?
Here lies someone who loved and was loved.

_____