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“Kill the chicken to frighten the monkey” works on the ambiguity between a symbolic execution and real political threat. The monkey (the citizenry) is warned that it too will come under the knife unless the government’s warning is taken to heart and subsequent behaviours are altered. Causality is ‘read’ backwards as the forewarned and frightened public avoids the chicken’s fate by altering their behaviour before any prosecutions are ‘necessary’. The result of the cautionary spectacle is self-censorship, a situation in which the antidote to what the government perceives to be social poison, itself becomes the people’s poison. In Lee Wen’s performances this complex political ritual is lifted out of historical context and deftly distilled into a series of verbal-gestural tropes. For example, while not a repeat of state action against Singapore dissidents, there was an exquisite and ambiguous violence in one of Lee Wen’s gestures in Yangon in 2005. A group of Burmese artists, writers and educators were attending a workshop focusing on performance art and visual art with a group of artists from the region, as part of ‘Performance Site: Myanmar 05’, an international performance art festival, organised by Jay Koh and Chu Chu Yuan at NICA (Networking & Initiatives for Culture & the Arts). We were all sitting in a circle on a platform outside the NICA residency house. A general discussion, followed a series of one-minute performances by everyone in the group. In my recollection, which coincides with Lee Wen’s, a Burmese professor and artist7 seemed to be verbally harassing one of the Burmese women. In the recollection of Sharaad Kuttan and a few others present, however, he was not harassing anyone, but was simply jabbering on in a drunken manner. While many of us were aware of the situation, we were observing it and not intervening. As I recall, without warning, Lee Wen got up from his chair, walked across the circle, and slapped the professor hard across the cheek.
Time froze as we all stopped breathing. There was silence. Everyone gauged the event and how to interpret these acts. The groundhog of intermittency emerged for a moment, was confronted by its Jungian shadow, and ducked back into its hole. Context and hermeneutics, that had momentarily been displaced through the shock of the real, rushed back in. I found myself ticking off boxes in my mind: a Singaporean man just slapped a Burmese man; a beautiful but shocking act; foreign “guest” slaps native “host”; two men fighting over a woman?, etc. Did Lee Wen at that moment signify the intrusion of globalisation into this subaltern community, disrupting local traditions and upsetting traditional gender roles? Was the act metonymic with the Singapore government’s consistent neo-colonial support of the military junta in Burma? Was Lee Wen’s slap called for? Was he the right person to be doing it? Was it cultural imperialism? Was it erotic? For his part, Lee Wen recalls that the man’s behaviour was objectionable, but he doesn’t recall the exact words that triggered the slap. He recently responded to my questions about it in an email: “oh no i forgot how brave and stupid i was i would not do it again maybe i shud apologise?”8
And then a couple of weeks later, responding to an earlier draft of this article sent under the signature, ‘Heraclitus’, Lee wrote an exquisite rant that reminds me of Lucky’s speech in Samuel Beckett’s Waiting For Godot. At a glance, via the awry side-car syntax of social media, it captures the mind behind the slap better than any of my descriptions: i have had vexations that my call of ‘if you see a performance artist on the road, kill him’ is being taken so seriously and now meeting its poetic justice with your ‘awry lee slapping imperialist’ anecdote, exhaustion after 36 hours of my no sleep buckminster fuller’s throw away bed experiment, last night i reluctantly dropped into bed for some hours of strung out sleep, as i dug into my memory bank and now having had some recollections your take aroused like jig saw pieces as i read your descriptions in earnest trust, i was getting ready to disappear into oblivion and start again with a fake id from the black markets off khao san road. but with my shaky parkin’ fingers i type out my hippie message of peace and love and sincerely if you know how i can get in touch with the guy i slapped in yangon, i like to beg for his forgiveness even if i believed when i did it i was acting in an individu-
But in the recollection of Myanmar artist, Moe Satt, Lee walked to the middle of the circle, paused, and said he wanted to perform again. He then bowed slightly forward from the waist with his arms hanging at his sides (a position he has used before in other performances), and lunged forward to deliver the slap. He then apologised to the shocked professor, and returned to his chair. In this recollection, the act was matrixed in the performances that had preceded it; but it was a performance with a difference – one that (yet again, as other memorable performances have done before) first constructed and then obliterated the ‘fourth wall’.
According to Jay Koh, NICA organiser, the artist in question was the only one whose paintings were censored in an exhibition around that time – clearly an important cultural activist in his own right.
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Lee Wen, email communication with author, 12 January 2012.