Some of us thought the exhibition was in bad taste. I know for one that several children screamed upon entering the sports hall without their parents' permission, and that someone from the town council nearly passed out with fright when he came to look for the source of the noise. Overnight, in celebration of hawker culture being nominated for the UNESCO World Cultural Heritage List (joining such storied practices as Albanian folk iso-polyphony, competitive grass mowing in Kupres, and the world-famous Mediterranean diet) a merry group of young sculptors fresh from the nearby secondary school had pieced together a diorama of twenty-five humanoid figures made out of various traditional foods they had sourced from the local hawker centre. There was barely any smell; the boys had taken good care to plastinate them in the manner of Japanese restaurant-window shokuhin sampuru or Gunther von Hagens' Body Worlds™ such that the various assemblages of noodles, rice, wheat flour, fish paste, minced meat, fried dough etc. looked as fresh and slippery as if they had just come out of the kitchen on a tray, and yet they were impossibly posed into a who's who of the local neighbourhood: a trio of old ladies made out of egg noodles immaculately poised mid-qigong, with little wantons for eyes; a spitting image of the newspaper seller at the bus interchange made entirely out of black bean paste; even the community centre's regular cleaning lady Mrs. Muthu had been made out of brown rice, her crisp uniform woven together out of a panoply of mixed veggies. It was stellar work for a bunch of teenagers; it was stupefying work; it stood in the sports hall for a total of thirty-six hours before someone with more hostility than common sense took the whole thing apart with a sledgehammer and hot water while no one was looking.

Being one of the few who dared linger around the scene, I can report staring with great fondness at the uncanny likeness of my recently-departed great-grandmother (who ran the fish soup stall at the hawker centre for forty years until her death at the hands of S. aureus-tainted fish paste sourced from a dubious Indonesian supplier) her face clear and shiny and made out of plastinated fish paste, it seemed, to preserve the milky complexion which she was known for, as milky as the soups she had served in life. I can also report on the artistry of the work, which would be later cited by the sculptors' parents as justification for getting their boys into the secondary school's elite arts-and-crafts programme, and would grace a series of award-winning photographs taken by a local paper's Young Photographer Of The Year centred around filial piety and the graceful aging of plastinated, deprecated things. There was a phone booth encased in jellified vegetable consomme, where a rice-vermicelli statue of the neighbourhood pervert was placed pretending to make a phone call using dried shallot slices as coins. There was even a surprisingly respectful depiction of the local Member of Parliament (who had donated generously and often to the secondary school and had personally worked alongside the principal and vice-principal during their shared stint as scholar-track officials in the Ministry of Education) and his wife both made out of solidified Teochew rice porridge, the water so clear you could see the individual grains right through the whole body, symbolising the transparency and purity he'd been known for in his work serving the community. Such and such went the rest of the exhibition and it left me with a wonderful buzzing feeling all over my skin; this kind of art was simply irreplicable in this day and time.

At this point I have to push back against characterisations of the exhibition as 'uncanny' or 'crass'. I think those statements were very disrespectful to those kind boys who had put so much time and effort into their work; not to mention disparaging to those figures who consented to be represented. Truer art couldn't have been made by our nation's legions of poets or athletes; this was community given flesh and form, made from the very stuff that flowed through our veins: wide Chinese rice noodles, prata dough, long-grained biryani rice, thick yellow noodles, etc. To deny such an achievement would be to deny our millenia of shared Asian heritage, to sever the very essence of nationhood out from its roots, and to leave the current generation adrift without reference to all things that have come before. This is why the timing of the exhibition could not have been more apt, and I would have willed it to stand for another thirty-six, nay, hundred-and-forty-four hours more if I had had the power. Alas, this permanence was not to be. (And to those that continue to ask why all that food had to be put to waste, I would urge them to consider just how important it was that we won the UNESCO bid in the first place, and take some time to reflect upon themselves and what they had done to celebrate, if at all!)

What's done is done, at any rate. There is no going back to what we were before, nor is there any salvaging of the constituent materials or original model sheets; one sign of a work of true genius is its propensity to remain undocumented for future generations. The sticky remnants of the exhibition was washed down by Mrs. Muthu herself mere hours after its disassembly, and the perpetrator was never found. Some said that a renegade faction within the town council itself had paid off a bad actor for the deed, while others refused to ascribe blame and instead maintained that the destruction be seen as a collective act. It's all very saddening to people like me, of which there are vanishingly few among the current generation. I can only sit and watch over my daily plate of chicken rice as the markers of our past are washed away into the gutter. This nation celebrates as if each day will be its last, dancing among the masticated boluses of history; if there was anything left, surely it remains in the bellies of rats, cockroaches, and the beaks of the scarred mynahs that came behind.