So this guy right, he got quite big in the nineties doing performance art, the kind where you walk up-and-down the street naked painted all kinds of colours, right? I think in some of the newer textbooks you can find his name next to Josef Ng, maybe they had studios next to each other or something. There's a photo of him sometimes in the galleries, it's a screenshot from a camcorder, he's holding up a long bamboo pole, and on the other side is a bundle of rope tied around a mynah. Protesting death penalty for weed smugglers, that type of thing. Allegedly one time they kicked him out of a mall for eating the mynah.

Like that, he passes quietly into the groggy dreams of history. But there comes a time where he comes back, right, out of nowhere, after exhibiting in Manila and Bangkok and the like. He somehow gets a commission from one of the old land developers undergoing a rebrand, the ones that used to have plantations of rubber and cashew or some shit, and he also makes some friends with the rail operator. Apparently one of their group directors was a huge fan of his work. So he starts this new live-in project, really much a copy of his betters, behind one of the knock-out panels under one of the new MRT stations, where they have cut out the station box while digging down but not filled it with anything yet, just some long concrete struts. Imagine a warehouse turned sideways. Legend has it the station staff weren't even involved, his team just pulled up in the GD's lorry with a set of power tools and metal tubing and got to work. Set him up a makeshift platform down there and pass him food and water through the little hole behind one of the removable panels in the wall. The original grant proposal is titled Worm Joy.

Day in day out he's down there learning how to survive in pitch dark, gradually he works out how to sleep, shit, pass the waste through another hole he knocked out behind a ventilation shaft, so for a few years all anyone could really smell down there in the station is this twice-filtered scent of shit and piss, you know? Eventually admits that he's constructing a harness that can leave him suspended in the centre of this tall, dark space for a very long time. Grows to live on less, sometimes just one cup of Milo and two slices of bread each day. The commuters going up and down the long escalator hearing the banging and moaning on the other side, they don't seem to notice or mind. He keeps up this charade day in, day out for the better part of thirty-seven months before the GD gets arrested for corruption and flees to Batam. Now then he crawls out of his hole and all of the evening rush hour on a Tuesday sees this blackened, broken, smelly man lower himself from a rope of safety harnesses down from the roof of Platform A and collapses in front of them, delirious, asking for funding.

He recovers. Is fined or jailed, nobody really cares, does a little stint in the mid-2010s pre-curating stuff for the new Biennale. It's a new decade for a new city and it's cool to be doing strange things in the dark once again, we even manage to send a couple people to Venice. One of the things that people tell him is that it's really stupid he never got anyone to record what he was doing down there, in the carved-out station box. He usually just smiles and talks about filming permits and how the true legible text is the body, shows them the stretch marks from when he got better and fatter and started eating normal food again, shows them his missing teeth from the scurvy. He is not a favourite of the shows that the NAC funds but he's a big hit among the universities. There are a few copycats, but nobody really pays them any mind.

Anyway he's just put out a video yesterday talking about the experience. Framed it as a kind of folksy YouTube confession we saw so much of during the pandemic, HDB kitchen, plastic monobloc chair, even got himself a little ukulele leaning against the wall. But he doesn't pick it up to sing. Instead, he talks about how he regrets having to jump through all these hoops for art, talks about the state of curation and the many growing means for informal expression. All the while he's speaking like he's forgetting words or missing them out, like the audio's getting cut out but his mouth is moving, but the ambient traffic noise from the window suggests that it's not the video doing that, it's him.

There's something moving in his mouth, swallowing his words before he can say them. In front of a live viewing audience of twenty seven university students he reaches past his lips and pulls out the dead mynah, covered in soil and what appears to be earthworms, except it's twitching and spasming. Man collapses on table, knocking the ukulele aside, and the mynah gets up and walks off the table on its own two legs asking for more funding, like it was never really very dead at all.