Hello Darling is a series of drawings situated within a larger research project that aims to read the wildlife market in Southeast Asia though the private and collective imaginations of a post-colonial archipelago. These works are a result of an intimate conversation with a taxidermist in Thailand and offer a tender account of the commodity and its maker.
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The time stamp on our first online chat is from November 2016. I had casually DM’ed him after seeing some process images of taxidermy he had shared on Instagram. A year later, I was standing in his studio in Bangkok. Waiting for him to cut open a bird.
Not too far from the studio is a thriving wildlife market where he usually sells taxidermy specimens. A market that to my eyes has, in flashes, often looked like a modern-day interpretation of the grand 17th c. Flemish paintings, celebrating trade and the wonders of the world brought together in a room. The one that particularly comes to mind is Jan Brueghel the Elder’s The Archdukes Albert and Isabella Visiting a Collector's Cabinet (1). In the painting, among the many trade commodities and collectables are the American sunflowers on the left side and a dead Bird of Paradise from New Guinea on the far right. Their uncanny mapping (East to West) seems almost as though by design and making a point.
It was in this very market that he first agreed to meet me for a coffee. After three weeks of missed calls and ignored requests, he finally showed up at the café with a shopping bag full of two beautifully fluffed out bird specimens. In that bustling Sunday market, we sat in the middle of the noisy coffee shop, with two Birds of Paradise on the table. In what can only be explained as a Brueghel-esque chuckle, our world had been reduced to an exotic still-life that could very well evoke the image of a ‘tropical paradise’.
A week later at his studio, he now seemed more at ease and wanted to know my interest in the Birds of Paradise. Sitting behind his large work table he remarked “Bird of paradise is raised in Thailand. But they’re brought into Thailand secretly to these farms. Not entirely secretly because you can keep them and raise them” while making the first incision on the dead peacock carcass. “It’s a decorative item for people who have a lot of money. People who don’t have a lot of money will also try to buy it. Maybe they’ll have a few items in their house. But for people who have a lot of money, they can never get enough of these things.”
The last few years, I’ve been really fascinated with trauma and its physical manifestations, and one book in particular that had its grip on me was Bessel van der Kolk’s The body keeps the score (2). In Chapter 11, Kolk revisits the history of psychoanalysis and the wards of Salpêtrière where Freud wrote his paper on Hysteria. “Freud reaffirmed that lack of verbal memory is central in trauma and that, if a person does not remember, he is likely to act out: “[H]e reproduces it not as a memory but as an action; he repeats it, without knowing, of course, that he is repeating, and in the end, we understand that this is his way of remembering.” I’ll admit that upon reading these lines, my first thought was not that of a human body but the larger wildlife bazaar - a body that ritually celebrates the colonizer’s gaze and aesthetics.
Between shuffling the innards of the dead peacock carcass and sipping on the green icy drink which was fast becoming less ice and more water, “If you want to find a Bird of Paradise, you can probably find it in Singapore. My friend said there’s quite a bit there, I’ve seen them bring it here to sell to some stores in the market. They say it’s not easy to find, but a lot of the time they bring more than ten birds.”
In the 1900s, one small ad ran repeatedly in The Straits Times (3). It mentions a certain Singapore Naturalist’s Store at 177, Orchard Road. On sale are ‘Birds and animals mounted etc.’ and then in bold letters, Birds of Paradise, separately. A hundred-plus years later, store no. 177 is not even a stand-alone shop and Orchard Road is a generic rendition of a Western urban shopping mall. But the market for wildlife is very much alive and thriving. On social media, I’d started following the Singapore trader that my taxidermist friend had mentioned. Over the 3 years that I’ve come to see the multiple photos that he uploads - the new Gucci leather shoes, his watch collection, parties, hotel pools that he visits, baking of the many banana breads during the Covid-19 lockdown, I’ll admit I’m still taken aback by the occasional bird-animal carcass photo in the mix.
If there is one species that has garnered the interest of myths and archives, both, it would be the elusive Birds of Paradise that lives on the island of New Guinea. As examined by Pamela Swadling (4), the first record of their feathers is on the 2000 years old bronze kettle drums and axes depicting the Dong Son, warrior-aristocrats of North Vietnam. And the last legitimate statistical record is from when all of Europe could not stop wearing their iridescent feathers in hats - as many as 80,000 birds were known to be exported each year before trade in wildlife officially started being frowned upon.
In concluding Secret Trades, Porous Borders (5), Eric Tagliacozzo writes, “There was, in fact, no ontology whatsoever to the category of contraband along this colonial Southeast Asian frontier: contraband was whatever those in power said it was, and these designations sometimes changed very quickly...Rice, pepper, betel nuts, newspapers, and porcelain all fit this description at one time or another, as did a host of other items, all of which were considered to be contraband commodities in some contexts but not in others.”
Downstairs, the evening food market had started to pick up the beat of increasing footsteps. The smell of fried foods had started to fill in the studio where the carcass was now emptied out - bones and organs laid out on the table. “You draw?”, he asked. “Yes! I do”, I said. “There’s such a small amount of people doing it (taxidermy), it’s kind of strange and it requires skill. I guess it’s kind of like artists, like drawers and painters. Like when 10 different artists paint the same flower. Even though in reality it’s one flower, it’s 10 different paintings.”
It’s been 3 years since we sat at that table, a dead peacock in between. We still talk via social media, albeit not very regularly. Just a month after the Covid-19 pandemic hit Southeast Asia, he posted a boomerang video of himself on a motorcycle holding a bird of paradise specimen that looped incessantly, making the dead bird look like it really could be flying. It was the last I spoke to him, and he said that he had found two Birds of Paradise at a small zoo in Malaysia and was on his way to sell them. The chat was left off at three consecutive smiley emojis.
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Endnotes:
[1] Hieronymus Francken II, European, Flemish, 1578-1623, Jan Brueghel I, European, and Flemish, 1568-1625. The Archdukes Albert and Isabella Visiting a Collector's Cabinet.
Baltimore, Maryland, USA, The Walters Art Museum. Accessed March 1, 2021.
https://art.thewalters.org/detail/14623/the-archdukes-albert-and-isabella-visiting-a-collectors-cabinet/
[2] Van der Kolk, Bessel A. The body keeps the score: brain, mind, and body in the healing of trauma. 2014.
[3] The Straits Times, 1911. Accessed March 1, 2021.
http://eresources.nlb.gov.sg/newspapers/Digitised/Article/straitstimes19110708-1.2.113.5
[4] Swadling, Pamela. Plumes from Paradise: Trade Cycles in Outer Southeast Asia and Their Impact on New Guinea and Nearby Islands Until 1920. Sydney University Press, 2019.
[5] Tagliacozzo, Eric. Secret Trades, Porous Borders: Smuggling and States Along a Southeast Asian Frontier, 1865-1915. Yale University Press, 2005.
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First published in the Antennae Journal, Uncontainable Natures. Journal link
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