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Cycles
"Cycles Grown Into, Lived In, and Shed" is a collection of twelve poems created for the Singapore Art Book Fair 2025, structured around the Year of the Snake and its associations with transformation, time, and wisdom.
The ouroboros—the snake eating its own tail—serves as the work's governing symbol, representing cycles as patterns of return that carry forward accumulated change rather than simple repetition.
The poems are organised from 01-12 for each month of the year, and end with an unnumbered "Hindsight" (00), spatially performing the ouroboros: an ending that precedes the beginning, completion that enables return.
The collection explores how cycles manifest across Singapore, based on the author's own experiences and observations. The poems move through relational, generational, technological, and mortal cycles, asking what it means to navigate recurring patterns with intention and care.
Great care was taken with typesetting and layout so poems breathe across the page in varied rhythms, conveying exactly how they would be read aloud. The illustrations—soft, shifting, dreamlike—anchor each piece in a specific time and place while evoking the hazy feeling of remembering. A futuristic typeface was paired with a humanist low-contrast sans serif, and ASCII art weaves alongside illustrations to convey the current landscape where technology is increasingly woven into our cycles.
36pp, thread-bound black and white print.
