I do not claim to know the lived experiences of queer, trans, mad, Black, and Native people on Turtle Island. I am not from Turtle Island. These illustrations are my offerings of gratitude as someone who on the other side of the world benefits from the language, movement, and resistance work by your communities.

I documented my initial thoughts while working on the zine in a previous Substack post called “Thoughts on Extraction”. I didn’t want to name the project and the client until the zine was officially launched, but it felt urgent to me to say the things I said there. Now that the zine is out and about, I’m glad I can write more about the process.

This has truly been my most favourite commission to date, and my best work.

During that first call, as we were talking about the zine and abolition, I kept thinking back to the impossible weight of settler colonialism, and how memory is embedded in all of our bodies.

I remembered my grandmother. There is a story that she “went mad” for 2 years, and walked from Jasin, Melaka to Teluk Intan, Perak, a 300+km journey, to find her immediate family. I remembered my father. His siblings swear in his younger years he was very different, that he was kind, but something changed somewhere. I remember how I carry them in my body, along with all my other relatives, both kangani and indentured labourer, policeman and imprisoned. I carry them now as queer, trans person that my government seeks to murder, in a world slipping away under a polycrisis.

And they ask us why we’re ill? Huh.

The abolitionist world that this zine is putting to practice reminded me so much of Octavia E. Butler’s Parable series. As the Earthseed duology is set in the redwood forests of California, it was really important that the visual storytelling centred Indigenous communities whose land the story is set in, and have been doing this work for generations. The Native communities that inform these illustrations are the Yurok, Hoopa, Karuk, Tolowwa, Wiyot, and Chimariko people. Land back is among many pivotal pathways to address these colonial legacies, and being to facilitate the healing we need from it.

Octavia calls it Acorn, talks about the bread Lauren learned to bake with it from her mother, rotating the crops, the cabins they built, the trees they plant at their love one’s graves. Earthseed and Acorn is Black, Native knowledge. I can’t just draw my interpretation idea of Acorn without learning more about the very real people and the very real land that very much exists.

Anything less is extraction. - excerpt from my post, “Thoughts on Extraction”.

I am big on little moments, and that is true for all of my art. I think it’s in the work of visualising the little moments that help people relate to how possible it all is. I want to show that what many might consider mundane is actually deeply precious, magical, and calling us to defend - to be able to cook with a open fire, to sit with friends and talk through the night, to dance on top of a police car, to catch fish the way your ancestors have always done, to sit in the quiet of the evening scrolling on your phone or reading a book, to look on to the horizon as a condor soars above.

The intention for the cover is to feel like a welcome. To me, a welcome looks like lots of good food. We have salmon on sticks, basted with butter and herds. We have acorn bread of course. Can’t forget the grilled corn. And did you know that rusty cop car door actually makes a great laundry rack? Come grab a plate and let’s talk about how we can show up for each other. Don’t forget your iced tea!

These possible futures come from the ceaseless organising and movement building in our present lives such as Black Lives Matter, No More Stolen Sisters, Defend The Sacred, Free Palestine, Land Back, queer and trans justice, police, prison, and psychiatric abolition, among many others. Our lives are interdependent and intersectional, and I wanted every scene to remind us of this and acknowledge the work behind it.

I take Toni Cade Bambara’s charge to make the revolution irresistible to heart. I’ve written more about this in an old Substack post called “What Does “Irresistible” Mean To You?”, and I still think that while “irresistible” is defined through practicing oppression, it cannot help but give way to the joy of the oppressed.

What would a world that nurtured people to heal each other and express what is innate to them through making things together without extracting from each other look like? - excerpt from my post, “What Does “Irresistible” Mean To You?”

This is the list of resources that helped me to create the illustrations in the zine. I am grateful for every person here. Thank you for the work that you do.

The Yurok People: The Klamath Tribe - History, Culture and Affiliations | Jaguar Bird

Restoring The River with the Yurok, Hupa and Karuk | Tending Nature | Season 2, Episode 3 | KCET

Restoring the Klamath River: Inside the world’s largest dam removal project | An ABC10+Special

First Descent: Kayaking the Klamath River after the largest dam removal in U.S. history | Oregon Public Broadcasting

Redwoods Shouldn't Be So Tall. Here's Why They Are | PBS Terra

Redwoods: The Tallest Trees | National Geographic

Our Sacred Earth | Mother Nature Ep. 5 | Earthrise

Heart of the World: How the Arhuaco Women Are Reconnecting with Sacred Land | Mother Nature Ep. 4 | Earthrise

Blackfoot Strive to Reintroduce Buffalo After 100-Year Absence | Full Documentary | PBS

History of Native California | Cal Poly Humboldt PBLC

Broken Treaties (Full documentary) | Oregon Experience | OPB

How This Native American Elder Reclaimed Sacred Land in the Bay Area | KQED Truly CA

Native American History | CrashCourse

Stories | California Native Plant Society

Endemic Plants | NPS.org

Calflora

Rare Serpentine Endemic Plants of the Klamath-Siskiyou Bioregion | Forest Service U.S. Department of Agriculture

Imperiled Species of the Klamath-Siskiyou | KS Wild

Collections | Sípnuuk Digital Library

Common Native Plants | Redwood National and State Parks

The Yurok Tribe | Facebook

And an additional special shoutout to Mariame Kaba, Kelly Hayes, the book they wrote together, “Let This Radicalise You”, and the artist behind the cover, Kah Yangni. Your work is transformational, and I hope the illustration that features the book honours you.

I think, what makes these illustrations feel so alive, is finding the shared angin. Angin in grief, angin in joy, angin in the refusal to throw each other away - the same angin that moves Lauren to write Earthseed and a new imagined community. And so this zine is very much what I see her Acorn to be - A cop car reclaimed by a redwood tree, a perfect clothesline. Freshly caught salmon roasting in an open fire, almost done. We are glad everyone could make it. Let’s eat, let’s dance, let’s sit together, let’s hold each other.

The timing of this commission is interesting. I’ve been thinking about what it means to be an internationalist, as someone is actively working on being as Alexis Pauline Gumbs put it, an aspirational cousin to all sentient beings1, and as someone who is being invited more and more to work with and illustrate for international organisations. I am very grateful for these opportunities, and I do not take these requests lightly. Organisations have a responsibility to uplift artists within their communities by providing these opportunities to them, and redistributing their wealth through these commissions. And I have a responsibility to not be an extractive asshole when I am asked to step forward in these ways.

In the hundreds of cover letters I’ve written since losing my job in 2023, I talk about wanting to use my skillsets to support the Work. What does that actually mean though? Does it begin and end with my brush stroke and pixel-by-pixel adjustments on InDesign? Or whether its pretty? Or that the funder is happy? Or that it honours the stories and people in it? “I don’t know I’m just the graphic designer”?

I think of my skillsets beyond literal design. Supporting the Work means supporting it’s spirit, honouring its intention. To me, every illustration I ever make for a project is like setting a flower on an altar. And in order to do that, I must be clear about who I am and all that I bring with me.

In my previous post, I wrote about angin. These days it’s been kuat, especially with this report. If you read it, you can feel it, or at least, I could feel it. And that did make me nervous. The visual concept was already set by the client when they brought me on, as it serves as the metaphor for the entire report. I’m not Pacific Islander, and my culture (as far as I’m aware) doesn’t have as close as a relationship and history to stones, but I am Southeast Asian, I know gods when I see them, and I know better than to refuse to listen.

Stones are cousins, ancestors, children, parents. They mark the fall of colonisers and tyrants, they remember the passing of loved ones, they are homemakers. They are there at your birth, and they are there at your death. I understood that. The images repeat for that reason. I might understand, but understanding and knowing are very different things. I’m not from the Pacific, I will never know, and I do not have permission to do anything else. My responsibility here is to set the flower, not make the altar.

I usually pull together a lookbook at the start of every project so that both me and client are on the same page when it comes to the overall execution. Even if the direction has already been set, I include a concept note to accompany the images references. It informs the client about what I’ve understood from the brief, and helps me process my learnings. I really like what I wrote for this project. The emotional and spiritual journey of illustrating this report felt like a fractal of how I view my practice as a whole, so I’ll end this post with it:

Weathering. The transformation of rocks. Cutting, shaping, bending, cooling, shifting through slow, slow, persistent, multi-pronged work.

Often times when we hear the term “weathering” in every day conversation, we mean to whittle down and wear out.

Working on the visual narrative of the report has me reflecting on the flip side of this thought. Weathering as giving parts of yourself to change and be changed in turn. To become what is needed, to be moved to where you are needed.

And while these frameworks are meaningful, I know that the weathering we are witnessing in the context of the Pacific is the violent fallout of a climate crisis caused by Western imperialism.

Meaning-making in systems hellbent on eating itself from within can sometimes sound naive, dismissive, and in its worst moments, justification for the oppression we experience. Holding both does not negate either truths. Holding both is the reality of movement building - to find the lessons that nature can teach us, practice them in our resistance, and leave new footfalls for generations to follow.

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I mean, I try. That line has stayed with me. Because a lot went into my training as an artist. And for all the hours I stayed up drawing hundreds of anatomy studies, portraits, isometric practises, material studies, archetype creation, and the tens of thousands of ringgit sunk when I inevitably burned out into a MDD-PTSD crisp and dropped out of college, 3 particular lecturers taught me how to save a piece of my soul - Moss, Ged, and Tenar (their real names changed for privacy)1.

Most importantly, they were kind. But also, at least to me, they seemed to have a different relationship to making art. I remember that in my very first anatomy class, Moss drew a stick man on the whiteboard and asked all of us if this was art, and does that make her an artist. I remember most of us disagreeing ignorantly. She asks us why we didn’t think so and for every argument we made - “It’s not technical.”, “It insults people who spend years on their craft.”, “Art is difficult, and a stick man is not.” - she simply countered with, “Whether it is a stickman or a great masterpiece, all art begins with an act of creation. It starts the same”. We had no reply for that. She continued, “Every single one of you is an artist for this reason already. In fact, everyone can draw. To make a stick man, you have to draw it. The question is how detailed do you want to get with it? How far do you want to go with it? That is what you need to answer for yourself.”

Man, did that rewire my brain there and then.

Because I was by no means an artist as my classmates and I defined it then. I mostly scored Cs and Ds in Pendidikan Seni. Only learned to colour in one direction at 13. Did not know how to shade. Frankly, I had no business being at The One Academy. In a room where everyone else was already having their work published in artbooks and boothing at cons. But it was the only place I knew I had a 50% shot at getting a tertiary education. My grades were shit. I was excellent at class and awful at exams. I barely scraped through my primary and secondary school education. Sure, I had great imagination and a penchant for telling stories, but going to regular college? Yeah, I best stick to my working with my hands.

Hearing Moss felt like I was given a key to what I can make this education to be. I’m going to be learning a lot things in a few short years. The promise of this education is by the end of it, we are efficient machines for an industry that chews people up and spits them out, and make cool looking video games in the process. This is the promise, but it does not have to define the artists we are. That is for us to decide. Our souls are ours to keep.

Ged co-lectured with Moss and the two remained a constant presence through the years (although I dropped out on the last sem of year 2 so I don’t know if they continued to teach classes for third years). Ged insisted we keep a personal sketchbook. We were to do anything we want to it, but we had to do something. We could not be only be picking up a pencil to do assignments. He wanted us to make a practice of making that existed outside of the capitalistic training we were receiving. And they would start every class by asking to look at our sketchbooks. They wanted to know if we were caring for our souls. It was all in earnest, and in hindsight, a somewhat fascinating (or morbid) exercise. It ended up capturing how we, over time, lost ourselves. Like watching a candle slowly melt out. I wonder how many of my classmates still keep their sketchbooks from those years.

Tenar taught gouche and watercolour, but really she taught patience. And listening.

“Water has it’s own will, you cannot force it to do what you want. You have to work with it, and be gentle. If you paint angry, it will be angry. You paint nervous, it will move nervously. So make sure you’re feeling well before you start. No use getting frustrated otherwise, you’ll only get a bad grade”.

It was always a quiet class. I struggled at first, but eventually started to get a hang of listening. I started to understand that creation does not happen in a silo, and it does not begin and end with your brush stroke. The paper warps and buckles, pooling water in unexpected places, so you should prep it first. Let it stretch. Recognise it has it’s limits. It can’t take all that pigment forever. Let it rest. How warm is the air? You might need the fan to dry it, but not too dry though, unless that’s what you want. Feeling tired? That’s fine, come back tomorrow.

Tenar took us out to paint outside as often as possible. “The best colour teacher you have is nature". I felt we were being asked to be present with the things we were meant to be observing and learning from as an alive being in the space. Shadows would fall differently because of how we might block the sunlight. Colours reflect and refract at odd angles from our glasses. All these things matter just as much, and we needed to know them.

All 3 of these lecturers were teaching what I later learned in theatre as angin. Angin is where the magic is. Angin is what moves people. Why art in any scale as impact, be it some multi-million dollar AAA game or a scribble on some tissue.

In many ways, the foundation of my emergent strategy learning was being laid in those years. Everything I have deepened since - through theatre, spoken word, Skin & Flowers - has grown from that soil of listening and caring for your soul.

Fast forward 10 years later and I am a cop hating, plant loving, disabled queer whose art has enough angin to make someone feel like the people in it are real. You can see why I would take that pretty darn seriously.

I think it’s because of the research that goes into it. I need to be present with the things I am meant to be observing and learning from. I can’t move unless I know where and who it comes from, and what it means to communities. How I might block the sunlight, as you will.

The visual approach I proposed for the current commission I’m working on is inspired by Acorn, the first Earthseed settlement founded by Lauren Oya Olamina in Octavia E. Butler’s Parable series. It felt like the right direction to hold all that was being asked of us to imagine and do better.

Octavia calls it Acorn, talks about the bread Lauren learned to bake with it from her mother, rotating the crops, the cabins they built, the trees they plant at their love one’s graves. Earthseed and Acorn is Black, Native knowledge. I can’t just draw my interpretation idea of Acorn without learning more about the very real people and the very real land that very much exists.

Anything less is extraction.

If you’ve followed me on social media from before, you’d know my obsession with Guerilla Games’s Horizon series. I have gushed so much about the sharpness and eeriness of the writing, and with all its flaws, was one of my favourite RPG stories (clocked 400 hours on it, yep). Writing that is so exact in its intention that to me, the series serves as a perfect vehicle for White people to talk about their whiteness and their genocidal history. My takeaway of the story’s general politic was “white people fucked up the planet so its on white people to fix it”. And I thought the writing did a splendid job of keeping to that maxim.

That is, until I started researching for my current commission.

As I learned more about Native history, I was also learning about Native aesthetics. Over time, I started to notice similarities between the game’s design choices and Native culture. It was episode 4, “What Makes Someone Native American?” from Crash Course Native American History that drove it home for me. Digging deeper helped me find queer, Indigenous writer and game critic, Dia Lacina. Dia’s 2017 review of Horizon Zero Dawn’s glaring appropriation of Native culture is the most cited in the ongoing conversation of the game’s extraction. The full review is no longer available though, I wish I could read it. This snippet from her review mentioned in Kaze15’s take on Jolt Studios stood out to me.

In all the years and hours I’ve played those games, I did not at all recognise the violence that game perpetuates against Native people. That the entire aesthetics of the Nora and Tenakth tribes take from existing, sacred imagery, colour, culture, and storytelling. Guerilla Games denies this of course, saying that the visual development of the Nora tribe is based on Viking aesthetics (as if that’s any better), and that the Tenakth tribe is based on damaged holograms from a war museum (which given the US military’s role in the genocide and active persecution of Native people even now, makes it even more insidious).

Realising this brought me back to my college days again, how I was taught to design for video games. It was always about extraction.

I was intentionally taught fucked up ideas around bodies and identities. A hero is white (I was actively discouraged from drawing non-white faces in the name of learning white proportions, which we know as eugenics.), an interesting woman is busty, a fat character is lazy, drunk, and/or clumsy (CC Erend from the Horizon series), evil looks queer and/or disabled. They called it archetypes. We were graded according to how well we performed this in our assignments. And when we were meant to think creatively and engage the real world for inspiration, the relationship was very much, “My moodboard consists of “x” because it looks cool, and I implemented it as “y” in my design! Cool right? Yeah!”.

So it does not AT ALL surprise me though it is disappointing, to learn of Guerilla Games’s refusal to be accountable. I was taught to think in the vacuum of white supremacy, with no regard for what the impact will be to real people. Success in an industry like that can only mean embracing a relationship in extraction, helping along the continued campaign of conquest.

This is a multi-million dollar industry; what about regular artists? How does this show up?

Here’s a local example.

In September 2025, I saw this comic by rachelwan.art, sponsored by the Malaysian government. It’s her reflection of her relationship to Malaysia. It drew the ire of many people including me. I was not gentle in my reproach. I encourage you to analyse the written and visual language in slide number 3, 4, 5, 6, 8,9, 10.

Here’s what I noticed:

Slide 3 - Calling brown people “legal”, “illegal”, and “foreign worker” against light skinned/white characters who have the label “expat” and “MM2H programme”. No one is illegal. Who benefits from these distinctions? Why is this so important to her relationship with identity? Mind you, the government regularly conducts raids to kidnap and incarcerate undocumented and migrant people which a majority of the country’s labour also relies upon. What does she want her audience to understand about “understand that the majority of people are not locals”?

Slide 4 - Using the term “true-blue” and “very questionable grammatical structure” when talking about languages. Why frame the natural mixing of languages, a fluid, shifting cultural aspect, as something that is fixed as being “true blue” while holding it against white ideas around language being “questionable” in structure? Who benefits from thinking of language only through nationalist and supremacist frameworks?

Slide 5 - One of these things is not like the other. One muses about her father’s colonial hang-up. The other two are just talking about their relationship to land. Somehow, all of this is considered “perspectives”. And the emphasis of the only Indigenous person in the slide to say “I’m definitely a Malaysian child”. What about any of this is considered a perspective? Who benefits from thinking of identity as a matter of “perspective”?

Slide 6 - Everyone gets slammed by the essentialist hammer here. A Malay woman holding a halal sign? A Chinese person with a dragon? Indigenous people in the East “winning” at racial harmony? All of them are facing a specific direction except for my personal heartbreak, the Indian woman who is… dancing? What does anything that anyone is doing meant to show racism? I can tell whose racism it shows - Rachel’s. Who benefits from the myth that Sabah and Sarawak are free from racism? Who benefits from reducing any of the lived experiences of Borneans into a single case of “harmony”? Who benefits from depicting Indian women as aloof? Who benefits from taking a sacred practice and place it next to…? Next to things that Rachel thinks is silly?

Slide 8 - A monopoly board with cards naming political gambits used by the government. Rachel looks at all of this - Malay supremacy, homophobia, theft, murder - and calls it colourful. Imani Barbarin said it best, “Memes in politics remove context and promote nihilism”. Who benefits from depicting the genocide of Palestinians as a game? Who benefits from dismissing real violence as thing that men just do?

Slide 9 - Which is pretty and which is ugly? Who benefits from thinking that land theft, destruction of houses, and gentrification is neutral, inevitable progress?

Slide 10 - “Laziness” next to a Malay woman who is a minimum wage worker, direct from Mahathir’s playbook, the ultimate supremacist. Who benefits from associating working class Malay people with myth of “laziness”? Which colonial legacy and capitalist exploitation remains unchecked?

Why did Rachel do any of this? And more importantly, why did she not back down when other people gently called her in? Who benefits from continuing the visual violence of colonialism?

But then again, as I wrote this, I went back to her account and found that she thinks Pocahontas has “nice lips” and likes to “waste time” in the forest so honestly, fuck Rachel la, ya? Another very perfect example of violence against Native people, coming from a Malaysian no less!

Rachel is not special. Many artists here and everywhere do this. Making sure we think that the process of creation is unanimous with extraction is a deliberate act of colonialism and capitalism, with it’s latest manifestation in Gen AI.

Thinking about all this, and looking back at Moss, Ged, and Tenar, I appreciate what they were trying to do. I hope they know it made a difference for me, even if they may not have the same political frameworks.

I’ll end my current reflection with Dia’s words.

What’s been going on.

Things got quiet after a personal tragedy happened last year, and I had nearly given up on ever running this shop. I let my licensing and mailbox lapse, I stopped thinking about ideas, I felt dull as a pencil nub.

I was very burned out, and it all accumulated to an intense open surgery and a 6 week recovery period (which I’m currently on the tail-end of!). I’m still working through recovery, albeit slowly, but I am very grateful for the patience and opportunities I’ve received through this year (I can’t wait to share them once its finished!). While it has been a painful year, I’m noticing the little seeds I’ve planted over the years as an artist and a human beginning to bloom. I’m learning to not have any expectations about how things may go, but to instead try to ground myself enough to weather whatever may come. And a part of that would be to tend to those blooming seeds, starting with this shop!

Clearance Sale at our new site!

So - Puli Prints now has a proper site! It’s a page within my own portfolio website, and utilises the selling tools so that both you and I have a smoother experience with placing, managing, and receiving orders. And in conjunction with this new site, a Clearance Sale! Up to 50% off! That’s right!

If you’ve been wanting to get your hands on some prints but felt the price point was too high, now you can get A4 prints for RM15, and A5 prints for RM10!

Shop Now!

Help me clear my current stock so I can make way for a brand new catalogue! I’m talking sticker sheets, new prints, and exclusive free downloads.

For the upcoming catalogue, I’m gonna go for a much smaller set up. You might find that you’ll have to pre-order things next time. This is because I don’t have physical space to keep stacks of merchandise anymore. Which means adding an additional week to fulfilment, but I’ll always do my best to send things out as soon as I can.

Stay tuned for a sneak peek of the upcoming merch, and I hope you have a even gentler beginning into the new year than last. See y’all on the other side <3

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I’m planning to launch a 2025 calendar, and my plan was to create pieces similar to “Thondar Padai” where each month we see newspaper clippings that cover moments of local resistance against policing going as far back as NewspaperSG has catalogued up to present day.

First I found this, which I thought was very amusing.

By amusing, I mean “Ugh, of course”. Like ugh, of course the police require less than throwing a stone at it’s sign board to enact violence. Ugh, of course it is not just a stone, I think of Palestinians defiantly resisting against tanks and drones with pieces of rubble that surround them (please support SAD MUTUAL AID FUND FOR Queer and trans Palestinians and front line organizers, and many organising efforts which you can find through Operation Olive Branch’s spreadsheet). Ugh, of course living in oppression will break us and deep down we know that we cannot continue like this. I’d like to believe that William knows this too, stomach ache or not. Ugh, of course property matters more than lives.

You can find a lot of little articles like the ones above calling for people to speak to the police. Policing has been around since 3000BC, and the modern police force as we know it since Francis Light? It’s pretty fucking telling when after centuries of existence, police and prisons need to constantly convince people they have their best interest at heart.

My favourite part from the second article is the bit about democracy being meaningless if the government dictated to the police its functions.

I know we don’t need receipts, but I’ll pull out the oldest one I’ve found in my digging.

Anyway, what I wanted to reflect on was time. The writing in some of the articles felt like takes I’d be reading on Twitter right now.

Before this rabbit hole, whenever I came across Malaysian Indians advocating for assimilation, I didn’t consider how this position is also informed by Indians in power actively participating in this erasure as a way to avoid accountability in oppressing Dalits. “Malaysiana” as a way mask the complicity in our own oppression. The fact that I cannot quite name what my caste is, is deliberately manufactured for my benefit.

It’s awfully convenient to say to minorities and dissenters that we cry over nothing, make problems where there are none, claim victimhood. Why do we reach for it? Why does our mind race to discredit what gets raised than to sit with what is being said? This is a fragility that has existed as long as empires have, it depends on it. Better still for oppressed communities to impose this fragility amongst ourselves. May we never reckon, may we never remember.

Time doesn’t give a fuck though, ‘cause look at me, remembering, reckoning.

Empire tries very hard to make time theirs. “This is not the time to discuss rights”. “This is the time to retaliate against the enemy”. Empire wants time to move linearly, in an orderly fashion, that never catches up to them. But Empire can only really be Empire if it remains static. Empire is obsessed with immortality, to lose nothing. It will pretend to change by giving itself a new name, but ultimately, Empire wants to freeze time.

Time really doesn’t give a fuck though. There is nothing in this world that is not touched by time’s circular reach. I think that’s why, while it is hard to find or build community, it is never impossible. That’s why, while movements build nuance, you can find the same echo a century before.

That’s why I wanted to find these articles for the calendar. To remember, reckon, remind us of why nothing about our struggle is unprecedented, and why our resistance, whatever the scale, is indispensable.

Newspaper Links (In Order Of Appearance)

THREW STONE AT POLICE NOTICE BOARD | Malaya Tribune, 31 January 1940, Page 2 | https://eresources.nlb.gov.sg/newspapers/digitised/article/maltribune19400131-1.2.12

TELL THE POLICE | Malaya Tribune, 20 July 1948, Page 2 | https://eresources.nlb.gov.sg/newspapers/digitised/article/maltribune19480720-1.2.27

Police not an instrument of Govt, students told | The Straits Times, 29 September 1967, Page 5 | https://eresources.nlb.gov.sg/newspapers/digitised/article/straitstimes19670929-1.2.25

PINANG. | The Singapore Free Press and Mercantile Advertiser (1835-1869), 6 January 1860, Page 1 | https://eresources.nlb.gov.sg/newspapers/digitised/article/singfreepressa18600106-1.2.3

THEY TALKED FOR 10 HOURS AND SAID 'NO' | The Straits Times, 24 December 1951, Page 7 | https://eresources.nlb.gov.sg/newspapers/digitised/article/straitstimes19511224-1.2.96

Position of Indians in the new Malaya | The Straits Times, 16 July 1954, Page 6 | https://eresources.nlb.gov.sg/newspapers/digitised/article/straitstimes19540716-1.2.88.9

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We live in capitalism, its power seems inescapable — but then, so did the divine right of kings. Any human power can be resisted and changed by human beings. Resistance and change often begin in art. Very often in our art, the art of words.

Ursula K. Le Guin1

I’ve been thinking a lot about how capitalism makes itself irresistible - in fast fashion, the smartphones released every other day, modern slavery, subscription services, Shopee, social media, the list is long and all encompassing.

But for all of its “convenience”, capitalism is very explicit and obvious about the oppression that fuels it. It is also very honest about how you and I keep it running, and how we get run over by it in return.

Oppression wants us to feel like “it could be worse”, “my suffering is necessary”, “look at all this technological progress, we wouldn’t be here without it”. And because it has been successful at making those feelings irresistible, imagining an alternative world seems impossible.

While it is very much possible to not engage it, not everyone is able to make that choice.

As a cultural worker who belongs to an oppressed people my job is to make revolution irresistible. One of the ways I attempt to do that is by celebrating those victories within the [B]lack community. And I think the mere fact that we’re still breathing is a cause for celebration. Also, my job is to critique the reactionary behavior within the community and to keep certain kinds of calls out there: the children, our responsibility of children, our responsibility to maintain some kind of continuity from the past. But I think for any artist your job is determined by the community you’re identifying with.

But in this country (US) we’re not encourage and equipped at any particular time to view things that way. And so the artwork or the art practice that sells a capitalist ideology is considered art and anything that deviates from that is considered political propagandist, polemical or didactic, strange, weird, subversive, or ugly.

Toni Cade Bambara2

What I want to write is how artists are being pushed to make themselves “irresistible” as defined by capitalism. Which internally, is deeply undesirable because its so extractive and just downright shitty. Trending audios, SEOs, being centrist to avoid shadow bans, making content that feeds into stereotypes or just flat out making racist, sexist, transphobic content, and publicising every single personal detail about yourself because it makes “relatable content”, putting marginalised people right in the crossfire of being silenced, doxxed, and many cases, killed.

And having “irresistible” already designed this way, creating an artificial intelligence whose relationship to the world is very much informed by extractive, racist, ableist, homophobic, transphobic, colonial ideologies and practices to “replace” artists, sounds a lot like a snake eating it’s own tail isn’t it?

What I mean to say is, while “irresistible” is defined through practicing oppression, it cannot help but give way to the joy of the oppressed.

A constant example of this is AAVE (African American Vernacular English) and particularly, language from Black Trans communities.

The joy and rage behind “yass queen”, “slay”, “werk”, is actively made and shaped through on-going Black queer resistance against anti-Black, queerphobic, classist oppression by white, Western ideas of language, gender, and race. While non-Black people even to this day will laud Black people for being “eloquent”, they have no qualms doing a death drop and screaming “mother” at other non-Black people. As if this language and culture is not what they actively sneer, mock, belittle, and dilute.

Appropriation comes from the need to extract joy and rage that you do not possess. Because joy and rage is palpable. It is innate. It reminds us we’re alive. A visceral emotion that capitalism cannot recreate no matter how hard it tries. Despite defining “irresistible” through practicing oppression, capitalism knows it can only sell its branding of “irresistible” if it takes desire from a real place. Whenever a new meme or TikTok goes viral, and the joy and rage that resonates from it is reverberated, it will be taken, appropriated, co-opted, diluted, and fed back into the system.

When GenAi has mined joy and rage to death, what will be left? When the joy and rage of the oppressed can no longer be bottled, where will it take its cue? It can only keep making what it knows - what is extractive, racist, ableist, homophobic, transphobic, colonial. It is cold and lifeless. The snake’s mouth finally reaches its head. There is nothing left to discover about itself.

So what does “irresistible” actually mean to you?

What do you inherently know in your body that brings you an emotion you cannot deny?

What does it mean outside of the practice of oppression?

What would a world that nurtured people to heal each other and express what is innate to them through making things together without extracting from each other look like?

I know we already know it, let’s embrace it.

PULI PRINTS will officially be open for business next week on July 25th!

I will post a quick guide on how you can place your order on the Instagram page before July 25th so that it’s smooth sailing. Don’t worry, it’s super simple, just a little unorthodox.

I’ve also prepared an FAQ that’s available here and I’ve added a “FAQ” Highlight on the Instagram page that you can check out in the meantime as well!

Thank you for your support and stay tuned!

Check out “Chuffs and Growls” - thoughts on the visionary futures we can build together and our collective rage at systems of oppression.

Read "Chuffs and Growls" Here!

If you haven’t yet, follow the shop on Instagram at @kedaipuliprints!