Contents

• Sumatra by the Side, Charles Lim Yi Yong

• Shallow, Simryn Gill, with annotations by Tom Melick

• Sea-view, Selene Yap

• To Catch the Wind, Chanon Kenji Praepipatmongkol

A book on living and working in the vicinity of the equator, or, as Gill writes, “‘What about the tropics?’ one of us asks. Nothing to look for. We’re here; we’re it.”

“I remember finding Allan Sekula’s Fish Story (1995) on the shelf in a campus bookstore shortly after college, and feeling like I had been admitted to a secret world of deeper, stranger, and more intimate critical creativity than all my schooling had indexed. Holding this new and beautiful book, Shallow, opening into its accordion folds, following its leveling itinerary, I find myself hoping it finds its way into the hands of those who will make the work we need for the generation ahead. May they experience it as the gift it is: both promise and proof that time and care and patience and attention, with others, can make inhabitable worlds.”

—D. Graham Burnett, Princeton University

“Shallow is co-created by Simryn Gill and Charles Lim, consisting of texts and images. The text is by Simryn Gill, a visual artist, telling of ceaseless homecomings and departures, and of abiding although fractured affiliations with the lands below the winds. When writing, she pictures conversations with artists, curators, the self; she shapes present and past lives; she evokes habitats hemmed by the Straits of Malacca, a maritime artery in and for the world; a passageway embracing the still, pulsating equatorial domain and propelling her itinerancy. Simryn Gill tells it quietly, compellingly. She is a diarist and a cosmographer; at once circumspect while being companionable and worldly. Charles Lim, a videographic artist and mariner, enfolds and unfolds the telling with pensive, photographic images, correspondingly and separately. Word and image co-exist, discreetly and conversantly. Shallow is an engrossing published work.”

—T.K. Sabapathy, teaches, speaks, and writes on art, artists in Southeast Asia, and their histories