Lawrence Lenhart
Reporting from the Front Lines of the Bubble-Gum Orgy:
On the Auspicious Origins of Cào Nǐ Zǔzōng Shíbā Dài
By Chan Yap, June 2013
CALLED THE MOST subversive artist to ever perform on the Malay Peninsula, Cào Nǐ Zǔzōng Shíbā Dài (a moniker derived from the popular Mandarin insult, "Fuck your ancestors to the eighteenth generation") is an avant-garde collagist whose career has been framed as an apologia for dissident art. Called a perverse Ai Weiwei and "Warhol but only the degenerate aspects,"[1] Cào Nǐ incites his audience to not just witness dissidence, but to participate in it. His project has been one sustained piece of durational art, a successive deconstruction of the Singaporean Penal Code. In a reliably litigious Singapore,[2] Cào Nǐ's job security is inviolable. His methods include provocative violation of the law, elaborate representations of violations of the law, and the coordination of collective violation of the law.[3]
Of all his irreverent performances, though, Cào Nǐ is probably most famous for his annual chewing gum parties. Often held at hipster hotspots like Haji Lane, behind brass stanchion posts with burgundy rope, the Chewing Parties are meant to disrespect Singapore's long-standing chewing gum ban. Originally meant to reduce costs associated with removing chewing gum from railway cars and to beautify a city that was shaping up to be the model façade of modern Asia, the restriction on the distribution of bubble gum in 1992 was met with emotional defiance. When an artist made the claim that chewing gum was a creative laxative—that chewing was thinking and vice versa—prime minister Lee Kuan Yew (LKY) responded: "If you can't think because you can't chew, try a banana." That young artist would become the performer we all know today as Cào Nǐ. Even now, Cào Nǐ's artist photo is only of his eyes peeking over a soft pink bubble.
For years afterward, there was an unsubstantiated myth that Singapore's criminal class locked legs in "bubble-gum orgies." While the accusation is widely considered to be ministry propaganda meant to normalize the criminalization of chewing gum, others were adamant that perversion this particular couldn't be made up. When Cào Nǐ published a zine reporting back from these very dens of iniquity,[4] the public got its first whiff of the artist's brand of satire. The media requested interviews, and Cào Nǐ obliged, over and over, even to international outlets.
It wasn't until one outlandish record, one which not even Cào Nǐ could improvise without his face crinkling into a boyish smile, that it became clear Cào Nǐ was not a veracious reporter, but rather a performance artist keen on lampooning Singapore's chewing-gum hysteria. The transcript reads:
And their faces are all puffy from morphine. But you can't see the faces because they often wear latex masks at these orgies. One is typical ang mo and the other is LKY himself. They wear these strap-on harnesses and gently whip each other across the mattress like pony and master. And the height of all hilarity is the way they blow bubbles through the breathing holes in the masks. Well, they're not bubbles so much as they're ellipsoids. To see our beloved prime minister's face spackled with deflated gum and dollops of cum is just so, so righteous.
Due to broadcast delay, producers had ample time to clip the content. Still, Cào Nǐ's retinue filled the studio with riotous laughter. Thus began the storied career of Cào Nǐ Zǔzōng Shíbā Dài.
As the ferries arrive at Poison Shrimp Quay in thirty-minute intervals, the passengers unload toward the turnstiles of the Welcome Pavilion, each clutching a red ticket issued from the Housing Development Board. The island has been terraformed from barges of crushed granite and soil debris, leftovers from tunnel projects completed beneath modern Singapore, which looms three nautical miles to the north. The topmost layer of Poison Shrimp Quay, upon which the first residents now stand, is a slurry of dyed silica and imported white sands from Cambodia's Tatai River. It's more amusement park than it is floating city.
A housing administrator jostles a microphone until it works. "Lee Kuan Yew once said . . ."
"Oh fuck." Cào Nǐ braces himself for secondhand drivel. "He tyrannizes from beyond the grave!" Despite his unmistakable audibleness, the comment is ignored. His fellow Singaporeans know how to tune out a wiseacre.
". . . 'In a world where the big fish eat small fish and the small fish eat shrimps, Singapore must become a poisonous shrimp.'"
"Typical idiocy," Cào Nǐ says, not under his breath, but as if in conversation with the administrator, many meters away. Cào Nǐ looks around, wondering if he is the only famous Singaporean in this lottery.
The administrator goes on to extoll his fellow board members and city planners and the thousands of construction workers who, through their labor and creativity, have made "nothing short of magic" happen. Cào Nǐ rolls his eyes as if practicing for a seizure. The administrator says that the future of Singapore is in "reclamation and rebar," that these are the antidotes to the city-state's puniness. "Welcome," he says finally. "Welcome home, all of you."
With that, a worker passes through the custodial door at the base of the Merlion statue. Cào Nǐ stares at the chimera, what one poet has called "a monstrous mating of scales and teeth." To Cào Nǐ, the Merlion had always been a cheap gimmick, a tourist trap, a tedious souvenir. It is so many things wrong all at once. Worst of all: these statues, mostly installed along the Singapore River, spit gallons of water every minute while Singapore's citizenry is required by law to choke down its own saliva. It was deeply unfair. "It's the government's way of taunting us," Cào Nǐ had once told the arts and culture reporter, Chan Yap. "It's a classic form of abuse."
The statue, made of porcelain plates and cement fondue, hums as the worker starts the first water pump. It hums even louder when he flips on the generator for the backup pump. Water spills into the base of the fountain, and the hum evolves into a gurgle. The rotating impellers churn the ocean water. Each current sloshes into the statue's reservoir and then empties from the pump's inlet, lifts through the tubing in the hollow statue, upward through Merlion's expectorating maw. A camerawoman, standing on the rung of a ladder, swivels to the crowd. Merlion spits, and the new citizens of Poison Shrimp Quay cheer.
Cào Nǐ steps away from the ceremony. He is escorted by golf cart to the condominium where the Housing Development Board has already shipped his many boxes full of appliances, art supplies, books, a printer, and an expensive bottle of Glenfarclas. He pours an hour's worth into a glass tumbler and climbs onto his balcony overlooking the old skyline. The attention: that's what he'll miss the most.
Like an Exile: The Downtown Core Says Farewell to Cào Nǐ
By Chan Yap, September 2018
IT WASN'T an exile per se. Cào Nǐ had lived in five apartments in a span of four years, and was routinely evicted when his landlords discovered his high-profile art crimes. They often accused him of petty or untrue infringements like subletting his flat to tourists (May 2015) or promoting racial disharmony among Indian and Chinese tenants (October 2017).
Just before the most recent eviction, his landlord had seen him on a video-sharing site, exhuming corpses in Bukit Brown cemetery[5]—skulls in his palms, femurs tucked beneath his pits. To be fair, the government—hoping to relieve congestion on the Pan-Island Expressway—had just announced plans to convert the remainder of the populous cemetery into an eight-lane highway. Some families personally exhumed their ancestors, but most couldn't be bothered with the emotional responsibility of reinterring their loved ones for a second time in space-saving columbaria. Cào Nǐ acquired phone numbers from a group of volunteers trying to contact descendants, and purchased the rights to hundreds of corpses for a "fitting memorial."[6]
After sleeping on friends' floors and futons for months, Cào Nǐ received news from the HDB that his name had been selected for residence on the new land reclamation project known as Poison Shrimp Quay. Only, he had never entered his name into the lottery.
It starts with jazz and a couple fingers of scotch, Sahib Shihab and the end of the Glenfarclas. Cào Nǐ slices through strips of tape with his longest fingernail and reaches into the packing boxes like he's a midwife. When he finds the clippers, he takes a break to snip his nails to an attractive length. Even though the flat smells like fresh carpet and new paint, he boils water anyway, adding drops of extract: lemongrass, peppermint, ylang ylang, and sandalwood. A minute later, and he's feeling loose, seduced. The algorithm circles back to Shihab again. He hears the passenger ferry's horn haunting its way into the room, drawn over Shihab's baritone sax with an identical timbre. Next is his phone's chime. Here. That's all it says. He likes the way she punctuates. He gulps the last of the scotch, confident his visitor has brought him some more. His hands shuffle the jars in the fridge as he looks for something mealy. He spreads quince paste onto a dozen crackers and caps each with a marcona almond. When she buzzes his room, he is brushing his teeth. "Com op!" he says with a mouthful of froth.
She hands him an oversized bag and pretends to turn away. "Okay, bye!" she says.
He clasps her wrist and tugs her in. "No, wait, Chan Yap. You're my finest import."
She rolls her eyes at the weak compliment.
"Scotch?" Cào Nǐ asks, rummaging through the bag.
"It's in there," she says, inspecting the flat.
"No. Do you want some?"
"Okay," she says.
He pours two fingers for her and a whole fist for himself. They lift the sherried drink to their lips. He holds the toffee taste in his mouth as she gulps and shivers it away.
"Do you have any wine?" Chan asks.
"Not yet." After swimming his arm through the bag, he notices the package of nails. "Fuck, did you bring a hammer?"
She holds up a finger. "In my purse."
"Really? You're the best." Cào Nǐ springs toward her purse, but notices her laughing. "What?"
She's covering her mouth now.
"You don't really?"
"Of course I don't have a hammer in my purse."
"Oh. Well." Cào Nǐ looks at the canvas leaning against the wall, a new acquisition from Koenji in Tokyo.
"Let me see it."
He shakes his head. "You don't get to see it." Even as Cào Nǐ says this, he begins to rotate the canvas toward her.
As she sits to study the painting—a shunga of a sitting couple, their heads replaced by a penis and vagina in a carnal staring contest—Cào Nǐ pivots modestly toward the kitchen. He assumes it will remind Chan of the last time they were together, their uneasy tryst in an upscale suite in Kuala Lumpur where things did not end well, not at all. He brings her the quince crackers and sits beside her on the floor.
"What do you think?"
"It's surprising," she says. "The colors are so mute."
Sometimes Cào Nǐ forgets Chan is actually an art critic and not just his lover.
She dips her cracker into the scotch.
"I'll never know why you do anything," Cào Nǐ says, accepting a bite of the soaked cracker between his teeth.
"Say, does this place have a bedroom too?" Chan asks mysteriously.
"I think I saw one," Cào Nǐ says.
Those are their last words before sex.
After some agreeable silence, Chan flexes her toes against Cào Nǐ's shins. "So, what happens to us if the next barge to Poison Shrimp Quay has Glenfarclas on it and you don't need me anymore?"
"I'm still going to need that hammer."
Awaiting Cào Nǐ's Next Act
By Chan Yap, May 2019
MEMBERS OF the Malay avant-garde continue to standby as Cào Nǐ enters his eighth month of inaction. Once a prolific artist known for his simultaneous performances across the downtown core, Cào Nǐ seems to have withdrawn into a creative retirement since relocating to Singapore's newest reclaimed island, Poison Shrimp Quay.
Critics from staid outlets such as The Straits Times as well as cultural blogs like The Maligned Merlion, have noted that Cào Nǐ has seemingly come to a truce with the state's penal code. "There is a glass ceiling for the Singaporean iconoclast after all," Weng-Choy Lee said. "And it was constructed by the HDB."
Tzu Nyen Ho, who once called Cào Nǐ "juvenile" and "anodyne," has regarded the quietude as Cào Nǐ's greatest accomplishment yet. "Look what happens when distractors fall asleep. Let's pray Cào Nǐ keeps eating snake." Ho is of course referring to promising developments in free speech and assembly during the first half of this year. Human Rights Watch recently issued its first favorable report for Singapore since the group's inception, noting a positive trend toward democratic human rights while urging there is "still considerable room for improvement." Many would argue that this transformation would not have been possible if it weren't for Cào Nǐ's early work, namely his bubble gum parties.
There have been a number of unsubstantiated theories about Cào Nǐ's next act, mostly spurred on by the artist's pinned Tweet: "Who was it that said the best place to hide a grain of sand is on the beach?"[7] Several residents of Poison Shrimp Quay have reportedly seen Cào Nǐ's laptop's browser windows filled with charts, calculators, and foreign trade data at the island's only WiFi-enabled café. If I know Cào Nǐ (and I do—admittedly), the silence will be proportional to the ambition of his next performance. Perhaps he's covertly looting the island itself, one grain at a time.
He spends a half hour deciding whether or not to tell the barista the calendar needs flipping. It's off by a quarter of a year. Which is egregious, he thinks. At least he's built up a tolerance (a tolerance, he assures himself, and not an affinity) for the current photo—a tiny baby sleeping in a rice hat—and isn't so sure he'll be able to stomach June's the same way. The photographer is some Anne Geddes wannabe, except all the babies are Asian instead of white. Cào Nǐ puts the laptop in its case. The cord. The chocolate-covered espresso beans. And the napkin with his scribblings. He stands and realizes his right leg is sleeping. He stomps and wiggles the toes. The barista glances at him, judging.
"Excuse me," Cào Nǐ says. "Your calendar is three months behind."
The barista glances at the baby in the rice hat. "A year and three months," she says. "It's a '2017.' But the owner likes this one. It's her granddaughter that's in it."
"That baby belongs to the owner?"
The barista looks at Cào Nǐ quizzically. "Well, the baby belongs, I guess, to the owner's daughter."
"Yes." Cào Nǐ studies the baby and his chest flutters. To think this baby is now just two degrees of separation. "Have you ever met the baby?"
"No." The barista says.
"Is this baby on the island?"
The barista is judging again. "No. I don't think so."
"Oh," Cào Nǐ says, disappointed. "Okay." It had been the closest thing he felt to art in weeks. He can't say how. And now the feeling was going.
The walk back to his flat is never long enough. He strolls around the building, several laps, before sitting at a bench facing a wall of tessellated balconies where he tries to discern any human drama. The women of Poison Shrimp Quay are too careful to be caught topless. Which is another way of saying 'the women of Singapore.' The lottery was the careful maker of this microcosm. A boy catapults something, maybe applesauce, from a spoon. It scatters like pigeon waste onto the cement. Why not take the ferry back to downtown Singapore once a week? Chan Yap asked Cào Nǐ. It might help, she said. Help what? he asked, coyly. She accused him of fetishizing his exile. You're not on house arrest, she reminded. You're free to go. He was working out a principle, though. Something about aesthetic mobility. The balconies are bereft of humanity: pointless receptacles for plant stands and sandals. Enough boredom. He goes in.
Another case of scotch dwindles. He removes a jar of sturgeon caviar from the refrigerator shelf. "You can take the artist out of Singapore," Cào Nǐ says. He removes a jar of salmon pearls. "You can take the artist out of Singapore." Again. He takes jars of artichokes, cocktail onions, capers too.
Cào Nǐ skulks on his balcony, facing the flame-white twinkle of Singapore at night. It's as if the city has been plated in LED filigree. The Helix Bridge glistens most of all, its canopy wound beneath wild-pointed lasers. Cào Nǐ phones Chan Yap. "Hey, where are you tonight, Chan Yap?" he asks her voicemail. He doesn't bother asking for the Glenfarclas. That fact is established by his calling. "Where did you go?" Cào Nǐ raises his glass to the city-state. He swigs the dregs into his cheeks and refuses to swallow. It burns and puckers, goes numb and number still until a sneeze disrupts the meditation. Nothing happens next.
Return to Sender: 'SAND, BOX' a Breakthrough in Cào Nǐ's Materials, Process, Vision
By Chan Yap, August 2019
I SHOULD BEGIN with this disclosure. Three months ago, I closed an article about the uncharacteristic silence of Cào Nǐ Zǔzōng Shíbā Dài by suggesting that the artist may be doing something so radical as dismantling the land reclamation of Poison Shrimp Quay "one grain [of sand] at a time." Never in fifteen years of art criticism has an artist thought to plagiarize a speculative sentence written by yours truly. And yet it was Cào Nǐ himself who once told a crowd at The Substation:
The artist's most important instrument is his ear. Let it graze the ground all day long. Everything is speaking: the natural and technological sublime, the business world and the state. Even the critic's murmurations are a part of the feedback loop that stretches out in the distance between Art and the art world.
With that in mind, in Cào Nǐ's latest performance, Sand, Box, the artist is in fact looting the island—just as I "prophesied."
Sand, Box is an art installation composed of dozens of recreational sandboxes scattered throughout Southeast Asia—namely Myanmar, Cambodia, and Indonesia. There are approximately 1.5 tons of sand in each structure, all of it presumably sourced from the Poison Shrimp Quay sand fill. The boxes themselves are constructed of long teak planks assembled by a corps of art assistants who were dispatched to the countries where the sand originated. The teak is brushed with gilding size and pressed with gold leaf. The first shimmering sandbox was discovered by a group of German tourists cycling through Bagan, Myanmar, a landscape famously crowded with pagodas. From the aerial platform of one of these pagodas, they spotted a gilded square along the banks of the Irrawaddy River and trekked toward it. The box, like the twenty-six others that have since manifested, is fitted with a small engraved plate that reads: "RETURN TO SENDER," followed by Cào Nǐ's moniker in Mandarin.
As the details of this covert, durational performance continue to surface, Cào Nǐ maintains his silence. This is a likely indication that there are more sandboxes to be found within the borders of those countries who have exported sand. Meanwhile, the Building and Construction Authority (BCA) has not been silent. Administrators are prepared to fine Cào Nǐ, even arrest him, for the thieved sand estimated to be in excess of fifty tons. Singapore Customs has echoed the BCA, warning that biotic materials within the sand could contaminate local ecologies in the receiving countries.
When I spoke with British expat and art pilgrim, Jai Chandra, by phone, he was amused by the installation. "It's a classic pastime exploded. You visit a place, take a little vial of sand, put it on your mantel." In fact, children and adults can be found filching sand on Siloso Beach most afternoons, and the BCA wouldn't dare intimidate them. "Cào Nǐ, though—and I've seen eighteen of the boxes so far—is making this everyday act a political one. The irony, of course, is that Singapore is utterly out of land. It is not reclaiming islands off the coast of the city-state; it is importing them."
This is what makes Cào Nǐ's installations so powerful. These sandboxes, whimsical as they may be, are a compassionate reminder of the ways in which highly developed states can and will buy their way out of climatological catastrophe while developing nations suffer losses as piteous as the land itself.
When asked which of the eighteen sites was the most affecting, Chandra's response was immediate: "There was a spot in Battambang, on the banks of the Sangker River. I almost didn't see it because the box was so full of children. They were holding sand in their fists and soaking it with water and molding it into little homes, little bridges, little tunnels. It was perfect."
It is as if Cào Nǐ is speaking directly to the next generation of our ASEAN neighbors, saying, "This is what land reclamation really looks like. Hold on to it tight."
The foundation of the concrete caisson is drilled and belled into the seabed. The sand-filled chamber rises toward the surface. Near the top, the cofferdam is pumped out, a dry compartment where workers go to check on the sand fill or perform maintenance. The only thing that exists both above and below sea level is the damned Merlion statue. Its plumbing is tucked beneath iron grates. Large grates that can be lifted away, nightly, once Cào Nǐ has made his way into the statue's core through the custodial door. He takes a ten-horsepower positive displacement pump with him and feeds a hose into the caisson's access tube. He could vacuum six tons per hour, but the suction nozzle is not drawing the sand into some high-volume bin. Rather, it courses upward into the base of the Merlion fountain where Cào Nǐ's primary assistant fills backpacks, fifty pounds each. The extra noise generated by the vacuum pump is mostly muffled by the cement fondue. From the park outside, it sounds like the Merlion's fan motor is temporarily overloaded. Once all ten backpacks have been filled with a quarter ton of sand, the assistant tugs the hose and Cào Nǐ switches off the vacuum. They add red dye to the Merlion's pump trough to signal three more assistants who loiter around the edges of the park. When the Merlion starts vomiting blood, they all converge upon the custodial door, yank the heavy bags over the threshold, and curl them up to their shoulders. They repeat the ritual every night for six nights, ending each session at Cào Nǐ's flat for a celebratory scotch. When they've collected 1.5 tons of sand (or enough for a single sandbox), they wheel it to the ferry in suitcases. Back in the city, they secure shipping and portage to the next installation space. They fly Air Asia to the destination where one acquires the teak, another the gold leaf, and the primary assistant, a charismatic polyglot, charms a family whose farm is on a visible stretch of the local river that was dredged and sold to Singapore. She has cash in her pockets (if need be).
Cào Nǐ to Changi Prison
By Chan Yap, July 2025
IF YOU WERE jogging the trails at Green Lawn Tuesday afternoon, you may have noticed an odd ferry slip creeping toward West Coast Pier—odd because its only passenger, aside from the excessive fourteen police escorts, was the dissident artist, Hon Siew Choh (aka Cào Nǐ Zǔzōng Shíbā Dài). The ferry, arriving from Poison Shrimp Quay, was originally destined for Marina South, but when protestors from The Substation formed along the Esplanade Bridge, the ferry rerouted to a "soberer location."
In an exclusive interview with Cào Nǐ that will appear in next month's issue of The Maligned Merlion,[8] the artist claims he would have continued constructing his famous sandboxes until he had depleted the entire quay. "I haven't even dented the fill. There's some millions of tons of sand on this island. I just hope that the rhetorical weight of my extractions is greater than the material weight." In fact, according to purchase orders from the Building and Construction Authority (BCA), a recent sand infusion to Poison Shrimp Quay weighed approximately twenty times the weight of Cào Nǐ's cumulative Sand, Box installation.
Figures like this illustrate the absurdity of the Public Prosecutor's investigation that attempts to conflate Cào Nǐ's art and the apparent foundering of the artificial island, which BCA officials have repeatedly chalked up to unseasonable king tides. Even as Cào Nǐ has been labeled an eco-terrorist, more and more sandboxes appear across the region—now at 477 (and counting). When asked why Cào Nǐ was not arrested sooner, the Attorney-General's office said they had assumed Cào Nǐ was bluffing. They had suspected that he was bulk-ordering the sand from Horme Hardware and calling it theft for attention. "There was no way of getting at the sand," said the Deputy Attorney-General, Sharmila Selvam. "But then we discovered surveillance footage of Choh and his assistants coming and going from the Merlion at night."
As Cào Nǐ settles in to Changi Prison, fans are clamoring for him to resume POA, the Fluxus-inspired "danger music" staged during his last incarceration in 2007. For now, Cào Nǐ has humbly requested that his favorite painting be hung on the cell wall. "I only want my shunga. A hammer too."
[1] In fact, one of Cào Nǐ's first galleried exhibits was an homage to Warhol's pop-art study of Campbell's Soup Cans, 1962; Cào Nǐ duplicated Warhol's process (synthetic polymer paint across thirty-two canvases), only with Maruchan Ramen Soup Packages.
[2] Founder of modern Singapore, Lee Kuan Yew, famously said: "If Singapore is a nanny state, then I am proud to have fostered one."
[3] For example, he once coordinated a competitive tiger-penis-eating contest one block south of Singapore's Chinatown. In the style of the Nathan's Hot Dog Eating Contest on Coney Island, ten competitive eaters sat on a platform with cartoon tigers etched on their bibs and proceeded to eat grilled tiger penises on buns. They dipped the buns dramatically in water before forcing them down their gullets. Cào Nǐ played emcee for the event; rather than serve as a play-by-play commentator, though, he repeatedly thanked the "sponsors" of the event, i.e., the thirty-four Traditional Chinese Medicine shops where the illegal tiger parts had been obtained. In a Buzzfeed-style Top 10 list published online, this was ranked second among all of Cào Nǐ's installations. (First was the time he and 1,060 "art assistants" defecated in public toilets at the Supreme Court of Singapore, National Gallery of Singapore, and even the president's palace at The Istana, refusing to comply with the country's mandatory flushing mandate.)
[4] To borrow a phrase popularized by Jonathan Lethem in "A Gentleman's Game" (The New Yorker, 2016).
[5] According to The Ten Courts of Hell at Haw Par Villa theme park on Pasir Panjang Road, the punishment for grave robbing is to be "tied to [a] red hot copper pillar and grilled." Eviction seems comparably undemanding.
[6] The bones were, according to Cào Nǐ's public website, pulverized, liquefied, and agitated into a mixture of bituminous pitch that was then sold at a competitive rate to the asphalt contractor who won the government bid for the eight-lane highway that now streams through Bukit Brown cemetery. From the site: ". . . the dead [are] no longer beneath the surface, but of the surface . . ."
[7] To my knowledge, nobody has ever said such a thing. G. K. Chesterton, though, said something similar of leaves in the forest.
[8] "to be published when I am arrested . . ."