Liminality is a central theme to most of Arthur Yap’s work, extending his material to a broad range of interpretations and possibilities that elude a definitive and denotative meaning. According to the Oxford English Dictionary, that which is liminal has three interpretations: “minimality”; something “characterized by being on a boundary or threshold” or a “transitional… state between culturally defined stages of a person’s life”.
This liminality is evident in Yap’s distinct artistry, where he engages in a sparse and economic style, representing the physical environment “sufficiently to give the reader a sense of what one feels, but not at the same time overwhelm the reader in any way” (Whitehead 2). Unlike other contemporaries like poet Edwin …show more content…
We can see this tendency in his 1978 fiction piece The Story of a Mask, who described the survival narrative of the Chinese immigrants who came to Singapore. Despite the change in space, they still brought “their beliefs, their superstitions and folkways and, when they were unhurried (which was quite often), they looked around and saw that, thought they felt unchanged, they were in fact changed” (42). Yap’s tendency to portray a spatial liminality was in fact a self-reflexive attention to the politics of space. Arguably, it can be said that The Story of a Mask focused on the lives of newly settled immigrants, while Wong Loo’s narrative in A Silly Little Story was that of a citizen having already established himself in the state. Nonetheless, it still exerts the ephemerality and precarious basis of identity construction in the island-city-nation-state in a postcolonial independence. Indeed, we see this sentiment expressed as early as his fiction titled Noon at Five’O’ Clock, where “[e]ngineers and architects may scheme and “city-plan” but there are always (to him rather delightful) accidents”
This liminality is evident in Yap’s distinct artistry, where he engages in a sparse and economic style, representing the physical environment “sufficiently to give the reader a sense of what one feels, but not at the same time overwhelm the reader in any way” (Whitehead 2). Unlike other contemporaries like poet Edwin …show more content…
We can see this tendency in his 1978 fiction piece The Story of a Mask, who described the survival narrative of the Chinese immigrants who came to Singapore. Despite the change in space, they still brought “their beliefs, their superstitions and folkways and, when they were unhurried (which was quite often), they looked around and saw that, thought they felt unchanged, they were in fact changed” (42). Yap’s tendency to portray a spatial liminality was in fact a self-reflexive attention to the politics of space. Arguably, it can be said that The Story of a Mask focused on the lives of newly settled immigrants, while Wong Loo’s narrative in A Silly Little Story was that of a citizen having already established himself in the state. Nonetheless, it still exerts the ephemerality and precarious basis of identity construction in the island-city-nation-state in a postcolonial independence. Indeed, we see this sentiment expressed as early as his fiction titled Noon at Five’O’ Clock, where “[e]ngineers and architects may scheme and “city-plan” but there are always (to him rather delightful) accidents”