My Future Isn’t a Pipe Dream: on surface, sincerity, and a Singapore scored in the present tense

Every image of Singapore seems to arrive already mediated: renewed, copied, authored by no one. In Transit’s live reinterpretations of these frames ask whether the surface, answered in the present tense, is where sincerity survives.

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你是不是像我在太陽下低頭　流著汗水默默辛苦的工作
你是不是像我就算受了冷落　也不放棄自己想要的生活
你是不是像我整天忙著追求　追求一種意想不到的溫柔
你是不是像我曾經茫然失措　一次一次徘徊在十字街頭

(Are you, like me, head bowed beneath the sun —
sweat running down, working hard and without a word?
Are you, like me, who even when the world turns cold
won’t give up the life I wanted for myself?
Are you, like me, chasing all day long —
chasing a tenderness you never saw coming?
Are you, like me, who was once so lost —
again and again, turning circles at the crossroads?)

 

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A song hides in As If To Nothing’s shadow. In Pek Jia Hao and Ang Jia Jun’s noir treatment of an ageing theatre prop-maker, Tom Chang is never heard once — but the absence is palpable. The title of his 1988 hit (also the Chinese title of the film) translates roughly to “My Future Isn’t A Pipe Dream”; amidst the deep, grim grain, the song’s bittersweet rallying cry haunts the film precisely by never arriving. It is subtext as presence — a reference that never surfaces to be decoded, yet organises everything above it.

Chang’s ode to youth was itself a piece of transitionary theatre. A Taiwanese star who died young, he left the song behind as an endlessly-covered standard — an earnest anthem a whole generation across the Chinese-speaking tiger economies, latched onto against a backdrop of economic explosion. His images map onto the film effortlessly: a narrator caught in the heat, sweat shed in the push and pull for self-image, for aspiration, above all for agency. And amidst all that Gen-X sincerity, it’s darkly funny that the force of it is best remembered as a jingle for soda. The point is also where it gets complicated — living in Singapore, everything can feel like surface: mediated, renewed, sponsored, sung back to you as an ad. But drinking the Kool-Aid doesn’t, on its own, make you shallow. Surface can be sincere too: the hard part is knowing which surfaces mean it.

When I began speaking to Cheng Lijie, the film’s sound designer, I asked about the song. Soon, I found out the title was a late arrival. For the longest time, the film simply carried the working title Jalan Besar — I was taken aback, given my studio is there, and I pass it every day. The film felt uncanny for it: its scenes seemed untethered to the real place, mapping onto it as if the location were only a placeholder — a habit the rest of the programme shares.

With the films largely wordless and heavy on sonic texture, In Transit felt fit for live scoring, which put the Archive in contact with Iqbal and Nash of post-punk outfit Intermission — also filmmakers themselves. The two enlisted a band from Singapore’s tight-knit indie constellations: Dan Borces (Subsonic Eye, Inkblot Page, recently Thee Miniskirts), Mattgnaw on synth, Farizi Noorfauzi on drums. Named after a cat, Biru worked from each film’s visual texture rather than its structure, inhabiting them one by one. “You begin in a psychedelic plane, at the stars,” Iqbal says, “and it heads back into Earth” — the approach freeing the band to surrender to more immediate, animalistic impulses. The films asked to be entered the same way: not strict documents, but inhabited for what they hold — AFA’s aim from the start, the moving image freed from the single screen, played in the atrium rather than the theatre, a space to be moved through.

Space, and documenting it, was also the initial impetus to As If To Nothing — the one film in the programme Biru do not score, its soundtrack left to Lijie’s original sound design. The treatment deepens once you learn its reality: the film’s weary protagonist is the actual father of the art director, the factory his own, where he built theatre sets for two decades. What was pitched to him as an impulse to document his disappearing space became a point of departure; as shooting began, the script took a backseat, Lijie shares. “It’s about the people,” he says, the filmmakers preferring improvisation but purposeful about the mood: “decay, degradation, and desolation.”

Against this darkness, the film plays against Chang’s lyrical contours at each turn. Nobody bursts out in a Springsteen register — rather, the protagonist is challenged in his own lane, left whistling an all-too-familiar folk cliché (Mo Li Hua), until he is met with a question he can’t answer. “All your neighbours have left. Why stay?” He goes silent. He has just always been there, even as death and desolation close in. “This is your last day here — why can’t you just leave?” he’s asked, tersely.

His is genuine aspiration with no place left to spend it. Unstoppable change leaves him to wander cryptic shadows of himself — undeveloped fields; cavernous drains where the water runs state-routed, permitted rather than wild — until it breaks his silence: “This world is not the world we know anymore,” he exhales, aghast at a generality. We never learn what happened to the factory, but knowing its real biography, the film’s derived narrative felt eerie: theatre made off theatre itself. What began as documentation had become designation.

When Lijie asked what I made of it, I said the film’s oblique stylisation rendered the protagonist a frontier figure. Lijie offered a take along similar lines: someone he’d shown it to called the film not a Western, but an “Eastern.” It fits on a glance — the cowboy frame, the pin-sharp pores, dunes in his tracks. But the frontier it conjures is borrowed, a landscape mythology I had laid over the film as readily as anyone. During our conversation, I couldn’t stop staring at the home-shaped window in Lijie’s room, lighting his mixing desk. It reminded me the film’s despair originated not necessarily in its documented reality, but in the frame — or the reverb he picked for it. Like the anthem in its title, the frame is imported — aspiration and its loss arriving here in someone else’s shape. That readability is the point, holding currency because it’s recognisable. Strangely in line with those “Eastern” values, the protagonist never explicitly explodes. When time runs out and debtors close in, Ang keeps everything measured, without violence: the lone elderly employee simply complies, standing up silently rather than putting up a fight. It is the film’s most Singaporean gesture — surrender that looks like grace, the same quiet consent that allows for renewal.

This mediation — the camera’s eye, its technical quirks — seems more real as a subject than the site it captures. In Grace Song’s Body Missing Body, XUE’s butoh probes the alien landscape of the Southern Islands while Song places the roving eye equal to it: the Sony DSR-PD150 is credited co-actor, at once mediating and mediated with. The glitch was chosen, not chanced — the team shot Pulau Hantu twice, splicing a clean digital capture against the analogue fallibility of DV-to-tape. It’s a fine-art habit, one the atrium will hold willingly — and unlike Robert Smithson’s on-set surrender to interlacing as interference (see: Swamp), the eye’s interstitiality was deliberate.

The programme’s two animators, on the other hand, negotiate with this sense of distance from more than just eye and place, but through lenses of craft themselves. Ryan Benjamin Lee draws imagery from special-effects textures — supposedly disposable, superficial stuff of craft — and turns it into something intimately sincere: a magically drifting biography. Meanwhile, EXYL’s vivid, stop-motion punk-house love letter, (Dirt Palace Film), enmeshes a lived-in place with kitchen-sink clutter; tremors of terror indistinguishable from images of pleasure. Eventually, things give way to blown-out dive-bar ecstasy — which Biru meet by loosening from a motorik pulse into a “sloppy impression of a show”.

Where Song’s eye keeps its distance from the landscape, theirs is folded into the material: the place doesn’t precede its mediation, but arrives made of it. In this sense, both artists treat longing not as what is left behind but as how a place, once lived in, is carried afterward. It’s clear that it isn’t documentary reconstruction that lets the personal into these impersonal pictures of Singapore (or landscapes elsewhere), but a commitment to surface and performative staging. “Most of the films are experimental, and I was keen on works that wouldn’t traditionally be screened in a theatre,” programmer Phyllis Chan says, gravitating toward filmmakers dealing in movement, physical and emotional.

But movement implies direction, and In Transit’s films circle where the motion heads, moving constantly and arriving nowhere — the roving eye, their drifting scores, their bodies choreographed against landscapes that refuse to stay definite. It is movement without destination, or rather movement whose only destination is behind it: a reaching-back dressed as travel. That, etymologically, is nostalgia — nostos and algia, the ache of the return journey, homecoming as pain. It is also the subject Svetlana Boym made her own, tracing the longing that accompanies homes already overwritten. There is nowhere to arrive, so the motion is the nostalgia, running on after its destination has dissolved.

Boym distinguishes that longing by what it does with the gap. Restorative nostalgia wants the lost home back whole, and turns to rage when told it can’t be; reflective nostalgia refuses consolation and makes a home of the fracture. The programme’s younger artists work mostly in the reflective; Blueprints for Volition City is its restorative holdout, and, not coincidentally, its oldest.

Blueprints still believes the ground can be answered, and its images display it violently: all paving-over and breaking, strobing through Singapore’s facades in damaged negatives, a stop-motion assault whiplashing between building the city and demolishing it. Its sonic lineage originally ran through Kelvin Tan, one of Singapore’s indie pioneers, whose noise scored the film in an earlier life — a generation’s resistance documented in abrasion, longing in detritus that will not accept its object has dissolved.

Biru’s response was simpler: it’s kinda too much. Rather than meet the harshness head-on, they divert — less “fuck it,” as Borces puts it, than “fuck la.” No strangers to noise freakouts, the context freed them from the freakout as trope; a backpocket of classic shapes — Iggy Pop, Dum Dum Girls, Bowie’s Warszawa, Unwound, Slint — stayed as suggestions for tension, not insisted-on forms. They know rage’s ceiling, and this wasn’t the place to climb it. “It was more about painting the moment than controlling the hits.”

In the one film Biru do not score, the programme finds a foil to this rootedness. Near As If To Nothing’s end, the narrator visits a red-light scene conjured at an actual Jalan Besar institution. This vice joint, however, contains no manyao or karaoke — instead a deathly psych slow-jam, less Lan Kwai Fong than Les Rallizes Dénudés. It’s from a liminal patchwork band, flowers hung around their necks and not the pin-up girls: its guitarist from founding punks Opposition Party, who wrote the song; its drummer, the screamer from Naedr and Bethari; Lijie himself on bass.

Step back, and the constellation shows itself. The programme quietly gathers three generations of the Singapore musical underground into one room — Kelvin Tan’s pioneering noise, Opposition Party’s punk biography summoned in the fictional band, and Biru answering live — each sounding in a different tense, yet all at once. Though you can’t hear Tan’s original score during the night, Biru’s answer to Blueprints live will itself be a convergence point. As their present ease drifts above where Tan’s old rage sat, the two briefly share the same air — not one generation supplanting another, but a lineage briefly made simultaneous, the underground’s whole timeline collapsed into a single performance. Meanwhile, where Biru relinquish form live, Ang and Pek summon their collage out of place and out of time — rootedness not performed but remembered; surreal; wrong on purpose. It insists on purgatory against a soundtrack from a band that shouldn’t exist, mourning precisely the loss of the live, present, rooted: referenced without presence, exactly the condition the film is about. As I would later find, the song is literally named “Purgatory Blues.”

But is mourning really all there is?

Sarah Noorhimli’s Senandung Malam comes closest to an answer. The video artist begins by physically retracing her mother’s past routes, a premise first motivated under LASALLE’s Winston Oh Travelogue award, which framed travel as artistic research. Yet the core of her work lies not in the journey but the referent — a thesis stated outright, quoting Kiarostami: “Without the existence of copies, we wouldn’t understand originals.” “I use the computer to search for you, but instead I find the sun, the source of all forms of life,” a mechanised voice pronounces at its climax. Where As If To Nothing closes on the sun falling serendipitously on its man, Noorhimli looks to the sun as sincere orientation and finds only what stands in its place: clipped digital damage and burn, an aspirational void scarred by time. Much of the film moves through Google Maps’ impersonal, globalised gaze — anyone’s, really — and yet, like a mother, it nourishes intimately, loss converted into life-force. No physical journey reconciles with this truth. 

What sits in place is a capture of artifacting, buildings bending into speculative memory — and that, perhaps, is the more honest lived experience than the physical landscape. If the real is only ever available as its own copy, there is no there left to be nostalgic for, only a now, endlessly reproduced and lost in the reproducing. The collapse of original into copy is, seen from another angle, the collapse of place into time. A country that can only know itself through its own mediation cannot be homesick for a location — only for the present tense. Call it temporal diaspora, past where Boym stops: what diasporic intimacy becomes when the homeland has already become a copy.

If this sounds hauntological, it runs the other way. If Mark Fisher’s ghost is a cancelled future haunting from ahead, Singapore’s temporality is instead over-confirmed, fatalistically on-schedule, where even the precarity it peddles engenders not cancellation, but predetermined self-confirmation. So it sits in the rearview mirror — a virtual image in the optical sense — not a ghost ahead of us but a present at our feet, vanishing as we look down at it, gone before it can be properly missed.

The programme takes its name from this. “The idea of not just transiting from A to B, but being in an in-between state, was something we thought about from the beginning,” programmer Yu Ke Dong says. “As technology changes daily life, existence itself feels tentative — being a student, or a member of a diaspora. There’s a precarity in being an artist in a pragmatic world.”

Singapore is well-haunted by transition: Rem Koolhaas notes that for all the city’s potemkin nature, its “artificiality is not sterile” — a place “always founded by people on the move, poised to move on.” That poise is where Boym locates diasporic intimacy — the fondness of people mid-departure, built in the gaps and broken syntax of leaving. But Boym’s intimacy assumes a diaspora — a leaving, and a home still standing to be pointed back at. The island, trapped in endless renewal as ambient condition, has neither. 

Rather than a departure, the place simply leaves first, shifting underneath faster than attachment can form, and so the longing turns and attaches itself to time. Where earlier films in Singapore’s filmic memory grieved place first, In Transit’s younger makers tend to grieve the present tense itself, a now lost in the act of being lived. Temporal diaspora: not homesickness across waters but across time, exile from a past by nothing but the speed that keeps producing it. It is the native condition of a place too fast to keep itself, where its filmmakers find themselves homesick without ever having left.

Yet, its residue can be unexpectedly tender too. Speed can banish the shared imagination — the public everyone could be homesick for together — but not everything. It drives the sincerity inward, into the private and fragmentary, where it survives in its particular relationality. Orientation, like Noorhimli’s, was never in the sun, or the street captured, or shared homeland — it was in the impulsive act of turning toward them, which no degree of speed or mediation can reach.

After all, public longing is corruptible longing. When an aspiration is shared widely enough to belong to everyone, it belongs to no one in particular. In Singapore’s uber-renewalist paradigm, shared feeling rarely stays untended for long. There is no villain in this. It looks, if anything, like virtue — and that is what makes the success total. A collective yearning is rare, and so, too useful to leave alone: it is managed, cultivated into coherent anthems, cared for so thoroughly that the caring becomes all that is left of it. Somewhere along the way, the remembered version outshines the thing itself — glowing stronger in memory than it ever did with something at stake — and that is how the nostalgia keeps running: not on the original, which is gone, but on an image that improves each time it’s circulated, deepening as the real recedes. It happens to a jingle and a factory alike, and scaled up, to the story a country tells about itself: romanticised, made official, circulated as feeling while the world they came from is lovingly stripped for parts. The damage isn’t that the longing dies, but that it’s kept alive, costing no one anything. As if… to nothing.

And yet the same condition cuts the other way. If public feeling here is always already cultivated, the private and the biographical become the one place a document can still be held, rather than administered. This is what the programme’s filmmakers keep reaching for — not new images of Singapore, but a way to take the impersonal, over-tended surfaces we all share and wield them personally. That is the real transit: just like how a factory that is any factory becomes this father’s factory; Noorhimli’s Senandung Malam turns Google Maps — authored by no one — into the portal through which one person searches for a familial face and finds the sun. While the image remains a copy, it stops being ownerless. The biographical doesn’t escape the shared surface, but in a place this cultivated, it may be the only way left to own one.

Noorhimli’s film ends without monuments — no jingle or skyline, but a simple epilogue with a mother’s handwritten note: “hang your dreams as high as the stars; fly; I will chase them with you until you succeed.” Even mutated through digital interfaces, the same aspiration persists — cita-cita, Chang’s striving at its core, just in Malay and one generation up. Its fragmentation is its purity: the handwriting emerging after the screen glitches out, the misspellings, the “I” (saya) that slips and becomes shared into the child’s retraced pursuit. Temporal diaspora, through the speed that dissolves and the cultivation that embalms, takes the shared homeland and the jingle both, but leaves untouched the smallest unit of belonging — the mother, the child, a here held between two people that fast time can’t map. The words could be lifted into an anthem; the between them could not. And yet we feel it as strangers. There lies the paradox the anthem never reaches: the personal, precisely because it can’t be handed around, is what travels furthest, in fragments, felt only by longing toward it — an artifact copied forever, and never once extracted.

If sincerity is lodged safe in the private, Valerie Theodas has stopped believing it needs safekeeping at all. Her generation no longer fears the market, because the market is just the default — the line between real longing and sold one has simply dissolved. In Intergalactic Constipation Bubble Tea, the weight behind aspiration is not damaged but indifferent. Made as a fresh-eyed university student at NTU ADM, the film metabolises the corruption fully, no longer felt as loss — so why not have fun? The soda was never the betrayal of the dream. Rather, this generation sees the soda as where the dream begins — bubble tea skibidi black box be damned. Corruption here isn’t what happens to sincerity, but material you can be sincere in — the surface no longer eats the meaning, but becomes the only place meaning was ever going to live.

Perhaps there is nothing to mourn, because nothing was ever fixed enough to lose. Yu notes the relative youth as a breath of fresh air — a process that makes its own intuitive frenzy. The absurd weightlessness becomes a kind of proof for dreaming: after loss stops registering as loss, the transition goes native, into a nostalgia that has finished eating itself and moved on — though still hungry, jump-cutting into oblivion, ready to blast into space.

Biru admit Valerie’s was the hardest to confront — not for how to answer brainrot overload sonically, but because its images are so convinced of their own charge that responding wasn’t enough; they had to build a different frame altogether. Even so, it stays aligned with their method. For all the programme’s concerns, Biru say they never thought much about space, only how it felt. At the Oldham Theatre atrium, they hope to stay out of the limelight and simply hold the frame for the audience, eyes on the screen, just like them. Where most of the films work in the synthetic, the band will answer through the now — an ensemble in the real, “just making music through wood.” Biru are quick to remind that there really are no “songs” for this occasion. There might be a hidden point to it: after all, Chang’s future-isn’t-a-pipe-dream was sung into a moment with everything at stake, then kept endlessly as a standard, preserved long after the stakes drained out. Dan and Iqbal joke about recording the set — then they could take it to the studio and perfect it, chase the ideal part again and again. Which would of course be that move exactly: the perfected version is just the embalmed one. Their wager is the opposite: sound made once, in the only tense renewal can’t administer. No one knows if the future is a pipe dream. But you can sure as hell play to it in the present, and drink along while it drifts.

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About the Writer

JX Soo is a writer and photographer working across Asian music and visual culture, with recurring interests in memory, transmission, and materiality. They have written for NME since 2021, previously co-founded the Singaporean independent webzine Big Duck Music, and lead the noisepop band freereina!.