Ming Arcade

A tripled hallway
Takes you from black back to black
Your heels will echo

Pale roller shutters
Expressionless when locked tight
Can scream like a roc

Behind these glass doors
There are no palm trees or sand
You can count on booze

One place is open
A man holds his arm as if
He’s paid up in blood

A festive banner
Maybe tables will appear
Stools wait like spiders

How far they travelled
Victorian tiles like these
Both in space and time

Silhouettes appear
Coming or going or stopped
The exit’s unclear

Quietly prepared
Just in case the floor is wet
Likewise, the heavens

Hands in startled mode
Hair swinging out, sudden turn
What ghost has she seen?

A cigarette butt
Abandoned, like the air duct
The arcade’s thorax

Top of the building
Heat can’t be controlled like this
But thanks for trying

I will soon go mad
Hard Rock? Planet Hollywood?
The fuck’s that logo?

Filthy hands, torn paint
Face grafitto bears witness
Eyes shocked, teeth jagged

Something harsh blew through
An idea? Violence?
Those who know have left

Looked at close enough
The sprinkler is a pulpit
Priest under palm fronds

If not for women
In relief while men fade out
Ming Arcade would die

Do children come here?
Two claw machines stand ready
Dad got you something

In blue-light water
Humans to and fro like fish
Aquatic affairs

Pearls Centre

Then, a pendant light
Now, a noose if you so wish
No one will find you

Twenty-five something
Tropical sun bleaches view
Movie-screen window

Wait just a minute
Someone was preparing this
It was to have life

A light saved by tape
What’s worth illuminating?
Nothing, filed away

Rectangles only
Except the curling tape and
Triangles of light

An army of flags
Silver and black semaphore
Ready to cry “Help”

A ghostly ideal
The eyes would be beautiful
If they were not dead

A fading model
She doesn’t mind being touched
There’s no flesh, no blood

The pair incarnate
Salome and Baptiser
We all lose our heads

It’s all imported
Nothing here is tropical
Bamboo soldiers on

This way up down stairs
Lines approach and turn away
Escher reflections

Only its leaves move
Bamboo pressed to the window
A breeze meaning rain

In a concrete town
Day and night look just the same
Grey, or darker grey

From your place inside
Sea almond tree in its square
There is room to grow

Awnings, shadows, glass
Protection from the hot sun
But not from decline

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What you’ve just looked at is a collaboration between my husband, Andrew Gurnett, and me, Alison Jean Lester, where he took the photos and I provided the words in the form of haiku. His photos were writing prompts for me, and were all taken between five and ten years ago, when we lived in Singapore. Even an old prompt becomes a writer’s present, so I felt the collaboration very strongly. Andy, not at all. What we did share in this effort, however, was an interest in the process of looking, and of looking hard.

Andy loves the unintentional beauty of the functional, forgotten or discarded. This love takes him to old places to seek out rusty, gritty, fading things. The first set of photographs I looked at was a series called Ming Arcade. Here’s how Andy describes that location:

“Right next to the pulsing commercial zone of Singapore is an old mall that refuses to be overrun. It has character – a sense of how things used to be, a sense of grit, of soul.

“I was familiar with and felt very fondly about a small part of this building but found the rest of it a little dark, threatening and unnerving. In photographing it I wanted to capture some of those feelings, and also show some of its strangeness and charm.”

Ming Arcade isn’t Andy’s only dilapidated shopping mall series. There’s another called The Ghosts of Pearls Centre:

“Pearls Centre in Chinatown, Singapore closed down in stages from the end of 2015 and into 2016. It was demolished to make way for a new underground train line. Towards the end of 2015 I was lucky enough to get in there before it was boarded up for good. A friend of mine was using the place as the backdrop for a short film he was making for the 48 Hour Film Project and I decided to go along and take photos to record their day. While there I also wandered around to make images that captured the feel of the place for me. By then, the place had been empty for some time. The shop owners felt long gone. The place seemed somehow settled in to its emptiness. Presenting itself as ‘this is what I am’ rather than ‘this is what I was’. There was a presence more than a loss.”

I used photos in these two series as prompts three days in a row. The first two days were pure joy. Facing the third day, though, I couldn’t imagine finding the task easy. What else was there to see? I realized that I just didn’t want to face the photos in the same order; I didn’t want day three to be just like one and two. I’d do it all backwards instead. When I announced this to Andy, he excitedly pulled up a blog post he’d written about the new perspective photographing Ming Arcade had given him:

“After two long and productive days I felt like I had got all the images I could possibly have taken. I was done. My mentor encouraged me to go back though. Unmotivated, I did, and as I followed my now familiar path up and down the staircases and escalators, I suddenly stopped dead, shocked at my unexpected inspiration. I would turn around and walk in the opposite direction. And just like that everything looked new and interesting again.”

Andy also remembered that four of the Ming Arcade photographs had been printed for an exhibition, and all of them were among the six I’d chosen as prompts. So, I had the added energy of moving in a new direction, plus a six-times increase in size for some of the photos. Day three was a lot more enjoyable than I had anticipated. The haiku are different between day one and day two, but, I think, more different on day three.

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Alison Jean Lester was born to a British mother and an American father. She is the author of the novels Lillian on Life and Yuki Means Happiness, and the short-story collection Locked Out: Stories Far from Home. She wrote the haiku that accompany the photographs in Marcel Heijnen’s book Hong Kong Market Cats. Find out more at alisonjeanlester.com or @A_J_Lester.

Black Country-born Andrew Gurnett’s photographs are held in private collections, adorn the guestrooms of a hotel in central Singapore, are included in Platform’s +50 Photo Book, and have been exhibited in both Singapore and the UK, including at various Affordable Art Fairs. Find out more at andrewgurnett.com or @gurnettphotoart.