FLORA YIN-WONG
Flora Yin-Wong is a London-based, Chinese-Malaysian producer, DJ and writer whose work draws on both personal history and metaphysical belief systems. Her debut album Holy Palm, released on Modern Love in late 2020, is an abstracted travel journal that combines disparate field recordings, including Balinese insects, Tokyo club ambience and an abandoned Arctic settlement in Svalbard, to produce a hallucinatory sonic-collage. Her first book Liturgy – published earlier this year by PAN and Primary Information – forms an uncanny companion piece to Holy Palm. Written over the same extensive travels that formed the source material for her debut album, Liturgy is a miscellany of foggy childhood memories, Cantonese fables, online conspiracies, ancient rituals and other elliptical research notes that together explore the unsteady boundary between the real and the unreal.
Interview by Guy Mackinnon-LittlePortrait by Paul Phung
Guy Mackinnon-Little How do you situate yourself and your own subjectivity in relation to the practices and beliefs you write about? In Liturgy, intimate details of your own biography are combined with these dry, encyclopedic descriptions of folklore, religious ceremonies, and the like. That juxtaposition got me thinking about how memories from our own personal histories can be as strange and elusive as some of the paranormal phenomena you detail in the book.
Flora Yin-Wong I wanted to echo these deeply personal experiences in a matter-of-fact way, presenting reality how it was or at least how it seemed to have happened. I might have misremembered or unconsciously augmented a lot of these experiences in some way to protect my own psyche, so I wanted to present them as plainly as possible. This is also the interesting thing about how a lot of myths and folklore are populated by pseudo-historical or mythical characters, real people who have been given these otherworldly characteristics through the way they’re remembered and misremembered over time. A lot of people will also have misremembered dreams or memories that end up becoming reality to them. On a simpler level, I really enjoy categorisation: bringing an order to things, linking them together and laying them out on paper. I find etymology interesting in that sense, for instance. It’s a way of confronting things that might be kind of traumatic as well. I didn’t really realise that until well after I started writing the book, maybe only when it came out.
GML How was that experience? What was your psychic state like when putting the book together and putting it out into the world?
FYW Every time I finish something, my mind always turns to what’s next, so when the book came out I was just like, “OK, now what?” It can be quite exhausting to think of things in that very capitalist mode of production, even as a creative. Things have settled a little bit since then and I feel more at peace. It was probably quite a dark time for me emotionally when I was writing the book a few years ago, and I think that ended up bleeding into the work. But, at the same time, I didn’t want it to be overly morose, or self-consciously disturbing or shocking as is often the case with things that touch on the esoteric, so I was trying to detach myself from that perspective. I also think that because my work so far has been very understated – there are no music videos or performances with me being a diva on stage or anything like that – I’m left with some room to develop things further if I want. If I feel a little bit aesthetically braver in the future, that’s something I can act on.
GML Do you see a continuity between your own writing practice and some of the rituals described in the book? Both seem like ways of steadying ourselves in the face of forces that cannot be known or controlled in any straightforward way.
FYW There’s an ethos of unspokenness that I apply in my sound work, as well as my writing. A lot of things are left open for interpretation, like in a Rorschach blot, for people to hear or to read in their own way. The less you say, the more room there is for misinterpretation, too, which I think is just as interesting as interpretation. It’s how I prefer to have a dialogue with people.
GML Sound is an interesting medium in that sense because it can be very indistinct, but also unavoidable and intimate. You can communicate directly with an audience even if what’s being communicated is quite opaque.
FYW I’ve always experienced sound as a visceral thing, and I can be quite affected by it in unexpected ways. Clubs, churches or temples are all designed to instil a sense of awe through their architecture and the way sound functions within it. Entering one of those spaces is one of the few occasions when you can feel entirely affected, completely transformed just by being inside a space. These are also all communal experiences. You go to church to experience yourself as part of a community. With clubbing, it’s a little more complicated: you can’t control who’s going to be there, how you’re going to feel, how the night goes, anything like that, but it’s still this very obvious release for people. It’s easy to become jaded living somewhere like London where there’s so much happening, but I think those experiences being out listening to good music can be extremely inspiring.
GML The book opens with a discussion of the Buddhist concept of śūnyatā, related to the idea of the “non-self” or the dissolution of the self, so it’s interesting to hear you emphasise the communal nature of those experiences. There’s also frequent discussion of collective beliefs in the book – folk suspicions and the like – where our mutual investment in an idea concretises it into an external reality. We can become absorbed in our own ideas without recognising them as our own.
FYW I really like those kinds of phenomena because they just don’t make any sense. It’s very difficult to dismiss them as mere delusion. There was the dancing plague of medieval Europe where people danced until they died, overtaken by mass hysteria. When I visited Bali I spoke with the Gabber Modus Operandi guys about the jathilan ritual dance, where people enter this trance state and put themselves through immense physical pain. They speak in tongues, writhe around on the floor, walk on coals and stab themselves and each other with knives. It’s very, very intense. I don’t think those things could happen if they weren’t group experiences.
GML You describe these various practices, superstitions, rituals, rites and so on in such a way that they remain somewhat distant or obscure; there’s an evident desire to preserve something of their mystery. Why avoid over-explanation in this way?
FYW That aspect of it isn’t about detachment or disbelief; it’s a form of protection. This is that question of how you weigh up the divide between reality and unreality. These things become real to you if you’re overtaken by them, but modern or secular people will readily equate those experiences with mental illness, which then becomes real for everyone.
GML There are different, contradictory criteria by which we categorise things as real or unreal, and pushing at that tension seems to be the overriding project of the book. You also discuss the perils of apophenia, where our desire to make sense of the world goes into overdrive and we see patterns and connections that aren’t really there.
FYW There’s definitely a dangerous hole that people can get into. I wrote a short story for Somesuch Stories in 2015 about an experience I had meeting a banker-turned-shaman in Hong Kong. He somehow put me under a kind of waking hypnosis where I began to see meaning and connection in everything around me. It was only afterwards when I stepped out of it that I saw how that was a form of madness, that those things weren’t true. A lot of conspiracy theories come together this way. Another example mentioned in the book are the Cicada 3301 puzzles that were posted online between 2012–2014, which involve hunting for hidden clues and connections across various media in order to be recruited for some alleged secret organisation. On a more relatable level, I think about the paranoia people experience in relationships, friendships or work environments. People will feel persecuted and pore over everything someone’s ever said, gathering evidence, before eventually realising it’s all in their head. That’s something that is very common, and more accepted than the obvious examples of conspiratorial thinking. It’s a form of control to feel like you understand the world.
GML That paranoia – to link back to what you were saying earlier – is seemingly compelled by an intolerance of uncertainty, a need to know everything at all times to feel safe in the world. Many of the rituals you describe in the book, on the other hand, are characterised by what is left unsaid or allowed to remain less rigorously defined. Another way to put this is that paranoia is a compulsive desire to know what’s real and unreal, whereas your project in the book is to challenge our confidence that we can maintain that distinction without deceiving ourselves, and even to try and find some relief in that indistinction.
FYW We do fear the unknown and try to anticipate unseen enemies, but I think we can also find comfort in ambiguity. I like the ambiguity of things that are just embedded in tradition. For example, in some religions you’ll go to a temple, stand outside and clap three times. In another culture you’ll clap twice, and in another you won’t clap at all. These things were put into place at some point and you could probably trace them back to something significant. But at the same time, there are all these rules that are just accepted – OK, that’s how it is. I think there’s something nice about that acceptance, to hear a myth or a belief or an explanation for why there’s a sun and a moon and just listen and revere it without trying to break it down completely. ◉