day in - day out: on telling time in a mall

CREATIVE EDIT
Written By Mary Ann Lim

Hong Shu-ying at Queensway Television

A&M’s Creative Edit is where we publish a creative response to an ongoing exhibition or display every month. These pieces can take a range of forms, from ekphrasis, to poetry, microfiction, creative nonfiction and more. 

Hong Shu-Ying, day in - day out: on telling time in the mall (video still), 2025, MP4, colour, single-screen, 16:9 with black rectangles, 10min 38sec. Image courtesy of the artist.

Hong Shu-ying, day in - day out: on telling time in the mall (video still), 2025, MP4, colour, single-screen, 16:9 with black rectangles, 10min 38sec. Image courtesy of the artist. 

Queensway Shopping Centre, 1 August 1972?, 1973?

In the middle of a large, octagonal cavern of beige, you look up and adjust your spectacles. After years of discussion, poring over blueprints, squinting at sample casts, and even more protracted and less civil discussions with contractors, it’s finally ready. In conversations and in dreams, you have deliriously recited the three main axes that govern the mall’s skeletal structure, anchoring its entrance points, and skewering the line of shops that radiate from where you are standing. Even without the diagrams, you can see the perfect lines stretching out, people twirling round and round, worshipping with bright eyes and open wallets at the feet of its glass doors. 

It’s a blank slate now, a tabula rasa trembling with particulates of possibility. The mall was meant to be a monument of brutalist modernity, juxtaposed against its neighbouring residential tower sleek with articulation and repetition. But no atrium is complete without a skylight. So now the ceiling gives way to an oculus, a small circle of sky. Today the sky delivers a sheet of light which catches the fidgeting dust and splays two suns across your glasses. Heavenly messages, the divine in your eyes. But you can’t stay long. There’s that other building to get to, and it’s for the Public Utilities Board. You finger your pager restlessly to message the developer. His late wife—she had always wanted to play a part in building this nation—she would have been most pleased.

Hong Shu-Ying, day in - day out: on telling time in the mall (video still), 2025, MP4, colour, single-screen, 16:9 with black rectangles, 10min 38sec. Installation view at Queensway Television. Image courtesy of the artist.

Hong Shu-ying, day in - day out: on telling time in the mall (video still), 2025, MP4, colour, single-screen, 16:9 with black rectangles, 10min 38sec. Installation view at Queensway Television. Image courtesy of the artist. 

Queensway Shopping Centre, 3 April 1976

Black metal teeth grinding forever, uninterrupted. Is this violence or peace? You had woken mummy up bright and early this Saturday morning because she had promised to bring you to the new shopping centre. An easy promise with her own excitement as collateral. You had overheard her nattering with the neighbour about the new Fitzpatrick’s, how the shopping institution had deigned the humble heartland a fitting second home. Now she did not need to travel all the way to Orchard Road just to witness an analogue of abundance: fridges of poultry, shelves of meat, the smell of fresh butter gathered into pastries and cakes, all just a ten-minute drive away. Daddy had grunted in assent to the request. He had heard on his end of the pipeline about a Jumbo Coffee House serving an excellent western meal. And a clock shop with all the latest brands and designs. They would go for an early lunch, some light window shopping, then groceries would be bought. 

Now that you are here however, the schedule matters not, to the dismay and annoyance of your parents. Before you is an analogue of eternity. A ruffling sensation surges through your chest. These black contraptions are apparently called “escalators”. Daddy said that his office has some, but these are the first installed in a shopping mall. You stand there transfixed, as the machinery churns, up and up and up. They do not come down. Why would they? Here you go into the hole of sky, falling heavenwards.

Queensway Shopping Centre, 10 October 2009

The escalators do not come down. When you head down the stairs, you make sure to land your feet a little harder than necessary, each one subtly dispatching to your mother your frustration. Under a practised veil of ignorance, she tells you to hurry up. You let the anger simmer in your legs, a heavy coagulation of heat and reluctance. Why did she have to come to this old, tacky mall, and why did she have to bring you? You should have been at Orchard Road with your friends, visiting that new mall. You dream of its crackled glass swimming above you, the posed smirk of a mannequin ushering you into each shop proffering things you cannot afford to buy, topped off with the hypnotic scent of perfumed leather.

A spicy tang of laksa leaves coiling around cheap rubber rudely assaults you back to reality. Before you, two bespectacled old men sit huddled under watchful hands, ticking out of time. These shards of yesterday should be left to dust. What was your mother’s insistence on clinging on to them? Better to answer the summons of tomorrow’s dreams. Time and tide do not linger for nostalgic aunties who can’t keep up.

Hong Shu-Ying, day in - day out: on telling time in the mall (video still), 2025, MP4, colour, single-screen, 16:9 with black rectangles, 10min 38sec. Installation view at Queensway Television. Image courtesy of the artist.

Hong Shu-ying, day in - day out: on telling time in the mall (video still), 2025, MP4, colour, single-screen, 16:9 with black rectangles, 10min 38sec. Installation view at Queensway Television. Image courtesy of the artist. 

Queensway Shopping Centre, 18 November 1992

The jagged crunch of shutters followed by fluorescent lights flickering restlessly to darkness. Along narrow corridors, you slip past the lunchtime crowd eager to grab some food and do their shopping at Cold Storage. Ever since you opened your sports shop here half a decade ago, the mall has etched itself into your brain, nestled into your senses. Only impulse guides you through your rituals. Past the incisive snip of the barber, a strand of aunty Lee’s humming darting through the relentless whirring of her sewing machine, the aquarium marked by a gaggle of kids and an earthy smell, routine screeches from receipts printing. You follow the hollow sound of toilets flushing, and up staircase D, your slippers slapping the cement with urgency. It was not officially approved by the building management but it was discreet anyway, and the window more or less faced Qiblah. You remove your shoes and perform the ablution at a nearby tap. The sun presses against the window slats. You begin your prayers.

Queensway Shopping Centre, 16 July 2025

You are here for one thing, but you cannot find it. The slippery labyrinth funnels you. This harbour of yesterday’s technology, impossible to differentiate. You make a mental list of recognisable markers to keep track of:

Sports shop
A tailor
Levi’s
A tailor
Printing
Shoes
Yonex
Cosmetics
A…Turkish bazaar?
A thrift shop (you will come back later)
Sports shop
Another sports shop
There’s one more thrift shop… should have noted down the name of the first one
Wilson
Golden City Clock and Watch Dealers
A tailor except this aunty’s eyes glint with a hint of amusement. Is she judging you?

It’s hard to think. Your nostrils are thick with a concoction of laksa leaves, lemongrass, dried shrimp. A nauseatingly indulgent haze has grafted itself to your senses. You pass by a tailor’s shop again. The aunty here cocks her head ever so slightly, amused but also reluctantly eliciting your attention in case you require her navigational assistance. It’s just another day, another hipster visiting this mall for the first time before it eventually goes through an en bloc sale. But who knows when that will be? You smile awkwardly and pretend to not have noticed her offer, so you turn in the opposite direction.

Oh, here it is.

The television.

Hong Shu-Ying, day in - day out: on telling time in the mall (video still), 2025, MP4, colour, single-screen, 16:9 with black rectangles, 10min 38sec. Installation view at Queensway Television. Image courtesy of the artist.

Hong Shu-ying, day in - day out: on telling time in the mall (video still), 2025, MP4, colour, single-screen, 16:9 with black rectangles, 10min 38sec. Installation view at Queensway Television. Image courtesy of the artist. 

Queensway Shopping Centre, ? ? ????

do you remember | the walls are succumbing to light 
call me to supplication | call me if you need anything | call me to one of your sides 
when I wake up | open my eyes | the shutter closes to reveal something new in its place
amorphous ziggurat | a creature of manifold faces
KTV lounge | pornography | arcade | two gyms | blink twice to reach an equilibrium
then go lose yourself | beneath the eye | raise your furtive glances to ambient wheezing
over and over on the carousel that only ascends | restringing time until it doesn’t exist
just how many days has it been | since you’ve adjusted my hands
rearranged my face until all that’s left is your waning heart ticking over my firm pulse | it’s fate
aircons belch so that printers can gurgle | peer beyond the trophies
the glass edifices you’ve given out to almost everyone in the country | ATM caught your tongue? you
can have it any way
trace your confusion and tug at my twisted spine | ghostly numbers eliding
I live for the days you have numbered | my insides cannot be contained
under 11 minutes

day in - day out: on telling time in a mall is open from 27 June to 10 August 2025 at Queensway Television. For more information on the exhibition, click here.

Mary Ann Lim

Mary Ann Lim is Programme Manager at A&M. She conceptualises programmes and content for external projects, while contributing to writing and media assignments for the platform. With her practice rooted across programming, writing, and research, her interests lie in alternative knowledges, ecologies, and thinking through interdisciplinary practices. She writes short stories and poetry in her spare time.