• Light That Lasts: Amsterdam, a Living Archive

    Light That Lasts: Amsterdam, a Living Archive

    On a canal boat, wedged between my mother and a sullen french teenager, a vaguely classical tune drifted through the universal-fit earphones perched above my hoop earrings. 

    On the right, you’ll see the Westerkerk–that is, the Western Church. This is where Rembrandt van Rijn was buried in an unmarked grave. His remains were later exhumed and moved, as was the norm for the poor at the time of his death in 1669. 

    Today, you can pay your respects for the renowned painter at the commemorative stone on the north wall of the Westerkerk, or even at the Rijksmuseum!

    In art school, Rembrandt often came up in lectures and from tutors’ lips. My earliest associations with the name were a paint brand, the artist’s reputation as one of the the masters of light, and an advertised course in my home city where people paid to learn how to paint like him.

    The promotional images captured dutiful students cutting out and taping up A2-sized inkjet prints of his paintings. They spent five days in a row, six hours a day, trying to capture his famed light beside them, like a devotional exercise.

    In the Rijksmuseum, tourists huddled around a vast glass wall where The Night Watch (1642) sat, tended to by an art restorer in an elaborate contraption that carried her to the very top right-hand corner of the massive painting. We watched as she methodically stared at the laptop in her lap and then back at the canvas, and I wondered when she might start doing something more interesting–like making an irreversible black mark, or turning around and saying, Did you know that Rembrandt was buried in an unmarked grave, because he was bankrupt, poor, and his work was suddenly unfashionable?

    Rembrandt van Rijn, The Night Watch, 1642, oil on canvas, 363 cm × 437 cm, Rijksmuseum, Amsterdam.

    I will spare you the history of another Amsterdam-dwelling artist with a familiar story of incomprehensible posthumous fame, but I couldn’t help being amused by the Van Gogh plushies in the Van Gogh Museum gift shop, complete with self-inflicted, bandaged ears. I was even more intrigued by a rogue Miffy masquerading as Van Gogh, paintbrush in hand.

    The inescapable trope of the tortured, canonical, white male artist bores many. This trip had me noticing something new in the powerful ubiquity of these figures–a cultural weight that now seems to operate on the same plane as a fictional, minimal, white bunny.

    While I like to think of myself as educated in matters of fine art, there is something alluring about Miffy memorabilia, which more or less amounts to two dots and a cross. Towards the end of our visit to Amsterdam, we even made the pilgrimage to Miffy’s birthplace: Utrecht, a town only a short train ride away. In the station bookshops, her face stared back from children’s paperbacks in half a dozen languages. She beamed from umbrellas in the rain. 

    It doesn’t stop there. In Tokyo, she occupied entire store floors; in London, she dangled on a passerby’s house keys. I began to imagine my own mark, however small, threading through the world in the same way. At the risk of sounding existential, the thought of the ripples we leave behind long after our passing was the loudest refrain of my time in Amsterdam. I blame the fact that I was knee-deep in my masters, trying to understand what it might mean to make art that may last for centuries.

    After the museum, we walked through the Jordaan and drank mint tea in a narrow café that smelled faintly of sugar and damp wool. We ate cheese fondue with a basket of bread cut into too-small cubes, dipping them again and again into the same pale pool. 

    Looking down into the narrow canal, I remembered the sterile audio guide from that morning that mentioned how Amsterdam’s canals were built in the 17th century. Almost immediately, The Singel Bridge at the Paleisstraat, Amsterdam (1898), which I had seen only an hour earlier, leapt into my mind: the timeless, anonymous figure in the foreground, the impressionist rendering of Amsterdam’s iconic narrow buildings.

    George Hendrik Breitner, The Singel Bridge at the Paleisstraat, Amsterdam (1898), oil on canvas, 41 cm × 60 cm, Private Collection.

    Now the same scene sat in front of me in real time. An Amazon delivery truck whizzed past. A mother cycled by on her bakfeitsen (cargo bike), children settled in the front. A woman opened her comically narrow, tilted window to light a cigarette, dusting the ashes into the water below. Like other cities with long, layered histories, Amsterdam revealed itself as a living archive–where past and present do not replace one another, but coexist, with the promise of some form of immortality lingering in the air. 

    Rembrandt’s light draped over tram lines. Renaissance-period canals accompanied cars and coffee cups printed with two dots and crosses, and Van Gogh’s Sunflowers (1888) reappeared on tote bags slung over passing shoulders. Everything endured at once, and everything kept moving.

    Vincent van Gogh, Sunflowers, 1888, oil on canvas, 92.1 cm × 73 cm, Van Gogh Museum, Amsterdam.

  • The Afterlife of the School Uniform

    The Afterlife of the School Uniform

    When I think of school uniforms, I think of polyester polo shirts and creased, knife-pleated skirts, black dress shoes with scuffed toes, or socks that are permanently grey from wear. And, if I really want to get visceral with my description, the lingering smell of sweat from PE class and Victoria’s Secret Love Spell.

    In theory, the school uniform is supposed to symbolise equality and functionality. In practice, each uniform eventually becomes individual to the wearer, be it by a name scrawled on a fabric tag or the controversial choice of skirt length. The hyperreal uniform, by contrast, erases this messy, lived-in reality. It sanitises the worn, the dirty, the unfashionable, reducing the uniform to a set of recognisable elements: loafers, tartan and white blouses.

    The school uniform has become a clean slate—something that can be warped, projected onto, and eagerly leveraged by capitalism. There are both positives and negatives to this. On one hand, there’s the perpetuation of fantastical and harmful tropes about girls in uniforms that overwrite the reality of lived experiences in school. On the other, the aesthetic’s revival opens space for reinvention. For the uniform to become something new, detached from its old connotations.

    Outside the schoolyard, the uniform becomes a storytelling device in popular shows. Rory Gilmore’s (Alexis Bledel) innocence and intelligence is reflected in her modest, neatly pressed Chilton uniform. Meanwhile, the confident and fashionable Blair Waldorf (Leighton Meester) styles her uniform with loose ties, headbands, and thigh-high socks paired with heels.

    In Japanese anime, sailor-style uniforms signify youth, purity, and cuteness. Sailor Moon would not be herself without her blue-and-white sailor suit. In Ouran High School Host Club, the crisp male-style blazers parody privilege and aspiration, while the female characters in pleated skirts become symbols of both conformity and comic subversion.

    In South Korea, amusement parks like Lotte World have entire rental shops where visitors—many of them long past high school age—can hire a uniform for the day. The photoshoot is the point: giggling in blazers in a picturesque location, eating candyfloss, posing with cartoon mascots. These are all things we rarely did as actual students. School was, in reality, a full-time 9-to-3 burden, heavy with rules and growing pains.

    At risk of sounding dramatic, wearing the school uniform, and in particular the school skirt—as a real girl in real school—is a historically, politically and socially charged experience. The earliest school uniforms for boys in the 16th and 17th centuries were based on military dress. When girls were finally included in mass education, their uniforms were designed not for equality but for modesty, domesticity, and clear visual distinction from boys. The skirt was chosen to reinforce “femininity,” whatever society deems it to be.

    There’s something to be said about how successfully this idealised image of girlhood infiltrates the average woman’s wardrobe. Even I have a soft spot for tartan-patterned-anything and socks with black, shiny, Mary Janes. But perhaps there is a subtle message within all this—one that women have always been told: to never grow up. To never age.

    So what’s the alternative? Non-gendered uniforms?

    Maybe it’s not just about what we wear, but the freedom to decide—whatever that could look like. To view the uniform as something fluid, unbound by gender, age, or expectation. Designers like Sandy Liang are already doing that, turning the once-rigid silhouette into something playful, genuine and universal. That’s the best outcome of the uniform’s afterlife: a fantasy we can finally control.

  • Dead Sea Dreaming

    Dead Sea Dreaming

    If you visit the Dead Sea during the summer, when the days are long and sticky, it’s best to dip into the water just before sunset or just after sunrise. It’s only an hour’s drive from Amman, a trip marked by a long highway lined with resorts and sun-bleached shops–each one conjuring memories of childhoods spent in the sun, the scent of plastic inflatables and sunscreen thick in the air.

    I’m used to visiting the water at dusk, just before dinner. In recent years, the make-shift beach reserved for our favourite hotel, the Kempinski Ishtar, has been enlarged, decorated with a drink stand and two brand-new outdoor showers.

    Standing at the shoreline is a meditative experience. You’ll find that the water tends to blend into the sky, creating the illusion that the sea stretches on forever. That couldn’t be further from the truth: the Dead Sea is evaporating at a rapid rate. Its exclusive salinity will soon be a thing of the past–a chapter closed forever, along with Egyptian mummification and centuries of conflict.

    If you ask, staff will source you some souvenir salt crystals, and if you’re fortunate, you’ll get a pretty one. However, there is a kind of guilt that comes with taking away from something as ephemeral as the Dead Sea.

    If you look like a tourist, someone will inevitably explain the “right” way to enjoy the sea.

    1. First, you should float in the water for five minutes. It’s no secret that the exceptionally high concentration of salt and minerals nourishes the skin.
    2. Then, dry off and apply mud to every visible inch of skin (avoiding swimwear, which the mud will permanently stain).
    3. You’ll be ready to go back into the water once the mud dries under the sun in ten minutes–pass the time by taking photos of your muddy limbs, or conversing with the medical tourist sitting next to you.

    It’s best not to spend too much time in the sea, because the salt is almost too potent, and can cause swollen legs. The water has a way of finding every vulnerability and making it sting: a paper cut you didn’t know you had, a tiny scrape barely exposing flesh.

    Anecdotally, spending time in the sea heals superficial skin issues like psoriasis and acne. I recall a woman who was often by the water, sitting on the edge of a sun lounger, with dried mud on her arthritic knees. The supposed benefits of the Dead Sea range from miraculous to modest–fifteen minutes of stillness, if nothing else.