Tell me why / Ain't nothin' but a heartache / Tell me why / Ain't nothin' but a mistake / Tell me why / I never wanna hear you say / I want it that way—Backstreet Boys¹

Pop tunes peal through the hallways of a KTV lounge, empty orchestras of merry-makers and songbirds singing to their hearts’ content, their voices often infused with equal parts elation and pathos. Karaoke, as a popular pastime and social activity globally, holds particular sway in contemporary East and Southeast Asian imaginaries. Often associated with diasporas and migrant communities of Asian origin, karaoke is also intrinsically implicated in the postcolonial condition, where identity is enmeshed in “​​colonial logics about merit and how it should be adjudicated through notions of authenticity, uniqueness, and individuality.”²

Yet by “allowing us to feel that in copying someone else’s performance we are also, however derivatively, expressing our core selves, our intimate desires, and even our grandiose ambitions and fantasies,” karaoke evokes an ensemble of echoes.³ One’s performance in the empty orchestra has the means to momentarily dissolve difference through the heightened theatricality that suspends or stretches across differences and disbelief. This potential to draw people outside of the identity markers and echo chambers they more often than not find themselves boxed in sparks unexpected affinities while disrupting capitalist and imperialist logics, forming fertile ground for self-determined aspirations and collective reverberations. 

“Surrounded by echoes, some familiar anxieties resurface about originality, authenticity, and worthiness; yet as we become increasingly more comfortable with hearing ourselves in others, and others through our voices, we grow to understand quite clearly, and quite queerly in the spirit of Wilde, that such music has never required a source beyond ourselves.”⁴

Total Eclipse Plumage, the second programme launched under the platform Monzoom.xyz, invites twelve Singaporean and Singapore-based artists to explore notions of identity, translocal histories, pop culture, and the unraveling of often private emotions and intimacies through the modern phenomenon of karaoke. Comprising six duets of newly commissioned video art that play with the format of karaoke videos and its attendant aesthetics, the idea for Total Eclipse Plumage stemmed from Kenneth Loe’s video installation, am i e riddim 2 yr blues?, first presented at Ikkan Art Gallery, Singapore in 2016.

¹ “I Want It That Way,” track 2 on Backstreet Boys, Millennium, Jive, 1999.

² Karen Tongson,”Empty Orchestra: The Karaoke Standard and Pop Celebrity,” Public Culture 27 no. 1 (January 2015): 96. https://doi.org/10.1215/08992363-2798355

³ Ibid., 102.
⁴ Ibid., 105.

Monzoom.xyz is a platform for emergent art practices that imagines other ways of relating and being together outside existing systems of commodified value. Founded by Weixin Quek Chong and Kenneth Constance Loe, the first program Monzoom Zchool was launched under soft/WALL/studs' Beyond Repair program for National Gallery Singapore and Singapore Art Museum's Proposals for Novel Ways of Being initiative, taking place from October to November 2020 as a series of online gatherings over Zoom to share artistic work, as well as ideas and feelings around art-making amidst times of instability, insecurity and change.