Reviewed by Priscilla Issa
Opening night at Everything But The Kitchen Sink Festival’s run at Qtopia’s The Substation delivered a bold experience that felt whimsical, profound, and unexpectedly illuminating. The evening began with Inspired, a one-man poetry performance, crafted and delivered by Albert Lin. A poet with unparalleled wit and a self-professed streak of writing a poem every day for seven years, Lin brought his audience into the messy, exhilarating process of creating art on the fly. Armed with a simple set—just a desk, chair, laptop, and printer —Lin demonstrated that creativity needs no frills, just the raw courage to expose one’s inner workings.
The premise was deliciously daring. With audience suggestions like "concrete floor," "Shanghai," "scintillating conversation," "roast chicken," and the rather gnarly "hangnail," Lin set out to craft a poem in under 20 minutes, live and in full view of an audience holding him accountable. It was part theatre, part performance art, and part creative masterclass, with the added touch of a downpour outside that felt like the universe conspiring to create an atmosphere.
As soon as the timer started ticking down, Lin exuded a manic charm, his energy oscillating between palpable self-doubt and explosive bursts of creativity. The opening minutes were a relatable ode to procrastination: thumb-twiddling, a sip of water, some pacing, and a hopeful adjustment of his blazer, all to no avail. The audience chuckled knowingly—who among us hasn’t sat waiting for inspiration to strike, only to realise it rarely works that way.
But Lin wasn’t stalled for long. “Time check, please”, he’d yell out. “18:42!” Then, with a sudden spark, he dived into what can only be described as a brain dump of linguistic fireworks. He projected his screen onto the back wall of the theatre, letting the audience witness the organised chaos of his mind. Synonyms and thematic connections exploded onto the screen in rapid fire succession, a kind of literary synesthesia that revealed surprising connections between the disparate suggestions. Roast chicken and hangnails shouldn’t belong in the same story, but in Lin’s hands, they began to harmonise.
By the 12-minute mark, Lin was fully in his groove, his fingers a blur across the keyboard as the poem took shape. The audience, initially quiet, began leaning in, captivated by what was unfolding. The poem itself was a love letter to imperfection. It opened in a “concrete” jungle—a nod to his hometown of Shanghai—but rather than the bustling commercial hub most would picture, Lin painted a vivid and intimate portrait of a city of mud crabs, bamboo scaffolding, the scent of cigarettes mingling with roast chicken, and the ever-present grey skies. In the second stanza, Lin turned inward, using the imagery of a hangnail as a metaphor for human flaws and vulnerabilities. He reminded his audience that perfection isn’t the goal; beauty lies in embracing and exposing our imperfections, much like the Shanghai of old—cracked and gritty but undeniably authentic. His final stanza brought the message home, weaving the seemingly unrelated prompts into a powerful meditation on how imperfections shape not just art, but life itself. And then, in a moment that both shocked and delighted the audience, Lin delivered his final twist. “So, was that poem any good?” he asked, receiving a resounding “yes” from the crowd. And yet, without a second thought, he tore up the freshly printed poem, hit "Don't Save" on his laptop, and shrugged off the masterpiece he had just created. The audible gasps of protest were met with his sly smile and a poignant explanation: art isn’t about permanence or perfection. It’s about the process, the commitment to showing up, and the willingness to create without clinging to results. It was a moment of audacious vulnerability that summed up the ethos of the evening. Lin’s performance wasn’t just a showcase of poetic talent—it was a reminder that creativity is messy, imperfect, and fleeting, and that’s precisely what makes it so extraordinary.
The second play of the double bill, the intriguingly titled Oops I Don’t Want No Scrubs to Hit Me Baby Again, was a stark and cutting counterpoint to Albert Lin’s reflective whimsy. Created by Linda Chen and performed by the formidable Tiffany Wong, this piece plunged the audience into the glittering yet deeply exploitative world of teen pop stardom, offering a sharp critique of the media’s role in shaping—and dismantling—female icons of the early 2000s.
Tiffany Wong played Alexis—a thinly veiled stand-in for Britney Spears—with captivating intensity. Alexis is a teenage pop sensation desperate to shed her “girly, cutesy” persona and enter her “grown” era. Her strategy? A shock announcement of pregnancy on her website. But instead of empowering her, this revelation catapults her into a whirlwind of media mockery. Using verbatim excerpts from real tabloid articles from The Sun, The New York Post, and Daily News (1999–2005), the production exposed how the media degraded her talent, ridiculed her body, and framed her as complicit in her objectification.
The theatrical concept was clever: Wong was confronted with the words on a laptop screen for the first time in real-time, forcing her to improvise her delivery. This choice highlighted the artificiality and choreography inherent to Y2K-era pop stardom and today’s algorithm-driven, hyper-curated TikTok culture. Her slipups, stumbles, and quick recoveries underscored the absurdity of a world that demands perfection yet revels in tearing women down. What initially felt like nostalgia for the glittering Y2K era quickly revealed itself to be a dissection of its misogyny, showing how media culture manufactured and commodified the rise and fall of young women like Alexis—like Britney—with ruthless precision. Tiffany’s Alexis was simultaneously complicit in and a victim of the system, embodying the paradox that while today’s pop culture appears spontaneous and chaotic, it is meticulously manufactured to exploit.
Chen’s production was a masterstroke of commentary, marrying past and present with brutal clarity. This production was a tribute to the pop stars of the Y2K era and an incisive critique of the forces that chewed them up and spit them out. A provocative, intelligent, and well-performed work that lingered in the mind long after the applause faded.
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