Cyril Wong

From SgWiki

Cyril Wong is a Singaporean poet and author of four books of poetry: Squatting Quietly, The End of his Orbit, Below: Absence and Unmarked Treasure. He won the Young Artist Award for Literature in Singapore and was thrice-nominated for the Pushcart Prize in the USA. His poems have appeared in such international journals as Fulcrum, Poetry International, Atlanta Review and many more. They have also been adapted to dance, drama, music and film and presented in their various forms in the United States, Australia, Hong Kong, Indonesia, Germany and France. He was featured at such festivals as the Edinburgh International Book Festival and the Hong Kong International Literary Festival. His poems opened the 2004 Queensland Poetry Festival in a performance that fused classical Indian dance with contemporary movement-theatre and dramatic recitation. His first verse monologue, Still Flight, was performed in Singapore and at the Magdalena Festival in Providence, USA. He runs an online literary journal at www.softblow.com, with the help of Jason Wee and Christopher Ujine Ong.

Wong is also a classically-trained countertenor. “Divine”, “ethereal”, “elegiac”, “tremulous”, “an instrument of beauty”, “sharp as a knife and yet beautiful as a bell” are some of the praises Cyril Wong has received as a countertenor from reviews in The Straits Times, The Flying Inkpot and Singapore Theatre Reviews. Taught by Belgium-based soprano Lu Ying Chun and mezzo-soprano Yang Jie from the Beijing Central Conservatory, Wong was a soloist in the early-music group, Musica Obscura, and he has been what The Straits Times' Life! section described as a "boy soprano lounge pianist" for The Fun Stage's Mandarin production, Lovers' Words at the Esplanade Theatre Studio (Singapore) and at the 5th Chinese Drama Festival in Yunnan (China), and he was also the Music Director of World-in-Theatre for their production of The Gospel According To Mark.

He performed at the Zero-Gravity Party, an interactive multimedia event commissioned by Multimedia Arts Asia Pacific at the Singapore Art Museum in 2004. Wong performed a concert of Love Songs and he was a featured artist for the Una Voce 2005, a 24 hours Sound Art Event by Pink Ark at The Substation, in collaboration with Circadian and Amos Tang. He will be performing Love Songs at the Hong Kong Fringe Club in Feb 2006 and he will be featured in Pain of a Million Ants for The Necessary Stage's M1 Fringe Festival in the same year. Cyril Wong is openly gay, and is one of the few figures in the Singapore literature scene to have come out.