CALENDAR UPDATES

The perk of a regular newsletter is you get to engage with your thoughts more actively, so this lapse in writing the past 2 months has affected my ability to grasp at fleeting emotions as urges to confront difficult topics fade.

I was recently contacted by a curator who really surprised me by saying she read the articles on my website. I’d written all of those, never imagining anyone would read them. In 2021, textile art was experiencing a surge, but being one of those mediums not well-understood in the local context, it was taken advantage of— some people were learning techniques off Youtube videos, haphazardly throwing material together and giving it a fancy name. As someone who loves textile and have practiced with it for so long, I was well, pretty much enraged, but a ranting person always ends up sounding salty. I decided to do it my way— start writing about the textile art I love and respect, so perhaps people could understand from my point of view why I wouldn’t deem someone an artist just because they stated it on their Instagram profile.

When I started writing, I found not only relief; working my rusty writing cogs, I realised how little I knew about this textile world I love. The first artist I wrote about was Faig Ahmed, because I was so intrigued with his work. It was also this article that the curator, who is based in France, brought up, because she had actually worked with him before! This little incident spurred me to start writing an article I’ve been meaning to write for a very long time. I’m working on it now, and very excited to share it when done— but not before I complete the new artwork I’m working on for an upcoming show (while concurrently working on a large commercial installation launching in July.)

ONGOING

Sensible Objects at Appetite (SG)

I’m showing a total of 5 works in this group show with 3 other Singaporean artists, curated by Tan Siuli. Appetite is a novel dining concept, where art gallery, restaurant and record lounge come together. I was very glad to be invited to join a show which so naturally embraces my vessels— deliberate in their lack of function, unapologetic with their voice.

WHAT I HAVE BEEN UP TO

Singapore Art Week 2025

If I thought I couldn’t get any busier from last year, January proved me wrong— it is the peak month for any artist based in Singapore due to Singapore Art Week (SAW). It’s my first year actually showing anything during SAW (COVID period excluded), but the previous years were just noting down dates and locations of the sudden proliferation of art shows across our island, actually getting yourself there (in a presentable outfit), trying to absorb art while waving to 1000 people and recalling their last active show, plus saying self-deprecating things such as “yeah, I’m the only artist in Singapore not showing anything this week” with a smile.

Being mostly introverted people who would rather hole up in the studio making something, it’s a commendable effort that all of us ‘art people’ force ourselves to pilgrimage to the 3 main sites (Gillman Barracks, National Gallery, Tanjong Pagar Distripark) to smile and make small talk.

ARTSG 2025

Being an independent artist, I was very fortunate to be able to exhibit at ArtSG with Art Outreach Singapore, a non-profit organisation and also cultural partner of this art fair. This artwork, Anekanta and its accompanying piece, Ekanta, are the result of my art residency in LOHJINAWI (Yogyakarta) last year supported by The Institutum. For more images and information about the work, you may access the link below:

I also experimented with a few vessels during that same residency, and presented 1 of them alongside the installation. Entitled ‘Self’, this vessel was crocheted around the kendi water vessel common in Indonesia; I then destroyed the ceramic vessel within. In early 2024, I started experimenting with ceramic in my artwork, and this exploration of different mediums is something I will continue to work on.

WHAT I’M READING

Amphibious Soul by Craig Foster

This book is written by the creator of My Octopus Teacher, a Netflix documentary film released in 2020. First diving (no pun intended) into the book, I was jealous of this guy who grew up on the cape of South Africa surrounded by wilderness. It then grew into incredulity when I realised how obsessed this guy was with trying to return to our ‘wild side’, something I had already deemed impossible. In his words, humankind did not realise that the agriculture revolution and modernizing was a one-way door.

First having lived free as hunter-gatherers, there was no need for us to store wealth or provisions, because we only took what we needed. It reminds me of the old Mongolian nomadic life, where they never over-grazed, so Nature always had time to recover. Back then, humankind understood Nature enough to work in tandem with her.

Foster suggests that humankind has become warped and violent, because we were born wild, and have been forced to be tamed in ways that go against our nature. The Agriculture Revolution, the Industrial Revolution, tools (including guns and cars), separated humans from our animal kin and Nature, giving us this power we do not know how to control (clearly, as we see in today’s news); and now we have become arguably parasitical to this planet. The author is more hopeful than me, saying that we are born kind, and provides tips on how to reconnect with our wild side.

His words inspired me to start swimming again recently. The lovely thing about swimming is, you are for once, forced to be with yourself, and yourself only. No phones. You focus on your breathing and your strokes to be alive, but you’re kind of safe to drift away with your thoughts without fearing a stingray coming up behind you.

Though, according to him, a wild animal would never attack you for absolutely no reason at all. His experiences with animals are magical. I have a diving license, but the past few times I dived, I did not enjoy it. Too many things to remember, too much weight to bear. Hopefully, in future, I will be strong enough to free dive, which was the initial motivation for me learning to swim in adulthood.

RECENT HAPPENINGS

School Workshops

The start of February was a week of intensive workshops with a local primary school I have been working with, as we work towards a communal installation in September. Compared to the ‘art classes’ we had at that age, art education here has improved by leaps and bounds, and I am grateful that there is a greater emphasis on it within the curriculum now.

I’m always reluctant to go into projects with a ‘sustainability’ angle, simply because it is so labour-intensive, hardly able to match the expected timeline or budget and most of all, end up being not very sustainable. However, with the power in numbers (an entire primary school!), I was hopeful that we would be able to learn about processing ‘trash’ into usable material, even if it requires a lot more time.

My artwork, Radiolarian (2019), has been included in the Singapore Ministry of Education’s official art curriculum for Primary 5 students since last year. Recently, I was contacted by the teacher’s academy to be interviewed for a video series featuring local artists, used for training the art teachers in Singapore. I was told that many local artists had rejected this request; after all, it requires time commitment, provides only a minimal honorarium (which I still appreciate), and isn’t the coolest collaboration around. However, I always try my best to be available when it comes to educating young children about art, because I think it is very important. As a kid who wanted the assurance that doing art is ok, that expressing yourself and being different doesn’t have to be frowned upon— I want to be able to help make that happen as an adult.

If anyone is interested, you may watch the video here.

LAST THOUGHTS

Money as a Stumbling Block

We, and I mean Asians in general, always think of having more money as a good thing. It’s one of those things that is definitely “better to have than not”, and even if you can’t use it, you have to hoard it for a rainy day. Lee Kuan Yew (the founding father of Singapore) once observed in his book (keep in mind it was published in 2013):

The point of this quote is not the ‘America’ of 2013, but a very succinct understanding of why the middle-class (even in Singapore today) are desperately hoarding money, at the expense of their daily comforts. The country is obviously wealthy, yet much of the middle-class is still poor at heart. In comparison with the immense wealth we are surrounded by, we cannot help but feel poor, and behave like the poor. It’s something that bothers me a lot personally, yet, observing my friends who were born with a silver spoon and have English-speaking, educated parents, I feel like this is a cycle I can never break. I can never be like these people, with whom I have to live ‘side-by-side’ (I mean, within society; in reality, they will never step foot into my bedtown estate, flooded with working foreigners who cannot afford a home elsewhere in Singapore).

In the recent year, and even more keenly in the last few months, I have tried to unpack what it means to be a middle-class Singaporean who have lived through this city’s growth spurt, and why there is so much mental struggle in spite of our obvious privilege and comforts. Why we are entitled, and why people from outside our country label us as such. Why our ‘identity’ seems so false, like a huge marketing project. Why I feel like a patient with amnesia, being taught my own history I feel no connection with.

I had a conversation with a friend about this recently, after reading an essay by an artist duo from Myanmar, feeling slightly ashamed, then indignant at the shame.

After this conversation, I started wondering— what if we finally acknowledge that it is exactly WEALTH that prevents art being meaningful (if it was a part of the plan from the origin point)? WEALTH gives us comfort, keeps us in this lukewarm soup of Soma— the antagonist to indignation, inquisition, revolution.

Some artworks present a certain plight or condition foreign to the viewer, yet does not make us feel disconnected; it appeals to the common human emotion, that which transcends language or culture. Such artworks move me. For that to happen, I surmise that the artist has lived a certain life to intimately know their subject, and then somehow shifted their perspective and observed it from where they think their audience might stand. I don’t think it’s possible to present an artwork reflecting on personal experiences without first having moved a distance away from it. You can’t talk about trauma that is still your daily truth, because you don’t yet know it is trauma. It is your life. If one is showing a video depicting the exact situation (even if it is truly unique or mesmerizing) without acting as part of the medium through which the work is translated, then it is mere self-indulgence.

So how do you disconnect from a society that promises you so much, gives you so much comfort and status, surrounds you with nodding beings beaming with pride on August 9 every year, our own little Brave New World? How do you question why this perfect Singaporean Dream is an illusion, explain to others why you can’t and won’t escape this prison with no bars?

If you have not before, and wish to partly understand this strange painful struggle of Singaporeans: please, PLEASE read this casual article written in 2001 by a Singaporean couple: Paved with Good Intentions. They went on to make a movie in 2006: Singapore Dreaming. Every scene in this movie, from the dreaming musician forced to be an insurance agent, the Hokkien father with dreams of getting rich, the intelligent woman deprived of opportunities because of her gender— the heartache reaches deep. So many times I see my family in the characters, as if spy cameras are trained on us. Even more than 20 years later, I relate so hard to both the article and the movie. But I am still living in this loop, and am not distant enough to analyse with clarity. I cannot yet talk about this.

For now, the monkey on my back will stay; but one day, I will be able to see its face.