Paintings

Concepts in my works emerge through embodied engagement with materials. Over the years, the use of ink and water-based mediums became a 'clearing' that enable me to think about boundaries, agencies, and relationalities. I develop ‘pooling’, a painting method that emerged out of my lived experiences of being a 'cloud'. Apart from the obvious action of painting with bulks of water, ink, and pigments on substrates across extended period of time, ‘pooling’ draws largely from the traditional Chinese ink technique of pomo (潑墨)[splashed ink], and from my observations of wetlands. Their waterbodies fascinate me; they are never static, constantly shifting across surfaces over time, not to mention the myriads of organisms living in them. I am interested in the concepts of ‘latent commons’ and ‘multispecies assemblages’ (Tsing, 2015), in how contingency, unpredictability and vulnerability become sites of encounters where the not-yet-articulated can find its place.

My brushwork is mainly calligraphic, influenced by traditional scripts , techniques of xieyi(寫意) [writing ideas] and gongbi(工筆) [meticulous style], as well as by the experimental possibilities I have explored through the watercolour medium. Years of working with these two similar yet fundamentally different types of mediums, have enabled me to combine and develop ways of communicate my ideas freely and authentically.

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The concepts of 'being' and 'place' play significant roles in my work, with complex links to geography, culture, and identity. Living and practising between the UK and Singapore, I practise through a diasporic lens.  In my ink paintings, I seek emergent knowledge in the interstices between multispecies that surrounds me, my Southeast Asian cultural heritage, and the in-between spaces I inherently find myself in.​​