Paintings

​Concepts in my works emerge through embodied engagement with materials. Over the years, the use of ink and water-based mediums has become a 'clearing' that enable me to think about boundaries, agencies, and relationalities. I developed ‘pooling’, a painting method that emerged from my lived experiences of being a 'cloud'. Beyond the the obvious action of painting with large amounts of water, ink, and pigments on substrates  over extended periods, ‘pooling’ draws largely from traditional Chinese ink technique of (潑墨)[splashed ink], calligraphic brushwork, as well as  my observations of wetlands. These waterbodies fascinate me; they are never static, constantly shifting across surfaces over time, and host myriads of living organisms. 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 influenced by traditional scripts , techniques of (寫意) [writing ideas] and (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.​​