Tapping onto her Buddhist-Malaysian-Chinese background, the artist attempts to make art that disturbs the binary between the sacred and the monstrous, nature and culture, as well as healing and illnesses. The human condition is re-imagined as monsters incarnate as different parts of the lotus, whose sacred task is to disfigure, challenge, and dismember the artist to the strange and queer expansiveness of the more-than-human world. The lotus is a symbol prevalent in Buddhism, symbolising purification and enlightenment. The monster is an invitation to stay with the trouble, to come closer to healing. Ghost and monsters are tricksters, they are the “Other”; third space creatures that offers a decolonial site of power to overcome the puritanism and rationalism of our dominant culture. Monstrous creatures are inconvenient and inarticulable things, troubling the Western, colonial, and logocentric world that is heavily invested in the power and promise of the word, language, and narrative.
2023. 91.4 x 121.8 x 3.5 cm
Mixed media on canvas (Acrylics and charcoal)