An artwork that was inspired by conversations between the art therapist-researcher and a participant with Singaporean Malay-Muslim background for her PhD project. A lightning bolt flashes between the woman’s fists, signifying the treacherous and difficult task of personal transformation. This figure’s powerful stance is an attempt to break away from Singapore’s propaganda of the “good citizen”, which is rooted in a narrative of modernity and civilisation building with roots in white supremacy and colonial agenda. Roots growing out of the galangal entangle with the figure of Stamford Raffles (widely known as the founding father of modern Singapore) attempts to remove the coloniser from the pedestal. The multiple hues of the woman’s upper torso is a critique against the coloniality and Whiteness that insist on the purity and stability of an Asian or Muslim identity.

2023. 91.4 x 121.8 x 3.5 cm 

Mixed media on canvas (Acrylics and charcoal)

This series is a diptych. One poetic and one dramatic. Alice is resting and slowing down as resistance against the world-building project that champions fast-paced economic growth and capitalistic pursuits. The figure of the Indigenous man playing the yidaki pays homage to the concept of Dadirri, the practice of deep listening and quiet stillness. Resting opens up cracks into monstrous spaces, making us aware of the many tendrils the myth of normal extends to keep itself normalised. 

2023. 91.4 x 121.8 x 3.5 cm 

Mixed media on canvas (Acrylics and charcoal)

Alice is not in wonderland, she inhabits the wasteland instead. She is exhausted from trying to fit into a disenchanted world. Healing and enchantment are antithesis to the modernising capitalist project, the latter encapsulated in the colonial figure of James Cook the white rabbit, rushing its citizen-subjects to be productive to ensure time is used and exchanged transactionally for money. The crystalline Sydney Opera House, hailed as the symbol of modern Australia, is reimagined as the heart of a monstrous creature with tentacles, creeping from deep within the global corporate system into spaces of our innate wellness and worthiness. 

2023. 91.4 x 121.8 x 3.5 cm 

Mixed media on canvas (Acrylics and charcoal)

The healing process must consider how we are completely interconnected with each other and the natural world. The central figure is part First Nations woman, part tree, part bird, and part ocean. Both her wrists are tied together by a knotted rope, which entangles modern skyscrapers and assumes a monstrous and tentacular quality. She cradles the curved torso of the rainbow serpent, which stands in contrast with the buildings—phallic, straight, and upside down. The city is an attempt to make abnormal the capitalist system’s notions and expressions of human nature that mirror the individualised, competitive, masculine, and neoliberal ideal. The measuring tape and syringe is a critique of how modern science is inadequately making healing really effective for Indigenous and non-Indigenous people, since it is a colonised field that fragments the mind-body unity and is lacking in the examination of the biopsychosocial elements of illnesses and health.

2023. 91.4 x 121.8 x 3.5 cm 

Mixed media on canvas (Acrylics and charcoal)

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)