ART
I started making art as a kid, like most kids... but unlike precociously talented artsy kids, I had no natural gift for making art. My markings have always been clumsy and unpretty, which is why I never really considered pursuing a career as an artist for the longest time. But making art for me was always in the background. Writing was my bread and butter day job, music was my creative outlet, and art was something that I did every now and then as a way to recharge.
But then 2016 happened... and you can read here about why I decided to pursue art full time at the age of 41. It was the scariest but ultimately best decision I ever made for myself.
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Even though I chiefly make art these days, I still don't really feel comfortable calling myself an artist. An artist friend of mine said to me that I should embrace the label... but I'm not sure. To be honest, I have no idea how to be an artist. Most of the time I'm just playing... and being silly. But I guess that's why I find it so liberating. Making art, as Louise Bourgeois rightly said, is a privilege. For me it is more than a privilege. It's a lifeline to joy.
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Below you can find some artworks I've made over the years.
HURT | NEED | UNDO | LIVE and RESIST
The works that were shown in my second solo show HURT | NEED | UNDO | LIVE and RESIST at The Back Room KL from Sep to Oct 2022, were mostly made over a four-year period from 2018 to 2022. These works shown were chosen from four loosely related series of drawings and paintings on paper and wood.
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The four series of works were nicknamed: 1. "The Chopping Board Series" (because they were painted on wooden chopping boards; 2. "The HIV Medicine Packaging Series"; 3. "The Talismans" and; 4. "The Pandemic Series".
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In these works, I was very influenced by my research on both Western and Eastern religious iconography. I was haunted by memories of my visits to churches and temples in France and KL, and scoured images I found online of religious scenes, especially from the pre-Renaissance era, when the figures look flattened. As an ex-Catholic, I didn't care much for the religious significance of these images. But I was very moved by the way they depicted human figures, with their stiff poses and often distorted angles.
Using these references, I wanted to make a kind of queer spiritual art, featuring bald figures that have no genitals or other gender atrributes. In a way, the figures are symbolic of a desire to free from the heteronormative body.
In a way, these works were an extension of earlier drawings and paintings from the Red & Gold exhibition, at Raw Art Space, in 2017.
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For the RESIST show, Sharon Chin, a Malaysian artist and wonderful friend who I've known for years, helped design the layout based on our discussions about temples and shrines and how I imagined the works would be displayed. Some of the works were grouped like altar icons, with a table for offerings that visitors would bring.
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I remember spending two days painting one of the gallery walls red... we had to coat it several times to get the vibrant vermillion shade just right. Sharon also devised a rainbow portal using holographic material to frame the talismanic works. You can see photos of the show below.
TRIPTYCHS, aka "The Chopping Board series"
The Triptychs were a series of acrylic paintings on wooden chopping boards that I bought from Daiso (a popular Japanese chain selling all sorts of household items). I was intrigued by the form because of its significance in Catholic art. But being queer and ex-Catholic, I wanted to see how I could subvert the format.
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Much of the imagery for the Triptychs came from looking at anatomy illustrations, Eastern religious iconography (especially Hindu and Buddhist), haute couture videos on YouTube, drag queen fashions, and the work of Sadao Hasegawa (1945-1999), a Japanese queer artist who I greatly admire.
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I remember wanting the works to be vibrant and colourful, strange and humorous, slightly kitsch and surreal. There were supposed to 69 pieces altogther (ha ha ha), but in the end I only managed to produce 27 that I was happy with.
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RED & GOLD Series
The Red & Gold series in an ongoing, slowly evolving series of paintings and drawings of human figures with a primarily red or gold (sometimes both) background. I started making them in 2017 for my first solo show (also called Red & Gold). At the time, I was still living in KL, pitifully broke (ha ha ha), and didn't really have a lot of art materials. What I did have a lot of were pencils and red and gold paint.
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I've always liked red and gold and the combination of the two, and how they can set off the blackness of graphite or charcoal markings. The limited but highly vibrant and contrasting palette of colours really fired me up. I was drawn to red and gold because of how revered they are in a lot of religious traditions, especially in Chinese culture, where they are almost talismanic, as though the excess of red and gold can ward off bad feng shui.
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I was also very interested in how red and gold correspond to the colours of bodily fluids, namely blood and urine. A lot of the works in this series are made on HIV medication packaging that I collected. I've been poz since 2016. It's a long story... but the short version is that I was low on paper and started using the medication packaging, which worked really well, because the material imbued the human figures I was drawing with layers of meaning that I was struggling to express from the frustration I was feeling at the time.
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Over the years, the series has been evolving as my understanding and attitude towards the materials change, as is natural I guess. But as long as I am taking the meds, the series will continue in one form or another... I still have a lot of red and gold paint. Ha ha ha ha.
