Art SG 2025: Discover the practices of three artists, from Southeast Asia and beyond, presenting at the art fair

"All the works presented in the UBS Lounge and the UBS Art Studio [at Art SG 2025] are conceived as an invitation for the viewer to engage actively with their surroundings. The suspended works in the UBS Lounge allow multiple sides of the works to be experienced. At the entrance are three totems entitled Through the Screen (2024), which function as filters within the environment, encouraging viewers to pass through them before entering the lounge.

The double-sided paintings, The Golden Field (2024), The Silver Field (2024), The Copper Field (2024) and The Wall (2024) were intentionally suspended and feature unique colours and patterns on each face, enticing the audience to explore the hidden subtleties on the reverse sides.

Similarly, [the] works in the UBS Art Studio also urge the audience to move through, walk behind, and look beyond what’s immediately visible. It’s my way of creating a sensory experience through these works. The Window (2024) is a large-scale canvas with cuts and slits that reveals the wall behind it, while The Wall (2024), where double-sided paintings are suspended in mid-air, invites the audience to navigate around each panel when entering the space.

Complementing the display is Untitled, ST DD23 (2022), a work in the UBS Art Collection, which represents a rainbow-coloured dream world, offering an escape from complicated reality and reflecting my hopeful view of Thailand, my home country.”

“With any subject, whether we acknowledge it or not, there are dual or multiple realities on one plane. This is important to highlight, since good art resonates between two poles—it doesn’t stop moving, it doesn’t settle.

I’m interested in collective non‑belonging, the idea that the more we believe there’s a sovereignty of nationhood, the more problems we run into with identity. Theorist Todd McGowan argues for the constitutive power of alienation, as an existential and political project. Instead of trying to overcome alienation to attain self-identity, he proposes that we should unite, from a standpoint that we are all displaced in some way, even within the self, and try to build something collective from there. 

I like to remain generatively unaware of certain things. While I know that experiences unconsciously mobilise aesthetics, I don’t like to weave them in, through narrative. To use a banal example, the clothes we pick and the colours we like are all informed by our backgrounds and experiences. In a sense, these elements do influence themes, but I don’t like to call them the whole of the story, only fragments.

I will, however, consciously insert more explicit symbols or metaphors according to the context I’m showing in, and the time relative to current events, to see how these elements interact with their environment.

I like to view the relationship between text and symbols as equal. My work is an experiment in the plasticity of language. On the other hand, it also explores the mutability of meaning on those two planes: how they interact and intersect to create new meanings and perversions within the culture we consume."

"The layering methodology, this saturation of meaning and form, reflects the impossibility of having any one linear meaning. Our current climate reflects the ways in which we consume information, how there’s an overfilling that creates disengagement, which has become a new violence. If we’re moving away from a culture of shock into a culture of disassociation, we’re dealing with the inability to process. The layering process reflects these registers, materially and viscerally showing a bruising process over time, and how things interact on a single plane.

The works presented at Art SG are part of my Net-Grid and Piece Painting series, which combine collaged and screen-printed fragments. In the Net-Grid series, these fragments are overlaid with grids, creating an illusion of unity that functions to simultaneously contain and obscure information. In the Piece Painting series, this process is arrested. Left exposed, the paintings reflect the potential to find structures to enclose disparate elements—these could be physical pieces or metaphorical bodies.

The Piece Painting (Newsstand Mondrian algorithm, Frieze 2024) works look at ephemera produced within a specific moment in time: October 2024. This marked one year of the current level of genocide in Gaza, the run-up to the American elections, and Frieze art fair in London. These highly contrasting realities create a very disjunctive moment, and the paintings function as an archive of this.

The components are assembled in a Mondrian grid format and combined in a visually seductive yet quotidian way—they are referencing media we are used to seeing day to day. Using pop art tropes, they have a newsstand aesthetic—a too-muchness, a saturation—formatted through a systematised grid that is overflowing, like a display of media which is spilling over with information. Marking a specific time, they are a pseudo-archive, embedding historical ephemera within recognisable art tropes.”

“I often see the body as a vessel and a vehicle for storytelling. Living between Singapore and London, I often feel simultaneously foreign and at the same time intimately related to both, and perhaps that could explain some of that surrealness.

I try to keep narratives as open‑ended as possible, even though some of the details and objects are very culturally specific or stem from some personal memory. It’s important that the works are true to life. Quite often the charge and absurdity stems from the narrative arc.

If a possible painterly resolution moves toward a direction that’s too kitsch, sentimental or obvious, I’ll attempt an about turn or start over. It’s a dance, animating the inanimate, orchestrating soundscapes without sound. And at the same time, because I’m also dealing with very formal elements such as colour and composition, I’m always looking for a solution that’s a fragile balance; so a suitcase morphs into a bed, a Chinese calendar becomes a doorway, and a reunion table transforms into a haloed being.

My figures manifest their desires and longings in familiar objects that momentarily ground them somewhat. They are extensions of their interior lives. They search for intimacy in unorthodox places. They participate in communal rituals in person or via their devices, but they are often lethargic, ambivalent, and at times alienated. Audiences are also often implicated too [as] voyeurs behind screens, mirrors and windows."

"I don’t really have a studio routine. It’s quite intuitive. But at the same time, it’s also like a day job. Like a good Asian kid, you have to put in the hours. I don’t use assistants as I like the off-screen time painting affords. It also gets very physical especially with the larger canvases. Some days are such a grind when you are unsure of how to proceed with a work in progress, but other days, you can really get in the zone and the hours go by. Above all, I cherish the fact that the studio is a physical place in which time is fluid and one has a space to try and fail miserably in private.

[At Art SG 2025] I’m showing Thinking of You, which I made in London during a bout of homesickness [in] mid-2024. It began with the idea of the hotpot as a kind of hat for the protagonist. [It simultaneously serves as] extensions of his headphones [while also becoming] a halo, giving rise to a cosmos. It’s also a work drawing on identity, nostalgia and cultural memory, immortalising important family festive dishes such as candlenut (buah keluak), and the pig stomach lining used in the preparation of pork balls (bakwan hati babi). I will also be showing work in a group show at the Ames Yavuz opening at the same time.”

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