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THE ISLAND
For the past few years, I have been working on a multimedia project titled The Island.
It began with a small, man-made tropical island I often pass while paddling at sea. Again and again, I catch myself slipping into a familiar fantasy—imagining I am cast away, like in childhood stories such as The Blue Lagoon or Robinson Crusoe.
But this is Singapore—one of the most densely populated places in the world—where true escape is almost impossible.
So I construct it.
Through imagination, and by deliberately blocking out what I do not wish to see.
Beyond “my island,” the horizon is filled with container ships. Nearby islands have been transformed into tourist destinations, industrial zones, or sites of waste processing. What were once untouched landscapes are now shaped, controlled, and repurposed. The idea of paradise persists—but only if I choose to look away.
Perception becomes a tool.
A filter.
A form of denial.
This tension forms the core of the work: a body of video, printmaking, large-scale drawings, and photography. It explores paradise and illusion, storytelling and fiction, sanity and its edges. I position myself almost as a naturalist—discovering a world that, upon closer inspection, reveals itself to be entirely constructed.
The rocks are hollow.
The sand is imported.
The shoreline is arranged.
The island is not isolated at all.
Paradise, here, is man-made—an attempt to recreate Eden. But it falters.
Utopia slips into dystopia.
And yet, this raises another question:
is this urge to create, to reshape the world, not also part of nature itself?
As Charles Darwin wrote in The Voyage of the Beagle:
“Man at last has been enabled to understand his own role, his own true position in nature and in the world we live in.”
Ongoing work (drawing, printmaking)
"Stories with a predictable, happy ending are generally extremely boring."
My ongoing work includes charcoal, pencil, watercolour drawings, monoprints, and film. Figurative yet enigmatic, it depicts worlds where unexpected connections evoke confusion, and protagonists—human or animal—seem absorbed in their own realities.
Meaning emerges only from the total image. Unexpected juxtapositions create a subtle tension, destabilizing the rational order and leaving the viewer without a single answer.
The work is shaped as much by the process of making as by any preconceived idea. Composition, materials, perspective, and style interact, with the quality of the drawing itself carrying equal weight to its subject.
Some series draw on literature, such as Hemingway’s The Old Man and the Sea or Michael Covarrubias’ The Island of Bali. Across all media, the work carries a poetic, ambiguous quality that invites reflection and imagination.
