Last year, A. restaurant in Chip Bee Garden commissioned me to make a large figurative drawing commemorating the longevity of friendship amongst three men who have been  business partners for more than 2 decades. Their directive was simple, "that it has taken a village to arrive". I thereby made a drawing of 3 clusters of 3 men: in the activities of eating, drinking and planning in a pastoral of a village. Afterwards, having made so many studies of men sitting on the ground t

After the Pandemic, a friend invited me to visit his new gallery in Georgetown. Penang seems to be a recurring destination for me at different times of my life. I first went there with a first love, later returned there with love ones and friends and no business for the place. Multiple crossed connections of old friends and newer ones soon mapped out a familiarity for me. Last June I decided to test out a memorial work I had in mind for TianAnMen 1989. I rented a temporary s

As a renewed dialogue after the Singapore Bicentennial, Road to Citadel memorialises a historical event —Crawford's destruction of the Sultan's Citadel in Kampong Gelam to make way for North Bridge Road. The act was under the guise of liberating the Sultan’s mistreated women slaves. Historically, the East India had exported Indian penal labourers for the construction of roads and civic buildings in Singapore. The figures of men boarding an open vehicle is taken from the hum

“Glorious, 1989”, collection of National Gallery Singapore. Took the title from an epithet on the WWII monument on Elizabeth walk (present day Esplanade). In the late 80s in Chinatown, I lived 300 metres from the Singapore river where it was a cruising ground for gay men by night before urban renewal took over the quiet stone steps. Most evenings I would take a walk along the river which led me to pass the Lim Bo Seng monument and make the turn-around by the WWII monument. I

This series of Raffles Trophies are musings prior to SG Bicentennial (2019). In the manner of Colonial eyes for Eastern Emporium , what would trophies of conquest be like looking westward?. Like the orchids in white tureens and peacock feathers in amphorae found in Interior magazines, will colonial English tables and Raffles chairs do? The desire for Imperial objet d'art, with offerings of tropical harvest for our ancestors. Empire R Us. these series of still life drawings o

In a group survey of SG sculptures from the 60s to present at the National Gallery till February 2023. The works were made over thanks to the immobility of the Pandemic. I have took an exhibited work from 2016 and performed on it with two artist friends in Singapore to transition the work from sculpture back to a shaman’s prop. Except from an OpenHouse blurb about the work: BeHeaded  and legless, the posture and crossed arms of this soft sculpture effigy serve as the only spe

Each day I sat at the kids’ table Unravelled seven Rafflesias of padded fabric rejects, unexhibited, BiCentennial past. Each disc of Solo...

In 2010 I made a Rorsharch out of a false start of lilies by the folding the wet painting into two. The result looks like a lions head....

2020/ September, NGS Out of Isolation Corvid19, Perspectives online, National Gallery Singapore’s online publishing platform for...

Conversation with Johann Yasmin and Kirti Bhaskar Upadhyaya webinar started as Insta-stories at NUS Museum during Corvid lockdown....