Making sense of the world through paint and prose
My art blends ink, acrylic, and abstraction to express the things that are hard to name like identity, memory, hope, change. My writing explores what it means to be human in a world shaped by culture, technology, and the past we carry with us.
Together, they form a record of what I’m noticing, feeling, and learning. You’ll find both finished pieces and works in progress here… fragments of thought, color, and meaning, shared in the hope they might resonate with something in you, too.
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01010011 01101111 01110011
S.O.S. Ghosts In The Machine
Acrylic and Chinese Ink on Canvas
Date of Creation: 27 October 2018
Date of First Publication (Instagram): 27 October 2018
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I painted this during a quiet kind of chaos; the kind that simmers beneath meetings, metrics, and manicured spreadsheets. The binary code across the canvas – 01010011 01101111 01110011 – spells S.O.S. A distress signal not from a person, but from a system. Not a scream, but a whisper. Embedded in code. Easy to miss. Meant to be found.
At the time, I had just read about Microsoft supplying AI to the Pentagon. I began connecting dots: Alphabet owns DeepMind and Boston Dynamics. Cambridge Analytica was merely the first crack we noticed. The breaches, the data leaks, the automated targeting, wrapped in sleek language like personalization and optimization.
By day, I build predictive models. I optimize campaigns, train algorithms to trigger repeat purchases, fine-tune attribution flows. It's clever work… sharp, efficient. But sometimes I pause and ask: when does clever become complicit?
We don’t often stop to consider how behavioral data, those tiny, seemingly insignificant actions we take online, can be stitched together into something far more revealing. And dangerous. Despite promises of anonymity, we’re handing over byte-sized fragments of our identity until we become fully reconstructable. Mapped. Modeled. Monetized.
“If you’re not paying for the product, you’re the product.”
But what if we’re the product and the producer? What if we are feeding the very systems designed to flatten us?These algorithms don’t hate us. They simply don’t see us. They aren’t trained to recognize truth, nuance, or humanity. They optimize for engagement – dopamine loops, confirmation bias, filtered realities. And so we drift, caught in the undertow of our own digital reflections.
So then what?
What are the ethics of the architectures we build?
What are the consequences we’re not calculating?
At what point does innovation become erosion?
And at what point do we jsut become the ghosts in the machine?
I guess it’s is a quiet elegy for autonomy. A meditation on what happens when systems become so complex they forget the humans who built them. Or why they were built in the first place.
When do we stop being subjects and start being signals?
When do we stop asking why, and start assuming this is just how things are?
It is a visual record of a critical moment before the singularity:
Right before we vanish into the efficiency of the machine.
Right before the self becomes data.
Right before we forget that we were dreamers once.
And somewhere, inside that silence, inside the static
The signal keeps repeating.
01010011 01101111 01110011
Save our souls.
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Allotrope
Date of Creation: October 2018
Date of First Publication: October 5, 2018 (Instagram)
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Allotrope began with a collision.
It’s a painting about duality, yes, but more precisely, about the violence of keeping opposites apart. Emotion and logic. Chaos and stillness. Fire and water. We’re often taught these forces can’t coexist; that to survive, we must choose one, suppress the other, fracture the self. But what happens when we stop running from the parts of ourselves we were told couldn’t belong?
Rendered in acrylic, the composition pulls from elemental tension.
This isn’t a painting about peace. It doesn’t really offer resolution either.
It asks instead:
What if the fire doesn’t want to burn you?
What if the water doesn’t want to drown you?
What if the edge between them is you — seen, contained, and finally allowed to exist as both?To me, Allotrope is about survival, but more than that, it’s about integration. The moment you stop splitting yourself apart and start recognizing the shape you’ve always held. Not in spite of your contradictions, but because of them.
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Inferno
Acrylic on Canvas
Date of Creation: July 2018
Date of First Publication: August 9, 2018 (Instagram)
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Inferno is a descent, not into a place— but into a state. A collapse of clarity. A tangle of stories, systems, and selves.
Inspired by the first part of Dante Alighieri’s Divine Comedy, this piece is less about hell as a destination and more about the inner terrain we pass through when we forget who we are. The noise. The repetition. The collapse of meaning. The confusion that masquerades as truth.
The quote that stayed with me: “Oh human creatures, born to soar aloft, / Why fall ye thus before a little wind?” became less an accusation and more a mirror. It asked What are the winds we’ve internalized? The doubts? The roles we’ve accepted? The inherited scripts we never chose, but still perform?
Inferno is a study in human fragility, but also, in spiritual potential. It’s about the strength that flickers even in the darkest recesses of self. The part of us that endures, even when we no longer recognize it as strength.
There are no clean lines here. No easy answers. But if you look closely, especially in the confusion… there are signs of flight. Not in spite of the fall, but born from it.
Because to rise, we often have to pass through the fire.
And sometimes, to find our way out, we first have to get lost.
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Pusaran Jiwa (Malay for Soul Vortex)
Acrylic on canvas
Date of Creation: September 2018
Date of First Publication: September 21, 2018 (Instagram)
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Pusaran Jiwa (Malay for “Soul Vortex”) explores the sensation of being pulled inwards, not in retreat, but in recognition. It’s about the chaos beneath the surface: memory, ancestry, identity, and intuition all spiraling at once. Created during a time following the loss of a loved one, this piece reflects how inner stillness can emerge from motion, and how dissolution often precedes clarity. The forms are deliberately ambiguous, somewhere between water and smoke, spirit and self.
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Les Trois Mages
Acrylic on Canvas
November 13 2016
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This piece was inspired by the Pillars of Creation in the Eagle Nebula, but what moved me most wasn’t just their grandeur, it was the tragedy behind them. A nebula births and nurtures stars, only to be broken down by the very things it created. There's something hauntingly cyclical about that. The pillars, these towering columns of gas and dust, are both womb and ruin.
I painted the central formation like three hands reaching, or perhaps retreating. Three magi, three seekers, three silent witnesses to their own undoing. I wanted the blue to feel alive, almost defiant, amid the decay. But around them, the cosmos churns. You can see the erosion starting, the inevitability.
In this way, the painting became more than an image of the universe. It became a meditation on existence itself. On how we create, destroy, and are destroyed in turn. On how love can be a force of both creation and erosion. On how everything we give life to will someday reshape or end us… and yet, that doesn’t make the giving any less sacred.
This, I think, is what it means to be a universe. To hold within us both the hand that creates and the one that undoes.
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S’envoler
Acrylic and glow in the dark pigments on canvas
Date of Creation: November 2024
Date of Publication: November 29, 2024 (Instagram)
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S’envoler means “to take flight,” but this piece isn’t about soaring. It’s about the ache that comes before; the quiet tension between what holds us and what calls us beyond.
This work lives in the liminal… between memory and transcendence, identity and illusion, self and spirit.
Composed with layered acrylics, ink, flourescent pigment, and scattered glitter, the textures shift as the light changes; it’s a reminder that transformation is never static. The figure doesn't break from the fire, it is shaped by it. Flames melt into soft light, lifting in a near-weightless rhythm into a choreography of emergence.
S’envoler is a reflection of how we lose and remake ourselves across timelines, narratives, and the silences we carry. It’s about the longing that precedes change. The flicker of recognition before a name. The moment just before we rise.
The figure is everyone and no one. A vessel for all we’ve been, all we carry, all we might yet remember.
Because we don’t escape the fire.
We rise through it.
And with us, something eternal takes flight.
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Meditations
Acrylic on Canvas
13 November 2016
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I didn’t plan this piece. I didn’t know where it was going. It just began. I called it Meditations because that’s what it felt like: a slow exhale, a return to something still. And also because Massenet’s Thaïs - Méditation was playing in the background whilst I worked on this :)
This painting is about the in-between. About holding space for softness, for unknowing. The world demands so much certainty from us. But I think real insight happens in places like this: blurry, tender, unresolved. There’s power in stillness, too. Not everything has to roar to matter.
I don’t know if this painting is finished. Maybe it never will be. But maybe that’s okay.