Beyond Permission

Working between Malaysia and Denmark, and shaped by earlier years in the United States, my work emerges from a transnational position where identity is fluid and continuously negotiated. Movement, displacement, and cultural translation are not only subjects but lived conditions that inform how and why the work exists.

Across sculpture, installation, performance, and artist-led platforms, I explore how power operates through objects, institutions, and everyday structures. Familiar symbols are often reconfigured into unstable forms that expose their vulnerability. In Soft Monument, an ice machine gun becomes a temporary monument—transforming a symbol of violence into something fragile, time-bound, and destined to disappear. What appears solid begins to dissolve; what appears authoritative becomes uncertain.

Humor and absurdity are integral to this approach. The COVID Surreality series, developed during lockdown, uses performative gestures and surreal imagery to respond to fear and isolation through irony and play. Humor, in this context, becomes a form of resistance—an opening that allows tension, contradiction, and reflection to coexist.

This exploration extends beyond objects into the creation of artist-led frameworks such as Stateless Mind Pavilion, Stateless Mind House, and PACAK. These projects function as autonomous cultural platforms where artists can gather, produce, and share work outside systems that regulate legitimacy and access. Rather than relying on institutional validation, they propose alternative ways of working grounded in exchange, experimentation, and self-determination.

Creating these environments is inseparable from the making of artworks. Some works exist as material forms; others exist as conditions for encounter. Together, they question how structures are built, who they include or exclude, and how they might be reimagined.

At its core, the work seeks to open spaces—both physical and conceptual—where fixed categories can loosen, where imposed boundaries can be reconsidered, and where new forms of presence and belonging can take shape.

Swing - from Covid Surreality series, 2020