I always get questions, why this, not that?
And it's like, there's so much that there's no why this, not that.
It's just too much to even have that question, which makes sense to me.
There's so many things I don't even know.
There's no point where I can start.
It's a dick cage.
I just thought, what is a dick cage?
So I had to buy one to understand it.
It's all silicone, so it's not actually as traumatic as I thought.
This is an interesting collection.
These are all different slingshots.
This one's really good because you can use the leverage from your elbow.
This is in the demilitarized zone, like food for the military that you know you rehydrate with water.
But I just love this color.
This is like a deathly color, but also can be a super, you know high-end lifestyle, luxury colour too.
Asian beef style strips with vegetables.
Apple sauce, delicious.
Yeah, apple pieces and spice sauce.
But that to me looks like that's what hell would look like.
A sachet like that.
Again, the way I describe the practice best is that I'm trying to process this reality because none of it makes sense.
And once it's processed which I don't think is ever complete it goes out and then I have a dialogue with the outside.
I'm not just in my head, not just in the terror of it.
So it creates space. the necessity to start with acknowledgement and that can be in material form.
There's always screens around in the studio.
So these are from the last series which are images taken from Abu Ghraib.
In the 2000s, when the American soldiers were like humiliating the prisoners and getting them into these weird sexual positions to humiliate them, and that was like on the advent of like this, this kind of camera phone and the selfie.
So that was like a big moment in this kind of cultural imagination and how the image worked, which is something I'm really interested in.
Yeah, I just was struck by the cover.
I haven't even read it yet, but like this kind of tinting just reminds me of like um, I don't know film and porn and like the erotics of it and the erotics of the image.
So just that cover like started this whole process and this research process.
Because the searching through Google images is like the thing, because I get more and more nervous when I can't find the thing and I'm like paranoid, and it's real and it's not.
I don't think you choose being an artist, I think you are.
And you kind of know from early on.
I think it's something about language not being satisfactory and you kind of are unconsciously building our kind of language out of necessity.
So I will say I come from like a broken syntax.
I was born in Malaysia, went to Sharjah, came to London.
And you know, having migrant parents feeling that, this kind of deep sense of responsibility and, you know, trying to go with that vein of making my parents happy in the kind of sciences or medicine, because it was a struggle for both of them to get there.
I think that was never a conscious choice to do, but when I got into college I enrolled myself into Art Foundation and that always felt a bit naughty, but it really opened up a space for me.
But what pushed it what pushed it into that space of like this is the reason you get up in the morning, this is how you're gonna sustain yourself was because of like mental health stuff, slowly going into depression with uh care work.
There was not much like community support.
I didn't even realize i was going into it.
So each time i have a breakdown i have more, more.
I'm more, more resolved with this um vocation, let's say um, but art was never really a thing.
Like my parents are not bourgeois, i didn't go to galleries growing up.
There's no kind of um privileged spot for it.
There wasn't.
It wasn't really a thing like art class, maybe in secondary school because I was good at it and every single artist has a story about this.
Like one teacher points you out and says you know, you got something kid.
So that was like you know, the kind of um start of it and then realizing that's actually the way that you express yourself in the world and how important that is.
Because when I stopped doing that later on, There were consequences to that.
In 2020 and it's also become a big part of my work.
Is I lost my mind?
I think anyone's predispositions in their mental health.
You know, it hit its worst point in 2020 the isolation.
I was alone for, I think, six months, but not speaking like and not seeing people, and I slowly kind of went in.
There were other circumstances, relationship things and stuff in the world.
I remember that George Floyd was happening and the same thing was happening in Palestine, but that never got the recognition.
So I felt like this thing of like I could feel myself slowly losing the thread and not feeling I was here.
Eventually that went into a full-blown psychosis.
That inner world that I pull from and consciously make work from became a very persecutory reality on the outside.
Talking to me,
There's signs, lots of signs.
It's basically like people think that you know That psychosis is like a loss of of brain functioning, but actually you're hyper-functioning.
Everything, the hyper-connectivity of everything and the associations are great.
So everything's a sign.
Everything has a literal meaning.
There's no metaphor.
And if you think about how an artist works, they work from a place of intuitive association and a loose association.
So if they get into a flow state, they can connect this color with this form, this idea, with this concept in history.
So, yeah, I talk about that a lot because I'm still trying to make sense of it.
And a lot of people have had these experiences.
And it was quite a long one.
It was like nine months, like giving birth to myself, a new self.
It's still so far out my baseline.
I need to unpack it through the working and processing.
Because I don't really think it's art.
I mean, it becomes art when it's accepted and taken in as such.
It becomes that.
It's a proof that I exist and I'm received.
Yeah, that makes me feel... When I heard that, that just clicked for me.
If you look around the studio, it's like the news.
It's the TV.
It's the words.
It's the phrases.
It's the thing.
It's the earworm.
I get stuck.
It's fragments of newspaper, parts of doodles from people I love.
This image here, which we can see the original later, is taken from Instagram.
It's wiped on the internet because now we have the biggest digital censorship in history, with a with what's happening in Gaza, where my father's from.
So I was thinking about like painting the exploded field and what that meant.
Exploding meaning exploding matter, exploding brain matter and all these things, which ties back to kind of like a psychotic thinking, because when you're in it, everything's literal.
So if someone says anything like that's a turn of phrase, like you killed it or know something like that, i'd feel it as like really um menacing.
So in an art school i remember the tutors are saying, like you know what is a good hang, as in like what's a good display or what's a good group of artists that you'd want to show your work and hang work up on the wall.
But to me i thought it was like lynching so um, partly to do the fact that i just wasn't in the painting conversation before that um.
So this thing of like who can afford metaphor?
And that becomes, in a painting field abstraction, and abstraction being the most elevated form, something that can hold the sublime.
But then this hystericism in me of not wanting to negate the brutal figurative shrapnel of where it started from, because now that's that's um taken apart enough that you can't really see what you're looking at.
But right now I'm working on, since the war, on this flattened civilian and it kind of took me back.
We go to like my source material here.
This is the kind of original image you see.
It says use template, kind of like that.
And it takes me back to my first kind of experiences of life drawing or death drawing, when I used to draw the dead in my art school and how the fat is just so much more vivid.
The yellows of the fat and the reds of the muscle are so vivid.
And just thinking about that and I found this picture of my dad in the 70s with this red fern and how like yellow, so I just made a kind of connection.
But yeah, so beautiful this fluffy hair.
But just thinking like all the associations that come with it, and then working with this collection at Boymans They have this grid system that old masters would do to transfer an image.
So it's like a study for Christ.
And this thing, similar colors.
I'm just thinking about these kind of connections.
This hand that's splayed out here.
And some Grace Jones.
Just the shininess of her body signifiers of that texture as well, because there's such a vividness that comes beyond the image, with the materiality of things.
I think it's all like an experiment of like empathy, even because at first I was so shocked by it I couldn't compute it that I had to send it to other people to just get their reactions back, because I was like so in it and it's almost like through others.
I can feel the horror because it's such a deadening that's happening with the image and it's reproduction, especially after months and months working with it.
It's become something else but the necessity.
I have to keep working with it and it's and it's power, like there's something about images like this one here, which is the screen, which is like with the American God and the dirty protest, I guess in Abu Ghraib prison.
But there's something about this image beyond the subject that is giving a resistant force outwards.
So I might not know the name, I might not know, I don't have consent from him, but it's like this power that comes from that act of resistance.
It's often said that painting is the kind of slowest form, slowest art form.
And you can't say that of many other mediums.
So again, it's another privileged space.
And I think a lot of the work comes from this fear of know, historical erasure.
But then, with all this saturation of images, now we don't have that singularity of a resistant image that goes beyond the subject, and then you know, this one's been erased.
So it comes from a fear of erasure.
So, thinking about how the image can create affects and its singularity to tie to a universal, i think, is it's really important.
So to start from a place of a wound or disturbance or a negation is so so um, key to staying sane.
Because if you, if you skip over, if you don't show or you don't work with or process,
It's going to come up again like a fistula in society, in your mind, in the family.
So I guess I try to like get into a warm place because I'm dealing with like quite heavy subject matter.
So I try to get into a place of non-judgment and flow which is kind of like a childlike state, I guess.
So I have these, like, stim devices.
One is, like, my glitter lamp light.
I put, like, these words in front of it.
But there's always this kind of mermaid colors that go on top of all the gore.
This is kind of like a reference to an opal, my favorite.
I even have like a real wet specimen opal here.
I don't know if you can see the colors there.
You can catch it.
That holographic bit there.
Like I'm obsessed with eyes and the evil eye.
I even have one here.
I always have a few on my body and then I have some on my ear.
Just for protection.
There's loads in the library.
But I remember like when my mum used to come back from working as a midwife in the kind of communal area there'd always be loads of vogues, dirty vogues, that people are looking through.
And I'd always rip out the pages.
So I put my Cate Blanchett up.
Because I remember as a kid just looking at that and seeing how the women's gaze was different from the men's.
The women's one would be like, I have a secret.
Like this kind of feminine knowledge.
And the men's one would be like a far away, wistful stare.
Like, you know, I'm busy.
So...
Yeah, those things, those things I can't quite place, I'll have them.
Like the laser grid, like the sniper's laser.
These are all kind of like ubiquitous things.
Like there's an advertisement for a cleaner in West London.
But they're all kind of things that have this thing I want to explore.
This horror underneath, just underneath the surface.
But they're so flat at the same time.
So latex has this kind of amber-y, saffron-y tone.
It reminds me of bile, urine, and iodine.
And so it's something that's always threatening to take away the fresh contemporary lightness that I use in my palette.
And it's always dying as it comes out the tree.
So it's doing the same as a grid, it's binding.
It's binding objects and ephemera pigment.
And it's giving it a body, it's giving it flesh.
It's something because not everyone wants to work with it, with me, because it stinks when it comes out.
It has ammonia to emulsify it.
Um, but when it comes out of the tree, it really smells like shit.
And my mum worked on a rubber tapping farm in the virgin jungles in Malaysia growing up.
Like she was working when she was a kid, the flashlight on her head early in the morning.
So it's like, it's, it's a, it's a connection back to that labor and it's not necessarily part of the kind of overt discourse, but when I'm working with it, I feel not so romantic it's a bit romantic I feel like I'm just in this thing that will do what it wants to do regardless of what my intentions of it are is because it's such an unruly unruly thing and so the opposite of say acrylic or or graphic images I'm working with it will rot like a body and it either goes towards petrification which is like stickiness or a mummification which is like a brittleness if you think of a rubber band and I love that it's preserving but dying and dying in specific ways that I can't know so this thing of like anything that's living is also dying and feeling this connection with a type of labor, which might go back to the working class guilt thing, because I remember seeing my team on the floor, like doing a latex in store floor.
I was like, God, have I worked this hard?
My family have worked this hard for me to be on my knees again.
I've got like four other white people doing it as well with me now.
So that was like an image that stuck in my head.
There is like a connection back to what labour means and value as well.
This is how I'd... I'm a terrible colourist.
Well, I'm not even one at all.
But I'd kind of get like these.
These are quite expensive though, so I hate it when I lose them.
I don't know if you can see, let's find one of the green.
There's always a bit of like a green tinge with the red, right?
And I'd like hold that up and think like what that painting needs.
See right there with the Dan Flavin, we've got the purples and we've got the reds.
Just need to find the yellows.
But yeah, these colors are more important to me than the primaries.
So these bile, bruised, kind of yellow, acidy tones.
And I'd often like the same, you know?
But that's how I'd pick colors.
I literally have to reference like this and think what it needs because my brain thinks in layers.
Being you, being in the space, just being here is political.
I'm breathing right now because we are in this world.
I thought about this and I thought I'd just come to it when it comes, but I don't know how to answer that.
To me, I think to foreground the methodology and the aesthetics is important.
Everything that comes in are arbitrary contingents, as in, They're things that affect me.
They're arbitrary in that the news comes in.
They're contingent because they've caught my eye.
So it's like, yes, because it exists now.
But no, as in it's not activism.
And that's, you know, a parallel, can be a parallel practice.
I don't think that's what. art's supposed to do.
Art is something that doesn't have function, but is a proof of our subjectivity, you know, and singularity, but also ties to something that is universal.
So this universalist gesture painting, it's incredible because it can affect and speak to the universe what comes from a singular position, that of the artist and their hand or their thinking.
So that to me is something so beautiful.
You can't make that connectivity.
You can't make a proof of this value and what it means to be human with all this horror, you know, and absurdity.
