Process
I began working on these paintings when Jessica and I
were contemplating having children. This of course brought
many things into consideration such as the social-political
climate at present, our welfare and the future.

This also made me revisit previous works I had created,
such as the immaculate politician, perpetual child and
the evil-good doer, which represented an aspect of the truth,
there exists others.

Everything has at least two aspects to it
and this creates a need to find balance, between now and then,
the urgent and the important and essentially what my sensibilities lead me to.

This force me to examine the feasibility of my career as an artist
and what it means, because almost every aspect of life has a
connection with commerce, and commerce is never simple.
Much like life.

The beginning and now
It started in 2005, in a workshop on using the human body as
visual motif and how various ideologies and political forces
shape attitudes toward our bodies. While it dealt mainly with
identity, this offered me an avenue to view a more intricate
working of society in this country and how it all weaves into
one entity called Malaysia. It was the beginning of my quest
for truth.

Coming close to three years, what I had hoped for turned out
quite the contrary. Apart from being layered and complicated,
society is further tempered by the complexities of life. There
is not one way in working it out, but many, the fact remains
that truth is contained in vario-aspects.

What appears to be justified in one aspect is not in another,
and in this age of reason, humanity is faced a questionable
challenge to make sense of everything.

Why?

Logic and life
While logic ensures a consistency parallel to scientific methods,
life is not something we can predict, not when the only constant
is change.

Through processing the time and space that I belong to and the issues
surrounding it, these works, have distilled into intimate accounts
of my time, reflecting the climate from the perspective of matters that
are closes to me. While it does show my smallness, it also reveals
a larger, universal need for care and love.

Mercurial times
In these times everything is challenged, companies designed
to last 100 years crumble, ideologies are replaced or amended
and the human race takes on the challenge of holding
on to old values while in the relentless pursuit of progress and change.

Values are challenged constantly and the outcome, becoming
ever more obtuse. We no longer have the convenience of oneness,
it is replaced with division and the revelation of mixed motives.

These are mercurial times.

The works
The pieces are evolving spaces on which I balance a cocktail of
emotions and observations. In the process, I lay out disparities
in perspectives, made up of actual and perceived truths,
focusing more on how it feels like to be human, an artist, friend,
husband and hopefully as a father.

I believe that reason will do more damage to humanity as it continues
to seek answers, It takes over much of what is needed to be felt.
The fact remains that there are no empirical evidence to how life
will become, or how good things will get.

In spite of breakthroughs and revolutionary ideas, there will always
be suffering, as there will be joy and happiness. There will always
be conflicts and resolutions caught in a constant oscillation and the art
I create reflect how it affects me, in your space.

In my smallness I find the magnitude at which life operates,
and only in its daunting shadow can I share my stories.