Artist Bio

Aya Elena Bundurakis (Greece/Japan) is an artist currently living between Crete & Corfu island, Greece. In her artistic practice, her camera acts as a sensory prosthesis of the body rather than a technological device: a tongue, sometimes with teeth. Her work moves between scientific and tacit knowledge, where agog looking becomes a survival technique in what she calls the techno-soil era. Her practice spans photography, text, video, drawing, and haiku, where her own body becomes both specimen and conduit, channeling collective flesh memory.

Her work has been exhibited internationally, including Fotomuseum Winterthur, Noorderlicht Festival, Fotomuseum Antwerp, K-Gold Temporary Gallery, Metronom Gallery, Marres, the Athens Photo Festival a.o., and has been nominated for awards such as the ING Unseen Talent Award, Bird in Flight prize and Prix Virginia.

^{Aya Elena Bundurakis, Andric Lake, from the series Eating Magma. Courtesy of the artist.}

On Conceptual Framework

Eating Magma approaches dualities through the condition of simultaneously eating and being eaten; as a porous condition in which bodies continuously leak into one another.

Bodies consume the world in order to survive, yet they are simultaneously absorbed, altered and metabolized within it. Within this cycle, nourishment becomes vulnerability and intimacy requires contamination. Eating Magma, inhabits the melting threshold between organism and environment, control and surrender.

^{Aya Elena Bundurakis, Stratum Phalanges, from the series Eating Magma. Courtesy of the artist.}

The work explores this porous continuum by focusing on four “F’s”: my Flesh, Food, Fauna and Flora -these four F’s constantly shifting and mutating into one another. Within this oozing universe we are moving from semi-alive limpets to mushy mycological lumps, and from body surfaces to vacuumed hearts. Are they food, animals, water ~or something else entirely?

^{Aya Elena Bundurakis, Pulpus, from the series Eating Magma. Courtesy of the artist.}

In Eating Magma, agog looking becomes a methodology of symbiosis. By isolating and reframing natural elements, it seeks to activate bodily awareness: to encounter fellow organisms not as distant ecological symbols of a landscape, but as a primal life material that shares structural, tactile, and evolutionary affinity with our own bodies. In a society engulfed in information systems designed for focus and intention to be easily lost, simple observation becomes a tool for a deep ecology awareness, but also, more egoistically, a tool for dealing with the stress of being alive.

^{Aya Elena Bundurakis, Touching Glutinous II, from the series Eating Magma. Courtesy of the artist.}

On Methodology & Rigor

My work often starts with bodily questions or organic sensations that I feel driven to further explore, before them being formally formulated. Such questions can look like: What is the primal form of nurture? Is body a free home that I have been gifted, one I continuously negotiate? How does it feel popping an egg out of your body? How does it feel to have a flesh?

^{Aya Elena Bundurakis, Derma Den, from the series Eating Magma. Courtesy of the artist.}

These organic sensations are stimulus and entry points into research, that land between scientific and academic material, food recipes and methods of nourishment, all-wordly medicine, spiritual and bodily practices, micro & super organisms. Writing is a mother throughοut this process. It allows these diverse and often chaotic materials to metabolise into something that gradually becomes legible.

Making images can enter any time, within this prolonged period of absorption. Sometimes it appears as hard to make sense of what images I want to make, to translate these thought processes. Yet I continue returning to it; I love images for their ability to operate as cross-modal anchors of activating multiple senses and generating an embodied recognition before language arrives.

^{Aya Elena Bundurakis, Amniotic Auras. Courtesy of the artist.}

I also love the unassuming simplicity and flatness of photography, especially as it is perceived in this timeline. In a way working with photography can be seen as a simplistic act to the core, where i borrow the optical technology that has been developed long before me and bring to it my own bodily tools, my eyes, my fingers, my breath, to together make an image, in a what lasts like a few or more moments. I am interested in what I call agog looking : a mode of sustained attention that questions categorisation in favour of relationship. It is a sensory methodology of symbiosis, but also a way of surviving the intensity and stress of being alive.

^{Aya Elena Bundurakis, Den with Drops. Courtesy of the artist.}

The Trajectory

I am trying to immerse myself in the idea that (my) practice is not as a linear progression, but rather a constant swirl that has the possibility to expand, to go deeper, to go faster, slower. In that sense, the current goal of my practice would be to practise presence while in it, and experience joy when possible, and pain as a form of collateral joy too.

^{Aya Elena Bundurakis, photo by artist & photographer Sara Lorusso}

Within my latest research Mud Logic, which follows the European Eel as mentor-species through fractured ecologies of control and desire, poetry functions as my main research methodology. It metabolises scientific data, field observations, ethnographic fragments and my own embodied experience of culturally fractured womanhood into research poetry. I hope to continue deepening and optimising this process, while keeping it raw.

^{Aya Elena Bundurakis, Mud Logic, photo by artist & photographer Sara Lorusso}

Artist Bio

Shumaiya Khan, b.1990 UK. Visual artist specialising in painting, sculpture and installation. BA from Goldsmiths University of London (2013) and MFA from City and Guilds of London School of Art (2025). Held residencies at London's Design District (2023-24) and Soho House (2022). Named one of 99 Future Blue Chip Artists by Artsted (2023), listed in Lucy Corban's (Girl & Gallery) 107 Female Artists You Need to Know in 2023 and Studio Blups' BLUP50 2022 cohort. Featured in The Sunday Times (2023), Spaces magazine (2023), The Art Bystander (2026) and Women in Art (2023, 2026). Exhibited at London Art Fair 2026 with Zarastro Art (Istanbul), Carta Magna (London, April 2026), auctioned at the Modern and Contemporary South Asian Art Department at Bonhams London (2026), 5050Collective, Paris (2026), 'TUFAN' at Whitechapel Gallery (July–September 2026) and Drawing Room, London (August–October 2026).

Your piece featured in the DUALITIES exhibition navigated complex tensions. Can you dissect the conceptual framework behind this specific work and how it responds to the exhibition’s overarching theme?

Even though I’m someone who doesn’t claim full autobiographical dialogue within my work, I understand that I’m partially present within my practice’s existence. Be this as a part of a collective conscience which drives broader metaphysical understanding pertaining to life, or that I can see how my life has taken on themes understood by so many around and before me.

The particular work which was featured in DUALITIES takes learnings from mythology, animism, the human body, divinity and mysticism. Each of these themes shows us that what we initially see isn’t always what is in front of us, causing a multitude of dualities.

The Mountain of Many Sides Takes Two Days to Climb holds both a feeling of an internal world being built and subsequently exposed, as well as posing the audience with a number of choices on how to approach the work itself. In previous and current works where the internal bodily structure is warmer and fattier, Many Sides has a coldness to it, as though my own blood is not running through this work, separate from my own body, appearing as its own entity. A strong contextual reference for this work is the ancient tale of Inanna’s ascent up Mount Ebih: the challenge that greets her in her pursuit up this mountain, and how she ultimately succeeds. To win, she must draw on her learnings from her previous descent into the underworld. My work, as such, feels to be a record of mythic interpretation.

^{Installation/Painting/3D. Double-sided. Oil, salt, ribbon and cotton muslin drape on suspended, folded canvas. Hangs on Devonshire steel reinforced burnt birch spear. 240 x 340 x 25cm (inc support), 180 x 330 x25cm (main body). Installation shot shown with ‘Two of Wands’ (two spears at back) and ‘Seven Apples for Seven Heavens’ (porcelain apples on ground).}

This work was created at a time when, for me personally, there was a push and pull between the internal and external environment/body. A metaphysical sensation of growing or pulling away from your skin, forming a new body, and learning how to inhabit this sacred space again. In some regards, the making of this work was the making of my own skin, and the coldness of the overall colour may be blood which has not yet been fed oxygen. The duality of life and death, oxygen and carbon, a root and a branch, muscle and stone, the body and the soul.

I could say all my work contains multitudes, or dialogues between states which extend beyond spoken language. I am drawn to an Islamic teaching that the physical body is tied to its metaphysical existence, and that for one to know themselves is to go inwards, release and build from within, which then is unveiled in a physical form. There’s also a deep belief that gnosis (knowledge) enters through the physical heart. This may point to my fascination with mythologies and quantum physics. I often wonder: in how many other forms, across billions of different perceptions, can we exist? I believe personally that all things, animate or otherwise, keep a record, and I often think about how this is portrayed through records such as artefacts, imagery, sound and the spoken word, through interaction.

^{Shumaiya Khan, I made you with two hands.}

The technical execution of your work requires a highly specific approach. Could you walk us through your methodology? How does your chosen medium and physical process actively reinforce your conceptual intent?

Whenever I’ve been given free rein to create something for a show, I tend to think about how I can expand the language of my practice. What I mean by this is where, or how, my recurring instinctual forms can continue to grow and live beyond more traditional substrate confines.

In 2025, I made this work for my MFA graduate show, knowing that folds, physical suspension, and a demand to explore the work from multiple angles were all physical requirements for my practice. This form in particular is double-sided, with multiple folds made possible by an excess of ribbon, which creates both physical and psychological tension. The work itself is held up by a burnished, steel-reinforced birch spear, allowing the work to become multidimensional and ‘stand’ by itself, alluding to existence as an entity, something or someone that can stand in the way of a mythic path. All my materials are naturally processed via pressure: the burning of spears, weaving of canvas, production of oil, and extraction and making of alloyed metals. If I’m going to make work about a metaphysical connection to an intense and concealed natural world, then all my materials must also have some contextual link to that same world.

^{Shumaiya Khan. Seven Apples for Seven Heavens. Porcelain.}

During this time (2024–25), I set myself the requirement of creating more immersive spaces by incorporating sculpture, which could stand on its own as standalone work, to build out installation spaces. As the year went on, my stretched substrate works began growing their own forms, which mimicked growing life, and this slowly intertwined with how the substrate the oil paint sat on could appear and be physically supported.

There was always a question of how my works physically interact with their space. For many of my wall- or ceiling-supported works, I had an obsession with the pieces connecting to the ground, to ensure the audience and the work itself share the same physical environment, so that an audience feels they can walk up to, or into, the work itself. This idea of shared space is linked to another contextual thread in my practice: the alchemical addition of salt in oil paint, as we humans also contain both fat (oil) and sodium (salt) within us, curating further the spaces both we and my works occupy. You could say this forms a mirror to how I see broader humanity residing within all our environments, or at least where I go often.

^{Shumaiya Khan. Flesh of the Palm, 2026.}

In terms of how this particular work has influenced my current practice, the forms which appear in my work are slowly becoming more structured, layered deeper and less ‘immediate’. I see a lot of my work being built from a position of power and devotion to a divine force. That notion requires care and conviction.

^{Shumaiya Khan. Two of Wands.}

Much of your practice challenges traditional boundaries within contemporary art. How do you see your current body of work responding to, or perhaps disrupting, the current cultural landscape?

I read this question and laughed a little, because while yes, I understand my practice can challenge or trigger conversations and expressions that I feel a more comfortable, typically Western society doesn’t necessarily want to understand or entertain. I think something I’ve always aimed to do through my practice is to invite the act of creating to a point beyond what we initially thought was possible, or that we were capable of. What this particular expression could feel or look like, what it could bring out of ourselves, how we embrace the body, a soul’s alchemical journey, and even how we respond to intense colours and environments.

^{Shumaiya Khan. Two of Wands.}

I’ve learnt, maybe I always knew, that my work, although abstract, is inherently political. My works carry a very active energy, made by an Asian diaspora woman who curates a spiritual passageway through her works. The forms and textures are visceral. Everything, although structured with intent, is a lot. There is an ever-present questioning of symbolism. These themes are not light.

In the age of capitalism, where value is placed on what can be bought or obtained, and people are tired, it can be overwhelming for some to engage with how they personally relate to broader philosophies. We have seen how capitalism, generally in the West, has tried to monopolise on spirituality, bypassing the lessons needed to obtain that peace and calm. So I understand fully if someone approaches my work and feels that the visceral energy within it translates to ‘trauma’ rather than ‘celebration of life’, because that very vocabulary is missing from how we are taught to engage with spiritual and mythic spaces in today’s society. It’s said that Western psychology doesn’t always work because it fails to initiate alchemical direction within oneself, so we relapse back into a hurt or trauma because that is the only part of the self we recognise. In alchemy, however, we’re taught to create from that healed space via restructuring and actualisation of a path, building worlds, i.e. something akin to Inanna’s conquering of Mount Ebih.

A good reference for me is Audre Lorde’s essay ‘Uses of the Erotic’. Lorde shares that eroticism exists at the centre of all women as a large creative reservoir, and can exist only for oneself. That the feeling and power of the erotic goes beyond what it has been limited to, i.e. sexuality, and is only activated when shared with or for another, mistaken for pornography and the performing of desire, rather than embodying the moment itself. Every time I create, in my fullest expression, joy, generosity, life and sensuality pour out, existing within their own right. To me, red is the colour of life and conviction. The colour of oxidised blood, iron ore, lava, heat. The fullest of things. I want to carry on making in my fullest.

^{Uses of the Erotic: The Erotic as Power by Audre Lorde.}

As an artist whose work is gaining critical international traction, how do you foresee your practice evolving next? Are there new mediums, scales, or theoretical territories you are preparing to explore?

Currently, I have work on show at Whitechapel Gallery and another on view at Drawing Room in London, August through October 2026, and previously auctioned work at Bonhams South Asia. Off the back of this current institutional direction, I’m aiming to continue working with other institutions and ambitious commercial spaces (curators/galleries) to realise more ambitious, research-driven projects. Not only do I paint and sculpt, but I also write, a practice I’ve taken a break from for the past few months while I research and focus on making more physical work.

Whether or not I have the ideal settings, I want to keep creating larger installations, consisting of multiple separate works which come together to create their own, and/or echo established, mythologies. I’m currently making a series of porcelain objects which connect to the human body and plants, and starting on a few more multi-panelled and loose suspended works. In terms of scale, I think each individual work will tell me what scale it needs to be made at. Recently I’ve started enjoying making smaller works alongside massive pieces. There’s something really intimate and solitary about these works, which play off my really big 3m paintings.

I do see myself creating immersive environments, working with others across different, typically analogue, mediums. I’m hoping to embark on a few residencies in the near future, hopefully in Asia and southern Europe, to explore spiritual and mythic histories, in particular spiritual resonance in plants, and how this echoes out in society today: what stories remain true, and how this feeds into art and other things we consume. I have scheduled time to write and make a small, limited-edition book reflecting where my practice is at the moment, with an estimated release by the end of this year. I may turn this into a bi-annual record for myself.

^{Emperor Dowager Cixi, photographed by court photographer Yu Xunling in 1903}

Dawn approaches and Emperor Dowager Cixi’s team of beauticians are performing her five-step daytime nail routine: “泡沫拍吸戴“ — soaking, lathering, patting, drying and wearing. As a prerequisite, her nails were (impractically) grown for years to an astounding length of more than four centimeters. She dons her three-inch long gold filigree set with jade, dragon carvings, and kingfisher feather. Worn on the fourth finger and the pinky, sometimes on both hands at once. The Qing dynasty nail guard (护甲套, hùjiǎtào) was not jewellery in the decorative sense. It was a ranking system worn on the fingertips. Gold for the imperial family and high-ranking concubines. The more elaborate the craftsmanship, the higher the wearer‘s position. Empress Dowager Cixi held exclusive rights to dragon and phoenix carvings on hers. Why did the Qing dynasty turn impracticality into a marker of prestige?

Historical Background of the Qing Dynasty Nail Guard

Across the dynasties, fingers and hands were viewed through the lens of beauty and class. The Tang Dynasty poet Han Jian composed a poem titled “Ode to the Hands” artfully praising a woman’s hands: “Wrists as white as jade, skin as rosy as a bamboo shoot; tuning the zither and threading the needle, their slender tips gleaming.” (“腕白肤红玉笋芽，调琴抽线露尖斜”). Similarly, the Book of Songs describes fingers as “hands like tender shoots,” emphasising that the beauty of traditional fingers lies in their long, white, and slender shape. To exude beauty and elegance, one ought to grow long nails.

^{“喜溢秋庭图”: Consort Jing wearing a Nail Guard}

While the Qing dynasty nail guard gained eminence through the Qing dynasty (as reflected in contemporary historical soap operas with the emperor’s harems), it was rooted in the Ming dynasty. However, it was not until the Qing dynasty that its usage flourished, with its designs evolving to be more elaborate. Generally, nail covers are between 2.6 and 14.7 cm in length, and are made in pairs, but asymmetrical wearing is popular. During the Qing dynasty, nail covers were often made using a combination of ten different patterns. For example, one cover could feature kingfisher feathers, double happiness signets, and inlaid coral beads, combining three craft techniques.

^{Instances of the various motifs on the nail guard}

Just as the Chinese language is symbolic and represented by logographs, the nail guard was rich in symbolism too. One could find it engraved with Chinese knots, bamboo leaves, the longevity pattern (“寿纹”), Coin pattern (“钱纹”), and the Double Happiness Butterfly pattern, tiding in blessings for the future. (Refer to Figure 2 and 3).

What the nail guard tells us about classism, fashion and manufactured distance.

^{Nail Guard adorned with Pearls in the the longevity pattern (“寿纹”)}

Typically, Imperial women practiced the arts (calligraphy, music, painting, embroidery, etc). leaving the remaining fingers bare allowed them to continue. This was very important as being well practiced in the arts was a way to gain imperial favor and thus prestige. Within the contest of Empress Cixi’s reign, the nail guards of the Qing dynasty implied that the wearer does not need to work, protecting not only the nails but also one’s social class. The significance of Empress Dowager Cixi’s long nails transcended that of ordinary nobles. They were not only for protecting the nails, for aesthetic pleasure, and for flaunting her class, but also for their emotional connection to wielding supreme power.

The nail guards therefore did more than advertise wealth. They manufactured a visible distance from labour itself. Their very impracticality became the point. Every movement, from eating to dressing to writing — required assistance or adaptation, transforming dependence into a marker of privilege. The body itself became evidence of exemption from ordinary life.

Sociologist Thorstein Veblen’s Theory of Leisure Class posited that individuals use conspicuous consumption to signal their class status. In the nineteenth century, the upper echelons wore sartorial clothes items, which implied more discomforting clothes. Haute couture and stiff-fitting clothes was a visual sign that the individual was not suited to more manual labour, and that the wearer had sufficient capital to afford items beyond necessity. Simmel’s Fashion echoes this, claiming that “... fashion represents nothing more than one of the many forms of life by the aid of which we seek to combine in uniform spheres of activity the tendency towards social equalization with the desire for individual differentiation and change.” In this tension between conformity and distinguishing oneself, the nail guard could be continually weaponised to reproduce a noble’s exquisite taste.

The Gendered Dimension of it all

Nail guards were never merely indicators of wealth, they were also instruments in which ideals of femininity were performed and reproduced. In late imperial China, elite women were imagined less as economic contributors than as the aesthetic embodiment of a household’s prosperity and moral refinement. Thorstein Veblen’s observation that women became the “chief ornament” of the household is particularly apt here: the ideal aristocratic woman was valuable precisely because she appeared detached from productive labour.

Like many forms of elite dress, nail guards imposed a subtle discipline on the body. Their exaggerated length rendered many everyday tasks impractical, transforming physical incapacity into visible proof of privilege. The body itself became evidence of leisure. Every gesture—from lifting a teacup to turning the pages of a book—had to be slower, more deliberate, and often assisted. In this sense, nail guards did more than signify status; they cultivated a performance of refinement in which elegance was inseparable from dependence. Femininity was measured not by what a woman could accomplish, but by what she could convincingly appear never to need to do.

A portrait of the Empress Dowager Cixi (1835-1908) painted by Katharine Carl (1862-1938)

Yet, in the case of Cixi, it was also a moment of empowerment in the context of the time. She acted reflexively, to reshape the nailguard not simply as an object that signifies, but also dignifies. In Simone de Beauvoir’s “The Second Sex”, she claims that women are viewed as the other with respect to men. To combat this, a woman must combat the inequalities of the patriarchy “reflexively”, acting in subversion of societal standards. Empress Dowager Cixi held exclusive rights to dragon and phoenix carvings on hers. Wearing guards on both hands simultaneously communicated the highest status of all: that neither hand was needed for anything.

This does not mean that Cixi escaped the gendered logic embodied by the nail guard. Rather, she demonstrated how symbols created to discipline women could also be strategically reinterpreted as instruments of power. Her authority was exercised not outside the visual language of femininity, but through it. The nail guard thus becomes an object of contradiction: at once a technology of patriarchal control and a medium through which one of China’s most powerful women projected imperial legitimacy.

Transcendence of the Qing Dynasty Nail Guard

The Qing nail guard belongs to a much longer history of elite fashion in which inconvenience becomes desirable precisely because it is inaccessible. Corsets that restrict breathing, powdered wigs requiring hours of maintenance, towering platform shoes that hinder walking, or luxury handbags too delicate for everyday use all share the same underlying logic. Their value lies not in utility but in demonstrating freedom from it. This begs the question, has the essence of the Qing nail guard transcended itself in reality today?

^{Karl Lagerfield’s Nail Rings}

While people of the contemporary age no longer grow long nails, the practice of nail care has retained, with nail artists creating coffin acrylic nails. Moreover, international fashion labels have also taken to launching fingertip decorative jewelry. For instance, Karl Lagefield had once designed bespoke fingertip rings for Chanel’s haute couture show. In 2019, Burberry and Nike similarly commissioned Unistella to craft brand-specific nail guards.

Ultimately, as the goalposts for class distinction evolve, so too will the essence of the Qing dynasty nail guard. While its material elements may change, its luxury will not: Luxury has never been about beauty alone, but about making power visible.

Artist Bio

Claudia Koh (b. 1999, Singapore) is a painter whose practice explores the relationship between human experience, the built environment, and the ecosystems that emerge between them. Drawing inspiration from urban landscapes, domestic spaces, and cultivated environments, her work reflects on the ways individuals navigate structures that simultaneously nurture, organize, and constrain everyday life.

Raised in Singapore, a young city shaped by careful planning and continual cultivation, Koh is interested in the tensions between nature and control, intimacy and regulation, and individuality and collective belonging. Through imagined environments that blend architecture, landscape, and domestic life, she examines themes of resilience, care, and coexistence.

Your piece featured in the DUALITIES exhibition navigated complex tensions. Can you dissect the conceptual framework behind this specific work and how it responds to the exhibition’s overarching theme?

In The Magician, duality emerges through the relationship between the human subject and the fish, two beings inhabiting parallel yet distinct ecosystems within the dense urban fabric of Singapore. Rather than existing as separate entities, they become reflections of one another, each negotiating containment, adaptation, and the search for connection within carefully constructed environments. The human figure embodies conscious introspection, while the fish moves through instinct and repetition, together revealing different expressions of the same condition.

^{Claudia Koh. The Magician, 2026. Oil on canvas, 120 x 100 cm.}

The aquarium and the apartment function as parallel architectures of enclosure, blurring the boundaries between sanctuary and confinement, observer and observed, freedom and restriction. These spaces mirror Singapore’s highly planned urban landscape, where systems designed to provide stability and collective life can also shape experiences of isolation and intimacy.

Responding to the exhibition’s theme of Dualities, The Magician proposes that opposing states rarely exist in isolation. Instead, they coexist and continually inform one another. The work suggests that visibility and solitude, care and control, autonomy and dependence are not fixed opposites, but interconnected conditions that define contemporary urban life. Through this quiet dialogue between human and nonhuman life, the painting reflects on how companionship and belonging emerge within environments structured by both support and constraint.

The technical execution of your work requires a highly specific approach. Could you walk us through your methodology? How does your chosen medium and physical process actively reinforce your conceptual intent?

My process always begins with observation. I collect fragments from everyday life in Singapore, from the geometry of public housing and cultivated landscapes to domestic interiors and fleeting interactions between people and their surroundings. I am also drawn to the quiet visual language of Singaporean Chinese homes, where customs, rituals, and everyday objects express an aesthetic of restraint, order, and care. Rather than documenting these places directly, I reconstruct them into imagined environments that feel psychologically familiar rather than geographically specific.

The paintings evolve slowly through layers of oil paint, where I build, erase, and revise the image over time. I think of this process as mirroring the way cities and ecosystems develop through continual adaptation rather than fixed outcomes. The composition is carefully structured, but I leave room for intuition and unexpected relationships to emerge as the work progresses.

Materially, I am interested in balancing precision with softness. Architectural forms establish a sense of order, while fluid passages of paint allow nature and human presence to interrupt that structure. This tension between control and organic growth reinforces the conceptual framework of my practice, where environments simultaneously support and constrain those who inhabit them.

^{Claudia Koh. Finale, 2026. Oil on canvas.}

Ultimately, the physical process is inseparable from the ideas I explore. The gradual accumulation of layers, revisions, and traces reflects the ways memory, identity, and belonging are shaped by the environments we move through. Rather than illustrating these ideas, I want the act of painting itself to embody the quiet negotiation between structure and change that lies at the heart of my work.

^{Claudia Koh. Rainfall, 2026. Oil on canvas.}

Much of your practice challenges traditional boundaries within contemporary art. How do you see your current body of work responding to, or perhaps disrupting, the current cultural landscape?

I don’t think my work is trying to disrupt contemporary art as much as it is trying to offer another way of looking at the world. I’m interested in slowing things down and paying attention to the quiet relationships that often go unnoticed between people, architecture, plants, animals, and the domestic spaces we inhabit. Much of my work reflects the subtle anxieties of postmodern life, where technological advancement and increasing connectivity often coexist with loneliness, emotional distance, and a growing sense of disconnection. Rather than approaching these anxieties through dystopian narratives, I’m interested in how people quietly adapt to them. I imagine environments where different ecosystems exist independently while remaining deeply connected. Human figures, plants, animals, and domestic worlds occupy their own rhythms and identities, yet they sustain one another through companionship rather than dependence.

^{Claudia Koh. Minor Key, 2026. Oil on canvas.}

I hope the work suggests that coexistence does not require uniformity. Different ecosystems can exist in isolation while still forming meaningful relationships, revealing that belonging is often found not through constant interaction, but through the quiet recognition that we are part of a larger network of life. In that sense, the paintings are less about isolation itself than about the resilience and intimacy that can emerge within it.

As an artist whose work is gaining critical international traction, how do you foresee your practice evolving next? Are there new mediums, scales, or theoretical territories you are preparing to explore?

I see my practice becoming more research driven while remaining rooted in painting. I’m interested in expanding my investigation into Singapore’s urban planning and architecture, not only as physical systems but as frameworks that shape the way people think, live, and relate to one another. Public housing policies, for example, have profoundly influenced ideas of community, family, privacy, marriage, and collective responsibility, and I want to better understand how these structures quietly shape cultural identity over time.

^{Claudia Koh. Bird, 2026. Oil on canvas. Close up.}

I’m also interested in how technology increasingly mediates the preservation of life, creating new ecosystems and redefining our relationship with nature. Alongside this, I hope to deepen my research into Asian philosophies of gardening and ecology, particularly ideas of cultivation, restraint, balance, and coexistence. I imagine these ideas expanding into larger, more immersive paintings that continue to explore how the environments we design ultimately shape the ways we live, connect, and belong.

^{Claudia Koh. Stretch, 2026. Oil on canvas. Close up.}

The coffin that could fly

^{Funerary Processions, photographed by Secretan Thierry in “Going into Darkness”}

Have you heard of the coffin that could fly? Carpenter Seth Kane Kwei’s grandmother, who grew up in Teshie, a coastal suburb near Accra’s airport, was enthralled by the mystique of flying. While she spent her time witnessing the whirs of plane engines and their contrails, she never experienced sitting in such a contraption. In the wake of her passing, when Seth built her an airplane-shaped coffin, he not only honoured her dreams, but also completed her journey in her death. This led to the inception of the Fantasy Coffins of Ghana, as we know them today. To Seth, death was not an end in itself, but a celebration of what was, and an actualisation of aspirations.

Yet, who is allowed to be given such a return, and how does such a tradition compare to other parts of the world? In this essay, we seek to unravel the reasons for the Fantasy Coffin’s existence, who gets a good and bad death in Ghana, and what fantasy coffins tell us about the subjective human beliefs of death and life.

History and Context of the Coffins of Ghana:

^{Funerary Processions, photographed by Secretan Thierry in “Going into Darkness”}

The coffins are called “abebuu adekai”, Ghanaian for “proverb box”, ironically with designs conceptualised out of the box — objects the coffins are made to communicate professions, achievements, and unrealised dreams. Strikingly, the coffins themselves are found across faiths in Ghana, eliciting that the coffins communicate an ethnocultural view of death rather than a religious one. According to Thierry, who had done fieldwork on the fantasy coffins in “Going into Darkness”, the coffins are usually accompanied by elaborate funeral processions, where the deceased are placed on a bed and surrounded by songs and buried with cash. After, they are transferred into the coffin and nailed shut. Lastly, the coffin is carried by family members around town, to places that the deceased frequented, before touching the earth. The deceased becomes an ancestor, watching over and protecting the family they left behind, and should arrive well equipped, dignified, recognisable as themselves.

^{Coffin by Paa Joe, depicting a Mercedes Benz Coffin}

With the increased traction of this newfound Ga tradition, these coffins have become a statement piece in itself. Artists such as Paa Joe, Kane’s nephew and second-generation coffin artist based in Accra, have become renowned for their coffins, now housed in museum exhibitions. His Mercedes coffin gained critical acclaim at Les Magiciens de la Terre at the Centre Pompidou (Paris, France) in 1989. Since then, he has evolved into creating smaller box-shaped sculptures. Additionally, Paa Jone has even introduced contemporary symbols such as Air Jordans and Nokias, adapting with the times.

Good Death, Bad Death

Fantasy coffins are often remembered for their exuberance: their improbable forms and playful imagination. Yet beneath that visual spectacle lies a far more exacting question: who is entitled to such a farewell? Within Ga cosmology, death is understood less as a moment of disappearance than as a passage into asamando, the land of the ancestors, where the dead continue to inhabit a recognisably social world. Relationships endure. Status endures. So does identity. Anthropologists studying Ghanaian funerary traditions frequently describe the ancestral realm as an extension of earthly society, one in which the deceased remain embedded within family and community rather than detached from them. Arrival, however, is not automatic. Like any journey, it depends upon the manner in which one leaves.

^{Sardine Coffin which buried a fisherman, photographed by Secretan Thierry in “Going into Darkness”}

A “good death” is one that unfolds naturally and peacefully: at an old age, at home, surrounded by family, having fulfilled one’s social obligations and receiving the appropriate religious rites. Such a death affirms that the individual has completed the moral and social arc expected of them, making them eligible to become a benevolent ancestor who continues to watch over descendants. It is within this framework that fantasy coffins acquire their symbolic force. Far from extravagant displays of wealth, they function as carefully crafted vessels that communicate who the deceased is to the ancestral world. Whether shaped as a sardine for a fisherman, a cocoa pod for a farmer, the coffin becomes a final declaration of identity, dignity and belonging. In death, aspirations unrealised in life need not remain unfinished; the coffin completes the biography that earthly existence could not.

Conversely, the absence of such rites exposes a stark moral hierarchy embedded within death itself. Not every death grants entry into the ancestral realm. Deaths deemed sudden, violent or socially disruptive—including suicide, accidents and historically stigmatised illnesses such as HIV/AIDS — are often categorised as “bad deaths”, rendering the deceased spiritually unsettled and, in many communities, ineligible for full funerary ceremonies. Scholars like Van der Geest have argued that such individuals occupy a liminal position: neither fully integrated into the world of the living nor accepted among the ancestors, their spirits are believed to risk wandering or bringing misfortune upon surviving relatives. This distinction demonstrates that funerals in Ghana do more than commemorate the dead; they actively determine one’s social destiny after death. Religion further reinforces these expectations.

Whether expressed through Christianity, Islam or indigenous African spiritual beliefs, many Ghanaians regard life and death as governed by divine will, believing that healing, deliverance and even miraculous intervention remain possible until one’s final breath. Death therefore becomes not merely a biological event, but a spiritual and communal verdict upon a life completed or interrupted. Fantasy coffins thereby are only privileges reserved for those whose deaths affirm the continuity between earthly existence and ancestral life. The question is not simply whether one dies, but whether one dies in a manner that aligns with society’s grammar.

^{Collection of Fantasy Coffins}

Comparison against other Death Rituals

The fantasy coffin becomes particularly illuminating when placed alongside other funerary traditions around the world, as it reveals that every society answers the same existential question, “What remains after death?” in different ways.

Across much of contemporary Western Europe and North America, funerals tend to emphasise remembrance over continuation. Coffins are deliberately understated, often simple wooden or polished caskets designed less to represent the individual than to respectfully contain the body before burial or cremation. Identity endures through photographs, spoken eulogies, engraved headstones and increasingly digital memorials. While these ceremonies celebrate a person’s life, they rarely suggest that the deceased requires material possessions or visible markers of identity in the afterlife. Rather, remembrance is directed toward those left behind. The body is buried from social life, while memory persists through curated narrative. The coffin, consequently, functions as a practical object rather than a symbolic extension of the self.

^{Chinese Columbarium in Kuala Lumpur}

Across much of East Asia, another philosophy emerges. Influenced by Buddhism, Confucian ethics and longstanding ancestral traditions, cremation has become the predominant funerary practice in countries such as Japan, South Korea and increasingly parts of China and Southeast Asia. In this instance, the physical body is expected to return to its elemental form: quite literally, ashes to ashes. Permanence sought is not the preservation of bodily identity, but the continuation of familial relationships across generations. After cremation, ashes are placed within urns, family tombs or columbaria, while ancestral tablets occupy places of honour within homes or temples. The dead continue to participate in family life through seasonal rituals such as Qingming, Obon or Jesa, where descendants offer food, incense and prayers to reaffirm filial obligations and to ensure their stability in the afterlife. Identity survives because descendants continually remember and perform their responsibilities toward previous generations. In this sense, remembrance becomes an ongoing practice rather than a singular funeral event.

^{Artful Coffins of Ghana, by CBS News}

The Ga tradition offers a striking alternative to both approaches. Unlike the Western tendency to preserve memory through stories, or the East Asian emphasis on lineage through ritual, fantasy coffins insist that individuality itself accompanies the deceased into the next world. The coffin is not merely an object of procession; it is a visual language through which one’s profession, achievements, aspirations and personality remain legible beyond death. In doing so, the fantasy coffin resists the universalising tendency of death itself. Where mortality threatens to reduce everyone to the same biological end, the Ga people proclaim that difference, identity and personal history continue to matter. Death, paradoxically, becomes one final opportunity for self-expression. The result is not simply an elaborate burial custom, but a radically different philosophy of personhood: one in which individuality is expected to survive, not despite death, but through it, and a celebration of life rather than an end in itself.

^{Le Dernier Voyage, photographed by Kenny Germé}

Conclusion

Ultimately, the many ways societies care for their dead are less about death itself than about answering a timeless human question: What, if anything, survives us? The West often locates survival within memory, where photographs, gravestones and stories preserve the traces of a life once lived. Across much of East Asia, continuity resides in lineage, where repeated acts of ancestral veneration sustain relationships between generations long after the body has turned to ash. The Ga tradition, however, differs in imagining survival. Here, personhood remains socially affirmed in death, where one’s identity within society remains: the fantasy coffin becomes the final medium through which identity is recognised, affirmed and carried into asamando. What is ostensibly an eccentric artistic tradition illuminates a philosophy of existence.

By confronting mortality with colour, symbolism and imagination, the fantasy coffins of Ghana remind us that funerary rites are ultimately acts of cultural storytelling. They reveal not only how different societies bury their dead, but also how they define a life worth remembering, whose death is worth honouring and the hope that something recognisably human continues long after the funeral procession has passed.

^{Nazira Karimi, photographed by Zhuldyz Valeyeva}

Artist Bio

Nazira Karimi is an artist and filmmaker based in Almaty, Kazakhstan. Her practice studies the political-historical and environmental transformations of Central Asia, with a focus on the aftershocks of war and broader regional dynamics. She works across film and installation.

Her work has been exhibited in Turandot: To the Daughters of the East, a Collateral Exhibition of the 61st International Art Exhibition of the Venice Biennale (2026); the inaugural Bukhara Biennial Recipes for Broken Hearts (2025); Foreigners Everywhere, the 60th International Art Exhibition of the Venice Biennale (2024); and documenta fifteen, where she contributed to the public program of the DAVRA Collective (2022).

Nazira studied scenography and painting in Almaty and earned her Magistra degree in Vienna in 2024.

She is the editor-in-chief and co-founder of Ruyò Journal, and a founding member of MATA Collective, and an Advisory Board Member of Tamyr Central Asia Art Lab (2026–2028).

Your piece featured in the DUALITIES exhibition navigated complex tensions. Can you dissect the conceptual framework behind this specific work and how it responds to the exhibition’s overarching theme?

It is a seven-part video installation “Hafta” that approaches the idea of extinction not as a single historical moment but as a continuous process shaped by the colonisation of Central Asia. Within this framework, I interweave the history of the region with my own family history.

^{Hafta, photographed by Daniyar Jussupov}

The work consists of seven interconnected chapters, each dedicated to one of the seven maternal figures in my lineage. Because parts of their biographies were absent or inaccessible, the work inevitably moves into a space of fiction. In this sense, imagination and fiction become necessary tools rather than aesthetic choices. I rely on poetic reconstruction.

^{Hafta, photographed by Daniyar Jussupov}

The film was created through a journey I undertook with my mother, Mariam. She was born in Tajikistan after her family fled Kazakhstan, and later she returned with me and my sister to Kazakhstan. This circular movement between geographies became central to the work. Traveling together, we were tracing not only family memory but also the physical remnants of lost ecologies. The landscapes became historical registers of migration. The installation is structured so that seven simultaneous screens allow the viewer to experience these narratives overlapping. This spatial arrangement is important: it suggests a possibility of reparation. Water, both literal and symbolic, becomes a central motif of restoration, returning to places it once withdrew from.

^{Nazira Karimi, Hafta, 2026 (still)}

Within the framework of DUALITIES, the work moves between history and fiction, and between loss and restoration, absence and presence. The duality is not resolved but held open: truth and imagination coexist as equally necessary modes of narration. This becomes especially important when dealing with erased or under-documented histories, where fiction is not a departure from truth but a way of accessing it.

^{Nazira Karimi, Hafta, 2026 (still)}

The technical execution of your work requires a highly specific approach. Could you walk us through your methodology? How does your chosen medium and physical process actively reinforce your conceptual intent?

For HAFTA, the technical structure of the work evolved directly from its narrative logic. I initially created it as a single linear film composed of seven parts, and I realised that each of the seven stories required its own autonomous space. This led me to develop it as a seven-channel installation, where all narratives unfold simultaneously. This decision was not only formal but conceptual. Placing the seven channels side by side felt closer to the logic of memory, genealogy, and time.

^{Nazira Karimi, Hafta, 2026 (still)}

More broadly, my methodology is intuitive and image-led. Before working with film and installation, I was trained as a traditional painter and scenographer, and this background continues to shape how I think. I approach each work as a form of visual narrative or what I sometimes call “visual poetry”. I see the structure before I fully articulate it in words. I also film and edit the films myself because I need to maintain continuity between vision and execution. The narrative always determines the form, whether the work becomes a single-channel film, a multi-channel installation, or something else entirely. The medium is not chosen in advance; it appears from the logic of the story itself.

So in that sense, methodology and concept are not separate stages. The form is already contained in the narrative, and the technical decisions are a way of making that structure spatial.

^{Nazira Karimi, Hafta, 2026 (still)}

Much of your practice challenges traditional boundaries within contemporary art. How do you see your current body of work responding to, or perhaps disrupting, the current cultural landscape?

I’m not fully convinced that artworks, on their own, can disrupt a cultural landscape in any direct or immediate sense. What I can say is that when my work is shown in European contexts, it often functions as a form of re-education or reframing. There is still a lack of awareness about Central Asian histories, as well as about the complexities and violences of the Soviet imperial past. In that sense, the work opens up space for narratives that are often simplified in European cultural discourse.

However, I don’t see this as the only, or even the most important, part of my response to the current cultural landscape. A significant part of my practice is a collective and infrastructural work within Central Asia itself. I am part of the Almaty-based MATA Collective, where we are currently developing projects such as MATAZAÑ, which focuses on improving working conditions for art workers in Kazakhstan. This includes practical tools like a booklet for art workers that outlines rights, labour conditions, and aims to increase legal literacy within the cultural field.

In parallel, I am a co-founder of Ruyò Journal, a platform where Central Asian practitioners can publish, exhibit, and share their work and are compensated for their labor. Beyond visibility, it is also about building an ecosystem, creating paid opportunities, while also developing a space for critical dialogue and knowledge production.

So I think my response to the cultural landscape operates on two interconnected levels: on one hand, my individual artistic work engages with historical misrepresentation in international contexts; and on the other, my collective work is focused on building local infrastructures of support, knowledge-sharing, and economic sustainability for artists in Central Asia.

^{Nazira Karimi, photographed by Zhuldyz Valeyeva}

As an artist whose work is gaining critical international traction, how do you foresee your practice evolving next? Are there new mediums, scales, or theoretical territories you are preparing to explore?

I must say I’m quite a dreamer, and I feel like I’m only just getting started, there is so much more to come. With some of my recent exhibitions, I’ve become increasingly interested in moving more deeply into physical, sculptural installation. That feels like an important direction for me right now, something I want to spend more time developing and expanding.

At the same time, I’ve been carrying a narrative film within me for quite a while. It’s something I feel a strong need to realise, and I am actively working towards making it happen. I think it will allow me to extend my language further into cinematic storytelling. For now, I prefer to let these trajectories unfold naturally. There are things already in motion, but also things still forming internally. So I would say: keep an eye out.

^{Nazira Karimi, photographed by Zhuldyz Valeyeva}

Artist Bio

Born and raised in Agra, the city of the Taj Mahal, Shubhi is the founder and creative director at Object Theory. A deep curiosity, seeded in early childhood, Shubhi has been captivated by stories and how they travel, how they transform, and what they leave behind. This fascination became the foundation of her practice, and a simple realisation its compass: every object has a theory.

The intersection of art expression through paintings, furniture, ornaments, carpets broadly grouped as objects embodying Indian rituals, philosophies and practices in a uniquely Indian design language is the central guiding principle at Object Theory.

Her experiments with creating and curating objects as symbols of art started with a series of sculptures installed in industrial complexes in Agra, made out of scrap from the same industry. These endeavors contributed to the discovery of purpose. To pursue this passion, and get formal education Shubhi went on to study art history, art business, and art marketing at Sotheby’s Institute of Art. To widen her exposure to art at a global level, the past few years have featured intentional visits to world-class museums, galleries, the most insipid backstreets and bylanes, where artisans reside.

Explorations, personal, and professional pursuits across television, print journalism, event design and production, and yoga each discipline has quietly shaped the ethos behind Object Theory.

Curated over two years, Object Theory opened its gallery in Agra showcasing a collection of objects made and found in India. The products portfolio comprised, a section inspired from, and depicting Yoga Mudras, to hand-made tribal artworks, lamps, and furniture created depicting Hindu mythology and the lord Shiva, Indian artworks, Mughal carpets and historical objects from all over the country.

The collection was received with unexpected enthusiasm at both the local level in Agra, and across social media, being noticed and mentioned with celebrated names like 1000 Vases in Paris. With over 90% of the first collection sold, Object Theory is now working towards its next product portfolio with a deeper rigour, curatorial eye and a purpose to raise bars for Indian designing.

The Conceptual Framework: Your piece featured in the DUALITIES exhibition navigated complex tensions. Can you dissect the conceptual framework behind this specific work and how it responds to the exhibition’s overarching theme?

At the heart of Yog Chitta Vritti Niroga lies one of the most common tensions in human experience: the duality between a mind in disturbance and a mind in freedom. This cannot be simply defined as modern anxiety. These fluctuations have been the very core nature of the human mind as this became Patanjali’s one of the first chapters written between 200 BCE and 400 CE.

Chitta means the physical body; Vritti the subconscious mind and Niroga means free of diseases. A mind whose activities are free from disturbance. A practising principle only experienced in deep meditation or on the mat.

This is the duality the piece inhabits: the fluctuating mind and the free mind. Not as opposites that must fight each other into submission, but as two states of the same consciousness, one caught in the noise of the material world, its desires, its fears, its endless accumulation of impressions, and the other resting in something quieter, something more essential. One speaks of force; the other speaks of grace. Yoga, in its deepest sense, is the practice of moving between these two states with awareness.

The piece holds this tension in its form. The spiritual and the material are not separated here they are brought into deliberate dialogue. The three marble inlay panels, worked in semi-precious stone by hands that carry a craft rarely practiced today, translate this sutra into a visual symbol as if ancient philosophy made tangible, meaningful, present in a room. The sculpted legs in teak, rising in the form of the Shivling, root the piece in one of India’s oldest acknowledgements of duality itself: the union of consciousness and energy, the formless made form.

A console table is a functional object. It exists in the material world, in the daily life of a home. And yet this one carries within it a philosophical proposition that the mind need not be stilled into silence, but healed into health. That the spiritual and the material are not opposing forces to be resolved, but a duality to be lived inside of, consciously, with intention.

The piece holds something that is perhaps less visible but equally presents the tension between the ancient and the contemporary. The sutra it draws from is over two thousand years old. The hands that made it carry craft traditions that are centuries deep. And yet the object it has become is a console table, a form entirely of the present, designed to live inside a modern home, beside modern lives. It does not resolve this tension. It insists on holding both.

That is what the DUALITIES theme asked for. And that is what this object, quietly, answers.

Methodology & Rigor: The technical execution of your work requires a highly specific approach. Could you walk us through your methodology? How does your chosen medium and physical process actively reinforce your conceptual intent?

Design, for me, does not begin at a desk. It begins in lived experience in practice, in feeling, in the gut.

The Yog Chitta Vritti Niroga console was born during my yoga teacher training in Goa. It emerged not as an idea I arrived at intellectually, but as something that surfaced through the practice itself through the daily confrontation with the fluctuating mind, through readings that moved from book into the body, through the particular kind of clarity that comes when philosophy becomes something you are actually living. My inspiration is inseparable from my life from the rituals, philosophies, and spiritual frameworks I have grown up inside of.

Mythology, yogic wisdom, ancient traditions, spirituality are not references for me. Growing up surrounded by mythological stories and the rituals and traditions of India has had a great impact on how I design and conceptualise. A concept becomes an object when I have felt it long enough to understand what it truly means before it is born into form.

The translation of concept into material is where the craft enters and here, the choice of medium is intentional. It is argumentative. For this piece, the primary technique is Parchhikari, the ancient art of marble inlay with semi-precious stones that was brought to India in the 17th century when Mughal emperor Shah Jahan commissioned the Taj Mahal, introducing the craft for the first time. Today, the craftsmen are 5th generation artisans who carry the knowledge of marble inlay and continue the work behind the lanes of Taj Mahal.

The choice of Parchhikari was not incidental. While technology has enabled artisans to replicate these designs with advanced machinery, there is a certain intangible essence that only the human touch can bestow; it is in the imperfections, the slight deviations. That soul is present in this piece. The teak legs, carved in the form of the Shivling, carry the same logic. The material, the maker, the method, all of it must be in service of the concept. When they are, the object stops being a product and becomes something closer to what it set out to be: a meditation in form. This is what the console holds, the essence of stillness, of memory.

Cultural Context: Much of your practice challenges traditional boundaries within contemporary art. How do you see your current body of work responding to, or perhaps disrupting, the current cultural landscape?

India is not one culture. It is thousands and some more. Every few kilometres, the language shifts, the customs change, the gods take new names and new forms. There are rituals for the rain and rituals for the harvest, beliefs carried in the way a threshold is crossed or a river is addressed. There are communities like the Gond, who do not separate the spiritual from the natural for whom a tree is not a tree but a living presence, a river not a resource but a relationship. This extraordinary diversity, this ancient and still-breathing wisdom, is what Object Theory is built around.

The disruption I’m interested in is a specific one and it has less to do with the dynamics of the art world and more to do with a gap I find genuinely troubling.

There is a Scandinavian design language that the world recognises instantly. Clean line, considered material, a certain relationship between function and quiet. There is a Japanese design language restraint, negative space, the philosophy of ma, woven so completely into the object that you feel it without being told to. These aesthetics travel. They sit in a home in São Paulo or Seoul and they arrive with full authority, with a coherent worldview behind them. Nobody asks them to justify themselves.

Indian design does not yet occupy that place and I don’t think the reason is that we lack the depth. If anything, we have almost too much of it. The problem is that for decades, the dominant conversation has been about bringing Indian craft up to a global standard, cleaner finishes, more neutral palettes, less ornamentation, as though the path to the world stage requires first shedding what makes the work distinctly ours. It is often interpreted for export, simplified for legibility, decorative rather than substantive.

What Object Theory is trying to do is something different. Not adaptation. Not translation. The work I’m making - the Tapas collection, the Parchhikari console, the forms rooted in Shiva and yogic philosophy or the vase we have designed for Paris Design Week inspired from the Kathak dance form is an attempt to build a design language that is unmistakably Indian in its bones and yet needs no explanation to sit in any room in the world. The same way a Noguchi table doesn’t need to explain Japan to you. You simply feel that something true is present.

That is where I see the disruption. Not in rejecting the global market, but in refusing to arrive at it as a supplicant. We’re early in that project. But I think the objects, when they work, begin to answer it. We think in this manner, that something can be ancient in its root and entirely alive in its intelligence. That a craftsperson in Agra and a collector in Paris can be in genuine dialogue, not a transaction of the exotic. That spiritual philosophy is not ornament, it is the structure, the load-bearing wall.

The Trajectory: As an artist whose work is gaining critical international traction, how do you foresee your practice evolving next? Are there new mediums, scales, or theoretical territories you are preparing to explore?

The most honest thing I can say about where my practice is going is that I have no intention of fixing it in one place. Experimentation is not a phase we are moving through, it is our ethos, our brand language, the thing that keeps the work alive. Our tagline says it plainly: Experimental by instinct.

India offers too vast a universe of concepts, crafts, and mediums to limit ourselves to one. Each collection will ask a different question of a different tradition. The Gond community, Parchhikari, Naga wood carving, these are not a fixed vocabulary but entry points into a much larger conversation that India makes possible. There is enough here to spend several lifetimes exploring, and that is precisely what we intend to do.

The next material move is a deliberate contrast. From the density of wood, we move to ceramics and into a collaboration with artists from the Gond tribal community in Central India. The Gond cosmological tradition is one where the natural world is not a backdrop but language. Every bird, every tree, every river carries a story told without interruption for centuries. In that sense the shift is philosophically precise: from Tapas, the collection of the inner world, we move toward Gond - the outer world of nature, ritual, and ancient cosmology as lived experience. Alongside this, we are beginning a small collectibles section in metal craft. Intimate objects. Things you pick up, turn in your hand, and place back down differently than you found them.

The longer arc is toward design as experienced objects that inhabit space in more complex ways, and eventually, spatial work itself. We are also moving toward global collectors and institutional spaces, not by making the work more legible for export, but by trusting that genuine cultural rootedness travels on its own terms.

On a more personal level, something has shifted in how I relate to the practice. I have arrived at a place where the process holds more meaning for me than the finished object. The conversations with craftspeople, the slow translation of concept into form, the weeks or months a piece takes to come into being that is where I now live as a creative. It teaches me things that have nothing to do with design: flexibility, patience, the wisdom to pivot, the courage to stay. It gives me life, even as I pour life into it.

And when a piece is complete, I find I am able to part from it with a kind of finality. It has its own life now and no longer needs mine. Completing a piece, for me, is something close to a necessary death: a clean separation. The work goes out into the world. I return to the process.

That, in the end, is what Object Theory is not a fixed body of work, but a practice in permanent becoming. Rooted deeply enough to travel anywhere. Curious enough to never stop.

What is the foundational theme or question that drives your current practice?

Can I offer new language to reference the human experience? Can I insert beauty in the unimaginable, in the unexpected, in the overlooked? Can I offer optimism, more tenderness, or a necessary provocation with my work? Can I offer more moments of presence with what I create? Can I bring more simplicity to complexity and more complexity to simplicity?

How does the physical act of creating your work translate the abstract concepts in your head?

I would say this depends on the creative outlet in my process, since I use different media, like photography, film, and writing. I would say 50% of my work exists in my mind, and 50% takes shape on the spot, “on stage.” I see images and compositions I would love to take in my mind; I sketch them on paper, but I’m fully aware that there is that other gap that can only be filled when the camera is in my hand and a person is in front of me. I think you can prepare as much as you want, but I trust a lot in my ability to feel a room, to dance with the person who is in front of me, and discover new shapes together and play with what they are comfortable with. I’m a good improvisor, but it is because I become so present, so focused in the current moment, that I allow what is around me to inform me. I think the “magic” of the creative process happens most in that radical sense of presence with what is in front of you, not only in the “conceptualizing” state in your mind.

I would say this is the case for photography; for film, it is a different process because it often requires more moving parts and a tighter timeline, so there is more preparation and rehearsal for it, more sketching. But even then, I like to leave room for what can emerge in the moment, not only on the sketch.

And when it comes to writing, it is also a very visual process in my mind. Sometimes, the writing comes precisely from the abstract images and concepts in my mind and writing is my desperate attempt to contain them in a physical “body.” Sometimes writing is the only attempt to capture what I know an image will probably fail to capture. Writing for me is often the act of painting a picture, without images.

How do contradiction and balance naturally play out in your everyday creative routine?

I live for contradiction and contrast. I love high energy, boldness, directness, and I also love slowness, silence, poetry. My life and my creative process are swimming between those two extremes and polarities, and that swimming between these two territories gives me balance.

I do kickboxing and moan at the punch of a sandbag, and I also go into Buddhist silent retreat. I find both cathartic in different ways, on one end I get to release whatever primal, explosive force is in my body without inhibitions, and on the other I practice groundedness, restraint, compassion.

All of this informs my creative process. I work on projects for brands that require a much more strategic part of my brain; I’m building systems and structure. Others require me to create language that is shrewd and direct, like a kickboxing punch. And then there are other projects that are more personal which allow me to tap into that poetic nature that exists within me, and to tap into her I need to cultivate all that groundless and silence I mentioned before.

These contrasting sides all belong to me, and they feed into each other. That is why I’m inspired by contrasting creative work.

When someone steps in front of your work for the first time, what immediate shift in perspective or emotion do you hope to provoke?

Talking about my love for contradiction, I hope something softens inside them, and something else tenses. I hope their heart softens upon seeing a certain reality reflected in a different light, or that it softens because they rediscover a new sense of beauty. And at the same time, I hope something tenses because they are provoked to reconsider something anew. That feeling of “Oh, I hadn’t thought about it in that way.” I hope they tense up, because some discomfort is healthy and means we are learning something that pushes us outside our inner bubbles.

What is the foundational theme or question that drives your current practice?

In the last few years I’ve spent a lot of time interested in dissecting the way computational media are constructed. Game engines, 3D models and artifacts specific to digital world-building are recurring subjects of investigation in my work - treating these systems not as tools but as objects of inquiry. I work a lot not only on questioning these frameworks from a technical standpoint but also a cultural one. I draw a lot from my personal background and upbringing where questions of identity and belonging were always present.

As an example, my project “Is This the Middle East?” (2020 present) is an investigative look at video games based in the SWANA region. During COVID I revisited games I hadn’t played since childhood, and noticed patterns I weren’t able to notice when first playing them. One of the first things I realized was how a lot of these games use Arabic writing to set the scene, yet often the writing is gibberish or meaningless. It was a good example of who these games are intended for and how decoration can pose as culture. Being Tunisian and growing up in Europe placed me in a strange position of both consuming and being represented by the same media, which in turn allowed me to notice patterns that might be invisible to someone else, and even myself as a child.

On a second aspect I was specifically interested in the way these games are made from a technical standpoint, and how someone had physically built the environment of the game. To explore these ideas I started archiving screenshots of as many games claimed to be set in the SWANA region in hopes of answering the question of “what is the Middle East according to these games”. Screenshots were useful but ultimately I was interested in the physical 3d data in the games - the models themselves.

After a lot of R&D I came up with a system to “extract” the models from their games using photogrammetry (a technology consisting of taking hundreds of screenshots to reconstruct 3d environments). This allowed me to archive the scenes in a much more dynamic and photographic way, similar to a photojournalist. Instead of still screenshots I could build an entire library from 3D models extracted from games. The result was initially a website installation where users could interact with all the artefacts I gathered. Later it was also developed into VR, video and print. I’m always adapting the project to where it’s going to be shown. A key part of the process was introducing a sense of distortion -- by extracting these scenes from their original context they begin to feel uncanny. I’ve had many people ask me what they were looking at - real photographed places, illustrations or something completely different.

How does the physical act of creating your work translate the abstract concepts in your head?

My practice is very research-driven and usually starts with a research question. But equally, I’m not an academic or anthropologist - I’m an artist first so the way I convey my ideas is through the work itself. My work is largely influenced by photography with image-making at the core of my practice. I rarely use a physical camera but my work is always shaped and borrowing codes from traditional photography. My relationship to image-making started young from skateboarding. It gave me a very specific visual culture that skateboarders know all too well. I carry this way of seeing the world and directly or indirectly it’s impacted my work today.

My series How to Build a Mosque from my project dome.prefab uses 3D rendering to reframe how religious architecture is translated into digital building systems. What’s interesting is that mosque models are freely available on asset marketplaces. You can download one the same way you’d download a chair or a lamp. In that process of commodification something gets flattened. The Mosque becomes a prop, stripped of its material and cultural specificity ready to be dropped into any scene. The Mosque is used as a lens for a broader question of how digital systems handle material and cultural forms, and how these are circulated, distorted or reshaped. Similar to my work in “Is This the Middle East?”, I use custom-built techniques to extract, virtual assets from game engines, Google Earth, or purchased models from asset marketplaces.

So I’m constantly juggling between research and unorthodox ways of image-making to convey my research questions, and it always starts off with a genuine curiosity of how a pipeline works and the code behind it. I sometimes also step away from the screen. For the last year I’ve been working on a custom engraving technique to explore translating codes unique to digital worlds on material surfaces. “Seasonal Caprice” is a series of engravings where I erase dry pastel on paper using a lasering machine. I use Google Earth terrain data to explore how computational systems render the world, where a highway in Los Angeles and a mountain peak in the Alps are processed identically. Seasonal Caprice places this within a long history of landscape image-making, from the Capriccio paintings of Canaletto and Guardi to the satellite composites of today.

How do contradiction and balance naturally play out in your everyday creative routine?

There are several ways I could answer this question. Like I mentioned before, my practice sits between research and image-making intended to be experienced. I believe visual language is often the most direct way to communicate an idea, which is why I approach my work first and foremost as an artist.

At the same time, I’m constantly negotiating a contradiction around the role of aesthetics. My work often deals with hidden politics and questions of representation, and I’m very aware of the paradox of producing images that are visually compelling while also critically engaged. In Is This the Middle East?, which examines representations of the Arab world in video games, the resulting images have their own distinct aesthetic presence. There is always a risk that the viewer engages primarily with the surface of the image, which can unintentionally reinforce the very stereotypes the work is trying to question. For that reason, framing becomes crucial. In that project, I used an ironic title as a first point of entry, already asking the viewer to question what they are about to see.

In How to Build a Mosque, the dynamic is slightly different. Here I work with 3D assets that are constantly downloaded, exchanged, and circulated across platforms. In this process, the model itself can become altered or stripped of its original context through repeated reuse, a kind of feedback loop where geometry and texture gradually lose clarity or meaning.

More broadly, one of the recurring themes in my work is the relationship between physical environments and their computational representations. I’m interested in what happens in the space of translation between the two, and what kinds of meaning are produced there. For example, while working on Is This the Middle East?, I became interested in collecting digital artefacts from games set in the region. It was interesting to find 19th-century Orientalist paintings embedded within these virtual environments, images that originally circulated in European art contexts, reappearing inside games produced largely by Western studios. That layering of historical imagery inside contemporary digital worlds revealed to me how representation doesn’t simply evolve, but gets continuously recompiled and recontextualised.

When someone steps in front of your work for the first time, what immediate shift in perspective or emotion do you hope to provoke?

I’m interested in proposing a shift in how we look at images, in the broadest sense, not necessarily in a purely critical way, but in a more speculative one. In Is This the Middle East?, I wanted viewers to step back and reconsider how video games are constructed visually. We’ve become so accustomed to their language that it often feels invisible, and in gameplay it can be difficult to step outside of that immersion, especially given how immediate and continuous many gaming environments are.

By extracting and isolating elements from these games, I try to present them from a different angle. Once removed from their original context, familiar scenes, Arabic text that becomes meaningless, repeated orientalist imagery, architectural fragments, environments shaped around war, begin to read differently. That decontextualisation is what I’m offering the viewer, a way to highlight patterns otherwise unnoticeable.

Ultimately I’m interested in making visible what usually stays hidden -- both the politics of representation and the technical systems that produce it.

Q: If you had to name a single theme, proposition, or persistent curiosity that keeps driving your creative work, what would it be?

A: I’m curious to see, as my mindset shifts and my thinking on life deepens, what state my work might eventually reach.

Over more than a decade of creative work, I’ve made over a hundred Dunhuang-themed caisson-pattern Tuanshan. I went from the smug satisfaction of finishing a simple Tuanshan in a day, to the deep contentment I feel now after months of deliberation over a single piece. Within a few inches of space, there’s endless transformation, unfinished threads of thought, themes that embroidery can never exhaust.

As an embroidery artist, I shouldn’t simply remain in the present. Instead, I should fold the techniques I’ve encountered into this era, push forward how embroidery is expressed and shared, and explore more of what embroidery can become.

To me, embroidery is like a diary. It records the growth of a woman obsessed with this craft, examined from a third-person perspective, a state of selflessness. Of course, I’d love to flip ahead to the final page and see how the story ends. But embroidery has taught me to wait patiently, to wait quietly for the flowers to bloom.

Q: Is there a question you keep circling back to through different pieces of work, without ever fully answering it?

A: Mending and stitching shut the rift in how East and West understand embroidery, building bridges with needle and thread so that, without a single word, you can grasp what I’m trying to convey in an instant. Eastern and Western aesthetics have long shaped one another, and in the process of creating, I’m searching for that fusion, transforming the unfamiliar or the deeply ingrained into a beauty that knows no borders. Of course, this is a question I still can’t fully answer today, because I’m stumbling and feeling my way through the exploration myself.

Q: What is the relationship between the medium you choose and the content you want to express?

A: A lot of people think of medium as simply material, the beads, silk threads, crystals, Tuanshan I choose are all just “tools” in that sense. But to me, the medium is an interpreter standing between embroidery and myself, telling the world that embroidery can speak this way too.

Q: During the creative process, how does the actual hands-on work of making, adjusting, and experimenting help translate the ideas in your head into a finished piece?

In every moment of joy, anger, sorrow, or longing, I step outside of it and let embroidery do the translating.

I don’t think with my mind, I test with my hands. The length of every stitch, the direction of every bead, the way different materials come together, all of it starts from the heart, a pure expression of the self beneath the self. Sometimes I’ll just stare at a blank piece of fabric, and I can see what it’s going to become. The basic lines flash before my eyes in an instant, and once I trace them, something unexpectedly delightful emerges.

I love this process. It lets me work more freely, not just chasing what’s beautiful. Of course, the process is never smooth sailing either. It usually comes with tearing things apart and rethinking them, but the direction never changes. Every time I pick up the needle, it’s a revision and a rebirth of the idea itself.

A: This exhibition is themed Dualities. In your everyday creative work, how do states like opposition, contradiction, balance, and tension show up? Do they shape the way you work, how you think, or how you understand the world?

These days, when I start a piece, the starting point is never “I want to simply combine two techniques.” It’s not endless competition, and it’s not what people now call “lying flat” either. It’s having a goal and moving toward it.

If art became like a competitive sport, it would represent opposition between people. What makes art compelling is precisely that you can appreciate the work purely for what it is, with no concept of winning or losing. When art-making is driven by self-interest, it fills with distracting noise, that pull of wanting this and also wanting that, and it’s all too easy to drain your own talent dry that way.

Staying clear-headed and aware, this is what Wang Yangming meant when he said: it’s easy to defeat the bandits in the mountains, hard to defeat the bandit in one’s own heart. My attention gets pulled back to this again and again throughout the day, because there’s a wish living in my heart, to leave more beautiful embroidery work behind for this world.

When people from outside question whether I’m not traditional enough, nothing I do is about standing in the West to challenge the East, or standing in tradition to resist the contemporary. I’m simply standing on my own heart, putting the needle in honestly, recording how embroidery is changing in this era, leaving behind, like so many artists before me who are now gone, a trace of beauty for this world. Harmony is what matters most. Once you hold to that, opposition, contradiction, balance, and tension all settle back toward a kind of mean. Create from a peaceful state of mind, and whatever results follow will be beautiful, just like embroidery itself.

Q: When a viewer stands in front of your work for the first time, what do you most want them to feel? Some kind of emotion, a new way of seeing, a question, or a shift in understanding? If only one moment could stay with them, what would you want that moment to be?

I hope that as they look at my embroidery, they can also feel the love I hold in my heart for it. Patience paired with awareness, a state of being that’s resilient and optimistic. To wake yourself up, no matter how rough the road has been, there’s still, deep inside, a longing for beauty. If you can stand in front of my work and feel curious, or feel like you can’t wait to share it with a friend, then that seed of beauty has already taken root and sprouted in your heart.

I am officially having a crisis of faith regarding minimalism.

It starts in design school, doesn’t it? The brainwashing is efficient. You are sat down and told that clean lines are virtuous and ornament is a lie. If you dare to decorate a building, you are hiding its truth. We are trained to worship the International Style, that endless parade of glass, steel, and empty space, as if it’s the only sophisticated way to exist.

My mother went on a solo trip to Taiwan last week, and true to the Asian Mom archetype, she has been sending me a strict quota of about 100 photos a day. But while scrolling through this barrage of JPEGs, I realized something depressing: the new stuff is boring. My eyes just glazed over the glass boxes and generic high-rises.

Instead, I found myself zooming in on the background details, specifically, the 1970s shophouses with those rusted, chaotic, absolutely beautiful iron grilles covering the windows. Maybe I’m just getting old and sentimental, but lately, I’ve been doing the exact same thing back home. I find myself wandering around Singapore’s traditional shophouse districts(Blair Road & Chinatown), totally liúlián wàngfǎn (流连忘返), lingering, reluctant to leave, and obsessed with the textures we’re slowly erasing in modern architecture.

To an architect, these Iron Window Grille probably look like “cages.” They’re aggressive symbols of crime. But standing there, looking up at a grille bent into the shape of a mountain or a blooming flower, I didn’t feel unsafe. I felt delighted? It was a stark realization: what we were taught to dismiss as clutter is actually just personality.

We need to talk about Adolf Loos.

If you want to know why our cities feel so sterile today, you have to blame this guy. In 1908, the Austrian architect published Ornament and Crime (Ornament und Verbrechen), an essay that effectively ruined modern aesthetics for the rest of us.

Loos believed ornament was a sign of moral regression. He famously wrote that the evolution of culture is synonymous with stripping ornament from everyday objects.

The audacity is breathtaking, really. His argument was explicitly Eurocentric, comparing ornamentation to the tattoos of “primitive” tribes, implying that a civilized modern person has evolved past the need for beautiful things. This ideology bled out from Vienna, infected the Bauhaus, and eventually took over the architecture schools of Asia. We were told that “Modern” = “Minimal,” and that the “Iron Window Flowers” (Tie Chuang Hua) of our own heritage were just kitsch.

Fortunately, the Asian homeowners of the 1970s didn’t care about European theory.

During the economic boom, families moving into new apartments had a very real need for security bars. But they refused to make them invisible. Instead of accepting the International Style box, they remixed it. While Loos declared ornament a crime, the Asian auntie decided it was a necessity.

They commissioned blacksmiths to twist steel into coins, landscapes, and text. They turned a security feature into a status symbol. It was Vernacular Modernism at its best, using industrial materials to tell traditional stories.

Next time you spot a rusted grille, take a closer look. Here are the three most common dialects you’ll see on the street:

• The Flex (The Mount Fuji)

  • The Look: A triangular peak, often topped with a white-painted snow cap.

  • The Secret: It’s usually a hangover from Japanese colonial influence or just a homeowner dreaming of travel. It’s a technique called “borrowing a view” (shakkei), you create a landscape on your window because the actual view outside is probably just your neighbor’s laundry.

• The Trap (The Coin)

  • The Look: Interlocking circles or squares with holes.

  • The Secret: This is spiritual capitalism. It’s literal Feng Shui architecture. Placing coin symbols on the window was believed to trap wealth inside the home, physically preventing your fortune from flowing out the window.

• The Brand (The Typography)

  • The Look: English letters or Traditional Chinese characters twisted into the grid.

  • The Secret: In the 70s, your house was your resume. A music teacher might have a grille bent into a treble clef; a wealthy family might weave their surname right into the steel. It was the original Personal Branding.

Adolf Loos might have won the battle for our skylines, most new buildings are still glass and steel clones, but he didn’t win the culture. These iron flowers prove that we don’t have to live in the sterile boxes we were sold. Design can be functional and symbolic. It can be secure and beautiful.

So the next time you feel the urge to “clean up” your work too much, just remember that these Iron Window Grilles are here to remind us that intentional clutter is good for your soul.

I get suspicious when everyone agrees that something is good.

Whenever a brand, a design language, or a beige minimalist aesthetic feels unanimously affirmed, my attention drifts away from the object. I stare at the agreement around it. Why does this feel so obvious to everyone? When did we all sign this contract?

I question the consensus.

Who’s speaking.

Where it’s published.

Which institutions are funding the launch party.

Without that context, it’s easy to mistake authority for neutrality. Or a marketing budget for Truth.

In August last year, I traveled to Inner Mongolia for work, and shortly after, I went to Egypt on holiday. They weren’t supposed to be connected. I certainly didn’t plan on having an existential crisis across two continents, but experiencing them back-to-back broke something in my brain.

Inner Mongolia hit me with a specific kind of embarrassment. It is part of China, yet culturally it sits worlds away from the Han, urban, hyper-efficient environment I was born in. Being there made me realize that for all my “cultural awareness,” I was wearing blinders. I had been looking right past a profound, ancient logic simply because it didn’t fit the frame I was taught to see through.

Intelligence there ignores modern categories. Life organizes around land, movement, and survival. Tian and Di, sky and land, are structural realities regarding balance and responsibility. The horses, sheep, and cattle, they are collaborators. I watched systems operate simply because they worked, with zero need to explain themselves to a Western audience or justify their existence in a design manifesto.

Then came Egypt. If Mongolia made me feel ignorant, Egypt made me feel so incredibly small.

The pyramids are annoying like that. They make it very difficult to hold onto your cute little narratives about “progress.” You look at the mathematical precision and the engineering from thousands of years ago, and then you look at our current definition of innovation, and you start to wonder if we’re actually the primitive ones.

The absence bothered me the most. Despite Egyptian knowledge being foundational to mathematics, engineering, and cosmology, it barely registers as a living reference point today. On the flight back to Singapore, I stared out the window, exhausted, wondering what the world would look like if we hadn’t let that lineage fragment. If our sense of “modernity” hadn’t been hijacked by a handful of European cities in the 20th century.

I let the contradiction sit there. I stopped trying to force everything into a neat grid. (Terrible for my anxiety, great for my brain.)

Those two trips ruined my ability to be satisfied with the status quo. They dismantled the idea that culture evolves in a straight line, or that “good taste” is a universal standard.

They also forced me to look at my own background. Growing up across China, Singapore, and the US, and later being educated in a protected, elite art school environment, I realized how much of what I absorbed as “neutral” was actually just... inherited.

So, Design Beyond Eurocentrism started there. It was the only way I could give language to the discomfort I had been carrying for years.

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