Making sense of the world through paint and prose

This is where I collect what I can’t quite say out loud — the questions that linger, the patterns I notice, the stories I feel in my body before I find a way to articulate what it is. Sometimes it comes out as a painting. Other times, it’s an essay, a reflection, or something in between.

My art blends ink, acrylic, and abstraction to express the things that are hard to name — identity, memory, hope, change. My writing explores what it means to be human in a world shaped by culture, technology, and the past we carry with us.

Together, they form a record of what I’m noticing, feeling, and learning. You’ll find both finished pieces and works in progress here… fragments of thought, color, and meaning, shared in the hope they might resonate with something in you, too.

  • 01010011 01101111 01110011

    S.O.S. Ghosts In The Machine

    Acrylic and Chinese Ink on Canvas

    Date of Creation: 27 October 2018

    Date of First Publication (Instagram): 27 October 2018

  • I painted this during a quiet kind of chaos; the kind that simmers beneath meetings, metrics, and manicured spreadsheets. The binary code across the canvas – 01010011 01101111 01110011 – spells S.O.S. A distress signal not from a person, but from a system. Not a scream, but a whisper. Embedded in code. Easy to miss. Meant to be found.

    At the time, I had just read about Microsoft supplying AI to the Pentagon. I began connecting dots: Alphabet owns DeepMind and Boston Dynamics. Cambridge Analytica was merely the first crack we noticed. The breaches, the data leaks, the automated targeting, wrapped in sleek language like personalization and optimization.

    By day, I build predictive models. I optimize campaigns, train algorithms to trigger repeat purchases, fine-tune attribution flows. It's clever work… sharp, efficient. But sometimes I pause and ask: when does clever become complicit?

    We don’t often stop to consider how behavioral data, those tiny, seemingly insignificant actions we take online, can be stitched together into something far more revealing. And dangerous. Despite promises of anonymity, we’re handing over byte-sized fragments of our identity until we become fully reconstructable. Mapped. Modeled. Monetized.

    “If you’re not paying for the product, you’re the product.”
    But what if we’re the product and the producer? What if we are feeding the very systems designed to flatten us?

    These algorithms don’t hate us. They simply don’t see us. They aren’t trained to recognize truth, nuance, or humanity. They optimize for engagement – dopamine loops, confirmation bias, filtered realities. And so we drift, caught in the undertow of our own digital reflections.

    So then what?

    What are the ethics of the architectures we build? 

    What are the consequences we’re not calculating?
    At what point does innovation become erosion?
    And at what point do we become the ghosts in the machine?

  • It was never just a painting. It was a transmission. A relic from a future we're spiraling toward, and a past we never escaped.

    The code pulses beneath the surface, quiet and insistent: S.O.S.

    A figure fades in the lower left-indistinct, dissolving. You can't tell if it's human, or if it ever was. No mouth to scream. No eyes to plead. Just presence. Watching. Waiting. Maybe remembering.

    It's not reaching upward. Not resisting. Just there, suspended between circuitry and soul. It’s outlines blur into data smudges, ink that bled too far. But nothing in this painting is accidental.

    The background is noise, carefully curated, an ocean of algorithmic wash, like signals too scrambled to read. Still, the binary shines through. A message that's part code, part prayer.

    The painting doesn't scream. It doesn't protest. It haunts.

    It is a quiet elegy for autonomy. A meditation on what happens when systems become so complex they forget the humans who built them. 

    When do we stop being subjects and start being signals?

    When do we stop asking why, and start assuming this is just how things are?

    It is a visual record of a critical moment before the singularity:

    Right before we vanish into the efficiency of the machine.

    Right before the self becomes data.

    Right before we forget that we were dreamers once.

    And somewhere, inside that silence, inside the static

    The signal keeps repeating.

    01010011 01101111 01110011

    Save our souls.

  • Allotrope

    Date of Creation: October 2018

    Date of First Publication: October 5, 2018 (Instagram)

  • Allotrope began with a collision; not on canvas, but inside me.

    It’s a painting about duality, yes, but more precisely, about the quiet violence of keeping opposites apart. Emotion and logic. Chaos and stillness. Fire and water. We’re often taught these forces can’t coexist — that to survive, we must choose one, suppress the other, fracture the self. But what happens when we stop running from the parts of ourselves we were told couldn’t belong?

    Rendered in acrylic, the composition pulls from elemental tension. Fiery reds and oranges push against walls of blue and teal, neither yielding nor retreating. In their convergence, a mirrored edge forms — a soft, human-like contour. Not quite a figure, but something familiar. Something whole.

    This isn’t a painting about peace. It doesn’t offer resolution.
    It asks instead:
    What if the fire doesn’t want to burn you?
    What if the water doesn’t want to drown you?
    What if the edge between them is you — seen, contained, and finally allowed to exist as both?

    To me, Allotrope is about survival, but more than that, it’s about integration. The moment you stop splitting yourself apart and start recognizing the shape you’ve always held — not in spite of your contradictions, but because of them.

  • Inferno

    Acrylic on Canvas

    Date of Creation: July 2018

    Date of First Publication: August 9, 2018 (Instagram)

  • Inferno is a descent — not into a place, but into a state. A collapse of clarity. A tangle of stories, systems, and selves.

    Inspired by the first part of Dante Alighieri’s Divine Comedy, this piece is less about hell as a destination and more about the inner terrain we pass through when we forget who we are. The noise. The repetition. The collapse of meaning. The confusion that masquerades as truth.

    The quote that stayed with me — “Oh human creatures, born to soar aloft, / Why fall ye thus before a little wind?” — became less an accusation and more a mirror. It asked: What are the winds we’ve internalized? The doubts? The roles we’ve accepted? The inherited scripts we never chose, but still perform?

    The painting emerged through motion — forceful, uncertain, alive. Colors collide in layers: feverish reds, polluted greens, ghostly blues, divine yellows. There’s no fixed figure here, only fragments. The psyche refusing to hold a single shape in the midst of unraveling. That refusal itself felt honest.

    Inferno is a study in human fragility — but also, in spiritual potential. It’s about the strength that flickers even in the darkest recesses of self. The part of us that endures, even when we no longer recognize it as strength.

    There are no clean lines here. No easy answers. But if you look closely — especially here, in the confusion — there are signs of flight. Not in spite of the fall, but born from it.

    Because to rise, we often have to pass through the fire. And sometimes, to find our way out, we first have to get lost.

  • Pusaran Jiwa (Malay for Soul Vortex)

    Acrylic on canvas

    Date of Creation: September 2018

    Date of First Publication: September 21, 2018 (Instagram)

  • Pusaran Jiwa (Malay for “Soul Vortex”) explores the sensation of being pulled inward — not in retreat, but in recognition. It’s about the quiet chaos beneath the surface: memory, ancestry, identity, and intuition all spiraling at once. Created during a time of emotional turbulence, this piece reflects how inner stillness can emerge from motion, and how dissolution often precedes clarity. The forms are deliberately ambiguous, somewhere between water and smoke, spirit and self.

  • I painted this on a night that didn’t feel like night — time was looping, and I was sinking inward, not in despair, but in search.

    The idea came to me before the title. It felt like something was spinning at the center of my chest — a spiral, but not chaotic. More like a remembering. A return to something older than me, but still mine.

    The strokes moved fast, almost involuntarily. As if my hand knew what I didn’t yet understand. There’s a current to this piece — not just in the brushwork, but in what it carries: loss, motion, fragments of stories I never lived but somehow inherited. Culture. Memory. Emotion without language.

    When I named it Pusaran Jiwa, it clicked into place. “Soul vortex” — not as a collapse, but as a container. A pull back to center. A recognition of all the selves we carry, spinning in and out of focus.

    This wasn’t meant to be a beginning, but looking back, it was. It marked the moment I gave myself permission to feel without translating.

  • Les Trois Mages

    Acrylic on Canvas

    November 13 2016

  • This piece was inspired by the Pillars of Creation in the Eagle Nebula, but what moved me most wasn’t just their grandeur—it was the tragedy behind them. A nebula births and nurtures stars, only to be broken down by the very things it created. There's something hauntingly cyclical about that. The pillars, these towering columns of gas and dust, are both womb and ruin.

    I painted the central formation like three hands reaching, or perhaps retreating. Three magi, three seekers, three silent witnesses to their own undoing. I wanted the blue to feel alive—almost defiant—amid the decay. But around them, the cosmos churns. You can see the erosion starting, the inevitability.

    In this way, the painting became more than an image of the universe. It became a meditation on existence itself. On how we create, destroy, and are destroyed in turn. On how love can be a force of both creation and erosion. On how everything we give life to will someday reshape or end us—and yet, that doesn’t make the giving any less sacred.

    This, I think, is what it means to be a universe. To hold within us both the hand that creates and the one that undoes.

  • S’envoler

    Acrylic and glow in the dark pigments on canvas

    Date of Creation: November 2024

    Date of Publication: November 29, 2024 (Instagram)

  • S’envoler means “to take flight,” but this piece isn’t about soaring. It’s about the ache that comes before — the quiet tension between what holds us and what calls us beyond.

    This work lives in the liminal: between memory and transcendence, identity and illusion, self and spirit. The central form — rising, dissolving, becoming — is deliberately ambiguous. It’s not fully human. It’s not entirely known. It hovers somewhere between matter and myth, between something ancient and something not of this world.

    Composed with layered acrylics, ink, glow pigment, and scattered glitter, the textures shift as the light changes — a reminder that transformation is never static. The figure doesn't break from the fire; it is shaped by it. Flames melt into soft light, lifting in a near-weightless rhythm — a choreography of emergence. Not escape. Not erasure. Becoming.

    S’envoler is a reflection of how we lose and remake ourselves — across timelines, across narratives, across silences we carry. It’s about the longing that precedes change. The flicker of recognition before a name. The moment just before we rise.

    The figure is everyone and no one. A vessel for all we’ve been, all we carry, all we might yet remember.

    Because we don’t escape the fire.
    We rise through it.
    And with us, something eternal takes flight.

  • Meditations

    Acrylic on Canvas

    13 November 2016

  • This piece came quietly. I didn’t plan it. I didn’t know where it was going. It just began—like breath, like tide. I called it Meditations because that’s what it felt like: a slow exhale, a return to something older than thought.

    The wave moves from shadow to light, from depths to sky. But there’s no violence in it. No crashing or splitting. Just movement. Surrender. A rhythm I trust. The upper half is more ambiguous—almost atmospheric, like memory diffused through seawater. I see a forest in it sometimes. Sometimes just a feeling. That’s the point, I think.

    It’s about the in-between. About holding space for softness, for unknowing. The world demands so much certainty from us. But I think healing—real healing—happens in places like this: blurry, tender, unresolved. There’s power in stillness, too. Not everything has to roar to matter.

    I don’t know if this painting is finished. Maybe it never will be. But maybe that’s okay.