The Chinese New Village was an apartheid community created on political grounds.

Designed by the British colonial administration in 1948, its purpose was to

counteract the Communist penetration into Chinese communities. The order of

segregation was not lifted until 1960 when the Malayan Emergency ended. Today,

among some 600 Chinese New Villages, only the few located in the vicinity of cities

have transformed into fully-fledged modern communities; the remaining majority

have been marginalised and perceived as squalid slums.

I was born in and grew up in a Chinese New Village. Although I left at the age of

eighteen for new pursuits — studies, work, settling down — the New Village lives

with me and pursues its course through time: this place of childhood, rife with

energy, cultural memory, identity, and a sense of belonging.

This series takes these family and personal memories as its point of departure.

Drawing on family albums, newspapers, historic images, memories written by

members of the Malaysian Communist Party, and photographs taken during my

fieldwork, I reflect on what binds a person and his or her hometown. I investigate

conflicts arising between the pursuit of a utopian vision for a dwelling place and one’s

humble abode in reality. Through the prism of this vision, a variety of images serve as

essential references for my contemplation of social reality through painting.

Drawings on paper also illustrate my attempts to document the social history of

Chinese New Villages and the memories of family and individuals living on the

margins of visions of the past. These scripts amount to a non-linear narrative

structure characterised by fragmentation, superposition, and irrational associations,

demonstrating how the past and the present are connected through flashbacks. At

the same time, I employ an approximate and note-taking approach to visual

representation, constructing the home as I remember it, bit by bit from fragments.

My purpose is to turn these emblems of culture and memory into a mirror of the

formation of places, sites, spaces, and selves in relation to cultural shifts, from

changing ways of living, ideological turns, to emerging forms of art and literature.