Making Material Personal: Sign of Strength in Precarious Times

Choy Chun Wei

Art attends to a double focus – the individual and the world. The personal stance is the world that heals and reclaims the human world. Creating art is more meaningful now than ever. In times of uncertainty, it becomes a privileged gift and a profound act, emerging from the depths of lived experience. This trans-formative process converts the suppressed internal landscape into tangible forms, creating a personalized material configuration expressing deep empathy and recognizing the visible fragile inner world. In Changing Identities (2023), a series of artworks allows for the forming anxiety to stabilize my growing sense of distance, alienation, and growing conflicts with the ‘New Normal’ environment during COVID-19 and see that subsequently the emergence of global war and conflicts. In and through making this series, I grew to understand the loss and surrounding artificiality in and within human behavior, conditions, and increasing communication. In making the artwork, the forming of human forms is crucial, and the content reflects the critical state of the effects of disruptions and mediated technological-driven communication. In making the imagined human and robust(tactile) material landscape, I crafted my path so that a palpable sense of disconnect in the present landscape can never be allowed to dominate.