My family is from a people group called the Hakka (“guest”), fanning out from central China after 800 AD. Some settled in Southeast Asia and later became Singaporean. But the ancestral homeland is lost, swallowed up by the passage of time. Much of my Hakka identity has also been lost in an unrelayed oral history and denatured by the construction of “Singaporean.” Painting and performance have become vehicles to explore what is irretrievable in me.

My lived experience in the twenty-first century is so different from that of the Hakka living a millennium ago. But the same sun and moon preside over our existence. I work with their images and light, hoping to coax a connection backward in time. I do not have a native land to claim, but I can be native to the sky. It is yours as much as mine. If our story of land is marked by exploitation, conquest, and pillage, then what is our corresponding story of the sky?