At my solo installation at Budderup Odekirke, Rebild, Denmark-2013 
Double Warhol, collage and acrylic on canvas, 1999
Shop til u flop, Collage and acrylic, 2006
From Pop Art to the Present: My Evolving Artistic Journey
Art has always been my gateway between self and world — a dialogue at once personal and collective. My practice did not emerge fully formed. It began with fragments, with chance encounters, with what was available at hand.
I was first introduced to art-making by the late artist Jeri Azhari in Kuala Lumpur. He showed me a few technical things — how to stretch a canvas, how to use photocopies to make portraits — but more importantly, we talked. For hours, for days, sometimes deep into the night until the morning call to prayer. Other times we sat together in silence, saying nothing, simply holding space. From him I first learned that art could be both discipline and ritual: not only about making but about being present.
In those early years, Pop Art caught my attention. Its bold colors and irreverence spoke to a childhood shaped by television shows, American films, and advertising images. In its repetition of icons I found both a mirror of my own fragmented upbringing and a language of critique. But Pop Art was not the end point. It was a gateway, one that eventually felt too neat, too closed.
A turning point came during my time on Perhentian Island. There, life was stripped to essentials. The sound of boat engines in the early morning would wake me. My feet sank into soft sand — shoes unnecessary. The sea was warm, inviting; you could dip into the water and stay there the whole day under the heat of the East Coast sun. Materials were scarce. We didn’t have many magazines or newspapers on the island, but I had a few cuttings of images I carried with me. I began using what I could find: discarded wood, ropes, fishing nets, sand from the beach, and those fragments of print. Out of scarcity came improvisation, and from improvisation, the beginnings of my practice: assembling what was broken, overlooked, or cast aside into something that could speak again.
A couple of years later, back in Kuala Lumpur, I was still working with popular images. But the experiments had expanded — into monoprint, woodcut, and assemblage. At the same time, I continued collecting what I could find: old newspapers, discarded magazines, and objects from the street. These fragments carried the city’s texture, just as driftwood and nets had carried the memory of the island. In KL, my practice became less about images alone and more about the material presence of what others overlooked.
In the early 2000s, I experienced a rupture: the total loss of my personal archive — drawings, writings, photographs, certificates — all discarded. Out of that devastation, I began again. At first I returned to the basics: drawing, painting, collage.
The actual turning point arrived in 2002, when I moved to Copenhagen. That shift — geographic, cultural, and personal — marked the beginning of a deeper evolution. Trash there was abundant, almost a paradise. Magazines and sales catalogues arrived daily through the pigeonhole door. Old furniture — chairs, tables, doors — was left on the corners where people threw things away. These discards became my resources, shifting my practice toward assemblage, layering, and improvisation on a new scale.
At the same time, I began to explore digital art more seriously. Video became both documentation and artwork in its own right. I experimented with video animation, photography, and moving images — a shift deeply influenced by my wife Pia. Alongside this, I entered performance: reading poetry and spending time with Ole Lillelund, the Danish beatnik poet. Together we created Escape from the Shark, a video of him reading poetry across the city. Copenhagen, for me, was not only a material paradise but also a testing ground for new forms — a place where assemblage expanded into performance, digital art, image, word, and sound.
Only later did I begin to work with more charged materials: old passports, rubber stamps, maps, gauze, bandages, atlases, x-ray films, and broken vessels. These were not just objects. They carried memory, migration, bureaucracy, faith, and fracture. Each one was both surface and story.
My practice became less about representation and more about transformation. Collage gave way to installation, to performance, to works that breathe with participation. In Dear Helle, visitors added their own postcards to mine, dissolving authorship into collective ritual. In Rhythm of Identity, kompangs made from x-ray films became instruments played by others, layering sound over the fragility of skin and memory. With Gravity of Time, I am exploring the inevitability of collapse: clay vessels placed on blocks of ice, waiting to fall as their foundation dissolves. The work already exists in its title and conception — the collapse is only a matter of time.
What links these works is not style but attention — to process, to fragility, to the unstable beauty of impermanence. I am drawn to gestures that resist finality: cutting, layering, undoing, reassembling. To rhythms that echo both prayer and daily life: repetition, silence, listening.
Today, my practice is not about producing a fixed image of identity. It is about inhabiting the in-between: visible and invisible, personal and political, memory and forgetting. It asks for patience, for openness, for presence.
Still evolving, still shifting. Art remains my question and my answer — a site of negotiation between past and future, certainty and doubt, loss and renewal.
Silver, Acrylic on paper, 2010- from the Most Wanted Series
The Thinker, Collage on polyester, 2006
Lincoln, Postcards Assemblage on Softboard, 2013
