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‘Memory & Rebirth’ was born from a series of sketches from 2012 to 2019 moving from Singapore to Johor, Malaysia. The art is a form of visual diary of my life, relaying my experience, memories and reflections. 

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Beauvoir (1949) said “ One is not born, but becomes a woman” and I cannot help but agree with her. As much as I want to believe it is not so, the experience in life has taught me otherwise: that as a woman, you are the other. I had my first taste of identity the moment I was born. “Ah, it’s a daughter,” my mother would often recount how she grieved that I was not a boy. Born in a traditional Indonesian Chinese family, sons are prized over daughters, as sons can achieve great work in society while women should just prepare for marriage and childbirth. Thus, my father saw no need for daughters to go to school. But thanks to my mother’s determination, she brought her four daughters from Indonesia to Singapore for an education. In Singapore school, I experienced no discrimination of gender and we all competed equally, male or female, based on meritocracy. With the exception of medical degrees, which had a gender bias back then in 1997, as they felt women will not be able to meet the career demands of a medical doctor once they get married and have children. I married young right after I finished university into a Hokkien family, and during one dinner my mother-in-law turned to me and said, “Go serve your husband rice”. In my head I was asking quietly, “Why can’t he get his own rice?” but I got up, walked into the kitchen and served my new husband rice. That was my first lesson in marriage, which further extended to other rules of submission and servitude in marriage that I slowly learnt. Although I have always wanted to work and connect with society, before I knew it I was a homemaker with two children, spending all my time in the house with little interaction with the outside world. For years, I was isolated as a home-maker, confined to the domestic home. My daily life is centered around my home- taking care of my husband, raising my children, and cleaning the house. The objects around the home and especially the kitchen became close to me like friends and I felt a sense of bond with them where the objects shared and stored my daily life memories. As I drew these familiar objects around my kitchen, new thoughts and reflections of my life in Johor arose. The home objects served as an extension and documentation of my daily living, but also as a reflection of the meaning of my existence as a woman, wife and mother. 

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The art is directly related to my life- being fixed around my daily routine of sending and picking up my kids from school, cooking three meals a day and household care, tutoring and playing with the children and waiting for my husband to return from work, cooking, taking care of him and helping in his career; these activities formed the routine of my life. Thus, I spent a lot of time at home everyday doing my household duties and alone. With my husband, I was mostly listening and supporting while he talked, with my two young children ages 6 and 11, as much fun we had, it was mostly baby talk with little intellectual stimulation, and with the exception of one of two close friends who were also mothers where you could have an occasional lunch, there was no one I can have real conversations with. This posture of silence, which I learnt from the defeated battles of trying to speak your mind, led to an acceptance that the struggle to speak is pointless, that the position of women as wife is submission to my husband. Thus, it was the home objects that constantly surrounded me and accompanied me in the long hours alone that I felt connected to; they gave me a sense of safety and feeling of home from which I felt comfortable to share my most personal thoughts with. 

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Over the years, I felt my life had become smaller and the sense of isolation between my husband and I increased. Though in one sense the routine is a part of fulfilling my role as mother and wife, and I love my family very much, I also questioned if that is all a woman's life is about; I searched for my own identity. I looked around at the women in my society for answers. From my memories in Indonesian, I recalled the women had little to no education, so they were either homemakers, wives running a family business or many had little choice but to be maids. In Singapore, the high education level allowed most women to be working and have careers, single but working, or married and working, with maids to help them if they had children, and usually Singaporean women have very few children. I recalled in my class gathering from my all girls’ school, a small minority were homemakers while the norm for women was to work. There were many women professionals in the alumni- doctors, accountants and lawyers, entrepreneurs, and even a few holding high ranking positions, like CEOs, directors and partners in our midst. In Malaysia, there were a fair amount of homemakers and working women, though few would hold a significant leadership position. Though the drawings are autobiographical and based on my personal memories as wife and mother, the collective memories of womanhood in Indonesia, Singapore and Malaysia are embedded within. Most artworks are embraced by embroidery, where the fabric patterns allude to Chinese and Indonesian culture, and the flower motifs in embroidery represent the generation of women’s life stories and values passed down through centuries. Thus, the artwork goes beyond reflections of my personal life to contemplations of the lives and voices of past generations of Indonesian, Malaysian or Singaporean women, questioning whether their experiences were the same as mine. 

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Drawing was a natural choice of remembering as it has an immediate quality and innate ability to capture one’s thoughts. In the artworks that emerged, they bounced from recent memories I wished to preserve or they fluidly traversed memories across different periods of time in the past and present and sought a possible future. As a counter memory to various entangled feelings as a woman, each art is inspired by different objects around the house. They captured a point in time and state of mind, where the symbolic elements that emerged and narrative associations formed constructed my memory and identity. The artwork expressed my fears and desires. The juxtaposition of memories was a way of sorting out my thoughts, in thinking through drawing; to reinstate a certain belief about life and a struggle to solve a dilemma I could not resolve. 

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For many years my art questioned the role of a woman within the family and if there was any meaning beyond the context of wife and mother. If I am not a wife and mother anymore, who am I? In the course of living in Malaysia, my marriage broke down and I got divorced, and my whole world fell apart. Suddenly, the world that I had known for almost two decades shattered, I was no longer a wife.  As a concerted choice to forget my past during this period of trauma, I threw away a lot of personal belongings, I threw away almost all my clothes that reminded me of my past, as depicted in “Moon Water.'' Now, I was only a mother and I clung on to this role more than ever before. As a divorced single mom raising two young children, the responsibility as the sole breadwinner and in giving them a good education weighed heavy on my shoulders and my art “Hibiscus Dream” and “Rice City” reflected the constant struggle to ensure they have a strong education and incessant worry for my children’s future. With the competitiveness of Singapore can they survive or can they find a home in Malaysia? Now, my children are slowly growing up, and soon I will no longer be needed as their mother, then again, “Who am I?” In this way, art is a resistance for me, a means to grapple with the struggles and challenges of life through a choice of keeping certain memories while throwing away others, a fact and fiction constructed and reconstructed in remembering, as an act for my survival.