*ARTIST STATEMENT
(EN) I explore nostalgia not as a sentimental longing for the past, but as a contemporary condition emerging from the misalignment of space and time. Working with red bricks encountered across Asia, particularly Southeast Asia, I approach architectural material as a structure of time—one that carries colonial histories, collective memory, and postcolonial transformation. At once historically charged and intimately familiar, these materials become “memory-images,” mediating between personal experience and broader historical narratives.
Through photopiles and photosculptures, I transform photographic images into spatial and material configurations. Photopiles are constructed by cutting and layering images into thin, three-dimensional forms, where fragmented urban landscapes are dismantled and recombined through repeated frames and the skyline of Creole architecture to evoke a sense of place. Photosculptures extend this process by translating memory-images into objects situated within space, foregrounding their physical transformation in dialogue with diverse materials and their relational positioning within the exhibition environment.
Across these works, images are displaced from fixed coordinates and reconstituted within an indeterminate spatial field. No longer bound to a singular geography or temporal origin, they inhabit an in-between condition—what I describe as an “other place”: a cosmic place, open and undefined, where spatial and temporal boundaries dissolve.
In this context, nostalgia does not signify a return to origin. Instead, it emerges through processes of fragmentation and recombination, as a way of experiencing place in conditions of dislocation. My work reconfigures nostalgia as a reflective and postcolonial mode of perception—one that holds memory not as a stable image of the past, but as a material and spatial experience unfolding in the present.
28/03/26