*** What would be your earliest memories of making art? The first time I felt that I could be creative-slash-different was when I was in kindergarten and enjoying a lot the art lessons—drawing and colouring—when the rest of my classmates were struggling with it or complaining about it. My main source of satisfaction was, if it’s colouring, to colour really hard and within the lines. There was also this Chinese calligraphy competition in secondary school, where it wasn’t really facilitated properly or in an inspiring manner. The teacher would ask us to just copy the texts. Everybody complained but I was thrilled la. Basically I wanted to master form since I was very young. I’d see how my Chinese teacher wrote the words and I’d just copy it. It’s mimicry of form. No content. (laughs) I also enjoyed doodling, especially buildings, foundations, civil engineering—like very complex expressway interchanges—just from memory. It was quite specific actually: a cross-sectional elevation of a building or a plant. This view allows one to firstly see through from the outside, but also see underneath the ground. I enjoyed giving very, very deep foundations to buildings in my doodles. Maybe I have this unconscious wish to make things very stable and show the insides of how things work. Which has since been a recurring thing isn’t it? Yah, I also liked looking at construction sites, building things with mahjong tiles. But this fascination with structure and architectural form took a backseat after Sec 2. NS even when I was doing my BA in Communication Studies (in Nanyang Technological University), architecture was not the main thing. The one that interested me most, pragmatically, was video production. In my final year project (the video One Or Zero) I was focusing on marginal communities, specifically on sexual minorities. All three members of the group were gay so there was this personal stake involved. We dealt with how the gay community in Singapore identified themselves as such and related to each other within the community and outside. We were also interested in experimenting with forms through the video platform. It eventually won first prize in the experimental category of a Philadelphia-based film competition – but it was also partly a pitch to my future boss in Water Films, a (defunct) production house in Singapore. In the film, I took charge of the visual aspects, the shooting and editing. We wanted to screen it publicly, including at The Substation. It was banned mainly because it condoned alternative lifestyles and at the same time, it was also banned because we could not appeal for an RA rating as a video. The rating was only for film.