I write about abstract social structures and socio-cultural opinions with an odd sense of humour (and love of music) in my free time. Each post is a snapshot of my thoughts on that day and time. The cynical topics might become a miniature version of Disney. I’ve woven my personal life into the web that caught me, but it’s becoming an interpretation of that lived experience.
Thursday, February 5, 2026
Test_piece.cda
Thursday, January 29, 2026
Cannot_let_go.cda
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| "Not knowing" why I made those tentacle structures at university, and only at university. In my case it's not a 'roll safe' meme, It's 'role safe' |
Friday, January 23, 2026
Personalising_as_an_art_form.cda
One of the first pieces of advice I received on the Fine Art course was to avoid making artwork in the sketchbooks. My criticism is that it made me conceptualise the schematic image of what art should be like, so that it would be accepted into the narrative of the art world. But the counterargument is that it's the course of 'how to function in professional arts', and plus it "justifies" the nine grand as a piece of legitimate institutional information.
I mean, I guess the end goal is the white cube spaces of the galleries, and making work inside sketchbooks or books is cumbersome to present. Here is the problem - I'm observing that my creativity is split into a. what viewers in galleries would see, and b. the work I make for myself inside books. The latter became non-existent, following a very resentful and bitter version of myself. I've trained myself to care more about the results than the process of art.
I'm slowly trying to get back to creating work for myself.
I've experienced this joy when I was personalising my planner in a mini collage session. I didn't have this much fun in personalising something since my sketchbook on the astronomy theme. I'm slowly feeling more aligned with myself by accepting my limitations (introvert needs), rather than feeling resentful when I was an active artist for having exhibitions.
Saturday, January 17, 2026
Collecting_and_niches.cda
I attended the Collecting Power lecture (online) on Thursday with St Bride Foundation. It inspired me to look through my own collections. I realised my neurodivergent traits often show up on lectures. I had trouble focusing on the lecture, because of excitement rather than boredom. I started looking at my own collections within the lecture and my brain was like, 'let's start a blog post!' That was my attention span gone until the half way break, because all I was thinking about was what to write on the next post.
I think teachers are doing kids a disservice when they just say the child is being disruptive in their lessons due to boredom, because sometimes it might be the enthusiasm the child is reacting to instead of being bored.
Photos of my collections.mp3
I'm a passive collector, where physical circumstances and exposures influence my collections. I'm not conscious of collecting things, but often end up with the same items collected from different places and life events. These are my less personal collections. I collect cards my friends, family and acquaintances send me throughout the years, but these are too personal to distribute.
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| These are some of the tote bags I've collected |
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| I collect bits and pieces from art exhibits, and things like foreign travel tickets and exhibition ticket stamps. |
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| Collected art catalogues, as well as books on the things I'm interested in at the time, so my personal library is eclectic. |
Tuesday, January 13, 2026
Becoming_better?.cda
Saturday, January 3, 2026
7am.cda
Universal feeling of work anxiety.mp3
I've changed the name of my blog to '7am', because its significance in culture is associated with waking up for the new (work) day, but metaphorically too. There's an almost universal dread that comes along with it. Even the pit in the stomach anxiety the day before. I'm feeling that ugly, and privileged feeling now, after having 2 weeks off work. When I was in my teens, I had a pattern of recurring dreams at the last leg of the holidays, before the start of school. I used to dream of missing the school bus. These dreams morphed into dreams of taking maths tests at work - I had that last night and didn't sleep well. (It didn't help that it's January and Stranger Things finished.) Again this is a privileged statement - but I'm miles away from the MCR concert and seeing the Venice Biennale, so I feel like I'm in barren land.
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| I made a digital drawing of a radio and merged it with radio waves and 7am. There's a lot of implicit tropes in the creative community surrounding radios as a visual code and 'tuning into information'. |
Lesser of 2 evils.mp3
It's the obligation of the external rules that's causing my unconscious to become unease. I don't think we can get away from the universal dread of routines, even though it keeps us mentally in check. I've just changed my work shift schedules too, from 5pm-1am back to 6am-6pm. I think I like or hate them both equally. When I was on the latter shift, I'd find myself preferring the former one, and vice versa. It doesn't matter whether what the job is, what field it is in, and how prestigious it is, I'd end up not liking it as much as I hoped - hoped - only to end up missing it after it's gone. I sometimes think about retiring (and I've tried making art as my main job). But in living in it (irresponsibly - I took a gap year after my first graduation, and my family footed the bill) and emotionally dissecting it, I ended up worrying about existential matters, such as my work identity and legitimacy. Legitimacy matters a lot more than I let on. It's pretty absurd really. And it doesn't matter how many videos I watch of people talking about this feeling, or even after talking to friends, I still feel deeply alone on this. The social consensus might say I'm overreacting, but this is how I feel.
I feel this after every weekend, and it's worse after annual leave, especially one where I spend time with loved ones. I've slept off all my sleep debt on annual leave, but it will come back this week, and I'll have no energy outside work again.
Camus would have said to embrace life passionately, but I think it’s better to not become attached to life circumstances too seriously, but again, I might be privileged to recognise, and even tolerate with this aspect of life. [It might change in the future when I do finally fall in love with my endeavours, but it wouldn't make this interpretation of life invalid.]
4am.mp3
I slept worse than the night before. I woke up every hour, then between 3 and 4am, I woke up every few minutes. One of my dreams was kind of weird. The dream started when I was interrupted by my former classmate and I took my headphones off. We were in a studio space, and it was a seminar between us two and someone who taught me. My classmate was talking about my artwork of the paint splatters I did directly on the floor and on the wall of one of the shows. I was discombobulated, because I was wearing headphones. She didn’t have to say anything in the dream, I felt her energy. My classmate felt like his energy reminding me of my past work. (It’s the manifestation of the animus and anima again). I apologised for listening to music, but was then puzzled, as no music was playing. Could headphones be a portal? like in one of Lee Bul’s works involving headphones in an installation that connects the past with present. What if me listening to music on headphones in the dream world, is the time I’m awake in real life? It’s absurd to contemplate about, but I’d like to think what if I’m having conversations with these people on a different spatial plane? Maybe I’m being crazy. Got to defrost the car now in real life, or the non-metaphysical. Maybe abstract thought is what saves us from the clutches of the raw chaotic world.
Side note on good and bad (vs the messy comprehension).mp3
Upon reflecting and analysing on the moralities of key characters’ dynamics in Wicked and Stranger Things - What if everyone has a point of view, and believes their view is the good one? The good and bad are myths of what we were told in childhood about morality? And we’re actually in amoral systems that clutches on the alopecic hope of childhood beliefs? Listen to Wonderful for wicked:for good. This song is self referential. He has a point when he sang about history being the true/untrue - it has a lot of uncredited labour that’s misattributed to key figures. If I learnt anything from the wizard, it’s this quote of ‘nothing bonds communities together like a common enemy.’ Be it in atrocities like wars, or academically in the battle of subjects, where the opposing subject is viewed as ‘bad’. I don’t view it personally - it’s just an observation of humanity.
Maybe the quote from the wizard (the zeitgeist of the 21st century) is the pessimistic view of bonding communities, what is its optimistic equal where enthusiasm of humanity emanates from? Just curious on that, think we’ll benefit from having a news outlet that gives us positive things on the day (like stories of an ordinary anonymous stranger finding a wallet and returning it to the owner. Not having a name or distinctive ‘brand’ attached to the good deed makes the deed more sincere). I quite liked The New Day newspaper that was out in 2016. I first came across it in hospital and I liked the ordinary narratives the journalists used. It was a shame it finished not long after starting. Could this be attributed to ‘politics sells more’?
The working impression I’m getting about Elphaba, is that she is naïve (which is the target of opportunist scapegoating), especially when Boq sang about the cowardly lion in March of the witch hunters. He sang that Elphaba didn’t ’let the lion make his own mistakes’. Sometimes you have to let the person make their own mistakes in order for them to learn, even though you have to watch them suffer as a result of their own actions.
It’s interesting how Henry in stranger things was also naïve before he became a vessel for darkness to utilise (but the moral narrative of stranger things is more black and white, compared to Wicked).
Monday, December 29, 2025
Upside_down_culture.cda
[Unintentional ad for Stranger Things + Netflix. It really is unavoidable in postmodernism.]
Physical matter.mp3
I made a wormhole diagram and put the model of the world we live in into the Stranger Things schema. It was a bit of fun during the crimbo-limbo boredom. I'm going to expand on this diagram. I made it into an art form (but going out on a limb to put it into an art exhibition is another kettle of fish). Keeping the ribbon panel at the top of the work is important because it gives an insight into the origin of the work - it came from an iPad. If I were to crop that bit out, it would be cut off from its roots. It also contains the date, so that it acts as the artwork's witness, as it came into existence at that time and place [albeit on iPad].
Quasi matter.mp3
I called it 'That's Y / Axis (After Stranger Things)', because the wormhole is vertical (Axis Y on graphs) - and in some sense is a hierarchy of some sort in this 'not so' new century, but it also acts as a pun for 'that's why'. I put 'art world: right side up', and it is symbolic for the form of the good. We were born in the upside-down (The bridge of the wormhole), so this world is all we've known. Kids were living in a dream that the world is full of possibilities, but is an illusion and they are kidnapped into dimension business by toy advertisements. The institutions we know that exist, are imitations of the form of the good, surrounded by monsters which came from dimension business. BANK's Ad men, the bad men find themselves there.
The exotic matter (The wormhole wall) is the media that 'glue' our cultures together into a coherent form of journalism for the masses. Social media is the void outside the wormhole, where everything from the upside down is sucked into slop, as a consequence of the media being ruptured - due to cynicism of the news being an authentic source. (That car from Stranger Things prompted me to think back to someone's art exhibition called 'Pertinent Folly' as a reference to apophenia and cultural schemas, and they had a miniature toy car in the show, probably to criticise conspiracy theories...but it’s integral in the post-truth era, maybe they were criticising this era in relation to the renaissance). Maybe I’ll add algorithms and AI slop with the social media as the void on the wormhole diagram, because it’s the place where reasoning goes to die.
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| There's something pertinent about the series I made during MA Fine Art. I hid a lot of things in the blog I made back then, because of the failed blog in 2016. The copies of these blogs are supposed to be gone now because I erased them, but I don't know what happened to the other copies |
The abyss or dimension business isn't inherently evil (it's just the chaotic universe and survival instinct - the desire to win), and is a necessary evil to earn money that applies to several levels [I later wrote this, because I've compartmentalised my paid work identity from my personal identity - the ego is the bridge too, mediating the outside world with the internal one], but it goes too far and monopolises places. It'll be cathartic to criticise certain figures as evil, but in doing so, one is able to criticise evil from the place of being good, even though no one is perfect.
Test_piece.cda
I finally made artwork this year. It's a random test piece, because I wanted to see if printing on 17 x 9.5cm size Filofax paper would...
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Living room desk (for manual artwork), taken by a DSLR I bought in 2013 01 Studios.mp3 My first studio space was at university. This was i...
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The diaries throughout my adolescence A spouse portal.mp3 I started writing diaries at 14. I still keep diaries at the age of 31. This was a...
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Polyheaded creature.mp3 Maybe there are shareholders of artistic vision [rough label to describe the word - but even that is a textual repre...
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