The Beauty In Tiled Walls

The tiled wall was the greatest puzzle I had ever seen.

But my attention wasn’t on the square tiles. Instead, I was intrigued by the white adhesive between each tile. How many boxes can I form without overlapping or breaking the line? To five-year-old me, facing the wall wasn’t a punishment – it was a conundrum that could captivate me for hours. My eyes traced the gridlines in different directions as I visualised shapes I could form. The best way to move was diagonally; it’s impossible to form a 2x2 box. Each discovery exhilarated me. The possibilities were endless.

My imagination is the link of interdisciplinarity between my analytical and creative sides. It propels me to explore the permutations of Rubik’s cubes, and perceive them as a symbol for the order and disorder caused by authoritarianism. It inspires me to paint irregular shapes using Delaunay Triangulation, and calculate their area with Lagrange Interpolation. It helps me translate mundanities into commentary in my art, where I compare playing Jenga to the exhumation of graves for infrastructural development.

Nonetheless, my connections don't just remain figments of imagination. I am driven to reinforce them through research and real-life observation. This can be visiting libraries, diving into archives, or visiting cemeteries to understand Chinese death rites.

While today, I have moved beyond the tiled wall, I continue to learn with the same child-like curiosity. Because whether it’s at the vast sky or ants on the ground, you’ll find me staring, observing, connecting – enthralled.