Specimen Garden (2025)
Exhibition: 15 June – 26 July 2025, Core Design Gallery, Kuala Lumpur
Medium: Steel, chalcedony stone beads, hand-embroidered filament.
This body of work explores a surreal symbiosis between structure and ornament. Each sculpture is composed of skeletal steel frameworks, coated in coral-hued gradients and embroidered with chalcedony stone beads that evoke coral formations—fragile, intricate, and enduring.
Each piece feels like a living fragment of a surreal coral garden—plant-like in posture, reef-like in texture, and jewel-like in detail. Together, they form a quiet ecosystem of imagined species suspended between nature and artifice.
Inspired by the ethereal elegance of natural systems—coral, roots, jellyfish, diatoms—these works reflect my fascination with the subtle, intelligent structures of the natural world. There is beauty in their balance of fragility and strength, chaos and order.
This series also continues my ongoing dialogue with nature and draws from the ornamentation I grew up with in Chinese-Malaysian culture: beaded curtains, jade jewelry, embroidered textiles. Here, those influences take new form—specimens woven from memory, structure, and reverence.
Photography by Ewyn Shum and Bricksbegin