STRUCTURES AND EVERYDAY LIFE

One of the first things that came to mind was Singapore's HDB flats.

There's something interesting about the repetition of these buildings. The windows, corridors and balconies follow similar arrangements. Look closer and every home starts to differ: plants, laundry, decorations and everyday adaptations interrupt the repetition.

I liked the tension between a shared structure and the many things that happen within it.

It made me wonder how a similar logic could apply to cultural patterns. A collection of individual motifs could form something larger and hold onto their differences.

FROM MOTIFS TO MODULES

I began exploring cultural motifs as a collection of repeatable units.

I wanted to create a system where individual elements could shift into different compositions.

The idea was simple: a shared set of rules can create room for variation.

BUILDING A PATTERN-MAKING TOOL

To explore this, I built a custom web-based tool that allowed me to work with motifs as modular tiles.

I could experiment with scale, density and arrangement, gradually building larger compositions from smaller units.

Building the tool became an important part of the process. I used the system to try things out, discover unexpected combinations and develop the composition as I went along.

A COLLABORATIVE SENSE-MAKING

The final artwork brings these individual pattern units together into a shared composition.

Some motifs sit on their own. Others overlap and gather into denser clusters. The final composition keeps the order of a grid, with a looser field of marks moving through it.

For me, this became a way of thinking about community in Singapore. Shared physical structures hold identities, cultures and everyday lives that keep shifting the larger composition.

The artwork was created for the Design 2035 Masterplan, appearing in the publication as part of its visual interpretation of Singapore's design future.