Sometimes, I feel like people living in Singapore lead a very structured, scheduled life. Compared to the people of Indonesia (I was born and raised in Indonesia), everything in Singapore feels very organized, to the point of rigidity. When I first came to Singapore, I was surprised by the stark difference between Singapore and Indonesia.

At first, I thought Singapore would be a “follow-the-rules” country, which hinders creativity. However as I spent more time in Singapore, I realize while there may be a lot of rules, as long as you can justify yourself, creativity is not being frowned upon.

I represent that discovery of mine with this Bauhaus piece; the blue circles are all in the box, seemingly following a set pattern; but actually inside every single blue circle there is a little yellow triangle that can go out of the box and explore more possibilities (represented by different shapes and sizes of the triangles).

 

Bauhaus piece

I was just walking around when I spotted something that piqued my interest: two different type of flowers growing in the same pot. The first one is bougainvillea, while another one is… some kind of orchid? To be honest, I’m not sure, although I see it around a lot.

You can’t really see but they share the same pot. It’s hard to find a nice angle.

It’s something really simple, often overlooked, but to me it represents Singapore. It shows that from one common ground, there can be different flowers produced – which to me portrays the diversity in Singapore. Inspired by that, I made this Art Nouveau pattern. The two different flowers share the same stalk, to show that they have a common ground. I added flowing lines at the background to represent the flow of life, hence overall this piece represents the life of Singaporeans, harmony in diversity.

My piece

Not really how it sounds, but it’s pretty close, I’ll take it.

References:

https://thenounproject.com/search/?q=van

https://thenounproject.com/search/?q=knee