Chua’s practice took a big turn when she kept company with fellow painters at London’s Royal College of Art.

“I realised we used the same vocabulary, and it was then that I had the revelatory understanding that a pictorial space can also have a turn of phrase in the way that someone speaks in first or third person. I have a continual urge to pivot my works in different directions, in more than two dimensions even,” says Chua who sees her art as an avenue for people to experience materiality in our current, tech-dominated, screen-based world.

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Her works have a minimalist quality that echoes architectural form through the play of light and shadow. She describes her artistic approach as “near-abstract”, a term coined by British art historian Briony Fer to describe abstract works that reference natural objects or objects that exist in reality.

She says the titles of her works — “Blink”, “Apex and Depressions”, “Headset”, “Breeze Blocks” and so on — all describe an event or a situation, and hint at how the work can be read. Chua’s interest in abstraction was sparked by her work behind the scenes as an art restoration painter and gallery technician, which she plied for several years after graduating from art school. Through these roles, she was able to experience the materiality of artworks that would later inspire her explorations.

In “grrrraaanularrrrrrr”, her solo exhibition at STPI Gallery early this year, she played with the arrangement of letters and shapes, using the order and design of letters as a kind of texture in prints. The show consisted of 46 artworks in a texturally evocative series that explored the quirks and loopholes around materiality, reality, and identity, as well as the role that technology plays in contemporary life.

The works in “grrrraaanularrrrrrr” came from Chua’s love of concrete poetry and written utterances. “The way contemporary language in texts uses the repetition of letters for dramatic effect — for example ‘hmmmmm’ or ‘hahaha’ or ‘: – )))))’,” she explains.

Chua shares that she was impressed by American author Gabrielle Zevin’s best-selling novel Tomorrow, and Tomorrow, and Tomorrow, which features video games as interdimensional worlds where players gather. “The way the novel describes game design is evocative of two things, a progression of difficulty and the idea of a loop. Both are concepts I employ in making compositions with shape and form,” she says.

She’s also intrigued by the idea of the glitch — “what we can think of as a moment of hesitation and intervention” — and the palimpsest, a residue of what came before. “This idea is conveyed in the text in my ‘Typestracts’ series which look like they can almost disappear after they swarm together,” says Chua. “Most importantly, I rely on chance to give me a permutation of shapes, be it fallen twigs on tarmac or stains on a glass window.”

“grrrraaanularrrrrrr” also included silkscreen prints featuring a particular shape in UV cured ink to communicate an idea. She says: “In some ways, these works can also be seen as diagrams or a blueprint for something not yet built, or that cannot exist in reality. That is the wonder and quandary of making paintings and prints — they can be real or impossible masterplans.”

At this stage of her career, Chua is known for her cement-based sculptures “Pathway 1, Bevel Pivot Right”; “Pathway 2, Steadfast” and “Pathway 3, Lull Reverie”; and her ‘Breeze Blocks’ series, which combines acrylic paint and linen. The works take into consideration the porous and breathable nature of architecture. She represents this by coating paper with cement, or linen with acrylic paint to produce a surface that is hard and strong, yet light and porous at the same time. Chua says she takes a very loose approach to bringing lines and blocks together, making a choreography of shapes, and then playing with spatial planes as though she is building a maze or an illusion of space.

As an artist, she regards everything around her as a visual stimulus. It’s only when she goes on a nature walk and looks at flora and fauna that she can take her eyes off work, or when she stares at a blank white wall at home that she can relax. “The visual pause to reset is crucial for my creative process.”

She is currently working on a public commission for The Everyday Museum, a Singapore Art Museum (SAM) project where she plastered CAPTCHA codes on the edifice of SAM at Tanjong Pagar Distripark. She says: “The work is titled ‘Prove you are Human’. It is my bid to the audience to decipher letters and numbers on the building to prove they are not robots travelling in the humdrum of traffic on the Ayer Rajah Expressway.”

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