A Sense of Place and Tangled Braid are both artist books containing photographic works. These were submitted as separate studio projects to LASALLE College of the Arts, Singapore.

Tangled Braid is set against the confines of my college dormitory — where the girls staying here weave in and out of each other’s lives like a tangled braid — the work draws from the experience of girls living in a shared space to reflect girl culture through a cinematic lens.

With picturesque scenes, Tangled Braid reveals a magic to be found in the
mundanity of living together, the allure to how girls move as a group, and in the experience of girlhood as a collective.

A Sense of Place examines how more often than not, the impulse to see oneself as the sole protagonist in life is rather inevitable. We go through life purely from our own perspective, as if we were the director, producer, and actor of a movie all at once; there is the tendency to place ourselves as the crux of a narrative, to cast oneself as the star of a series of cinematic moments.

However, what happens when the movie includes not only another character, but a main character? What happens when we stop, see, realise, and comprehend that another person’s life is just as complex as ours? 

The project centres on people observed around East Coast Park who appear to be having this “main character moment”. In essence, those who seem distant, not due to isolation, but because they are consumed by their own presence - as if they were the centrepoint at a key event in the film. This project explores the fact that these multiple, uncountable vivid realities coexist with one another.