Mother Knows…Best? is a semi-fictional and semi-autobiographical illustrated publication based on a series of conversations with my family and close friends. The publication explores stories of emotional inheritance in Singapore from a Generation-Z perspective and serves as a means of self-reflection of my own experience.
Emotional inheritance is the transmission of emotions from generation to generation. In studying the intergenerational transmission of trauma, also known as generational trauma, where the effects of a traumatic incident get passed down from those who directly experienced the incident to subsequent generations, we investigate how our ancestors’ unprocessed emotions, especially trauma, are passed down as an emotional inheritance, leaving a trace in our minds and in those of future generations.
Through storytelling, the publication will allow greater awareness and understanding of this phenomenon, and educate the various nuanced and layered ways in which emotional inheritance manifests in family units and their dynamics. This will encourage readers to make sense of their own experience, as well as provide them with a culturally appropriate, pragmatic and accessible means for retrospection.
Reverie is a project centered on the production of a comic book, developed through processes of
illustrative penciling, inking, editing and lettering, and features a book-length three act narrative. The graphic
novel is hand-drawn and inked by myself, and presented purely in black and white with additional digital
refinement.
The story details a hero, Vesper is taken from a war between Dreams and Nightmares by an otherworldly
monster, into her subconscious which she must escape with the help of an unlikely ally. The short graphic
novel of about 30 pages deals with the themes of war, the search for truth and Good vs Evil. The story is an exploration of contradiction and how the grey areas of war are manipulated to serve the powers that be.
The project serves to educate me in the processes of learning the developmental aspects in the craft of comic book drawing, writing and publishing. The project itself is actually an opening chapter to a larger story I hope to continue writing and illustrating
in the future.
Cog in the Machine is an experimental graphic novel that takes a posthuman approach to narrativity and design. The project seeks to use themes of technology to not only provide answers about our place in the universe as humans, but also to raise questions that contribute to the ongoing posthuman dialogue. The graphic novel features narrative and visuals produced in collaboration with open-source artificial intelligence models such as Generative Pre-trained Transformer Vr. 2 (GPT-2) by OpenAI and Attentional Generative Adversarial Network (AttnGAN) by Microsoft Deep Learning Technology Centre.
The narrative is inspired by recent developments in biotechnology in Singapore such as culturing meat with stem cells, genome editing on animals and the implications of such changes. Visual communication will play a critical role in making these unseen subjects tangible to the general public, enabling them to comprehend subjects that are beyond their visual scope — and, in turn, encourage bridging the worlds of visual arts and technology.
Religion has always been one of the topics that could bring people together, or push people apart. In the case of sex education, Muslim youths who live in both the religious and secular societies, while still developing their identities, face a unique struggle. Through face to face interviews, online questionnaires, and secondary research, it is found that many young Muslims who live in diverse societies, surrounded by external influences, are fed unrealistic messages of love, lust, and relationships, as they struggle to meet the expectations of both worlds. In this report, it goes through the creative process of creating a graphic novel series that touches on sensitive topics that are age appropriate for the pre-teen target audience. “Sofia’s” is a series of short graphic novel stories created for pre-teens, aged 9 to 12, that revolve around stories of seemingly normal everyday happenings that test their beliefs in Islamic values, inspired by Muslims from around the world who also live in diverse societies.
Tradigital Mythmaking: Baia is a comic project that seeks to tell the story of a negotiation between
tradition and change. The story features Baia, the main character and a youth of the Crocodile Tribe that
dwells deep underwater, who encounters Lita, a human girl who saves his life.
‘Baia’ seeks to be primarily an entertainment and exploratory piece that can act as a spark of interest in
investigating traditional motifs with contemporary comic styles and sequential storytelling formats. These
visual motifs are derived from research on the traditional woven crafts of the Iban people of Borneo. The
project’s visual development studies the reptilian motifs in the Iban woven crafts and seeks to investigate
potential graphic novel design process deviations and the effects of traditional meanings imposed on a
contemporary comic style.
The outcome of the project is a fully coloured 34-page graphic novel and a visual development
booklet.
