My family originates from Kuala Lumpur. I remember growing up listening to my late father talking about his childhood in Brickfields back in the 1950s to 1960s. He said he had picked rambutans from rambutan trees planted in the nearby orchard across the road (the land where KL Sentral is built on today), swam in the Klang river after school and caught fighting fishes in the river with his friends. When I was a kid, those kampung life adventures were fascinating to me, simply because those imageries contradicted with what I was used to experiencing as an urban kid.

As I grew older, I found him began to sound like a broken record for repeating the same stories over and over again. They got less exciting and I paid lesser attention as time went by. I did not find resonance in his stories because I grew up in a totally different era and environment. Now, the storyteller is no longer around, and the feeling of nostalgia hits. It is during moments like this I begin to understand why my father looked back on his childhood often even when he reached old age. He wanted to find connectedness with us.

When facing major changes or going through major events in life, humans naturally tend to think a lot about the past, which is feeling nostalgic. It is a comforting feeling to remind us who we have been, what we had been through and who we are going to be. By understanding this theory, I am able to empathise with my father. He might have had compared the childhood of his children living in an urban area while reminiscing his childhood in the village. He might have had hoped that we were still able to grow up happily despite missing certain type of fun that he used to enjoy as a child. Whether consciously or not, having shared his childhood with us was a way of uniting sense of identity. This had allowed us to form close parent-child bond since young.

To me, nostalgia is bittersweet. Remembering the best times and the fond memories we shared being the sweet part. Irreversible of time spent with my father and having to deal with longing memories of him that I can never be retrieve again is bitter.

In terms of art practice, I have been using art as a medium for therapy to help me in my grieving journey. Therefore, for 2023 Bakat Muda Sezaman project, I would like to make an installation artwork that can convey my artistic conception on what nostalgia is like for me. I intend to create a space where the audience can interact with. In the said space, the audience can temporarily abandon the current state of mind and let themselves travel back in time, to be in touch with their fondest memories that they have shared with their closest person. Playing with opaque and transparent forms, I hope to visualise the metaphorical meaning of present times versus the longing memories of the past.