SHENTONISTA

“My favourite fusion restaurant isn’t even in Singapore actually. It’s called Manja, and it’s in Kuala Lumpur. Oh my gosh, it’s the best. It beats even Michelin restaurants. It’s that legit, and it’s not even very expensive. It’s Indian mixed with European, and every dish is like wow, amazing. Flavours bursting in your mouth and stuff.”

“I work as a video producer, but I enjoy taking photos and videos as a hobby. I have a lot of cameras, because I like using different cameras for different things. For making videos, I like Sanyo’s retro video cameras. For photos, I like using digital Fujifilm cameras, and film cameras.”

“When I was younger, I volunteered at the Boy’s Home, and met kids my age who were living totally different lives from me because they were neglected by society. Since then, I’ve wanted to be a positive change for them, which is why I’m now a youth worker working with kids at risk.”

“I admire everything about my dad. I think he is one of the wisest people ever. Like if I ever need advice, he would be the person I would go to. His sense of humour is great too—I feel like he finds humour in everything, and nothing brings him down, so that’s something I really admire, because I could never!”

“In the past, most people believed that children should never talk back to elders, but we want to give our kids more autonomy. We want them to know that their voice and opinions matter, so we have discussions as a family instead of us providing close-ended options like a yes or a no to everything.”

“It’s pretty common, especially for Asian countries, to see art as something that you can’t go far with. I want to prove that belief wrong, and show that I can make a living out of it. It doesn’t have to be the starving artist way—there are many paths you can take. It’s not a one-way route.”

“One piece of advice I live by is to not take life too seriously, because life is really short. I’m a practicing yogi, so I believe that we are not our bodies. Our bodies are just machines that we’ll use for a little while in this life, before we drop it off and pick up new bodies again and again in our subsequent lives.”

“I wore braces for eight years, and my teeth still aren’t perfectly straight. Eight years leh! I put them on in Secondary 1, and only took them out when I was in my first year of university. My original dentist even retired halfway through.”

“I do freelance work with a Malay theatre company, Anggerik Temasek Bangsawan. Bangsawan is a type of traditional Malay opera, but we’re trying to revive it using new technology. The last production we put up had a fully digital set shown on LED screens.”

“You won’t normally catch me out for lunch in the afternoon actually, because most of the time, I’ll be in the gym. It’s become a habit to destress at the gym, either in the morning or in the afternoon, so I always sacrifice my lunch hour to gym.”

“My boyfriend and I met four years ago, at a wedding for our mutual friends. I had just come back from the Dominican Republic, and he had just arrived from Andorra, and we happened to meet there at the wedding. It’s fate!”

“I started photographing since 2015. Back then, I found an old camera in my wardrobe—it was a film camera, so I decided to just play around with it, and I’ve been photographing moments in my daily life until now.”