Velda Phua
Singapore/London
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VELDA PHUA 潘梓嫣 she/theyAs an artist and writer, Velda is interested in potentials of the jarring, absurd and maladapted. Currently, her practice engages with the experience of illness. Velda's work is playfully committed to materiality as an integral force to open-ended meaning-making. Her practice accounts for the circumstances that we keep swept under rugs or struggle to find the words for.Education(2021 - 2024)
Goldsmiths, University of London
BA (Hons) Fine Art and History of Art
with 1st Class Honours
London, United Kingdom(2018-2019)
Raffles Institution
Singapore, SingaporeAwards2018
UOB Painting Of The Year, Gold Award
Emerging Artist Category
Walking A-way: The idle saunter as a practice of non-sovereignty is a humble invitation into my reconsideration of the practice of walking as a critical but neglected technology of self. Developed alongside a personal experience of what De Botton termed ‘status anxiety’, I theorise the idle saunter within the ordinariness of depression. which stems from 'a culture that says people should be sovereign agents’, walking came to me as a similarly ordinary habit that 'resides in the art of daily living’.This essay attempts a critical renegotiation of the covert attachments and optimisms that affect us, and posits walking idly as a method of embodying the practices of non-sovereignty, non-being and non-self. Writings from Berlant, Cvetkovich and Daoist doctrines are woven together to form a possible tool of emancipation from this moment of ‘crisis ordinariness’.↪ The accompanying visual diary can be found here: The Walking LogFinding My WayQueer Disconnection, Desire and Defiance: The Cyberfeminist Roleplay WorldBecoming Utopia: Lee Wen’s Journey of a Yellow Man No.1Unveiling the God-trick of the Smart Pass Vision Machine24 Hour Psycho: How Douglas Gordon reawakens dead time through the creation of the potential
