When I was sixteen I created what was probably my first true piece of art with something to say. I wasn't very good with titles so I termed it as best as I could, Popularity. That was the word that decorated in Verdana the full length of the first A3-sized board of preparatory work, mostly because I thought it a clever and convenient thing to do, "look that's one board down, only six more to go!" You might call it a sculpture installation even though I did not know what to call it at the time, not that it mattered since I never was quite able to speak about my work to anyone.

The sculpture was formed of two dull gray mechanical arms standing a couple of metres apart rising out of the ground, one shooting straight up to about eye level griping onto a sphere with its three-pronged claws, another bent away from the other at its base and elbow joint in a gentle angle such that it seemed reaching out for another identical sphere, suspended inches away in nothingness by a fishing line. I built this thing out of odd pieces of recycled and found materials - wood panel and foam board with nuts and bolts for the claws, cardboard tubes and dismantled bits of past students' works like a metal stand and a wheel hub to form the central structure, some acrylic and spray paint, sand, white glue, and two plastic inflated balls the kind that children play with. It was a strange yet fresh undertaking because up to that point, most of what I ever did was draw. I would come into the studio for Drawing & Painting exams and draw something I had thought up the night before even though we would get three weeks to develop ideas, or I remember one time in third year, draw the whitewashed motorcycle which was the centrepiece of our massive still-life set up - the then realistic manner which I rendered it led to much attention and also became the thing my fellow art students came to remember me for, I probably secretly enjoyed this a lot because finally here was something I was good at after embarrassingly failing all my other classes and being good for nothing in one of the top-ranked schools of the country.

I started on the project rather late, in August when it should have been April, perhaps only consulting my tutor thrice on what I wanted to do. I am sure he was perplexed and worried, but he would later comment to another tutor that I was very independent going about my work; systematically sawing, sanding, painting, drilling and building my odd contraption. I enjoyed this freedom, though I probably abused it more than I ever did embrace it. We got to choose our day for class, which corresponded with a specific tutor, of which there were three. So Friday afternoons I would stay for art class, the best class ever because it meant a late lunch with friends in an almost-empty refractory, walking into class with drink in hand, breaks as you liked it, jokes, and drawing. At times there would be rules enforced and work demanded or a lesson proper, but even then it was nothing like Elementary Mathematics whose quadratic equations I could still not do by third year. I remember we once had an ex-student come in, who had moved on to studying at Art Center or CalArts or some such fancy place in the United States because he was drawing shiny concept cars with markers, and that left a deep impression on me - it was like watching Feng Zhu work and talk about his work in first person.

Although I called it the first, I would not call it my favourite piece of work. For one thing I don't think I was ever very clear about what I wanted to say through it. Popularity really should have been Exploitation of The Desire for Popularity or I Do Not Understand Why Everybody Buys this Popular Shit or Sometimes I am Glad I am Not Popular, though I admit the original does carry with it a certain simplistic, ironic, sardonic charm. I might have had too much to say; at one point the installation was to include a weaving, twisting, repeating stream of rectangular possibly acrylic panels sandwiching the spheres, as it were, to symbolise a kind of basic contrast in shape and thus nature in this flow of life. The spheres represented in a sea of bad ideas good ones being snatched up and sucked dry and essentially sold out by some unseen corporate machine - as such they were also meant to glow with an alluring radiance. I did not possess the time, ingenuity or resources to create such a mass of objects but the idea stayed the same, I came up with the rationale that ideas are unseen anyway, and they are within us, perhaps the audience or the people walking about observing this scene before them, just as blind and oblivious as in the real world to what happens to ideas on a grand scale. Some people might choose to call this bullshit-rationalisation and that is fine because frankly I do not care anymore.

I was certainly proud that last night we slaved to beat the midnight chime to finish our works in the new gallery on the fourth floor; proud that I had managed to accomplish this thing which I never thought I would and how it actually managed to look pretty fine and mean something at the same time. Things seem simple those years ago, I am almost amazed now of having ever thought of creating such a piece of work, also at the rest of the cohort with their other abstract installations comprising of tree trunk sections, dismantled car interiors, blown-up colour-in covers of Time magazine, giant bee drawings with dead leaves, surrealist illustration on unused projection-screen and papier-mâché fist-sized cocoons. The environment encouraged a very hands-on, non-painting (yet focusing on drawing in first year and design concepts in the second), non-traditional approach to art, and although I did not realise this until I was in junior college where I had received a culture shock of sorts, it formed the conditions which taught me to explore the possibilities of expression through art. As I await to begin a next phase in my life, I am thinking and maybe hoping that this environment which I have chosen will allow me to make yet more discoveries, that I will do all I can to not have to regret it.