Click on the thumbnails below to view full image and artwork details

As an artist Choo Ai Xin is multi-modal and has to-date produced artworks in various forms using a variety of media. What specific media is utilized for a given artwork is based on careful analysis and selection, determining which medium(s) best convey the ideas she wishes to put forth.

Her current body of work focuses on the everyday mundane, of things that most people don’t give a second thought to, completely ignore, or do notice but take for granted. One of those things is texture, both visual and tactile. For Ai Xin, texture is an important element that provides an added dimension to the viewer’s perception of an artwork.

Ai Xin’s realization about texture being an element frequently overlooked came about partly from her observation of tourists visiting her hometown, Ipoh, taking in the sights and surroundings of Old Town Ipoh, but paying scant attention to the history of the buildings and structures these tourists would busily photograph. Ai Xin regards the textures on these buildings as time records, silent witnesses of Ipoh’s bygone days. By and large, the rich variety of textures found on these buildings go completely unnoticed by visitors and passers-by. If only those textures had a voice, imagine what wonderful stories they could tell.

Textures, however, are of great interest to Ai Xin not merely from the visual aspect, but from the tactile sensations one gets from touching them. One interesting characteristic about Ai Xin is that she is able to discern by touch minute differences in texture that might be oblivious to most of us, due to her sense of touch being more acute than that of the average person. Because of this Ai Xin pays a lot of attention to the tactile quality of textures, in addition to the visual aspects of it, and she believes this is primarily due to her heightened awareness of touch.

With the work she has already produced, Choo Ai Xin has already proven herself to be an artist with tremendous potential. The careful consideration she gives to each artwork she produces, plus the research she carries out to verify and back up her ideas, points to a level of artistic maturity well beyond her years.

Winning two important competitions in as many years – emerging as the first prize winner in MyCreative’s Visual Arts Pitch 2.0 in 2017, the year she graduated from Dasein Academy of Art, and, of course, as the first prize winner in the 2018 edition of Nando’s YOUTHreka Art Competition – are clear indicators that we can expect great things from this young artist in time to come.