Yesterday I submitted the final assignment for my Research Methodology course as part of my PhD at Universiti Sains Malaysia.
What began as a 12-slide presentation eventually became a 48-page script and a 10-minute narrated video. The assignment asked us to explain our methodology, but for me it became something much more important. It forced me to articulate what I have actually been doing over the past several years as an artist and researcher.
After months of writing, making, performing, questioning, and rewriting, I realised that my research can be expressed in a single sentence:
I investigate how artistic practice can function as a Living Archive by using site-responsive performance, movement, mask-making, and visual art to engage with, reinterpret, and reactivate living traditions, folklore, and cultural heritage in contemporary Southeast Asia.
This also helped me understand why my work takes place in temples, cemeteries, museums, memorial spaces, and heritage landscapes. I do not visit these places simply because they are historically significant. I go because they are living cultural environments where traditions continue to be practiced, rituals are performed, stories are remembered, and everyday cultural practices remain part of contemporary life.
These are sites of living heritage—places where cultural continuity, intergenerational transmission, and ancestral knowledge are carried through ritual practices, symbolic gestures, practices of care, material culture, architecture, movement, and relationships with place.
For me, these places are not backgrounds for performance; they are active collaborators in the research. Their histories, atmospheres, sounds, textures, and symbolic qualities shape movement, artistic decisions, and ways of thinking that could never emerge in the studio alone.
The process has also made me think about another project that is slowly taking shape. I keep returning to the idea of the body as a kind of temple—not from the perspective of looking inward or searching for the self, but from the perspective of attention, care, and relationship. What if caring for the body is also a way of caring for how we encounter the world? What if movement, ritual, and everyday acts of care help us become more attentive, more sensitive, and more open to the people, places, and environments around us? I am interested in shifting the focus away from self-absorption and toward embodied presence—a way of living that begins not with self-centredness, but with curiosity, respect, and care for the world we inhabit.
Sometimes an entire semester of work leads not to more complexity, but to greater clarity.