Minimal man

THIS series grew out of my interest in how much you can express with the simplest forms. I was drawn to the economy and elegance of Chinese black-and-white minimalism, particularly the work of Ch’ng Kiah Kiean, as well as Paul Klee’s idea of “taking a line for a walk”. In this type of art, a few marks can suggest an entire world.

I made my sketches quickly and intuitively, on art pads and small pieces of photocopy paper cut to A6 size. Working at such a modest scale encouraged spontaneity and let forms emerge before deliberate composition took over.

Built from wandering lines, geometric shapes, and subtle tonal shading, the drawings sit between abstraction and representation. A line may suggest a path, a body part, a landscape, a frame, or even a character, depending on how the eye follows it. The drawings invite viewers to look slowly and discover their own connections.

Playfulness is at the heart of the series. Spirals, dots, masks, and looping pathways recur like fragments of a personal visual vocabulary. Chance and control work together, each mark suggesting the next in a process of visual improvisation. This is also apparent in my Conversations from ‘taking a line for a walk’ (2023, read here). Before that, in Excerpts from a doodle for my first solo in 2022 (read here).

Minimal Man was part of Lim Siang Jin’s solo exhibition, Evolution: A Conversations series, at Art Voice Gallery, 28 Jalan Kovil Hilir, Sentul, 51100 Kuala Lumpur, June 28 to July 28, 2026. It was curated by Stephen Menon. Read here, here, here and here.