Alumni Documentary

This year has started with some really interesting events. The university which I graduated in, Monash, has decided to invite former students to come back to participate in the making of a documentary about their working lives right now. Me, being the oddball of the lot, who graduated in Bachelor of Arts (this arts does not apply to fine arts, but to humanities and social science) .

I was invited to go back to speak about my choice of career, and how the university education has helped shape this choice?

I told the interviewer that I am an artist, and an art therapist.

And I secretly think to myself, as if being an artist is not funky enough, there's the healing aspect that I'm engaging which makes my work even more fascinating or strange, I couldn't decide.

Sitting there talking about being a painter has this element of surreality. It's strange to come out to former lecturers and fellow friends and classmates in such an academic environment (the library) about being an artist. And an art therapist does not reduced the strangeness.

I told them feminism has formed my interest to paint female subjects, and psychoanalysis has directed my passion to art therapy.

Most of my peers, I gathered, are working as PR agent, journalists, copywriters. Of course there are also individuals who joined the rarer industry, amongst them one is in performing arts, one is a filmmaker, some followed their initial passion-pursuing music, or teaching.

I was rather nervous initially about the Q&A session. It's one thing to commit to pursue one's passion to oneself, and telling it to your closest and most trustest friends and families about it. It's altogether a different thing to admit being an artist to people whom you're not exactly close with. It's a great challenge, and it's also perfect timing, because I was adamant to make 2011 a year to make painting a full time thing!

"Coming out" as an artist feels both surreal yet at the same time because everything is recorded down in the video, it confirms the fact and reality that I'm pursuing art!So looking back, I was surprised by how permanent it means, that there's no turning back from art!*gasp



My former lecturer, Dr Yeoh, being the well-loved and supportive lecturer that he always is, proceeded to buy an artwork immediately following the interview. I was of course just much too pleased to part with this painting, titled "Surrender". That's the same artwork I used for my header for this blog. He said he will "show off" to his other students. He's very good at stroking egos.
This is the library, where the interview+documentary was conducted.