justina forever

In my last post, I wrote about moving flats. Today’s post is about decorating said apartment.

When I first moved to Singapore, a friend told me about the “ID” he’d hired to help him with his flat. I stared at him, blinked twice (audibly, like a cartoon character), listened to him for another minute, then asked, “What’s an ID?” An interior designer. Oof, obviously!

Dear reader, help me out: Is hiring an interior designer… normal? Am I only noticing it now that I’ve reached a certain age? Or is this a uniquely Singaporean thing?

After a year spent living in a weirdly hotel-like loft studio that my friends jokingly referred to as my “boss bitch apartment,” I decided I would decorate my next home with intention.

This was not because I suddenly became a design person. I don’t have an innate sense of or interest in design and have historically dismissed publications like Dezeen and Design Anthology as cold and wanky. (My punishment for turning my nose up at design: sleeping one metre away from the ceiling for two years.) For some reason, acquaintances have some vague impression that I’m interested in design, but I’m just… not.

Historically, I’ve used milk crates as shelves and a cardboard box draped with a scarf as a side table. I’ve inherited whatever random furniture previous tenants left behind rather than shopping for it myself. I’ve never given a second thought to floors or walls.

I don’t want a designed home. I wanted a lived-in one!

After sending myself on a weeks-long scavenger hunt for second-hand furniture from Carousell, the Salvation Army, and Hock Siong, and after putting in a big Ikea order for the rest, it was time to think about wall art.

I had the idea that it might be fun to make my own paintings. Around the same time, my cousin Chengxi told me she’d put her birthdate and time into ChatGPT to generate a birth chart / Bazi. I did the same (aren’t you, too, taking spiritual advice from AI these days?) and it gave me some pointers on which elements and colors to use and avoid. With that context, I asked ChatGPT to suggest images I could paint to bring good luck to my home (or, at the very least, not tempt misfortune).

I painted these using only cyan, magenta, yellow, white, and black acrylics,  partly because someone once told me you can produce almost any color with just these, partly because the sheer number of paint brands at Art Friend overwhelmed me, but mostly because I was too cheap to buy more tubes, especially “niche” colors I might use once. I used the cheapest set of brushes I could find and finished each painting with a coat of satin Mod Podge.

And now, without further ado (and there was a lot of ado), here are the paintings I made, in the order I made them!

My sisters and me with our childhood dog, Reilly.

My sisters and me as budgies nestled in the fur of our other childhood dog, Jumbo.

Boris, my sister Jessica’s dog, and Amelia, my sister Jennifer’s dog. The Boris painting is my favourite because he looks like a thumb. I’ll put them by the front door, like a pair of guard dogs.

Wanchai Cat (2002–2023), a shop cat who lived in a Chinese pharmacy in Hong Kong. Her name was Hawaii. I made a video of her once that went viral (2 million views in a few days). I painted this at a friend’s house during an art-jamming session. Usually I begin with a pencil sketch, but for this one I anyhow whacked it and let the Spirit move me. I like how it turned out. I think it captures Hawaii’s spirit, and painting without a plan was fun! I drew the whiskers with a white Posca marker.

A painting of the moon over a still lake. ChatGPT told me not to include any solitary creatures or boats lest I be alone forever. It also advised me to keep the water calm to sweeten my dreams.

A painting of fuchsias. These are Jessica’s favourite flowers. They remind us of the papier-mâché sculpture Jess and I made when we were seven. Our art teacher banished us to a room separate from the rest of the class because we were too disruptive. Alone, we slapped strips of newspaper soaked in wheat paste over chicken wire and eventually made a weird sculpture shaped like fuchsias.

I really struggled with the colors here. The pinks and purples look really muddy against the green, but I was determined not to add other tubes of color into the mix. I think it looks good enough. ChatGPT was quite helpful when I was troubleshooting the colors!

And lastly, these paintings by my parents…

A painting by my mom, inspired by Balloonia, our favorite book she’d read to us as kids. She painted it at an art jam with my aunts in Singapore some years ago, when she was visiting from Hong Kong. My aunt gave it to me when I first moved here, and I nearly burst into tears thinking that my mom chose to paint something we have such fond, shared memories of!

A piece by my dad, using Posca markers, of some slogans arranged around a tree. He really tortured himself over what to put on the canvas; his notebook was full of sketches of the three “no evil” monkeys he was envisioning in his head , but they were a little too evil-looking (read: horrifying and probably inauspicious to hang on the walls — I didn’t need ChatGPT to tell me that!), so I gently dissuaded him from painting them. I could tell the thought of using acrylics intimidated him (my mom throws herself into new things, my dad less so), so I offered him Posca markers instead.

And that, dear reader, is how I got my home to feel like home!

Next task: figuring out how to hang all the art up!