My work, Placed, is a self-portrait in form, but at its heart, it’s a conversation with myself about cultural identity, belonging, and the uncomfortable in-between.

I’ve always found the question “Where are you from?” oddly unsettling. Not because I don’t know — but because the answer rarely fits into a neat sentence. It usually starts with, “Well… how much time do you have?”

Placed emerged from this restlessness, from years of carrying a lineage that defies borders. My heritage is a layered mix: Burmese, Indian, Portuguese, English, and Irish. The idea of coming from one place felt complicated long before I was even born. For a while, I thought I needed to return to Burma, speak the language, cook the food, earn my identity. Only then, I believed, would I be “Burmese enough” to speak on it through my art. But through the process of creating Placed, I came to a quieter realisation: cultural identity isn’t always tethered to a country. Sometimes, it’s a feeling. A liminal space. A patchwork of stories inherited and lived.

The work itself uses charcoal — not store-bought, but charcoal I forage, crush, and grind by hand with a mortar and pestle. It’s a tactile, grounding process that connects me to something ancient and instinctual.

When I began Placed, I knew I wanted to disrupt the traditional portrait of a woman. After spending ten hours on a detailed self-portrait, I took a sharp blade and sliced through it. I deconstructed my own face — cutting, shifting, and rearranging the features into a fragmented yet unified whole. It was a symbolic act: rebuilding an identity from multiple angles and perspectives, much like my experience of culture, history, and selfhood.

That act of cutting — of reassembling — felt strangely liberating. It echoed the process of making sense of the scattered, colonial, diasporic fragments of my story. n many ways, I feel I’m only scratching the surface — but that’s the beauty of it. Art, like identity, is never really finished. It just keeps evolving.