The Taste of Belonging, 2026, 122x91cm, Mixed media (Acrylic, incense, textures and mica) on canvas

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The Taste of Belonging explores food as a language of care, memory, and home. It is a tribute to my mother, who passed away from lymphoma, and to mothers whose love is quietly expressed through the everyday act of preparing meals. Despite old age, cataracts, and rheumatism, she continued to cook for her family. Behind every dish lay invisible labour—gestures of devotion that transformed nourishment into a profound sense of belonging.

The painting process is an act of remembrance. Acrylic paint is combined with incense ashes from daily offerings, embedding memory into the material itself. Layered textures evoke how remembrance resides not only in the mind, but also within objects, spaces, and the body.

Drawing upon Roland Barthes' concept of punctum, familiar elements of a Singapore HDB kitchen become repositories of lived experience. Archival images of my mother intertwine with the present-day kitchen, where newer appliances occupy a space she no longer inhabits. The perspective subtly distorts, stretching the foreground reflecting emotional rather than physical distance.

My mother gradually dissolves into light, suspended between presence and absence. Like 落叶归根 , she has returned to the earth, yet her care continues to inhabit the home she shaped. The kitchen becomes a surreal landscape where memory and reality coexist, suggesting that the taste of belonging is never found in food alone, but in the enduring presence of love that continues to make a place feel like home.