Off Stone 4: Sheila Singam, Opalyn Mok, Marina Emmanuel, Jahabar Sadiq & Lim Siang Jin

SHELIA SINGAM

AT THE EDGE, Sheila was part of the Options team under Surinder Jessy. They shared the same floor as me and BK Tan so we saw each other often. At the time, I did not know how multi-talented she was. Since then, mainly via her Facebook posts, I have discovered how multi-faceted her skillsets are. I am very glad she opted to participate in Off Stone.

Eclectic trainer-artist who helps others find their purpose

Sheila is a multi-hyphenate who uses her story and skills to enable people to see possibilities and find their purpose. She has had an eclectic career spanning more than three decades and has been at different times a journalist, training and innovation consultant, coach, and more recently, artist.

She believes in constantly reinventing herself, in inding excitement in her life’s journey and allowing challenges to build her inner strength. She takes delight in using her skills to build people and organisations to accelerate growth through Human Equation, the company she set up for that purpose.

She currently conducts coaching and training programmes for corporations, while pursing new courses and producing ‘Joyous, Colourful Art’, the tagline for her art brand, Kaleidoscopic Art. She held her first solo exhibition, ‘Forest in the Brain’ in 2022, and donated 20% of the proceeds to two cancer patients in memory of her late husband, renowned journalist KP Waran.

The Upstarts: It happens insidiously. They grow innocuously in the soil of acceptance and bastardised teachings, to become the heroes of a new dynasty, wading in with their brand of illogical righteousness, trampling upon a national heritage of culture, tradition and harmony. They are compelling in their rhetoric, using race and religion as their unholy tools of conquest and masking the real soul of a nation. Can the old outlast the new in the long run? It depends on us, the complacent bystanders, doesn’t it?

Spring Came Early: For hopes and dreams frozen in the winter of our grief, our disappointment, our adversity, there is always the promise of spring. Where the glimmer of faith, like a seed, exists, the colours of a new day can shine through to overcome winter’s harsh reign in our hearts. This piece was created to inspire hope and joy in the unknown adventures of the future.

Stalkers: A fun piece that on the surface, depicts flowers stalking through the garden, this composition is a metaphor for the people that populate an ecosystem and lend strength and colour to the milieu in which they exist. Deceptively simple, it represents complexity through the colours and textures that comes from the juxtaposition of organic and inorganic material.

OPALYN MOK

MY FIRST meeting with Opalyn took place during a Rasa Rasa Penang Food Hunt I organised in 2008. She was covering it for theSun. We kept in touch and, last year, she was assigned by Malay Mail Online to cover my second solo (read here). I sensed an artist in her and asked to see her works. They impressed me so much that I told her about my plans for an art exhibition for journos. I also asked if she would take part. I am glad she did. This is how she describes her dyptych...

Last Editions: Call to action to preserve our natural world and integrity of information

In ‘Last Editions’, I explore the poignant parallels between two forms of decline: the vanishing of endangered species and the fading influence of the traditional news industry. This diptych, rendered in charcoal on newsprint paper, features two iconic symbols of this shared fate — the Asian Elephant and the Malayan Tiger.

Both the subjects and the medium serve to emphasise the transient nature of their existence. The Asian Elephant and Malayan Tiger, both critically endangered, stand as stark reminders of the fragility of life and the irreversible impact of human activity on our planet’s biodiversity.

The use of newsprint paper, typically associated with the fleeting nature of daily news, further enhances this theme of impermanence. Just as the newsprint will yellow and deteriorate over time, so too do the habitats and populations of these majestic creatures.

The medium of charcoal was chosen for its ability to capture the raw, ephemeral beauty of these animals, while also highlighting the impermanence of both the subject matter and the materials. As the charcoal works age, they will inevitably degrade, echoing the slow but steady disappearance of both the animals depicted and the once-vibrant news industry.

This intentional deterioration is not just a physical process, but a symbolic one—representing the decline and potential extinction of not only these species but also the traditional platforms that once brought their stories to light.

‘Last Editions’ is a meditation on the delicate balance of life and the transient nature of all things. It is a call to action, urging viewers to recognise and respond to the urgent need to preserve both our natural world and the integrity of information in a rapidly-changing landscape.

Opalyn Mok has 25 years of journalism experience and enjoys exploring her artistic side through watercolour, charcoal, and digital art. She believes art is expressive forms of storytelling that transcends language.

MARINA EMMANUEL

MARINA reviewed my book, Rasa Rasa Penang: A Visitor-friendly Guide to its Food, in 2006. It was my first major project after I left The Edge in 2005. We have kept in touch over the years and, after retirement, she has continued to write in her blog, postcodegeorgetown. Insightful and broad-ranging, the blog, I thought, would have a meaningful place in Off Stone. Thanks Marina.

Capturing the charms of Georgetown

After chasing headlines and bylines for over three decades in general news, politics, finance, lifestyle, technology and business with The Star and New Straits Times (her last position as a news editor for the Business Times), Marina is today an independent writer who also blogs at postcodegeorgetown.com

She lives in Penang, an island state, and thinks her affinity to water may have something to do with her name. These days she chases sunrises and sunsets, striking blue skies, (still) green hills, (generally) clear waters and amazing food, as she goes about capturing the charms of Georgetown.

JAHABAR SADIQ

I HAD read about Jahabar mainly in his capacity as a leader of Malaysian Insider and founder of Malaysian Insight. In 2022, at my first solo, I had the opportunity to meet him, probably for the first time. He and David ST Loh took part in a session entitled ‘Telling Stories with Photos’. Read here. From his Facebook posts, I could see that he wrote meaningful stories for his photos. The following are two excellent examples.

Of constancy, change and stories as connective tissues

The two photographs by Jahabar Sadiq show how our perceptions blend constancy and change. However, in themselves, the images do not tell the whole story. They need narratives, the connective tissues between what remain and what’s changed. Stories give answers, albeit in limited ways, to the perennial questions asked by journalists: Who? What? Where? Why? and How? We should therefore not see Jahabar’s images as standalones but always with their stories.

The Klang Valley Clouds: The rain clouds have hung over the Klang Valley since the dawn of time. They nourished the rain trees that grew to be giants providing shade for the fertile valley that held some of the world’s largest holdings of tin ore. That which brought many to make their fortunes and cut down the rain trees to build their own skyscrapers. And still the clouds remain.

The Nam Kee Kopitiam sisters: Their father opened the kopitiam in Kuala Lumpur’s then new wet market in Jalan Raja Bot just outside Kampung Baru. It was May 28, 1955, two years before Malaya became independent of the United Kingdom. The kopitiam prospered as much as Malaya and then Malaysia. But wet markets went out of fashion many years later as did kopitiams. Now was the age of supermarkets and convenience stores, now was the time of chain cafes and coffee outlets. Coffee was no longer a beverage to be sipped at leisure but a cup of Joe on the go. And so Nam Kee shuttered days before the old Raja Bot market shut down for the last time on May 18, 2024 – 10 days shy of its 70th year.

LIM SIANG JIN

Tattered mourners and the wealth of inconsistency

THE WORLD is a mish-mash of forms. Our search for consistency in art, influenced no doubt by the age of mechanical reproduction, is perhaps too one-sided. In this ‘experimental’ exhibit, I aim for inconsistency — and wealth in variation. ‘Tattered Mourners’ is a hand-painted cotton rag print of a piece I did in 1988. ‘Aftermath’ is handwritten on 300gsm Aquarelle Fontaine, while the typed text, with all its faults, is on 70gsm simili. The typewriter I used is an Olympia
SME3 De Luxe produced in the 1950s.

However, they belong together as a set. the pieces are part of my project on ‘The Refugee Child’ that, with verses and drawings, traces the movement of a child refugee from war-torn Vietnam to his resettlement in the West. I am still trying to figure out what to do with it.

This is what I wrote about it in 2018: ‘The seeds of this project were planted in the mid 1970s when I watched Saigon fall on TV in the United Kingdom. They were cultivated again later in the backroom of The Malay Mail when we were copy tasting regional news. In the late 1970s, a trickle of people leaving Vietnam by boat turned into an unimaginable gush.

‘There were horrendous stories on their plight at sea, the atrocities inflicted upon them by fishermen-turned-pirates, the concentration camps, their journeys to faraway lands and how they settled there. I felt deeply for them — feelings that imploded into this project.’

Read here about my work so far in the field of art.