Preserve

Preserve is an oil-on-aluminium triptych inspired by a visit to the Chou Chak Wing Museum on my campus. I was enthralled by a room filled with specimens suspended in jars: extinct species, fragile remains, organs, bodies held in liquid time. The experience felt clinical yet strangely intimate, a quiet archive of what has been lost and what we choose to keep.

In this series, I painted a preserved lizard, followed by a pair of frogs sealed in a jar, and a vessel crowded with human figures. The progression shifts from the natural world to ourselves, reflecting on the ways humans place other species under glass while remaining unaware of our own precarity.

Painting on aluminium reinforces this tension. Its smooth, enduring surface contrasts with the vulnerability of the subjects, pointing to the boundaries of what we can and can’t protect.

Preserve sits somewhere between observation and speculation, reflecting on the impulse to document life while hinting at the possibility that we, too, might one day be part of the archive.