Small Delights: On the joy-filled world of Pey Chi
By Anna Emina
This is a catalogue essay specially written for pey chi’s solo exhibition I cut fruit for you,
now showing at Lamington Drive until may 18. read our 5 questions with pey chi here.
Then a woman said,
Speak to us of Joy and Sorrow.
And he answered:Your joy is your sorrow unmasked.
– ‘On Joy and Sorrow’, Kahlil Gibran
It would be reasonable to admit that in every aspect of my life, I am drawn to a certain kind of melancholy. Gloomy winter days, sad gurl playlists, lonely walks, grief-stricken poetry and existential angst are a few of my common comforts. However, it is in the presence of art that my melancholy’s true weight can be understood. It is in the worlds of painters such as Tetsuya Ishida, Seta Manoukian, Bambou Gili and Jia Aili—who depict human isolation and alienation, displacement and the madness of war—that I find myself subconsciously consumed by. I would stay there forever, if it weren't for a tiny glitch in my melancholic fortress—if it weren't for colour. While it remains a struggle to understand these feelings, let alone put them into words, I know that colour has the ability to destroy any sense of gloom; it enters my being so unexpectedly, bypassing any barriers or reservations, instantly filling me with pure joy.
Bambou Gili, Everyone I know is just so tired, 2021
It is this feeling of joy that accompanies me every time I walk through Pey Chi’s pink studio door at Schoolhouse Studios. Despite having now visited Pey Chi for what could be the 100th time over the past few months, the process is always the same. I enter her studio, with no prelude to my visit, and even before hellos have been said my eyes are darting between the Hello Kitty clock and the purple Chinese New Year lion, sweeping over the ceramics table and landing on the makeshift easel. A white bucket sits on the beige chair backed up against the wall, not unlike one in a classroom. An unfinished canvas rests on top of the chair, surrounded by paints, markers, brushes, cloths and an upcycled tray used as a paint palette. A canvas in Pey Chi’s studio is a sight I have only recently become acquainted with: usually a ceramicist, Pey Chi began exploring painting in late 2023, a new medium in her art practice. A daunting and vulnerable endeavour to take on especially for her first solo exhibition I Cut Fruit For You at Lamington Drive.
Despite her art taking on a new form, Pey Chi’s work continues to explore her Chinese-Malaysian (Hakka and Hokkien) culture, and the sentimental facets that depict her diasporic experience. Beginning with the title, which points to a universal act of love (cutting fruit for someone, commonly a parent to a child) Pey Chi acknowledges the way in which receiving and making food has helped her understand herself and her culture. This is particularly apparent in ‘At that Mamee Food Court in Melaka’, a small acrylic on canvas with the words ‘Belly, so full, so nourished’ written in between plates of kuih lapis, da bao (大包), fried nian gao (炸年糕) with sweet potato & taro, and chee cheong fun with tian jiang (甜酱). The work is inspired by the pink and white terrazzo tables and specialty Malaysian dishes found at Medan Selera Tun Tuah food court in Melaka, Pey Chi’s mother’s hometown. Her favourite food court and a compulsory first visit after leaving the airport. She describes the work as full of ‘all the foods I love” and “are really easy to get there and that nourish me in different ways”.
Food is an understandable love language and imbued in Pey Chi’s life. Her father and grandfather have run restaurants their entire lives. Mangosteens, dragon fruit, bubble tea, peaches, fish, lotus seed buns, putu piring, and angkoo kueh all make appearances throughout the work.
Pey Chi, Mamee Food Court in Melaka, 2024
Food is not the only recurring motif in this exhibition—flowers, phrases in Hokkien and Malay, animals and caricatures are also part of her repertoire. When I ask Pey Chi about her work, she answers with short, no-nonsense sentences: ‘I like dogs’ or, ‘it’s fun’. There’s an innocence and playfulness to the work and her exhibition is filled with nostalgia and sentimentality, all inspired by Chinese iconography. There are odes to familial connections such as Haw Par Villa, a Chinese mythology sculpture park in Singapore she first visited as a child and returned to last year as an adult. The painting Sweet Honey depicts song lyrics from ‘Tian Mi Mi’, by the Taiwanese singer Terera Teng. The lyrics (‘甜蜜蜜 / 你笑得 甜蜜蜜 / 好像花 儿开 在春风里 / 开 在春风里’)—which translate to ‘As sweet as honey / Your smile is so sweet as honey / Just like the way flowers bloom / In the spring breeze’—are displayed on multicolored squares, surrounded by a black border with Pey Chi’s signature kitsch ’n’ cute style flowers. She recalls how whenever the song came on, a “nice vibe” would settle over her Ma and Ba. The song, she says, is a way to connect to her parents.
Pey Chi, Sweet Honey, 2024
Amongst the imagery, there exists only one human figure. This figure is an unnamed girl and features across several paintings, with big brown eyes, round rudolf nose, big lips and black hair; part self-portrait and part reflection of the women around her. This girl is usually in a state of movement or leisure, whether that’s on her bike or riding a fish that looks like it lives in Bikini Bottom. The works that draw my attention are those where the figure seems not to be doing much at all but, rather, is in a state of being. In Peachy Head, the figure looks directly at the viewer, a smiling peach sitting contentedly on her head, her pigtails up in the air. In Bubble Tea Break, the girl sits in a deep squat position, her eyes downward as she contemplates the bubble tea she is enjoying. We are in her world and she holds the narrative, unconcerned by us viewers.
Pey Chi, Peachy Head, 2024 and Bubble Tea Break, 2024
The culmination of Pey Chi’s nostalgia and search for home is represented in the painting 你几时回来? How do I get back?. ‘你几时回来?’ can be translated to ‘When are you coming back?’ The painting depicts three Asian girls just chilling and squatting while looking at their phones, each in their own worlds but together in each other's company. ‘It’s something I saw a lot of in Asia,’ Pey Chi says, reflecting on her recent trip to Malaysia. ‘Just, like, families and friends chillin’ on their phones … together. It was really nice. A space of comfort without pressure to be a certain way.’ As the painting progressed, Pey Chi began adding elements that reminded her of home. The words ‘Taman Mutiara’ refers to Pey Chi’s ‘home’ subway station in Kuala Lumpur. On the left corner, the fish is inspired by an image she took at the local pasar malam. Near the middle bottom, the blue plate contains lotus baos—one of her favourite baos—with a fruit basket full of mangosteen, duku langsat and guava beside it. The purple bottle contains grape-flavoured Vitagen, a Yakult-esque probiotic drink that you can only get in Malaysia. 你几时回来? How do I get back? is dedicated to her love for the three months she spent in Malaysia and around Asia in 2023.
Pey Chi, 你几时回来? How do I get back?, 2024
I Cut Fruit for You is not only an act of love to her culture but also to herself. While Pey Chi pays homage to her predecessors, she has also established a footprint of understanding for who she is. The dialectic of the paintings come together as one, representing all that Pey Chi loves and holds dear. It is as if we are witnessing Pey Chi in multiple states of being, the different elements of who she is coming together, synthesising the exhibition and how Pey Chi sees herself, on her own terms, in her own language.
While I listen to Pey Chi discuss her work, I find myself dissatisfied with the idea that she was simply born painting happy things. My melancholic self would constantly ask: But why? What do your characters mean? What are you running away from? Where does this happiness come from? My answer finally came when Pey Chi informed me that at twenty-one, she was diagnosed with Topical Steroid Withdrawal, a chronic illness characterised by inflamed skin that comes about after stopping long-term use of topical corticosteroids. Housebound for six months, and unable to fully participate in the world in the years after her diagnosis, Pey Chi’s work took a turn. Describing the time of diagnosis as ‘pretty black’ and ‘emo’, Pey Chi felt that a lot had been taken away from her. Sitting at home with nothing to do she found solace in art and colour. She stopped exclusively using black in her work and found a new direction in her art practice, choosing to surround herself with the things she loves. This journey of artistic discovery only continued, moving away from textiles, trying out tattooing, ceramics and now painting.
At first, I found it difficult to understand how she was able to make the leap. How she could possibly do what so many others including myself had failed to do—substituting sorrow for joy as if the two are interchangeable. But joy and sorrow have so much to tell each other, as the American poet and essayist Ross Gay suggests, who defines joy as ‘the feeling that emanates when we figure out how to tend to one another through our sorrows’. I soon learned that it was Pey Chi’s awareness of her sorrow that gave her the ability to focus on joy; that her experience with chronic illness and identity crisis, among the other difficulties of being human, is what brought her to this place of joy. In his poem ‘On Joy and Sorrow’, Kahlil Gibran describes the inseparability of the two emotions, that neither is greater than the other. He writes: ‘Together they come, and when one sits alone with you at your board, remember that the other is asleep upon your bed’.
Pey Chi, Bicycle Bad Bitch, 2024
It is an intimate tragedy to resist joy, to remove it from our lives bit by bit until we can no longer recognise it. The more time I spend with Pey Chi's work, the more open I become to the subtle differences of rust and burnt orange, caicos turquoise and aquamarine and sweet slumber and placebo pink. I’m reminded that I haven’t seen everything the world has to offer, and that the introduction of a single colour can negate all of my gloom. It reminds me of what the poet Mary Oliver once wrote, that ‘Joy is not made to be a crumb’. When I see Bicycle Bad Bitch, Sister Sister, and Peachy Head hung up on the walls of Lamington Drive, I realise that Pey Chi has joy in bucketloads.
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Anna Emina is an educator, curator and writer based in Naarm. Her practice centres around collaboration and seeks to create accessible opportunities for people of colour to connect with contemporary art in Australia.
(Photo credit: Erhan Tirli)