Fyerool Darma is an artist who defies any easy descriptions. Trained as a painter, these days Fyerool is known for his multidisciplinary practice spanning sculpture, video, sound, and craft techniques. He was born and raised in Singapore for all of his 38 years, but you’ll find plenty of his enigmatic works scattered across galleries in Hong Kong, Australia, Seoul, and Brazil. He’s one of our nation’s most quietly celebrated artists, but it wasn’t an easy road to success.

His father, a wedding singer by trade, allowed Fyerool to witness the beauty of life first-hand as a boy. Tagging along, he saw a celebration of culture and love play out beneath vibrant lights and loud music, whetting his appetite for the creative. But as he’d soon come to realise himself, being in the field of the arts did little to provide financial support.

In art, there are the privileged ones who can afford to walk the often-penniless path of being an artist. Then there are those like Fyerool, who grew up without the cushion of their parents. There were no parental bank accounts to bankroll a bohemian stint in London or New York. As a result, Fyerool is one of the rare few who have kept at it here, slowly chipping away at the local arts scene and actually making a name for himself.

But even though Fyerool continues to endure and thrive in this ecosystem, he does not view himself as a Singaporean artist.

“You're a writer yourself,” he says, bouncing the idea back at me. “Not a Singaporean writer. Just a writer.” Fyerool raises the idea that nationhood should not be tied to an occupation, and I agree. Especially in the field of creativity, it boxes one in and limits what is possible.

Singapore, of course, has made strides in building its art scene—there are galleries, museums, grants, and fellowships. But Fyerool believes we still have some way to go before artists can feel fully supported. Take the National Arts Council, he points to. It is not that they are not trying, but the kind of art they nurture tends to come with a certain flavour of patriotism. Art, in that context, starts to feel like another form of nation-building.

This form of support wrangles with how Fyerool views identity, especially as a Singaporean. The thing about identity is that it is never fixed—it is something he constantly negotiates with. “Singaporean-ness”, he posits, is a constructed label. Of course, the skin we are born with makes up part of our identity (and the projection of other people’s biases also contributes to it), but our identity as Singaporeans is also constructed from multiple historical and temporal threads.

It has been 60 years since we gained independence as a nation, but we can still feel the reverberations of the colonial period. Singapore now feels like a constant refraction of the time when the British used to colonise us. We speak in the tongue of our former masters, adopted capitalism, and maximised it. We call it progress, but what have we really learnt from it?

None of this, by the way, is said with bitterness. Fyerool is grateful for all the contradictions and discomforts. “As an artist, I’m allowed to sit with that, to sift through the residue, listen to the reverbs.” He sees it as his responsibility—or perhaps even his job—to point at the unbending structures that surround us. To incite critical thinking and start discourses with as many people as possible.

In person, though, Fyerool is pretty chill. All this talk may sound heavy on paper, but in real life, he’s cracking jokes while getting his hair touched up and lying dramatically on his side for the camera like one of its French girls. There’s no posturing here, just an easiness to Fyerool that made our conversations flow like a river into the sea.

It was in one of our off-the-record chats that he told me how he first got into art—through graffiti. When he was younger, he would use his feet (and not a skateboard!) to travel from one end of the city to the other, finding and using stray walls as blank canvases. He never planned any of the works he did; it came to him as he picked up the spray can. Just do this. Now do that. The non-linearity of graffiti allowed Fyerool to embrace the imperfection that came with it.

That early practice taught him something he’d carry into his later works—the understanding that making mistakes is human, especially now in a world increasingly dominated by artificial intelligence. Art still allows room for error, and it’s in that messy, generous space that he finds a reason to stay.

But his relationship with imperfection was not always the prettiest, it was a hard pill to swallow initially, even with his background in graffiti. Even now, it’s still something he grapples with. For the first and only time in our conversation, he hesitates when I dig deeper into this topic. “I’m still trying to understand if [imperfection] is a method or a strategy for me.”

In Singapore, perfection is bred into our bones. Our parents were taught to maximise output and strive for optimal productivity—after all, the nation's survival once depended on it. Later generations internalised that doctrine, and in many ways, it paid off. Singapore now boasts one of the highest GDPs per capita in the world.

But our country isn’t perfect—as much as the rest of the world would like to view us as such. “There's often pressure in Singapore to represent Southeast Asian culture in a way that's neat, digestible and polished and exportable for other people. What's your reaction to that?” I ask.

In response to this, only one thing comes to Fyerool’s mind: cai fan. Or nasi padang, depending on what you call it. Mixed rice is arguably our nation’s truest comfort food, but you’ll never see tourists come looking for it. It’s messy, uneven, and full of contradictions. It’s not as cohesive as the chilli crab, or as neat as the chicken rice. But within all that gravy-soaked chaos is where the flavour lies. It’s not tidy nor polished, but we aren’t either, and as long as we can acknowledge that, we’ll be fine.

Photography: Jaya Khidir
Creative Direction and Styling: Asri Jasman
Grooming: Sophia Soh at THE SUBURBS STUDIO
Styling Assistants: Naysa Subba and Quek Yu Tong