About
Belvia is a multidisciplinary Indonesian artist who focuses on the themes of nostalgia, memory and fantasy. She primarily focuses on painting and is often recognised for her use of expressive colour palette. Colour is a key element in her storytelling as she likes to use bold and dramatic colours to heighten emotions and immerse her audience in an atmosphere that feels surreal yet familiar.
Belvia's interest in storytelling drives her to create visual narratives in her practices. She creates to capture the emotions, fleeting moments and imagined worlds that exist between nostalgia, memory and fantasy. Her work is layered between personal reflections and fictional elements, creating a space where reality and dreams can intertwine.
Through this, Belvia aims to ignite imagination and reflection while exploring what is remembered, forgotten or reimagined. Belvia's art offers a step into an imagined past, inviting reflection on personal histories while wondering about the possibilities that never were. Her work is a continuous exploration of what lingers in our minds and what we choose to bring to life, an open invitation for viewers to dive into her internal world.
What Made Me
This series of paintings explores how everyday moments contribute to the development of personal identity through the means of recollection and reconstruction.
It examines small and usually overlooked experiences instead of significant and big events such as fleeting views, repetitive actions and quiet observations that are gradually brought together. This practice uses personal photographic collections as a starting point and then turns everyday moments into painted works.
The work emphasises emotion, colour and abstraction over realism, exploring how these moments are not fixed records of the past but fragments that change and evolve. It suggests that meaning is not determined by the scale of an experience but by emotional resonance and how it is able to remain within memory. This shows that the extraordinary exists within the repetition of the everyday.
Research methodology and theoretical framework
Belvia's methodology focuses on translating personal photographs into painted reconstructions. She treats the images as starting points rather than fixed records.
The photographs are taken instinctively from her daily life and are first digitally altered using applications like Picsart through blurring, colour distortion and layering. This begins the process of destabilising the image which reflects how memory shifts over time. In her paintings, Belvia does not replicate the photographs but reinterprets them. She retains certain compositional elements to anchor the memory while allowing other aspects such as colour, detail and clarity to shift. The balance between what remains and what changes mirrors the instability and selectiveness of recollection.
Belvia primarily uses oil paint because its slow drying time and capacity for layering and blending allow for continuous reworking that echoes the gradual formation of memory. The process is also intimate and meditative as repeatedly observing and painting these images transform fleeting moments into something more significant.
Through this, she becomes more aware of subtle details and emotional undertones, turning ordinary experiences into reflective encounters. By producing multiple works from similar types of moments, Belvia creates an accumulation of fragments that reveal patterns within her lived experience. As such, she emphasises how identity is shaped through the repetition of the everyday.
Michelle Loh
Neo Weiqi
Aleisha Binte Abdul Rahim
Emma Chong Ai Chzer (张爱慈)
Wang Runxin
Ye Min Khant
