About
Graduating from the BA (Hons) Arts Management programme at LASALLE College of the Arts, Lionel is an arts and community programmer whose practice connects art, wellness and community through storytelling.
Lionel’s work centres on building meaningful encounters across generations and communities. During his internship with the audience engagement team at National Gallery Singapore, he contributed to research and programme development for special exhibitions and the 2025 edition of Gallery Children’s Biennale, deepening his interest in how multi-sensory storytelling can transform passive viewing into active participation.
Additionally, Lionel has co-developed interdisciplinary initiatives such as Crafting Future Trading Places, an intergenerational exchange bringing youths and seniors together to exchange memories and knowledge in music and fashion. More recently, Lionel led Echoes of the Bay, a virtual reality community storytelling installation that translates personal memories into immersive digital experiences. Across these projects, Lionel is particularly drawn to co-creation processes, fostering spaces for stories to be shared with care and agency.
Beyond institutional contexts, Lionel co-founded Are You Okie SG, a youth-led initiative that promotes intentional wellness and interpersonal relationships. Lionel also leads and facilitates GiveFellows, a youth content creation bootcamp focused on social good .
Lionel is committed to designing programmes that are thoughtful, inclusive and socially responsive. He believes that when stories are held with intention, art becomes a bridge between people.
Virtual Reality as Storyliving: Expression, interpretation, and internalisation of Personal and Generational Memories in Echoes of the Bay
Virtual Reality (VR) has been increasingly used within the arts and culture scene because of its ability to provide embodied, interactive and first-hand experiences within immersive storytelling. Such experiences are often valued for their capacity to shape intimate experiences between audiences and the stories they experience.
However, existing literature on VR storytelling mainly focus on how audiences receive pre-constructured narratives. This presents a gap in understanding how individuals actively engage in the creative process within the immersive environment, particularly with interpretations and reconstructions of memories. This process becomes especially important in memory-based projects, as memory exchanges require a process of active construction and reconstruction. Thus, embodied VR experiences have yet to fully explore participant-based creation and the ways it fosters connection between memories.
This dissertation examines the potential of VR as a mode of storyliving through the creation process of Echoes of the Bay (EOTB), a participatory VR project focusing on personal and generational memories around the themes of migration and belonging. Adopting the concept of storyliving as a conceptual and analytical framework, this research focuses on the EOTB creation process, analysing six purposively selected case studies through a qualitative approach.
Along with oral transcripts, semi-structured interviews with the participants from selected case studies and the researcher's autoenthnographic reflections from workshop observations, this comparative analysis examines how participants make creative decisions to translate their personal and generational memory into virtual forms. This analysis is further supported by visual documentation, focus group discussions with other EOTB facilitators and an interview with the project's artist.
The findings of the study suggest that VR in EOTB functioned as a mediating environment for memory exchanges in three ways: (1) through spatial and sensory-perceptual affordances, (2) via representational negotiation between self -interpretation and accuracy and (3) through reflection and internalisation of memory. These processes contribute to the underexplored area of participatory VR and memory practices, highlighting the potential of VR as a tool for community and cultural memory-making.
The VR project Echoes of the Bay is an innovative arts initiative developed to commemorate Singapore's 60th year of independence. It addresses the challenge of fostering social cohesion in a multicultural society by creating a shared, virtual space.
The project features a serene island surrounded by sixty digitally rendered boats, each representing a personal story of belonging, migration or memory contributed by the community. Using participatory curation, individuals co-designed their narratives into 3D VR boats, transforming personal memories into a public, digital archive.
Publicly exhibited at major festivals, the installation allowed audiences to immersively explore these stories, blurring the lines between contributor and viewer.
The project successfully demonstrates how immersive technology can be used to build an inclusive, community-driven cultural heritage, presenting national identity as a symphony of individual voices rather than a single, monolithic narrative.
Professional practice
Lionel's professional practice is situated at the intersection of arts programming, community engagement, storytelling and immersive media.
As an emerging arts and community programmer, he is interested in how participatory arts experiences can create meaningful connections between individuals, communities and cultural narratives.
GiveFellows
Across four bootcamp seasons from June 2025, Lionel facilitated and supported over 100 youths through Give Asia’s content creation bootcamp, equipping them with skills in digital storytelling and advocacy for social good.
During these short, intensive cycles, these youths collectively activated more than 1,100 donors, raising over S$26,000 across four social causes. Lionel contributed to the planning and programming of the content creation journey, facilitating conversations with experts in fundraising and content creators, as well as with the beneficiaries.
Find out more: https://www.instagram.com/givefellows/
Beyond the Spectacle: Unpacking 2025 World Expo in Osaka, One Pavilion at a Time
In October 2025, Lionel and four friends stepped onto Yumeshima, the 'Island of Dreams', and were immediately enveloped by the scale and energy of the 2025 Osaka World Expo.
The Expo's central vision, "Designing Future Society for Our Lives," was emblazoned everywhere, serving as a guiding principle for the spectacle around them. Most striking for Lionel was the official mascot, Myaku-Myaku—an alien-like, five-eyed creature, described as a fluid amalgamation of cells and water—which was initially met with skepticism by both local and international audiences.
Find out more here: https://sg.eduprofile.net/stories/unpacking-2025-world-expo
Echoes of the Bay: VR narratives from Singapore's shores
Lionel was the project lead for Echoes of the Bay, a collaboration between LASALLE's BA (Hons) Arts Management students and visceral reality artist and educator Benedict Yu. This project explores the diverse narratives of Singapore's multicultural communities through a virtual environment, employing interactive VR storytelling.
This project was exhibited as part of Singapore Night Festival and Singapore Design Week in 2025, and was also presented internationally at California, Osaka and Sao Paolo.
Find out more here.
Crafting Future, Trading Places
Crafting Futures, Trading Places is a pilot project initiated by Fei Yue Community Services and supported by National Youth Council. The project aims to foster intergenerational connections by bridging seniors and youth through art forms such as theatre, fashion and music.
Lionel served as the programmes and partnerships lead for the Fashion and Music Pillars. Together with a team of youth, he developed concepts and planned one- to two-month workshops for each pillar, creating opportunities for deeper connection with the art forms alongside their youth counterpart.
Rock and Indie (RIF) Music Festival 2024
Lionel served as the media team head for LASALLE's RIF, managing photography and videography for marketing and event documentation.
Run by students from BA (Hons) Arts Management, Diploma in Audio Production, Diploma in Theatre and Production Management and Diploma in Broadcast Media, RIF is a student-led music festival staged annually in the heart of LASALLE.
The festival provides a platform for local musicians and small business owners to showcase their works. RIF 2024 celebrated all things [Y2K], with a focus on empowering youths to defy boundaries and explore their creativity.
ASEAN-ROK Youth Metaverse Idea Contest focusing on cultural heritage
In November 2023, Lionel participated in the ASEAN-ROK Youth Metaverse Idea Contest in Busan, Korea.
The theme was on cultural heritage, and his team's idea was to use immersive technologies to show Indigenous communities' cultures in their full context—placing tangible and intangible cultural heritage side by side—as a method for cultural preservation and to enhance audience's cultural appreciation.
This idea was later presented at the International Communicating the Arts Conference 2023.
Amirra Wardah Binte Shamsul-Bahari
Daniel Antonio D’Souza
Koh Jia Ling
Nurul Syazwani Binte Mohamad Shahril
Muhammad Rashad
Sharafah Malihah
