About
Yen Melia’s practice explores perception, memory and the emotional resonance of everyday spaces through painting and image-making.
Informed by her architectural background and a fascination with what lies opposite her as a way of shifting attention beyond the self, her work draws on phenomenological ideas to investigate the relationship among landscape, the built environment and embodied experience.
Her paintings often originate from quiet urban and natural spaces encountered during moments of contemplation or prolonged looking, prompting questions about why certain places linger in memory while others disappear unnoticed. Through monochromatic palettes, blur and fragmented compositions, she reconstructs these familiar environments as she remembers them, creating images that exist between observation and imagination.
Her current interest examines how memory, embodied perception, and spatial relationships shape our understanding of place and our position within it.
Yen Melia presented her solo exhibition, She Blooms in Colors, with Anggrek Agency in Zurich, Switzerland, in 2024. She has also participated in group exhibitions including Personal Structures: Confluences at Palazzo Mora, Italy, in 2026; And the rain witnessed...: MA Fine Arts Graduation Showscase at LASALLE College of the Arts, Singapore, in 2026; Art Jakarta with RUCI Art Space and Artsphere Gallery in 2024 and 2025; Seoul Art Show with SOMA Gallery, Korea, in 2023; and Of All the Odds with STEM at Srisasanti Gallery, Yogyakarta, in 2022.
In 2026, she was awarded the Winston Oh Travelogue Award.
Alone Together: Soft Landing
Alone Together
Alone Together is a series of paintings that explores the act of looking and the position from which we perceive the world.
Inspired by quiet encounters with everyday landscapes and architectural spaces, the works investigate why certain places linger in memory long after they have been experienced.
Arranged as fragments across the wall, they interact with the surrounding space, allowing negative space to become part of the work and creating openings that extend the viewer's gaze beyond the painted image.
Alone Together: Here and Thereof
Research methodology and theoretical framework
Yen Melia constructs spatial conditions in which recognition is gradual rather than immediate through modes of painting.
Influenced by her architectural background, she uses composition, proportion, and perspective to establish relationships between architecture, landscape, and the viewer.
Through desaturated color, softened edges, low contrast, and subtle transitions between forms, she creates images that remain recognisable while resisting complete visual resolution.
Yen’s research considers space as a relational condition experienced through the body, memory, and imagination. This understanding draws on phenomenological and spatial theories and is situated between the practices of contemporary painters such as Merlin James, Peter Doig, and Luke Heng, whose works engage with ambiguity, atmosphere, memory and spatial perception.
Sharon Hardjono
Brenda Lee
Wong Shih Yaw
Chen Shitong
Ashley Hi
Yin Chua
