Event Review: My Fable World –Children’s Collage Workshop
How do eave-tiles, coconuts, the Powerpuff Girls, and the Dutch East India Company logo converge within a single frame? What kind of creative process does this juxtaposition spark?
On June 6th, Ng Win Yi, Sixi Museum’s artist-in-residence, stepped into the role of an inspirational catalyst to share the creative secrets behind her method of layering and recombining cultural elements. Utilizing the shapes and motifs of the eave-tiles from the Six Dynasties Museum in Nanjing as her conceptual departure point, she unfolded a step-by-step chain of association. Expanding outward to the traditional Malaysian kuih kapit (love letters) and their ingredients, she traces further back to the historical origins of these biscuits under Dutch colonial rule to incorporate its historical emblem, and finally connecting these elements through symbols of speed and affection drawn from childhood cartoons.
Inspired by the artist's methodology, our young participants transcended rigid rational frameworks. Initiating their imaginative trajectory with a rabbit, their associations leaped across foxes, squirrels, pinecones, rice, and takeout boxes, ultimately landing on a cake. This fluid, non-linear association—which bypasses strict causal logic in favor of continuous leaps—is precisely the most invaluable form of intuition in artistic creation.
Guided by this seemingly irrational yet profoundly compelling mode of thinking, the subsequent hands-on session transformed into a playful experimentation with imagination and materiality. Utilizing the colored tin foils, durian-shaped cardboards, and hand-drawn cartoon figures provided by Win Yi, the children cross-referenced and reconfigured these media—which carry the artist’s personal memories—with their own preferred materials, such as cellophane, vibrant acrylic sheets, pipe cleaners, everyday snack packagings, and cut-outs from magazines. Liberated from the restrictive metrics, everyday fragments underwent a miraculous metamorphosis under the guidance of pure intuition: toy googly eyes of varying sizes came to denote mythical beasts, systematically cut acrylic strips materialized into skyscrapers, and small colorful pom-poms simultaneously represented clouds and tunnels.
Each naive and unpretentious piece serves as a concrete coordinate of their unrestricted associations. This event not only crystallized into art pieces imbued with spiritual allegory but also quietly planted a creative seed within the children’s minds—one that encourages them to defy convention and deconstruct the world through raw intuition.