This popular Malaysian dish isn’t to my taste, but that’s precisely why this exhibition takes its name from it.

I’m drawn to things that challenge me, that pushes me to change. I’ve been told that the secret to liking ROJAK is simple: have more of it. The mindset of ‘keep trying’ has hence allowed me to travel abroad and has shaped the artist I am today.

There are three things in life I treasure the most: my wife, travel, and art. This collection of acrylic-on-canvas works is my love letter to the thrill of embracing the unfamiliar, the strange, and even the occasional misstep – like fumbling through the syntax of a new language. It’s about finding joy in the chaos.

Frankenstein-esque compositions, blending snippets of life in to surreal artworks. Painting isn’t polite. It’s tactile, loud, and messy. It’s about getting your hands dirty, finding the right music to hit the perfect frequency, and diving in. No filters here, no carefully curated façades. Just raw, unvarnished joy, caught in a moment too real to fake. These paintings dig beneath the gloss, where the truth flickers and burns. They catch that split-second when the mask slips, the performance collapses, and what’s left is wild, messy, and impossibly beautiful — the kind of joy that doesn’t need to be staged. I intentionally leave the edges of my canvas raw, letting the material itself speak.

My paintings transform the mundane into something wild. Through bold strokes and unruly textures, the mundane becomes magic. This ethos comes from my artistic heroes – Basquiat, Warhol, Pollock, and Schnabel. They all understood that beauty isn’t clean but raw, loud and imperfect.

ROJAK is a celebration of life’s flaws, missteps and a beautiful chaos. Its about finding beauty not in perfection but in the messy, unpolished reality of life.

–  Nigel Sense

ROJAK is scheduled from 22 March till 27 April.