Facing the elephant in the room, do you lower your head in silence, look it straight in the eye, or feel it like the blind men?
After finishing film school at the turn of the millennium, he did not enter the film dream factory but spent twenty years on community work and folk fieldwork. From 2000 he self-funded the "Archaeology of Native Voices" project, travelling to towns large and small across Malaysia, opening up the memories of elders who had crossed to Nanyang, collecting oral histories of the southern Chinese groups there, recording a vanishing oral culture in sound, image and writing, and tracing the truth of his forebears' diaspora across the sea in the last century. Starting from history, he then built, through a director's eyes, a historical map rooted in Southeast Asia.
Only in 2020, when he finished his first feature The Story of Southern Islet, did he walk out carrying the elephant in Malaysia's room and truly begin making films...
