“At its core, it’s the questions I’m asking about ageing, and the choice to place aunties as the main character. That is the IP of the project. I came up with the idea, not AI.”—niceaunties
CNTRFLD. The Auntieverse feels deeply imaginative but also rooted in memory and lived experience. Looking back, what aspects of your childhood — or the women who raised you — most shaped the artist and world-builder you are today?
NA. I spent most of my childhood watching my grandmother. Doing her chores, crying, screaming at my aunties and uncles. But the thing I remember most is the scoldings, the insults. Aunties have a talent for finding the harshest possible words, and I remember many of them, registered as a funny kind of childhood trauma. Later, and especially while building the Auntieverse, I understood the sharpness was love, just wrapped badly. Really the project started as a way to understand why aunties behave the way they do, to ask questions about ageing, and to figure out what kind of auntie I want to grow up to be.
CNTRFLD. You’ve spoken beautifully about building the Auntieverse as a way of understanding what “auntie” really means. Has your relationship to that word — and to ageing, femininity, or care — changed as your practice has evolved?
NA. It started as a casual, fun inquiry. Just asking what being an auntie actually means. I started making lots and lots of images, putting aunties at the centre of a free universe, sending them on adventures. Back then the word was completely negative. Auntie meant old-fashioned, naggy, a stereotype nobody wants to be labelled with. But the more I explored it, the more complexity I uncovered. There was so much about this archetype I didn't know. And everyone has an auntie in them. It's the voice of your self-criticism. It's how you treat yourself and how you treat other people. It's the intersection of thousands of years of social and cultural conditioning colliding with the modern world and changing times. There is so much to understand there. So, trying to figure out what an auntie is turned into a way of understanding myself. A self-reflection. And not long after, my impression started to transform. It went from a negative stereotype to a positive character with enormous potential, and I only got more excited to keep asking questions and building the Auntieverse.
CNTRFLD. Your work holds humour, absurdity, tenderness, and social commentary all at once — from giant bowls of ramen to themes of loneliness, labour, and environmental collapse. How do you navigate that balance between playfulness and emotional depth in your work?
NA. I never sit down thinking I'm going to make something humorous, or absurd, or tender, or a piece of social commentary. The process is never logical. It's intuitive. I have an idea, I have an opinion about something, and as I'm making it, all these layers come in on their own. The emotions, the memories that get triggered, the things somehow related to the subject. They all get woven into the image without me planning it. Making the work is just what unlocks it. It's a collage of ideas that already exist deep inside us, and creating is how they surface.
CNTRFLD. Identity can be shaped by culture, language, gender, family roles, and the expectations placed on us. How has your own experience informed the worlds you build, and what parts of yourself do you see reflected in the Auntieverse?
NA. The Auntieverse is a reaction to my upbringing and my culture. I grew up in Singapore, a very structured, disciplined society focused on economic growth, security and stability, where success is something, you're supposed to plan out along a straight, wide path. I also come from a Chinese family, where the idea is family and society before self, harmony before your own identity. Then I went into architecture, a profession built entirely on discipline, structure and rules, where a designer with ideas still exists inside a much bigger framework of capitalism and making things work. So, I rarely had an identity that was just me, freely expressing who I really am and what I want to say. Becoming niceaunties and building the Auntieverse is almost a test bed. An experiment in having my own voice. It's me reacting against everything I've known, trying to find the voice I had as a child, before life happened.
CNTRFLD. Your work has resonated far beyond Singapore, with audiences in places like United Kingdom, France, South Korea and the United States. For audiences in the UK and Europe — especially those from diasporic Asian backgrounds — what do you think “auntie culture” reveals about belonging, memory, and community across borders?
NA. I think there are two things that are true for Asian people no matter where in the world they are. First, there are traits buried deep in our subconscious. The way we communicate, the way we criticise ourselves, that feeling of not being enough. It's been programmed into us over thousands and thousands of years. Second, there's the search for our own identity and voice, for who we really are, and maybe the auntie is the one who can help answer that. But that second part isn't only Asian. It connects people across every culture. Some people have told me they resonate with the Auntieverse for exactly that reason, wherever they come from.
