Art is a defining quality of humanity. It is the expression of our fears, our hopes, our dreams. The expression of an individual’s experience of reality. Whether it be through song and dance, theatrical displays, sculpting, writing, drawing, painting, or any other craft, art, in its many forms, is the soul of a people, a society. Today, meet three artists of our international community who are building our perception of tomorrow.
Physical Art in Our Digital World
In the modern day, in our 21st-century digital landscape, real art made by real people is more important than ever. Art that exists solely in a digital format is ephemeral in nature. It is easy to destroy and erase from existence. Digital hard drives and software corrupt, whereas paper and some may endure for centuries, if not millennia, with proper care. If we hope to preserve what will remain of us in our absence for our descendants who will walk this Earth seven generations from now, we must continue to encourage and uplift the artists of today. We must support art in every medium, but especially in physical mediums, for our generation’s voice to persevere. Below are the stories and voices of three up-and-coming artists of our time.
Claudia Koh (b. 1999)
Claudia Koh, born just before the turn of the millennium and raised in Singapore. She is a painter with a distinctly vibrant style focused on modern cityscapes, the female body, and perceived identity. There is also a strong focus on the idea of aquariums that create a disconcerting impression due to the conflation of the fish within and the woman looking on.
About her own work, Koh has said,
“My work investigates how Southeast Asian identity, cultural heritage, and Singapore’s dense urban environment shape our experiences of space, memory, and autonomy. Through both painting and sculpture, I explore the ongoing tension between constraint and adaptation, examining how political structures, social expectations, and environmental forces influence the physical and psychological landscapes we inhabit. Drawing from my own lived experiences, I reflect on how built environments not only dictate our movement and interactions but also encode deeper systems of power, surveillance, and control.”
(Credit: Claudia Koh)
“From a young age, I’ve believed in embracing the multifaceted nature of being female, particularly through reaffirming all of my emotions, values and perspectives. … Nude self-portraiture is empowering in its vulnerability. Despite feeling invisible in some real-life situations, on canvas I am a woman declaring that my existence is worth recording.”
(Vogue/Claudia Koh)
“The architecture and urban planning of Singapore, with their layers of history and rapid modernization, often produces a sense of displacement and longing due to its scarcity of space. My work seeks to capture this ambivalence, highlighting how individuals and communities navigate, resist, or adapt to these forces. By foregrounding the interplay between personal memory and collective history, I hope to open up new ways of reflecting on the post-modern desire to manufacture comfort and foster some kind of individuality and freedom while resonating with the quiet anxieties of our time. Yet, within this tension, I also reach for something tender: a longing for connection and belonging.”
(Credit: Claudia Koh)
Naomi Hawksley (b. 2000)
Naomi Hawksley is a visual artist who works primarily in graphite drawing. She was raised in San Fran and is now based out of New York. Her practice is concerned with the construction of identity, moral ambiguity, and the consumption of the female body in media. She has had work exhibited in New York, NY Brooklyn, NY, Minneapolis MN, Chicago IL, San Fransico CA, Easthampton MA, Pittsburgh PA, Seoul, South Korea, and Tokyo, Japan, and works.
About her choice to work with graphite pencils as her primary medium, she said,
“I’ve been having a problem with the way that drawing was taught to me at school. For the most part, it had been presented as a draft for a larger future project, which is historically true, but trying to convince myself that stand-alone drawings are enough has been really exciting. But I also really love the immediacy of using a pencil. The material alone is so strong, with such a huge range of values contained within a single tool, that I am allowed to play with many aspects of a piece at once. Because the material can be laid down so quickly, the composition unfolds in front of me so fast that it becomes like a game or a puzzle.”
(LVL3/Naomi Hawksley)
About her work process, Hawksley explained,
“I’ll usually start with a very rough sketch in the notes app on my phone, but after that I go straight to drawing on the final page. Since I don’t know much about the drawing before it starts, the composition unfolds in front of me as I work. It’s really fun that way.”
(LVL3/Naomi Hawksley)
Yuma Radné (b. 2001)
Yuma Radné, a painter and drawer, was born in the city of Ulaan Ude, Buryat-Mongolia. Today, she lives in London, England. A major goal of hers is to spread and preserve the ways of knowing and being of indigenous peoples around the world with her own lived experiences as a base.
About her identity and her work, she has said,
“Being buryat is a mix of things: we are basically a big Mongolian tribe that got disconnected from Mongolia, suffered through soviet repressions, and were forced not to speak Buryat-Mongolian language. … As an artist, I think my mission is very simple: I just want to speak for the indigenous communities in the world. There are traditions, knowledge systems, and beliefs that I would want to pass on and share. My goal is to really keep buryat culture alive, preventing its extinction. I think it is a humble mission — I will be happy if I can succeed in it at least a little bit.”
(Metal/Yma Radne)
About her decision to work with exceptionally vivid colour pallets in her work, Radne explained,
“colours can be so fascinating and feel almost fake. They’re shiny and can be neon, or unnaturally bright. I don’t always enjoy the colours of reality—my dreams are usually very colourful and bright too. I dreamt of little blue creatures in a forest, they were so beautiful and were shining. They didn’t know I could see them. I use the colour to try to make a similar effect of what it’s like to be in my dreams.”
(Metal/Yuma Radne)
The Humanity of Art
Ultimately, art is an expression of self and identity. It is an exploration of an individual or collective understanding of what it means to be human, and what it should mean to be human. It is a way for every person, regardless of background and socio-economic environment, to express what they believe is important to know and discuss in the world they inhabit. This is something the three women above embody vibrantly with pride, with their own brushes and their own voices. This is what it means to be an artist, to make art, to be human.
