Chua Jia Xin Sarah

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Chua Jia Xin Sarah (b. 2001) is a multidisciplinary artist whose practice spans performance and installation. Her work engages deeply with themes of the unseen, labour, time, repetition, and devotion — often drawing attention to quiet acts and the value systems embedded within everyday gestures.

Through endurance, process-based methods and material exploration, she constructs durational experiences that invite reflection on care, ritual, and the invisible structures that shape our lives.
Rooted by the pain of labour that comes with creation, she is interested in examining closer, the relationship between individual and material using routine and embodiment as a medium for expression exploring the interconnections of art and life, continuously evolving as she experiments with new materials, concepts, and techniques.

My practice explores grief, memory, and impermanence as lived, embodied experiences. Working across performance, installation, sound, and moving image, I am interested in how emotions are stored, translated, and fragmented through time through documentation and the body. I often draw from personal narratives, ritualised forms of mourning, and quiet, durational gestures to examine what remains unspoken or unresolved within socially prescribed frameworks of loss. Influenced by ideas of decay, futility, and failed attempts at preservation, my works question the desire for permanence and immortality. Through acts of repetition, stillness, and sensory disruption, I aim to create spaces for contemplation — where grief can exist as something tender, unstable, and shared rather than hidden or resolved.

Title: Futile Tasks (3.)
Year: 2026
Medium: Ice, Chinese Ink, Butcher Paper, Cloth
Statement:

If the end is inevitable, is the act of care a futile task?
Futile Tasks (3.) is part of an ongoing body of work exploring care and labour as intertwined forces, where acts of devotion coexist with exhaustion, erosion, and loss.

Working through duration performance, it bridges grief as embodied experience— felt through repetition, endurance, and sustained attention rather than spectacle. Materials are engaged not as passive matter but as collaborators, shaping and resisting the body over time. Rather than staging suffering, it spotlights quiet moments of release, tracing the fragile threshold between holding on and letting go. Grief is approached as a slow undoing, persisting even as form dissolves. Served as post-performance relics, it mirrors what remains when care becomes self-consuming, and what is left behind when preservation gives way to acceptance.