I've been chosen for the First Aids Art Collab: 23 day countdown

Hey ya'll !!!

I know I've put things off for such a long time since my previous post but I'm finally nearing the end now and it seems that the storm is just the strongest before we see the rainbow. No matter, as the days go by I grow more and more confident that I am going to make it after all! Who knows, I might even manage to finish this before the month is up!!! In the meantime, do check out PT Foundation's First AIDS art collab.

First AIDS Art Collab is an art book and exhibition project that serves to raise awareness on the issue of AIDS in Malaysia. In just over a month, we received close to 50 artworks from local and international artists answering the call for solidarity with Malaysia's People Living with HIV (PLHIV)
2001 will be the 23rd year since the inception of World AIDS Day. To celebrate, join us as we count down the 23 days to the Malaysian iteration of the worldwide event on the 26th of November. The artworks can also be viewed at our dedicated Tumblr blog here: http://firstaidsartcollab.tumblr.com/. Keep checking it for the other equally awesome artworks that did not make it into the countdown but will be featured in the art book. 


Meanwhile, guess whose artwork was chosen to be in the book as well as Day 10 of the countdown...

Those who live on the margins are like the caterpillars and the butterflies.

A caterpillar is a butterfly. It may not look like it, behave like it or incite the same emotions as it, but it is. A caterpillar is a butterfly, and the world so often forgets that fact. They look at the repulsive little worm, squirming in the dirt, it's blind featureless face, its pulsating and wriggling body, and they are repulsed. They cast out the caterpillar, kill it, stomp it. Employ all sorts of poisons and measure to keep them away. But always, they invite the butterfly. So obsessed are they by its beauty, its grace, the sort of inspiration it incites among the artists and poets alike that they forget that the caterpillar, so similar and yet so different a creature. But that is why they cast it out. So enamored are they, but the butterfly's beauty, that they refuse to embrace the repulsive thing it had come from.

A caterpillar is like a person living on the margins of society. It may not look like one, or act like one or experience the world in the same way as one but it is. Like the caterpillar, we live in the margins. We are a part of something and yet set aside from it. We are the children of the abject, we come from the body of the dominant "self" and yet are so different from it. And so they fear us, because we are constant reminders to them that their secured little notions of their "selves" are perhaps, not as secure as they would like it to be. And so they try to silence us. Beat us. Torment us. Keep us boxed and in our place. Always the "other". But just as the caterpillar who survives will inevitably turn into the butterfly, someday we too shall change.

To those of us who live in the shadow, persevere. Persevere so that someday we can spread our wings. Let our colors shine.

"because these things will change. Can't you feel it now? Those walls that they put up to hold back will fall down."

Can't believe, that something I sketched with a black ink pen and colored in with highlighters will receive such recognition now! Anyway I must say that it is such an honor to be received into this amazing project. CAN'T WAIT TO HAVE A COPY OF THAT BOOK!!!