Daisy Toh and the power of stillness through art

Daisy Toh is known for her delicate ceramics that immortalise the subtleties of the human experience. While the Singaporean artist was always interested in art, it was during her Fine Arts degree at the Taipei National University of Arts in Taiwan that Toh’s interest in ceramic making blossomed. There, she was drawn to the capacity of clay to “create very fine, deep layers”, and it was through her craft that she began to contemplate what it means to be human.

Currently pursuing her Masters at one of the first MFAs for ceramics established in Taiwan, Toh celebrates the cultural diversity of the programme, commenting that “it’s a great international platform where a lot of international artists come to visit Taiwan. Toh herself describes her own experience embarking on a student exchange in South Korea, explaining how this programme exposed her to new approaches to technique and craftsmanship. “In Korea, I really got to learn more about the refinement of their split testing method,” she says, commenting on the high craftsmanship standard of Korean ceramic artists who often embrace a very “fine stochastic technique”.

“Toh suggests that being an artist is also about being an entrepreneur – knowing how to sell, market, and brand oneself are all integral to being an artist in the contemporary digital age”

Beyond cultural exchange, Toh also examines the importance of community in the artistic world: sometimes it might be quite lonely, so “finding the balance of having a little social life” is necessary, especially through “surrounding yourself with people that understand why you continue to pursue art.” Despite forming a sense of community, Toh nonetheless remarks on the loneliness that emerges from “constantly traveling between Singapore and Taiwan”: she remembers “not feeling at home when in Singapore” while simultaneously “not belonging to a foreign land”. This tension is at the core of Toh’s art, represented through its endlessly flowing nature – her pieces never resolve or reach a final destination.

When it comes to artistic identity, Toh emphasises the importance of having a digital presence in today’s generation. However, she confesses that this is challenging for her, as somebody with a detachment from technology. Toh expresses how over time, she has learned how to create a digital presence, by updating her website, and posting on social media. Beyond purely creating art, Toh suggests that being an artist is also about being an entrepreneur – knowing how to sell, market, and brand oneself are all integral to being an artist in the contemporary digital age.

In particular, Toh describes how being able to sell herself has opened her up to many opportunities – “even though I spend most of my time in Taiwan, I have a lot of inquiries from Singapore, so I still get to attend or participate in exhibitions there.” Toh has an extensive history in exhibiting her art, one that began when she was one of three finalists in Singapore’s LASALLE College of the Arts’ Affordable Art Fair. This opportunity exposed Toh to her first curator and mentor, leading her to create her first professional exhibition. Toh asserts the value of “having the exhibition in mind while you are making the work,” articulating how it “lets you have a vision” of the final piece.

While a digital identity is important in attracting audiences, Toh is most interested in the tangible, slower aspects of her craft. “I work in a very tactile medium, and as I envision in my head, everything’s very spatial.” Toh describes the immersive, evolving experience of making ceramics, remarking on how “the whole process of starting out small, and experimenting and finding out what you like and what you don’t like slowly narrows it down into what direction you want to go towards.” She explains the intuitive nature of her craft, explaining that “sometimes, as I make the pieces, I don’t really have a final vision of how it’s going to be.”

“Toh equates the brittleness of making ceramics with the fragility and unpredictability of life”

She uses this slowness as a metaphor for life more generally, expressing that it reminds her to focus on the details, such as the ways in which “layer by layer, colours transform and gradiate”. She compares this visual feature to her personal philosophy: “the details and the little bits of life need not be glanced over at once”. Ceramic making “gives you a rollercoaster of emotions,” she reflects, especially because “even after the last stage of firing and taking out your pieces, [they] might crack, deform, or break”. Toh equates this brittleness of making ceramics with the fragility and unpredictability of life, which has encouraged her to be more optimistic in life. 

Toh believes that we are all artists in our own way. Critiquing the idea that art is a luxury, she asserts that “it’s actually just all around us – even the pots and cups we use, or the chairs that we sit in, things that remain in our daily life, these daily objects are all pieces of art. It doesn’t have to be a huge painting or a public installation: the little things in life that bring you joy can be art as well.”

Instead of viewing art as an untouchable, distant entity, Toh appreciates art as “a process and way of being and documenting one’s existence”. This documentation unfolds in her art which commonly centres on landscapes or skyscapes that Toh has come across. Regarding her ceramic pieces inspired by living in Taipei, Toh declares that she is the calmest at the seaside or admiring the sky, and that’s the kind of calmness that she aims to convey with the flow and the abstract skyscapes of her art. This certainly comes through in her ceramics, which reveal subtle emotions captured through subdued flowing patterns and gradients. In between the layers of the slow, intuitive art of ceramic making, Toh asks us to appreciate the minutiae of everyday life, to see beauty in the mundane.