Pressed Into Presence — On Flesh, Memory, and the Quiet Weight We Carry

by Tallulah Patricia

On my last day in Singapore, I gave myself what the city rarely offers: unstructured time. No meetings. No plans. No outcomes. Still life and observation.

I headed to the Botanic Gardens — Nikon strapped around one hand, iPhone in the other. The scent was incredible. Every few meters, it shifted — orchids, ginger, other unnameable scents. The colors were unapologetically loud; the humidity even louder.

Families drifted past me: grandfather strolling with his toddler, aunties shading themselves with umbrellas, a couple either making up or breaking up. A group of girls having an early picnic. Next to them a colorful cock. Full scenes unfolding around me in slow motion.

It was serene beautiful — and disorienting. Emotionally sense-full.

I had to keep reminding myself to put the screens down and just take it in. At the small lake, where pink and white lotuses floated between waterlilies, I finally sat. No camera.

No notifications, calls, or messages. Just breath and presence. Sometimes witnessing is just enough.

Later came the familiar last-day scramble: shopping, lunch off Amoy Street, a cold shower back in Joo Chiat, more shopping, frantic packing. And still — dayum — no visit to the Fancy Gardens by the Bay. The most touristy thing in Singapore. Well... next time.

Before our final dinner, I met my best friend, Fibi, after her workday, and we headed to Lim's gallery — a space I'd been raving about all week. A visual treasury tucked away on Haji Lane 8. Not just for the art — but for the way it made complexity breathable, without ever explaining itself away. I hoped bringing her there might stir something. Not a grand transformation. Just a nudge. A reminder that art — even messy, unplanned, 'uncurated' — still belonged to her too.

On a side note: Earlier that week, I had created a group chat introducing Lim to Gionata Gesi, also known by his Artist name Ozmo. Ozmo is an Italian street artist whose work I'd admired since a random encounter in Brera, Milan in 2021. No agenda. No strategy. Just instinct and trust. 

Baam! Within days, Ozmo had taken the initiative. And by the time we stood in the gallery, there we were: hopping onto a spontaneous Instagram video call. Singapore, Paris, Zurich — collapsed into one living conversation.

Check Out Ozmo's Work

And then, Michael Cu Fua arrived

Michael had read Sticker Diplomacy — the piece I wrote after first stumbling into Lim’s gallery — and reached out. We’d been in touch that week. And now, he simply showed up. No fanfare. No expectations. Just presence.

His work hung behind us. Funnily enough — so did his testicles.

Not literally. 

But there they were: printed, pressed, abstracted onto canvas, linen, foil. Circular impressions — some sharp, others blurred.

Flesh flattened into form. Unapologetic, but not performative.

Michael shared with us how the testicular canvas series began: a conversation among some of his friends. Men talking in private, circling the familiar orbit of preferences and standards in women. Women — preferably waxed (Brazilian wax, of course) — groomed, curated, polished, perfected.

Bodies just as canvases to suit someone else’s ease. When Michael asked if they held themselves to the same meticulous standards, the answer, predictably, was no.

So he did.

He shaved. Sat. Pressed. Created — Art.

Not as spectacle. Not as provocation. But as a kind of fun and precision — a refusal to look away from the asymmetry baked into daily life. The result wasn’t grotesque. Or erotic. Or tragic. It was simply present. The conversation he had. That sat with him.

His art isn't about shock. It's about witnessing and processing. The body — vulnerable, unfiltered, and real — placed exactly where judgment usually lives. And left there, hanging.

Without shame, nor apology.

Michael doesn’t just create; he reflects. Through discarded things: Bangkok bus tickets, burnt diary pages from Tokyo, coffee sleeves, Palestinian date boxes. His canvases aren’t statements — they’re living archives of overlooked moments.

"My art is like my diary," he said. "This is how I think."

I understood immediately.

All of my writing — this piece included — is an attempt to visually pin the fleeting, high-frequency moments of lived experience before they vanish and disappear into distant memories. Conversations, impressions, half-felt tensions. The stuff too complex and dense to hold, unless you anchor it somewhere or try and capture it in videos and images.

We both archive — not the monumental, but the friction, the overlooked, the fragments that would otherwise dissolve.

I asked Fibi afterward what she thought. She’s an artist too — a beautifully brilliant one — but since moving to Singapore, painting had slipped behind her. Not from lack of desire. Not because the desire disappeared. But because making art demands something rare: air.

Space to wander, to not be having to be useful. Space to be inefficient, unapologetically so. And space, when you’re always expected to be available, responsive, excellent — becomes a luxury.

In different worlds, luxury shifts.

It stops being time, or beauty, or even wealth.

It becomes the audacity to still make something for no one but yourself. No invoice. No measurable return. No social proof. Just the delulu stubbornness , almost irrational decision to create — even when the outside world only rewards what can be sold.

Still, she was there at Lim's. And sometimes, being there is the beginning.

Before we left, I bought two shirts and a small painting for her. Something small. Something human. Just in case the art didn’t shout loud enough that day.

The testicles were never the point.

The point was the weight they carried — and what that weight dared to say about masculinity, vulnerability, and the quiet pressures society rarely asks men to name.

Softness. Resistance. Memory.

Presence, pressed into form. A playful point about the discomforts men are taught to avoid: exposure, tenderness, fragility. On linen canvas, those discomforts became Michael's architecture — not protest, not spectacle, but a structural reminder that gendered expectations are carried as much in the body as they are in the mind.

And the quiet, radical choice to be fully seen — without asking to be understood.

I connected with Michael before I ever tried to trace the full map of his world. Before I knew about the exhibitions, the material experiments, the decades of practice stretched across cities. What struck me first wasn't the biography. It was his presence — the rare kind that neither demands attention nor shrinks from it.

Composing this piece gave me a reason to linger longer, to explore the layers of his work across time and space. And what I found only deepened my first impression. Complexity folded into vulnerability. Vulnerability structured into form.

That, perhaps, is the real architecture of presence: a connection first felt, then slowly revealed.

If you stay long enough, it doesn’t just unfold — it deepens.

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About Michael Cu Fua

Michael Cu Fua is a minimalist by instinct, and a layered, dynamic artist in practice. His work reads like a living diary — a time capsule of emotion, pop culture, and raw memory stitched onto canvas. Deeply shaped by the women in his life — from his mother and sisters to past loves — his art holds a reverence for presence and intimacy, without ever slipping into cliché.

Trained as an architect, Michael brings a rare structural precision to the emotional chaos he captures. His early pieces often featured the human body — fiery hair, detailed hands, vulnerable throats — rendered with unapologetic skin tones and bold contrasts. As he evolved, so did the intimacy of his method: eventually incorporating his own blood and semen into his paintings, not for spectacle, but for signature.

For connection.

His work defies easy categorization, transcending gender, geography, and linear narratives. Michael’s creative timeline moves through Manila, Singapore, Tokyo, Kuala Lumpur — intimate exhibitions, hidden galleries, cultural crossings. Each piece is both rooted in its time and deliberately loose from it.

Born in Manila in 1970, educated in architecture at the University of Santo Tomas, and based in Singapore since 1994, Michael Cu Fua continues to shape his own visual language — one stitched from fragments, memory, and a quiet refusal to explain everything away. His works live in private collections across Asia, Europe, and the United States — not just as objects, but as lasting witnesses to a life lived through form.

Visit Michael's Website

You didn’t just press yourself into canvas, dear Michael — you pressed a reminder into the world: that being fully seen, without apology, is still an act of quiet rebellion.