Nigel Sng Wei Jian
Empowerment Within
Mappig Motherhood: The Mama ArchiveFuelled by the world’s peculiarities, Nigel questions the familiar and reframes what often goes unnoticed. Working across photography, videography, and design, he uses visual storytelling to engage with sensitive and often overlooked subjects, challenging social norms and opening up alternative ways of seeing.
Rather than focusing on outcomes, his practice leans into reflection. Through visual storytelling, he creates experiences that give people time to pause and consider how they make sense of situations, opening up conversations that often remain unspoken. Grounded in advocacy and a curiosity about what society could become, his work positions design as a catalyst for dialogue and meaningful change.
Empowerment Within
| Empowerment Within explores how decisions are made in everyday situations within the context of participation. While participation is often positioned as something to be increased or encouraged, this work questions whether it truly reflects an individual’s choice. Rather than reducing decisions to binary outcomes, this project focuses on the conditions that shape how individuals arrive at them. Developed through a series of interactive explorations that make decision-making visible, This or That presents participants with minimal context, encouraging instinctive responses. In doing so, it reveals how quickly decisions can be made, often without full awareness of what informs them. Depends Lah builds on this by introducing situational scenarios, where participants respond using “Emotion Cards”. Here, four emotional reactions emerge, “I’m comfortable”, “I’m not comfortable”, “It depends”, and “Anything is fine”. These responses reflect how decisions can shift depending on context and personal interpretation. These explorations culminate in an Interactive Arcade Installation that brings decision-making into a more embodied experience. Participants are placed within a familiar scenario, such as being invited out for coffee, and respond through the same four emotional reactions introduced in Depends Lah. Rather than functioning as fixed emotional reactions, they reflect different ways a person might approach making a decision after encountering the scenario. Across all three formats, Empowerment Within surfaces a key observation. Decisions are not always deliberate, and participation does not necessarily indicate willingness. Choosing to engage may stem from ease, habit, or social expectation, while opting out may reflect personal boundaries rather than disengagement. By shifting attention away from outcomes and toward the process of deciding, the work reframes decision-making as something situational and often unseen. Empowerment Within does not aim to provide solutions or increase participation. Instead, it invites a reconsideration of how participation is interpreted. By making the act of choosing more visible, it opens up space for individuals to better understand one another. In doing so, it positions agency and the act of choosing as a form of empowerment, prompting us to consider what it means to recognise agency in the decisions we make. |