Chen-01

I did not meet Chen Yi Quan through a grand introduction. I met him the way people meet now—through the small, casual openings of modern life: a smiley face, a missed call, a short message that carried no prophecy.

Looking back, what haunts me is how ordinary it all was.

In August 2019, he appeared in my WhatsApp thread with a simple 🙂. The sort of message that means: I exist, I’m here, I’m thinking of you. A missed voice call followed, then nothing for a while. That, too, was normal. Friends drift. Life interrupts. Silence does not necessarily mean anything.

Then September arrived, and the thread began to speak with the busy warmth of real collaboration.

I was organising an art auction and fundraiser, the kind of effort that always begins with idealism and ends with logistics. Frames needed sponsors. People needed reminding. Links needed sending. I joked—half amused, half genuinely grateful—that the “lovely lady classmates” had stepped forward, while the “man philanthropist” seemed to have vanished. I sent Chen the blog link, told him I was still updating it, told him I was doing writing, and then—like a man who assumes time is obedient—I said I would be at the wall Sunday morning at 8:30am, please open the door.

He replied: “Ok.” And “Lol.”

What I liked about him was that he did not inflate the moment. He didn’t perform sincerity. He simply showed up in the language of daily life.

Soon after, he said he had two things he wanted to discuss with me—over coffee and bread perhaps. I remember that phrase clearly. Coffee and bread. It sounded like a European still-life, but also like a human-scale philosophy: don’t make it too dramatic, don’t make it too heavy. We talk, we eat, we keep it real.

One topic was the auction. The other was education—specifically, Chinese education.

He had an idea he wanted to pursue: use calligraphy art to drum Chinese characters “into the heads” of primary school kids. It was an intentionally crude phrasing, almost comedic, but behind it I sensed a serious desire. He was not merely talking about teaching handwriting. He was talking about rescuing attention. About building identity. About planting roots.

I questioned him the way I often do—directly, almost teasingly, not to belittle him but to test the strength of his foundation. What did he study in NUS? What were the modules? What was his actual training? When someone wants to teach children, I become cautious. Teaching is never only skills; it is character. It is responsibility. It is influence.

He told me he majored in psychology. Four years. Very good results. Then he sent his academic transcript.

That, to me, was the first time I realised he was not only an artist. He was a mind trained to look at minds.

We began talking about trauma and abnormal psychology, and the conversation turned unexpectedly sharp. He explained that “abnormal” referred to classification systems—DSM categories, nomenclature, names. Then he said something that stayed lodged in me: in the end, all take medication.

He said it with the detached clarity of someone who has stared at the institutional machine long enough to see its patterns. It wasn’t a rant. It was a diagnosis of a culture: label, manage, medicate, repeat.

I asked practical questions—only doctors can prescribe drugs, right? He agreed. He told me he believed in TCM. I joked that I believed talking alone could already solve many things. He laughed. He agreed that maybe, yes, it was true.

Then he said something even more revealing: it has something to do with environment too—风气. The atmosphere. A social climate. “It’s like a flu that can spread.”

At the time, it sounded like an interesting metaphor. Later, it would feel like a warning.

We kept talking in our usual way—half serious, half playful. I told him that if he wanted to teach, he couldn’t be seen smoking, parents would panic. He admitted he smoked and drank red wine. He knew it. I teased him about courting women. He laughed. It was easy to forget that behind such banter, a person might be carrying something heavy.

That night our chat drifted into love and metaphysics, as it often did when he was warmed up.

He spoke of meditation—how, in deep meditative states, the sexes were an illusion. He immediately said it was going way out, as if pulling himself back from the edge of his own thought. But he was already there, living with one foot in ordinary life and one foot in a world beyond it.

We began exchanging references like two boys trading mythology: Journey to the West, wuxia worlds, the impossible dual loyalties of devotion and desire. He sent a line that arrived like an old sword sliding from its sheath:

“世上安得两全法，不负如来也不负卿。”

How can one have a perfect method that does not betray the Buddha and does not betray the beloved?

The line was beautiful. It was also a confession. Because it implies a struggle so constant that it needs poetry just to remain bearable.

After that, life continued as life does—messy, practical, threaded with small joys and collaborations.

We discussed exhibitions. We met around Chinatown. We talked about speakers. We talked about food. Once, he even offered to buy red wine for my friends. I told him I couldn’t drink. We shifted to lunch plans instead. That was our rhythm: reality first, romance later.

Then the world fractured into the years of COVID, and everyone’s time became strange. Messages thinned. Greetings arrived like lanterns in the fog—Happy New Year, blessings for health, small acknowledgements of existence.

In 2024, he told me he rented a new space. A studio. I asked the questions any older pragmatist asks: how much is rent? How will you sustain it? He said 2300. I calculated aloud that he would need to sell perhaps ten thousand a month. He said he didn’t know. He only needed a space to paint.

That sentence, too, contains a kind of tragedy. In an economic city, needing space for the soul is already an act of rebellion.

We talked about exhibitions again. Bangkok entered the story. Thai artists, networks, openings, collectors, hand-carrying works on flights, framing overseas, aiming to sell. We negotiated practical terms—70/30, who decides price, how to prevent paintings from disappearing in the hands of “all kinds of people.” He said, simply, “Not right.”

I liked that about him. Under the humour, he still had a moral centre.

Then in mid-2025, his messages changed in tone. He wrote that he was depressed. He said nothing could bring her back, only memories—photos, videos—and he couldn’t bear to see or think. His beautiful wife had passed away, leaving him with a young child. In those lines, the artist became a widower, and the playful metaphysician became a man trapped in a room of grief.

He tried to move anyway. Plans continued. Exhibitions continued. Work continued. That is what many people do: they build a future quickly so the past cannot catch them.

Then January 2026 arrived like a door slammed by a wind no one saw.

On the 16th of January, he messaged me: he had been in jail for months. He had smoked cannabis in Thailand, and the Singapore authorities had taken action. Three months. He was back in Singapore now.

I replied in my blunt, ordinary way—why, where are you now, are you in Singapore? He said yes.

And then, just days later, the messages came that were not from him, yet came through his chat thread like a ghost wearing his name.

A photo. A notice. A cousin’s number. A date: Sunday night, the 18th of January 2026. The words that never become normal no matter how many times they arrive in a lifetime: he passed away.

Later, his cousin wrote again: he had been privately battling depression, and the family was deeply saddened by the tragic loss. Thank you for the tributes. Thank you for condolences.

When I read those lines, I felt the strange shame of modern grief—the way a death can arrive through a screen while you are still in your daily body. You are alive, you are eating, you are planning, and suddenly you are not the same person you were before the message appeared.

I went back to our earlier chats, as people do. Not out of obsession, but out of a quiet human disbelief. I scrolled through our jokes about smoking and teaching. Our talk of trauma and the DSM. Our laughter. Our references to nirvana. That impossibly honest line about not betraying the Buddha and not betraying the beloved.

What struck me was not that he lacked intelligence. He had more than enough.

What struck me was not that he lacked opportunity. He had made spaces. He had built networks. He had kept moving.

What struck me was the painful truth that a person can be capable, sociable, witty, educated—yet privately losing a war inside the chest.

And so the lesson, if there is one, is not a moral judgement. It is a responsibility.

Life is precious, yes. But sustaining life requires more than talent or affluence. It requires effort and determination. It requires training of body and mind. It requires expecting life’s bashing, accepting it, and still continuing. And it requires collectiveness—because alone, many burdens become unbearable, while together, the same weight can be carried.

When I think of Chen now, I do not reduce him to his ending.

I remember him as a man who tried: to make art, to teach, to build, to love, to transcend, to laugh. And I carry forward what I can: a renewed seriousness about friendship, a renewed respect for unseen suffering, and a renewed commitment to build not only a resilient self, but also a resilient circle—so that fewer people have to face their darkest nights alone.