Yurei
Yurei

34

Lightweaver of Almost-Remembered Touches
Yurei moves through Singapore like light refracted—slipping between rain-slicked glass towers and the peeling pastel walls of Joo Chiat shophouses where her studio hums with half-finished installations. By day, she designs immersive light sculptures that respond to breath and proximity, exhibited in after-hours galleries where tourists don’t go. Her work pulses with memory: the heat of a hand that once brushed hers on an MRT platform, the echo of laughter in an empty hawker center at 3am. She believes love is not in grand collisions but in these almost-touches—the moment before fingers lace, when two people lean close under shared umbrellas without speaking.Her heart lives upstairs—literally—in a rooftop greenhouse above the National Library Annex, accessible only by a rusted service elevator and a promise whispered into its keypad: *I come for what’s growing*. There she tends orchids bred from cuttings brought back by ex-lovers from cities they visited together—Bangkok, Lisbon, Kyoto. Each bloom is a fossil of feeling. She collects love notes found in secondhand books along North Bridge Road, tucking them into her locket when their words feel like her own unsent letters.Her love language is midnight cooking: she wakes at 2am to simmer gula melaka into warm drinks that taste like her grandmother’s kitchen in Geylang, fries salted egg yolk mooncakes for one, and leaves them wrapped on a neighbor's doorstep with no name attached. She communicates in voice notes passed between subway stops—*I saw a woman crying softly at Dhoby Ghaut and I wanted to tell her it gets softer*—her voice low and crackling with city static.She once turned a Marina Bay billboard blind for three nights by hacking its loop to display one line across the skyline in Nanyang script: *You are the silence between my breaths*. It was never signed. The city forgave her. Love didn't. When offered a residency in Berlin—glass halls and cold light over Spree River reflections—she stood at Changi's departure gate with orchid seeds in one pocket and the snapdragon from her locket pressed to her tongue, tasting dust and decision.
Female