The Body as a Measure
“Agak-agak,” a Malay colloquial expression meaning “roughly” or “to guess,” frames this exploration of intuitive judgment as a form of measurement. Rooted in everyday practices such as cooking without recipes, it centers sensory awareness, memory, and embodied knowledge over standardized systems. The project questions whether standardized units have overshadowed the value of bodily experience, and whether measurement truly captures what the body already knows.
A series of hand-crafted steel rulers, weights, and an hourglass reimagine precision through intuition rather than external standards. These tools function as a self-defined system of measurement, used to produce accompanying objects: Enzo Mari Sedia chairs constructed from these dimensions, alongside with Kuih Lapis, a traditional Nyonya multi-layered steamed cake, formed through embodied understanding of proportion. Together, the works challenge the authority of fixed metrics, proposing that the body itself holds a precise and experiential knowledge of measure.
