In A Thousand Stitches, a portrait of a Japanese woman, Mizuki, becomes the heart of a haunting narrative about war, propaganda, and human connection. Emma, an art conservation student, restores the painting, and finds herself drawn into Mizuki’s story, enigmatic artist Huang Wei, and the turbulent years of Japanese-occupied Singapore (then Syonan-to). Premiering as part of the 2025 Singapore International Festival of Arts, A Thousand Stitches then reveals the intersection of these lives during one of the darkest chapters of Singapore’s history.

But who exactly is Huang Wei? Born in 1914, Huang Wei was first brought to light in 2008, during the lecture-performance These Children Are Dead, where actress Nora Samosir played a curator, collecting morbid paintings, journals, letters, and oral history interviews to craft a portrait of World War II painter Huang Wei. And as you might have imagined by now, Huang also happens to be a figment of fiction, co-created by longtime collaborators Alan Oei and Kaylene Tan, also the creators of A Thousand Stitches.

“I’m the one who created the art works by ‘Huang Wei’ actually, and his name stems from my own name, which is ‘Huang Zhi Wei’ in Chinese,” admits Alan. “Over the years since These Children Are Dead, both Kaylene and I have continued to be fascinated by the mythos we created and wanted to continue exploring it, like with The End of History in 2013, and now, we’re getting the chance to revisit Huang Wei again in 2025.”

“It was just such an interesting collaboration for us, and even if it wasn’t in a formal setting, Huang Wei even made an appearance in audio tour New World’s End, where some of the paintings appeared in the bar at the end of the tour,” says Kaylene. “There was always more story to tell about this man and his paintings of dismembered, incomplete children, bleeding ‘paint’, and the origins behind them.”

On what space ‘Huang Wei’ occupies in Singapore art history, Alan explains more. “I think that we’re missing a large part of Singapore’s art history. Sure, you get the Nanyang artists who are so often valorised, but after the war, you also have The Equator Art Society, which was mostly written out of history, until the last 5-10 years due to new art historians, and it made sense to have Huang Wei as a bridge to this missing part of history,” says Alan. “We’re always wrestling with who he is, and he always offers new trajectories and perspectives when he’s situated in new stories, as this artist who can tell so much about what the war was like. While fundamentally a painter, his behaviours and conduct in life are what allows him to become an alternative lens to the past, and tell our story through his eyes.”

“In both his personal life and art, Huang Wei is meant to be an outsider, where he belonged to neither the Nanyang school of art, nor the social realist movements, and not Western either,” adds Kaylene. “Even after working with ‘him’ for so long, he still surprises us, where he offers a blank canvas each time for us to use as a filter to talk about something else through him; after all, he ‘lived’ through all the important historical moments of Singapore’s past, and it’s always interesting to provide this perspective of someone who existed on the periphery of society and offers a different point of view.”

In the promotional images of the show, A Thousand Stitches depicts a painting of a Japanese girl (Mizuki) in the middle of sewing a belt, also purported illustrated by ‘Huang Wei’. That is key to understanding the show’s title, which refers to the ‘senninbari’, or thousand stitch belt, that women would sew for soldiers going to battle, an amulet of good luck where every stitch represents a wish the sewer makes. “We wanted this belt to represent what we were trying to do with the show, not just a reference to the war itself, but also how we were unraveling all these stories that had been lost, and how we’re weaving them all together with new visual. Sometimes, these belts would even be passed around, and a thousand women would end up contributing one stitch each, and that was such a powerful image to me,” says Kaylene.

A Thousand Stitches then brings a new dimension to the Huang Wei universe, now acting as a ‘prequel’ of a sorts, and weaving in a greater overarching story of Singapore’s history. “This is a bit of a fantasy project for us that we pitched to Natalie (Hennedige, director of SIFA) when she came to New World’s End, and it made sense as the 80th year since the end of WWII, and instead of making Huang Wei the main character, we would be telling this story through other characters instead,” says Kaylene.

“The goal of this show was to create moral complexity to the textbook history we’ve always been taught, beyond seeing the Japanese as these cartoonish or straight-up villains with no ambiguity or nuance,” says Alan. “In all honesty, the Japanese did have some very big plans for Singapore, and with Mizuki, we see a very different perspective of the Japanese Occupation, especially with her background of having an officer for a father, and how she becomes increasingly conflicted as the occupation becomes more oppressive.”

Where Huang Wei comes in then, is as Mizuki’s friend, and while he will not be portrayed directly onstage, is instead represented by the art he creates, forced into creating propaganda paintings for the Japanese. “This has been the most character-driven story I’ve written in a long time, and has a very clear narrative arc,” says Kaylene. “But while the plot is straightforward, it’s being presented and told in many ways, with dioramas, figurines that will be moved in real time and shot through live cinema, and even a ‘kamishibai’ Japanese paper theatre, like a manual PowerPoint system, all to facilitate the storytelling, alongside some propaganda music that the Japanese composed back then, all adding to the incredibly emotional atmosphere we’re hoping to create.”

“I did a deep dive into my research, which I’ve already been doing quite extensively even before this project, but this time around, tried to really get into the Japanese perspective, and trying to uncover timelines of events and culture at the time; like how the Sook Ching massacre only took place at the beginning of the occupation, when so many people thought it was a regular occurrence throughout the war,” she adds. “I wanted to really explore how people lived, and the relationship between occupier and occupied and what they did to survive. I looked at a lot of oral history accounts and biographies from both Singaporeans and the Japanese, and was struck by how there was this attempt to maintain a sense of normalcy; kids went to school and learnt Japanese for example, and we want to convey all that in the show.”

But do Singaporeans really care, or have the capacity to care about history? “I think people sometimes don’t fight or question what is presented to them, because they might feel ok, it’s so long ago. We do mention about this tenuous connections we hold to the past, and how we ensure the survival of such history, passing it down from hearsay and records, and people should think more about how it affects them, even if it doesn’t seem to at first,” says Kaylene. “When you put all this onstage, the authenticity that’s further enhanced by the visual language and the emotional story, I think that we’ve produced a compelling narrative where the conflicts feel real, the characters feel grounded, and the audience is willing to go on this journey with us to learn more.”

“This is ultimately also a coming of age story during one of Singapore’s most turbulent times, and I think it will resonate with audiences. German philosopher Theodor Adorno once said that it was barbaric to write poetry after Auschwitz, because of how impossible it feels to convey such a tragedy and so much trauma. But perhaps art is precisely where we need to start – we can’t think of things in black and white, that’s too simple, even if it is human to villainise the other. But art helps us begin to explore the nuance and ambiguity that can be unearthed against our otherwise monolithic Singapore story, and where better to begin than with the Japanese Occupation, which is so often seen as foundational to our national identity?”

Will it be enough, especially with how people only seem to care a little for visual arts and the arts as a whole? Perhaps A Thousand Stitches will elevate that, with its promise of a powerful story that will draw its audiences in. “Art has always been a niche subject matter, and yes, people do ‘care’ in that they want to snap a photo and post it online, especially with these big shows bringing in viral, photo-worthy artworks, and it’s a little screwed up in how they miss the story and ideas behind the art, and focus only on what they see,” says Kaylene. “More than ever, in these uncertain and chaotic times, I think we need hope, and when we see the potential in art, that is where they can find it.”

“Do enough people care about the visual arts? I think it’s a symptom of a larger malaise in Singapore. Our relationship with history is so atomised, where we all do our own thing, and don’t really care about our individual identities so much and how they’re shaped by what came before us, and when you look at museum and art, it just doesn’t occur to you how you can form connections with it,” says Alan. “I’m not like Kaylene, I don’t want to instil hope in people. So what I’m hoping is that when they come and watch this show, they’ll go away speechless from the tragedy, weeping buckets, and know the suffering that can wreck us as human beings, all through art.”

Photo Credit: Alan Oei and Kaylene Tan

A Thousand Stitches plays from 23rd to 25th May 2025 at the Drama Centre Black Box.Tickets available from BookMyShow

The 2025 Singapore International Festival of Arts runs from 16th May to 1st June 2025. Tickets and more available here