Working Class Artist

Singer-songwriter-author Inch Chua is an all-round creative who tells GERRIE LIM that she’s an introvert who still yearns to be a painter

- Gerrie Lim

NOW THAT SHE’S done with an opera called Purgatory, which she describes as a “creepy ghost story” penned by Gordon Crosse and utilising WB Yeats’ words, there’s a new single where she collaborates with graphic artist Jonathan Lim Yong Ern, who mentored under Sonny Liew. “It’s a personal story of his, about a 30-something who’s disillusioned,” says Inch Chua (stylised on her website as iNCH), “and we thought it would be great to go with the story, which is called Walking Like Trees.”

The song, titled “Trees,” drops in January 2018 and heralds her third album, after Wallflower (2010) and Bumfuzzle (2013). Meantime, an EP called Letters to Ubin followed in 2015, in tandem with two singles, “MouseDeer” and “Dust That Moves”. In-between, in 2014, she launched her book, Between the Devil & the Deep Blue Sea, an amalgamation of her journals and lyrics, published by The Altar Collective in Los Angeles.

Isn’t that a relatively long wait? “I would call myself a natural introvert,” says the Capricorn (she was born on December 22, 1988) with a smile. “If I could, I would stay in a cave and not feel the need to connect with other people at all. I would not be lonely. But, in my purpose as a human being, I feel I should be part of this, going out with friends and being sociable, even though my baseline is to be an introvert.”