Eunice Chiong

Lego walls, limitations and puzzle pieces

Written by Elisa Chan | Photography by Phua Li Ling

“It’s crooked.”

Eunice has barely started lifting the corners of the print she just made, but she already knows.

“So crooked. In fact, it’s never been this crooked!” She dissolves into infectious laughter.

I find it impossible to think about Eunice without smiling. I’m unsure if it’s because her work is imbued with such glee (her tagline is Just making fun things) or whether it’s because she is someone who smiles a lot, and you can’t help but smile back. 

Before we met in person, I knew her only through her popular Instagram account where she comes across as charmingly effervescent. So telegenic, I thought to myself, watching her pop in and out of her zippy reels with a little microphone in hand. So savvy!

But that’s social media. Maybe she would be different off-camera?

Turns out, Instagram Eunice is pretty close to real life Eunice. I can tell this immediately, from the energy with which she opens her front door, and how she says hello. Flippy bangs, direct gaze, trademark wide smile. Right away, she launches into a story about how the monsoon rains have been leaking through cracks in her bedroom wall. Li Ling, ever-ready to pounce on a Meaningful analogy, makes a joke about Lego houses.

In fact, this is a brand new flat in a brand new estate in Woodlands. Leaky walls notwithstanding, Eunice’s home is beautiful and startlingly immaculate—the potholders match the cabinet doors which match the thermos which matches the coffee cups. The coffee cups themselves are lined up perfectly, the handles conspicuously pointing the same direction. “That’s my husband, really.” Eunice says, with a laugh. I cheekily pick up a coffee cup, and then immediately regret my recklessness and place it back down again. Li Ling adjusts it a millimetre, murmuring something about fingerprints.

We are a little bit in awe.

“My dad designed the house.” Eunice points out some of the neat features in her home that her father had taken care of. The doors with their invisible hinges. The hidden electrical sockets. The sensible plumbing. We’re impressed.

When Eunice talks about her parents, she glows with a quiet pride.

“My dad’s really creative. My mom too. She loves organizing my tiles and helps me when I teach workshops.”

She takes out a little album with plastic sleeves, and flips through some of her earlier lettering work. I admire the inky-black, perfectly composed hand-drawn letters that have their own clever internal logic and familial relationships. They are fonts, of course. Wild and wonderful fonts that she’s dreamed up and cunningly manipulated into place. Words and illustrations sidling up to one another, nestling into the negative spaces.

Eunice’s eyes brighten as she describes this process. “Layouts. I love layouts.”

“My dad asked me if I wanted to go to art school after my A Levels. And I didn’t want to, because I knew I wasn’t skilled at drawing.” Eunice says this without guile. “Drawing is so open-ended, you have a blank piece of paper and you can draw anything. That scares me. I need more limitations, and then I feel freer to be creative.

“Lettering has limitations. You are drawing letters which still have to look like letters at the end of the day. And you are creating them for a specific purpose.”

I understand it this way: under all its mystical layers, creativity is—in its most stripped down definition—inventive puzzle solving. And puzzles are defined by parameters, which can be as wide or narrow as we like. Some of us feel more inspired when these parameters are broad and expansive (what can I do with a blank piece of paper and a pencil?) while some of us prefer tighter limitations. In any case, we often search harder for what we can do when faced with what we can’t.

Eunice’s parameters of choice are quirky and unexpected: they comprise an assortment of flat Lego pieces meticulously plotted onto baseplates like chunky pixels on a screen. I see how this is right up her alley. Layouts again!

“I saw someone doing this on Instagram once and I knew immediately that I had to do it.”

This was back in 2023. She dove into the deep end right away, committing to a daily art prompt challenge on Instagram which had her designing and making a new print every day for the whole month. She figured out her materials and process as she went.

“It was pretty intense actually. I had to get my mom to help!”

She had just quit her digital marketing job at the time, and decided to commit fully to this creative endeavour for a while to see if she could make it work. “I didn’t want to live with the regret of not trying. I discussed it with my husband, and we agreed that I would try this for six months.” She smiles. It’s been almost two years.

Eunice’s whimsical prints are a delight. They are cannily designed, and the subtle texture of the rolled-on ink surfaces reminds us that they are handmade. There is also a feeling of nostalgia lurking in the mosaic-like nature of the designs. I sense my own memory being jogged; her prints remind me of old ceramic tile tables in HDB void decks. It feels familiar and warm, and even a little bit comforting.

Li Ling asks Eunice where her design inspiration comes from. “Usually from something I’ve been thinking about, but sometimes it just comes out of the blue. I don’t usually go hunting for an idea, I just… wait for it.”

I ask her how she came up with her “Mesmerised by Mantas” print, which happens to be one of my favourites. It has pleasing symmetry, but also movement; water churns and bubbles around two manta rays which appear to be locked in a dance.

“I had just gotten some new curved tiles, and I wanted to use them in an ocean theme. Manta rays came to mind first, and then I figured out how two of them could interact on the page…”

I realise our questions about inspiration are difficult to answer, even though we can’t resist asking them. We will always want to know how someone came up with that thing. But tracking inspiration beat for beat is like chasing a ghost that keeps disappearing through walls. There are mysterious leaps between mental associations, and we make intuitive decisions that lie just behind our consciousness.

Eunice says it exactly right: sometimes, thoughts just come. And when they do, we sit down with our materials and move pieces around until the puzzle is solved.

Eunice noisily rifles through her boxes of tiny Lego pieces, and gets us to attach a few tiles for her latest design. I snap on a couple of Legos, appreciating their apt qualities as design tools: Reusable! Reconfigurable! Accessible! Cool geometric shapes that line up and play well together!

At the same time, I’m keenly aware that these are toys, because they never once let you forget it. They make clacky sounds as you handle them. They come in a cacophony of bright, clashing colours. They give you little jolts of child-like satisfaction with their tactile click-ons and click-offs. They don’t allow you to take them seriously, at any point.

And yet, looking at the prints that Eunice carefully peels off their painted surfaces, you forget how serious or unserious you’re supposed to feel. All you can think is, damn, that’s clever. And you catch yourself smiling.

Find Eunice on Instagram at @eunicedenise