After working in advertising and music for over two decades, London-based Ash Ghazali quit his day job as creative director and has been pursuing art-making full-time. Heavily involved in the Singaporean music scene in the 1990s, Ghazali was a part of the country’s first mainstream hip-hop group, Construction Sight, and a member of the legendary drum and bass DJ crew, Guerilla. Looking back at his colourful career, Ghazali described advertising to be focused on “the art of honing down meaning to its simplest, most captivating form”, and music production to be about “creating a documentation of cultural zeitgeist”. His art-making, in contrast, privileges a process of turning inwards and holding presence, allowing his instinctual expression of self, a masterful appreciation of design and aesthetics, as well as an organic negotiation with his materials to take over. Presenting his second solo show in his homeland of Singapore, ‘Volume Eleven’ opens today at Richard Koh Fine Art, featuring 11 of Ghazali’s recent artworks belonging to a series he calls ‘cut paintings’.