I’ve been cartooning professionally since I was 17, when I won the Straits Times cartooning contest, and was hired to write and draw a daily strip for their fledgling tabloid, The New Paper. I didn’t know it beforehand, but I became the first ever Singaporean to write and draw a daily strip. Previously, Singaporean newspapers reprinted syndicated strips from abroad, while locals did op-ed or weekly pieces at most. Over the course of 20 years, I drew the following strips for The New Paper:

  • Orchard Road, daily comic strip, from 1988 to 1992.
  • Report Card, semi-autobiographical weekly comic strip about becoming a British undergrad, 1991-1995
  • The Concrete Jungle, daily comic strip, 1992 to 2005
  • Yankee Doodles, semi-autobiographical weekly comic strip about moving to New York, 1998-2006
  • Alien Talent, daily comic strip, 2005-2008

I also occasionally do comic strips for my long-running humour column for 8Days, Singapore’s highest circulation weekly magazine, as well as commissioned cartoons and comic books for both private and governmental organizations. My cartoons have also been published in many publications, including American Legion (USA), Troika (USA), The Mirror (Singapore), Sinica (Japan), AHA (Japan), Wenhua yu Youmo (China) and Pi (UK).

I also devised and drew all the cartoons for Chade-Meng Tan’s New York Times bestselling books, Search Inside Yourself and Joy On Demand (HarperOne).

But the main focus of my illustration work for the past few years has been for Dim Sum Warriors, for which I do the covers, thumbnails, promo art, and beginning with Volume 3, the complete artwork in full.

Here are just some of the many pieces of original artwork I generated for use in the Musical: