The Nap (Unique edition) | Tan Seow Wei

On Seow Wei's latest series titled The COVID Days, she notes how the virus was innocuously thought by many to be just a flu but exploded in unimaginable number of deaths all over the world. Personally," she writes, "the COVID-19 outbreak became a fecund source of images for me to work on. With the media's incessant bombardment of images informing the latest situation at hand, some visuals were powerful and shocking, while others offered unusual sights of the new normal. I began toying with the idea of documenting this pandemic of a lifetime by translating those images into artworks."

The result is a series of contemplative works imbued with a sense of quiet optimism powering through a stark, minimal background. Seow Wei's unvarnished and vivid treatment of her subject matter - the frontline healthcare professionals tasked to keep COVID-19 patients alive and well - invariably recognises the grittiness of their day-to-day battles; her sensitive portrayal of their resilient, dignified presence in the face of the pandemic conjures hope for the unknowable future.