Anonymous

15 Aug 2025

Field Notes
Be Happy > Good Work > Success


In April 2025, I got a call from an old friend, Kiat.

"Would you guys be interested to contribute a piece for an exhibition I'm curating?"

The exhibition, Lines of Influence, brings together 30 of Singapore's creators to launch the JYP Creative Legacy Fund, established in memory of Junyang Pow, a young designer who passed away in March. His final wish was to support emerging creatives through seed funding and a platform.



The brief was to contribute an artwork that sits at the heart of our practice and offers inspiration to those just starting out.

What insight do we have that might be helpful to a young creative? I sat with that question for days, flipping through old notes.

At the time, I had just spoken to a friend who was going through a rough patch, unsure of his direction. I mostly listened and didn’t offer advice, except for one thing I’d been thinking about for a while: be happy and the work gets better. When the work gets better, success follows.


We’re often told to do good work, become successful, and then we’ll be happy. So I chased the work, pushed toward success (or what I thought success looked like), and waited for happiness to show up. It didn’t. Not in any lasting way.

Took me years to unlearn that. But once I let myself be happy first, the work improved. The pressure disappeared. Success still came, but it wasn’t the goal anymore.

I wrote it down like this:

The trap: good work → success → be happy
The alternative: be happy → good work → success

I wanted to make something that could act as a reminder. For those just starting, and for those who’ve been at it a while. That we can choose to be happy first. Most of us learn this the hard way and you don’t have to.

The character 喜 means happiness. Turn it sideways, and it reads “Happy”.

After completing the piece, I thought maybe there’s something more here. Could this become a series? So I wrote an outline.

Bilingual Calligraphy

Language began as a way for humans to survive together. As groups spread out, their words changed, and language came to both unite and divide. This series creates a shared visual language, blending calligraphy with typographic form, reshaping the strokes of a Chinese character into its English meaning. 

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This is an idea we’re exploring now in the studio. We’re not sure if it’s a thing yet, but it feels meaningful. We’ll share more as it develops.


喜 (Happy) is drawn in Chinese calligraphy ink on archival paper, in an edition of three. Two have been sold. One remaining framed piece is available here.
—
Felix Ng
Co-founder, Anonymous
@felix.anonymous

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