I looked at him and said, “Do I look like a fridge magnet?”

I was joking, obviously, but there is something in that.
Why does something Malaysian automatically need the Twin Towers on it? Why does everything need a bunga raya? The minute we want to make something “Malaysian”, we seem to reach for the same handful of symbols. There is so much more around us, including all the completely ordinary things that perhaps say much more about where we live.

Which brings me, strangely enough, to a plate. I haven’t actually visited the Asian Civilisations Museum in Singapore yet. I went to the museum shop. Museum shops are one of my favourite pastimes in any city. Sometimes I spend longer in the shop than I do in the museum, which probably says something about me.

This one is particularly dangerous. I found these extraordinary porcelain plates by Singapore design brand Supermama. Beautiful blue-and-white porcelain, some produced in Arita, Japan, where they have been making porcelain for centuries. The quality is gorgeous, the packaging is gorgeous, everything is beautifully considered.

But what really got me was what they chose to put on the plates.

An HDB flat. A chess table from underneath an HDB block. Singapore’s otters. Completely normal things that people probably walk past every day without even noticing them.
Suddenly an HDB flat is sitting on beautiful Arita porcelain, looking terribly important. I love that.

For me, that is good design. You don’t have to make something exotic or glamorous to make it interesting. Sometimes you just have to look properly at what is already there.

We do this a lot at nala too. We have always drawn the slightly banal, slightly funny, very Malaysian things around us because they are part of our visual language. The red plastic chair is a perfect example. There is nothing glamorous about a red plastic chair, but somehow everybody knows exactly what it is and where they have seen one.

The museum shop was a bit of a wake-up call for me because the standard is so high. Singapore does have a habit of doing that.

Now I’m thinking perhaps I need to call Arita. Imagine our Malaysia on really beautiful porcelain. Not tourist-brochure Malaysia. The Malaysia we actually live in. The plastic chair, the kopitiam cup, the packet of nasi lemak, the pasar bag, the mamak table. All those ordinary things that make you smile because you recognise them immediately.

Maybe I’ll put the Twin Towers on the bottom.

Next time I’m in Singapore, on 8 October, I am actually going inside the museum. The Asian Civilisations Museum is currently showing Crosscurrents: Masterpieces of Mughal, Safavid, and Ottoman Art from the Musée du Louvre, bringing around 100 works from the Louvre together with pieces from ACM’s own collection. It runs until 24 January 2027, so there is still plenty of time to see it.

I’ll report back. Assuming I make it past the shop.