Sugar Painting is an experimental moving-image work that examines how traditional craft becomes a site where public space, labour, and cultural memory are quietly re-negotiated. Taking sugar painting as its central material, the project departs from nostalgic representations of “intangible heritage” and instead treats the craft as a social trace, one that reveals who is permitted to appear, work, and leave marks within contemporary urban space.

The film operates through a code of repetition, fragmentation, and material attention. Rather than explaining sugar painting as a cultural object, it uses its physical properties, heat, liquidity, brittleness, disappearance, as a temporal language. These material shifts echo broader urban processes in which street life is regulated, reclassified, and selectively preserved as spectacle. Sugar painting becomes both medium and metaphor: a form that repeatedly appears, hardens, fractures, and vanishes.

The methodology combines close material observation with archival interference. Intimate, tactile imagery is set in tension with historical fragments that surface, interrupt, and unsettle the present. Sound functions as a second register of memory, privileging texture, proximity, and absence over narration. Together, image and sound construct a sensorial inquiry into how tradition is re-coded under governance and cultural policy.

Rather than documenting a disappearing craft, the work asks what is lost when culture is allowed to remain visible only as an aesthetic surface, while the labour, rhythms, and communal histories that sustain it are rendered increasingly invisible.