With a belief that creativity knows no format and all creations should have emotions, Kiat has built an extensive portfolio of work in visual art, music and art direction. His many titles include DJ, producer, visual artist, award-winning art director and co-founder of Syndicate.
The art director has a client list of diverse international brands rooted in culture, from high fashion labels like Versus to street wear with Levi’s and Nike, to museums like the Smithsonian Institute and the Asian Civilisations Museum, that have won him more than 16 international awards.
As a pioneer of bass driven music in South East Asia, Kiat has been championing the adventurous side of leftfield electronica for close to two decades. He has shared deck duties with some of the world’s biggest names such as Goldie, Flying Lotus and Africa Hitech in both intimate clubs and huge festivals like the Singapore Night Festival and Gilles Peterson’s Worldwide Festival in Sete, France.
His production work landed him the honour of being the first Singaporean to be signed to respected UK label Metalheadz, with his debut release Feeder ending up on Goldie’s entry to the Ministry of Sound Masterpiece series. Other productions have aired on BBC Radio 1, BBC 1XTRA and on Singapore radio. In 2012, Kiat released his debut album The Inner Galaxy, “a cosmic voyage of sorts, traversing a spacious alien landscape of experimental electronica” (Midnight Shift). This journey through the leftfield blends hip hop, dub and soulful electronica with international collaborators from New Zealand to Iceland.
2013 saw Kiat participate in ‘Creative Destruction’ – a multi-faceted campaign by the Peranakan Museum in conjunction with an installation titled Luminous Depths by Lee Mingwei. Besides producing an exclusive track with samples from the work by the international artist, the campaign saw his first live drum n’ bass performance, in collaboration with Cherry Chan on the visuals.
A year later, Kiat worked with Marie Schuller – the Contributing Head of Fashion Film at leading progressive fashion site SHOWStudio – to score several fashion films, most prominently the Anthony Vaccarello x Versus Versace film that premiered at New York Fashion Week, and featured on Dazed Digital. This collaboration bore two more films – one showcasing the AW14 collection for the award-winning Turkish designer Dice Kayek titled Blue, and another for the Asian Couture Week 2013 on SHOWStudio.
In 2017, he has created original music for the recent Nike Air Force 1’ 30th Anniversary launch in China, as well as music for a film piece for Selfridges in London which features Mykki Blanco. 2018 saw him being invited to Barcelona with poet Deborah Emmanuel where they presented a Poetronica set with Cherry Chan on visuals at POESIA, Barcelona’s longest running poetry festival. Currently, he has been working on various projects from designing record sleeves for UK labels as well as scoring music for experimental production group Cake.