Aarti Meyappan Pillai (b. 2000, Singapore) is an artist and legal theorist working across sculptural installation, sound, performance, and new media. Her works are invitations to inhabit spaces of curious tactility, drawn from early memories of braiding grass, weaving fallen leaves, tracing patterns in sand, and playing amidst sea foam.
Rooted in the principle of ramuan—a Malayan ethos of ecological reciprocity, care, and radical abundance—her practice explores creaturehood as a mode of kinship, and the entanglement of body, environment, and law. Transitioning towards purely compostable materials, she works with organic matter such as shells, bones, and salt, alongside glass, virtual and extended reality, performance, and the body—often collecting sounds as an extension of touch. These works weave together pre-colonial folklore, coastal ecologies, queer futurity, and posthuman imaginaries to construct liminal worlds where memory, myth, and the sensorial interlace.
Parallel to her studio practice, Aarti’s legal research examines “legislative arts”—the intersections of emotion, memory, and legislation—and their implications for cultural affect, environmental morality, and postcolonial environmental justice. Drawing on legal anthropology, feminist jurisprudence, and Indigenous knowledge systems, she investigates how folklore, sacred sites, and speculative myth-making can inform climate advocacy and legislative reform. She is developing a non-profit infrastructure dedicated to leveraging legislative arts for coastal climate justice movements.
Aarti is a Rhodes Scholarship Finalist and recipient of the Chen Chong Swee Yale-NUS College Arts Scholarship and the Georgette Chen Yale-NUS College Scholarship, Shei is an alumna of the Double Degree Programme with Yale-NUS College and the National University of Singapore (Faculty of Law), holding a Bachelor of Law (Honours) and a Bachelor of Arts in Art Practice (Honours). She has exhibited in Singapore, South Korea, Germany, the Netherlands, Hungary, the United Kingdom, Greece, and the Czech Republic.
She recently completed her Master of Fine Art at the Royal College of Art, London, and is currently sitting for the Singapore Bar Examinations. Her work continues to unfold as a celebration of the natural world, a call to arms for environmental protection, and aN aide-mémoire for kinship in the face of ecological adversity.