Kumari Nahappan

[2] Nahappan decided to become a full-time artist after relocating to Singapore at the age of 37, starting her practice with painting before embarking on her advanced diploma in fine arts at LASALLE.

[1] Founder of LASALLE, the late Brother Joseph McNally, offered Nahappan the opportunity for the first solo exhibition of her paintings.

[6] Nahappan's minimalist acrylic paintings of cadmium red were contrasted with Cai Heng's delicate monochromatic Chinese ink on paper works.

[6] Nahappan would subsequently hold a solo show, Almanac, at the same gallery in 1997, her paintings and mixed media collages presented as an installation.

[11] Displayed on the grounds of the National Museum of Singapore in conjunction with its reopening in December 2006, the bronze sculpture with wax covering depicts a large red chilli pepper leaning on its side.

[16] In 2016, Nahappan participated in public art exhibition ENVISION: Sculptures @ the Garden City, presenting the work Road to Fifty (2015) which consisted of 50 giant fibre-glass saga seeds painted red scattered along Empress Place Lawn.

[2] Later in 2019 for the Indian Heritage Centre exhibition From the Coromandel Coast to the Straits: Revisiting Our Tamil Heritage, Nahappan would create Masala, a "spice garden" installation rendering three key spices of Tamil cuisine in sculptural form: milagai (chilli), krambu (clove) and jadikai (nutmeg).

[1] Her installations developed during her post-graduate studies drew upon the daily rituals and practices informed by her religious roots and her traditional Hindu upbringing.

Sabapathy has described her use of saga seeds as seeming to “loop back to the artist’s childhood [...] to the garden—a primary resource and locus for inaugurating her art”.

[5] She won Shell's “Discovery of the Year" award in 1992 while completing her advanced diploma in fine arts at LASALLE.