We scroll past hundreds of images a day. Art has increasingly become just another piece of digital content, consumed in seconds and instantly forgotten. For Milon Goh and Chingyi Chua of Art Again, pushing back against this meant giving people a reason to stop, sit down, and actually look.
The two former schoolmates had both witnessed the traditional art market’s tendency to build walls. The industry focuses heavily on high-stakes transactions at the top end, leaving very little room for the everyday collector.
“Once art enters a private collection, it tends to get stuck there,” explains Goh, who originally left a career in commercial litigation to pivot into art law, a move that eventually led him to co-found Art Again. “Unless your collection sits in the top one to two percent by name, value, or rarity, you’re unfortunately left to figure it out on your own. Auction houses are selective, dealers have their own agendas, and there's rarely a transparent, accessible place for the everyday collector to turn to.”
To solve this, Goh and Chua launched Art Again, a secondary marketplace dedicated exclusively to pre-owned art. “That friction is so deeply baked into the market that most people accept it as fact, but we didn’t want it to be that way,” Goh notes.
The platform operates at a deliberately human pace. Rather than demanding sellers hand over their pieces to sit in a sterile warehouse, Chua utilizes her technical background in gallery management to visit sellers directly in their homes.
“When assessing if a work is well-cared for, I look for signs of degradation like foxing marks and stains, which are common in our humidity,” Chua says. “If the signs of age obscure or overtake the composition entirely, I'd consider that poorly cared for. But we also have to be realistic. A work that is three decades old will not look like it was made yesterday, just as a thirty-year-old's skin will never look like a one-year-old's.”
This unhurried, physical appraisal allows Art Again to capture the human history behind a piece before it ever hits the website. It is a model that prioritizes personal context over pure investment metrics.
“I rarely encourage a purchase on the basis of investment strategy,” Chua adds. “What matters more to me is context and historical relevance. The first work we ever rehomed was a work on paper made originally by an unnamed Chinese folk artist. It had been collected by a beloved late Singaporean artist, who then added his own touches to it. You could clearly see his hand, his style, his flair on the work. The piece carried two lives in it. That's exactly why human context matters in our practice, and why no investment metric could ever fully account for it.”
But building a marketplace only solved half the problem. The founders wanted to cultivate a community of people who valued this slower, more deliberate approach to culture. They needed a way to get people off their screens and into a room together.
Their solution was life drawing.
“It's an exercise in mindfulness,” Goh explains. “Having to sit still, really look at a subject, understand what you're seeing and put it on paper... that's an experience we rarely have these days. What beats sitting in a room with twenty other people, making art together?”
This May, they are bringing that exact offline experience to the Journey East showroom for the next edition of Hands On!
Guided by industry veteran Lim Kim Hian, the session goes far beyond quiet sketching. Kim Hian will actively speak through the intense mental focus, weight distribution, and endurance required to hold a shape in space.
“A good life model can genuinely inspire and push an artist,” Goh says. “There's a tremendous amount of skill and mechanics that go into what they do, but it tends to go unnoticed because people simply haven't seen it for what it is. This session is our attempt at changing that, bringing the invisible skills to the conversation.”
The session will also feature archival images of Kim Hian modeling for the late Teng Nee Cheong in the 1970s and 80s. “Kim lived through that period, practising a craft in an environment that didn't readily accept it,” Goh adds. “He carries a wealth of experience, and a particular kind of vulnerability: the courage of baring yourself, literally and otherwise, to the world.”
Placing this session on the Journey East showroom floor is a highly deliberate pairing. Drawing in a blank white room is one thing, but sketching while surrounded by century-old reclaimed teak and vintage design completely changes the atmosphere.
“When Weekend Culture approached us for this edition, we felt it fitting to hold the session within Journey East's showroom, where so much invisible labour has gone into every piece of reclaimed wood and vintage furniture on the floor,” Goh notes. “It's handiwork and artistic vision that largely goes unnoticed, and we think there's a parallel with life models throughout history. We're curious to see what emerges when the two worlds share a space.”
Whether you are an experienced artist or haven't held a sketchpad since school, the afternoon is an invitation to put your phone away. It is a rare chance to slow down, observe the physical space in front of you, and create something by hand in a room where nothing was made in a hurry.
Hands On! featuring Art Again & Weekend Culture
Date: Saturday, 23 May 2026
Time: 2:00 PM – 4:00 PM
Venue: Journey East, 315 Outram Road, Tan Boon Liat, #03-02
Tickets: $60 per pax