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More Than A Job - Brick artist Xylvie Huang: Bit by bit

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More Than a Job

Whatever your chosen craft, vocation or profession, we all have work to do. In a brand new biweekly series, Yahoo Singapore talks to individuals who have chosen unique, unconventional and distinctive careers. For some, it’s about passion. Others have a sense of duty. But for all of them, it’s more than a job.

When Yahoo Singapore first met Xylvie Huang, she was completely tuned out. Clad in an orange dress and sporting purple, blue and blonde hair, the 32-year-old sat in a corner of My Little Brick Shop, working on her latest project The two-year-old store does commissions of three-dimensional Lego sculptures and murals, and also sells Lego box sets .

Huang’s task: putting together palm-sized Lego figurines of Kuan Yin, the Goddess of Mercy, that sit on a Lego lotus base. Commissioned requests for the deity started coming in after Huang posted a photo of the figurine on the shop’s Facebook page.

Dipping her fingers into different piles of multi-coloured Lego bricks measuring just 0.96cm by 0.8cm and even smaller Lego plates, Huang was laser focused. “When people talk to me, I can’t hear them,” she said.

Her concentration allows her to also ignore the physical discomfort that comes with the job.

“You get cuts all over, all the time. Your fingers harden after a while,“ she says.

Video by Andre He

The total cost of each Kuan Yin figurine: $156. Huang charges anything from $24.90 for customised mini-figurines to five-figure sums for life-size installations. Typical requests from customers include customised portraits, roses and even a cactus for Valentine’s Day.

Together with other brick artists, the mother of one has also done large Lego installations such as a Star Wars: The Force Awakens mural at VivoCity and sculptures of carnivorous plants at Gardens by the Bay.

The former civil servant said, “I can create almost anything that I want, and it looks essentially like real life. It’s actually a problem-solving game. Lego has a fixed dimension, a fixed proportion. The bricks will fit together even when you change it in multiple directions. So it’s more mathematics than anything else.”

She added, “The best compliments are always ‘I didn’t even know it was built out of Lego’.”

Brand new designs typically take four to six weeks to complete, while large-scale commissions can take up to two months. This is because the shop has to import large amounts of bricks and parts from the United States and Europe.

The appeal of Lego

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An exhibit at The Brick Collective: Tiong Bahru Edition, built by Huang and other brick artists. Photo: Andre He/Yahoo Singapore

Huang can recall playing with the ubiquitous Lego bricks as a child all the way into her teens, before drifting away from it as an adult. In 2010, she started playing and collecting again.

Then in 2012, Huang responded to a call for volunteers to help build a National Day Parade Lego mural that was displayed at various places around Singapore. In the process, she met many fellow Adult Fans of Lego, or AFOLs, including many of the artists she now works with.

Huang eventually left her job in the civil service to start My Little Brick Shop with two other partners.

“I have a constant need to create,” said Huang. “For this, you can build it, you can tear it apart, and you can reuse it. So I thought this was a very useful medium for me to create with.”

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A life-sized sewing machine at The Brick Collective: Tiong Bahru Edition, built by Huang and Eugene Tan. Photo: Andre He/Yahoo Singapore

But Huang isn’t just about the commissioned work. Inspired by renowned brick artists such as Nathan Sawaya and Sean Kenney, Huang’s goal is for her creations to transcend into the realm of art. “The highest form of artistry is when you can actually create art out of (Lego bricks), for it to be art rather than to be craft. I am not sure if I’m actually there yet.

Her latest collaboration with other brick artists: An exhibition titled The Brick Collective: Tiong Bahru Edition, currently showing at Temasek Polytechnic. Meant to be a walk-through display of Tiong Bahru, it includes a coin phone, a sewing machine and ‘food’ – all made out of Lego bricks.

But Huang has gotten used to people not taking her job seriously. “In Chinese, it’s what people would call wan piao xing zhi – they just think that you’re fooling around, playing, it’s not serious work.”

She added with a laugh, “The other way to look at it is, I’m sorry that your work is boring, and only boring work is called work.”

Look out for the next instalment of More Than A Job on Monday, 20 June.