An old, gold-coloured snack biscuit tin is painted floating on a navy blue ground of this canvas – a contemporary look for a nostalgic item. Goo See Ming notes that such biscuit tins represent “a container filled with memories for many Malaysians, their childhood, and even a "staple" of life”, and that it persists today using this design, retaining its familiar appearance.

We don’t encounter them often however, at least not in bright malls and supermarkets, and with the range of snacks now available, biscuit tins are rare items in the lives of a younger generation of Malaysians.

The painting captures a typical reflex of a young person on catching upon something novel – at its centre is the image of a girl taking a photo of this tin, and within it her own reflection. It also becomes our reflection as we, perhaps, hold up a mobile device to capture the painting. In this game of mirrors, “we have no answers about the true purpose of the photograph”.

The artist has used her painterly skills to create a clash of effects that complicate our “reading” of this picture. The empty blue ground offers no context for the subject, no time or place. The alluring glow of the tin’s surface makes it seem real enough to “ping” with our fingers, and yet the neatly packed, brightly lit crackers look like they are on a poster pasted onto the tin, clearly an illusion. The image of the girl itself has the feel of a ghostly and transluscent drawn transfer. Finally, on the surface of the painting is stuck an actual biscuit tin label, its printed details obscured by wear and tear. These tell many stories in Chinese script, Bahasa Malaysia and numbers – the distribution company (Hui Seng) in Johor, the biscuit brand (Cap Ping Pong by Hup Seng industries), the cost of the deposit and refund for a damaged tin, the weight of biscuits in the tin it originally belonged to, handwritten as 880g. There is a disclaimer and a catchy tagline for us to remember: “Sekali Cuba. Pasti Tak Lupa”.

The artist claims that this artwork “also subtly suggests the superficial knowledge that young people have about Malaysian culture, which makes them perceive it as ‘fresh‘.” Looking up close we can read the six-digit Johor phone and fax numbers on the tin which would have been changed in 1995 – the biscuits in this tin might be quite stale by now!