The motley array of seed shells singing out in shades of brown against the black and white backdrop of this picture may be familiar to Malaysians who have spent all or part of their childhood growing up away from our urban centres. Jasper Junior invites us to step into the world of “laga biji getah”, a children’s game using rubber seeds, foraged in season from the rubber plantations which for more than half a century stretched across the landscape of both the Peninsula and northern Borneo under British rule and in the early decades of independence.

This work recalls recalls memories of playing the game with cousins from his mother’s side of the family, as a child growing up in Keningau, in inland Sabah. “With a flick of your wrist, these seeds, each as unique as a fingerprint, take flight. Some are slender, others stout, and some mysteriously thick.” This fascination with the how the shells look and feel different is manifest in their sensitive and varied rendering in colour pencil, and this variety is also a key element of the game. In the “battle” of rubber seeds, you look for different types of shells to compete with against others by smashing them on top of each other. Whoever’s shell breaks first loses this competitive game, and we can see broken examples among the others here.

The artist also pays close attention to differentiating in fine pencil work the textures of bark, branch, leaves and base of the rubber tree that form the setting. Blending into this scene are the wrist and hand of an adult, wearing a contemporary wristwatch. His thumb and forefinger expertly hold a small seed on top of a larger one, poised to play – although he is older now, the muscle memory, like the memory of common childhood pleasures and nature’s bounty that afforded them, endures.