You might connect the dots now between Red and an artwork that went viral ahead of the actor’s 60th birthday almost a decade ago – it was she who crafted an image of Chan’s face using 64,000 disposable bamboo chopsticks, tightly tied together and suspended from a steel frame.

Red says she was inspired after meeting Chan in Beijing to discuss the commission and rewatching some of his old films.

The iconic chopstick fighting scenes from The Fearless Hyena (1979) and The Karate Kid (2010) sowed the idea, but it wasn’t until she came across the discarded implements scattered all over the streets of the Chinese capital that the concept of transforming an ephemeral utensil into something longer lasting crystallised in her mind.

This wildly popular chopsticks portrait put Red squarely in the spotlight; this and other projects that define her journey from architect to artist are narrated in her first book, How to Paint Without a Brush, which will be released on April 11.

In it, the Sabah-born creative tells the stories behind some of her most ambitious works, from taking two months to tie up 20,000 tea bags for a piece depicting a Malaysian street vendor pouring a teh tarik (pulled tea), to painstakingly constructing images of vases using only crushed eggshells, and assembling vegetables to use as printing blocks for a Chinese shanshui hua (landscape ink painting).

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A section in the back of the book details quirky DIY projects readers can undertake to create their own artworks without a conventional paintbrush, using items such as coffee, grains and beans, and even seafood (a nod to gyotaku, a Japanese printmaking method typically using fish and ink).

But it was a far more humble and experimental series of works she created in 2013 on social media that caught my eye. Showing her sense of humour and resourcefulness, a steady stream of artworks made using food, displayed on a white square plate, were posted to her Instagram feed by 5pm each day for 31 days straight.

In them, pink-purple shallots were sliced and layered to create a feathery owl; the tiny seeds of dragon fruit were plucked and rearranged on the cut fruit to create a, well, dragon; stems of bird’s eye chillies were turned upside down to create a field of tulips.

Behind the whimsy were some sobering messages, too – one of Red’s favourites showed chocolate polar bears perched on top of a melting ice cream bar (which she styled in an open fridge due to the hot weather) posted as a response to the growing climate crisis.

“At first it sounded like it would just be fun and games, but it was actually a lot of work,” she says. “Every day was a struggle.”

She also admits that it was around this time that she had quit her architecture firm to focus full time on her artistic endeavours, and was struck by an immense sense of impostor syndrome. “I was so afraid to put things out there.”

But then she remembered her mother, Terri Ng, who in 2012 undertook a 30-day recipe challenge set by Malaysian brand Royal Selangor.

The “Jellirific – Get Your Jelly On” campaign had food bloggers competing to create unique recipes using the brand’s cone-shaped jelly mould, with contestants posting one each day.

“Every day for 30 days, I saw her making a recipe with that mould,” says Red.

Ng’s blog details each one – from a fir tree-shaped Christmas pudding to a beautiful preserved sakura blossom jelly with a white chocolate base. “She was really creative every single day, and every day was a challenge.”

Ng ended up winning the competition, beating out nine other international bloggers and bagging a slew of prizes – Red received a return flight from Shanghai as part of it.

Seeing her mother persevere, and at the same time honing her cooking skills, was an image that stayed with her and gave her the motivation to keep going even in moments of doubt.

“I would remember my mum’s project, and think ‘OK, let’s start with baby steps and try and show up every day’,” she recalls. “It doesn’t have to be complicated. It can be something as small as something on a plate. And that’s how the food [project] happened.”

Red saw how her mother grew in confidence and how her cooking and styling improved throughout the competition. “Similarly, by the end of the whole thing my work was so much more refined,” she says.

“I compare it to going to the gym in terms of struggles. Eventually, you find yourself getting more and more strong. I think that works with creativity as well, which is kind of like a muscle. It may not seem like much, but when you compare yourself to day one, it’s like, ‘Wow’.”

It’s how she has, over the past decade, leaned fully into the role of an artist creating increasingly impressive and complex works – including an actual pop-up “Memebank” in response to the cryptocurrency and blockchain craze in 2021, but also as a criticism of the inequity of global financial systems.

She was also invited by Time magazine to create a thought-provoking world map consisting of 50,000 green-tipped matches, which took her team of six a total of 150 hours to assemble – and just minutes to burn to a cinder.

“It struck me that, just like the environment, the artwork could take aeons to create, but it could also be destroyed in a very short amount of time,” she writes.

Ultimately, Red’s works invite you to look at things differently, whether from an aesthetic point of view or to confront issues in society. Their success lies in her use of everyday materials, transformed and viewed in a different light.

She tells me that the inspiration for such an approach arose during her time living in Shanghai, a formative period where she not only found the courage to pursue her art dreams, but to reflect on her identity as a Chinese Malaysian.

“When I was living in Shanghai, I saw how life was lived differently,” she says, explaining how anything can be transformed, rethought or seen in a different light. “Even a slice of cabbage can be something else, if you sprinkle in a little bit of imagination.”