Before i go with what is expressive arts, its actually not new new to me.

i’ve been making things my whole life. Not professionally. Not perfectly. But consistently… and mostly hidden. 

Portraits that drew resemblance. Sang in the School choir. Danced in the National Day Parade. Graffiti on my wardrobe and bedroom walls with my nieces. I did crafts, made things from recycled cardboard, took photographs to match my moods, and wrote journals so private that even my future self felt like an intruder reading them. 

Art was always the thread, running through every season of my life. Loud ones, quiet ones. 

Until i decided it didn’t count. i told myself i wasn’t really an artist. Because i am not trained. Because i am not good enough. Because it can’t make me any money or be something “useful”. So, i chased all of that instead. And somewhere in the chasing, i forgot how to just play.

Simply put, expressive arts is using different forms: movement, sound, visual art, writing, not to create something “good”, but to explore and express what’s happening inside you. 

And to clear it up before it gets any confusing, there’s a difference between ArtS and Art (with no S). Art usually means a specific creative act through visual medium like painting, drawing, illustration, sculpture or photography. The plural form, “ArtS”, is the big family: movement, visual art, music, writing, drama, sound. All of it. That’s the umbrella that expressive arts, aka creative arts, sits under. 

And it’s not the same as art therapy, which is a clinical profession with its own training and registration. What i do as a facilitator is non-clinical, it’s using expressive arts, to hold a space for expression and exploration. No analysis. No diagnosis. No interpretation.

No, you don’t need to be creative. Or talented. Or an “artsy person”. You just need to… show up and play. 

Like, when we as a child, you start moving your legs to walk, or pick up the pen and start scribbling.

Here’s what i noticed about myself, and maybe you’ll recognise it too. 

When i don't feel like talking, i dance. When i don't feel like dancing, i paint. When i don't feel like painting, i write. When i don't feel like writing, i sit in sound and let it do the work.

Different modality for different moments. Different doors into the same room. Being able to move between them isn't a sign of distraction or inconsistency, it's a kind of intelligence on its own. The arts give you more than one way in, on the days when one door feels too heavy to open.

Howard Gardner’s theory of multiple intelligences remind us that intelligence isn’t one fixed thing: we can be musical, kinesthetic, spatial, linguistic, interpersonal, and more. All of these count. 

School mostly test a couple of them and the rest under extra-curriculars.

Expressive arts says: what if all of them matters? What if the way you move, the colours you reach for, the sounds that settle you, what if those are valid ways of knowing and expressing yourself, not just hobbies you do when you have time? 

i’ve observed this across some practices. Yoga. Breathwork. Somatic movement. Kundalini, TRE and sound healing. They may look different on the surface or in depth into each modality, they work on the same continuum: body, emotion then comes the thinking. Lisa Hinz mapped this as the Expressive Therapies Continuum, and i keep coming back to it. Expressive arts is that same logic, applied across many modalities, in an integrated way. 

The arts give you more than one way in. On the days when one door feels too heavy to open, there's always another.

This was what shifted for me during my studies in expressive arts. The distinction that sounds simple yet changes everything until you feel it: art as product vs art as process. 

Art as a product is the outcome. The performance. The piece you hang on the wall, post online, or waiting to get responses from people. It’s judged. It’s compared.The approval that tells you: this is good enough. 

Art as a process is what happens while you are making it. The moment you scribble something completely chaotic and started noticing… oh, something is there. A shape trying to emerge. A color that chose itself. A story that you are telling yourself. Order, finding its way out of mess. 

"Creativity is allowing yourself to make mistakes. Art is knowing which ones to keep."

- Scott Adams

This is at the heart of what expressive arts is. Sue Jennings, who explores the developmental power of play and the arts, speaks to this movement from chaos to order, and I’ve felt it in my own making, again and again.

i used to be obsessed with the outcome, waiting for the approval or praise, the way you wait for a reply that never comes. i took lessons, practiced, and compared. And each time i rejected a part of my own work, i was actually rejecting a piece of myself. 

Not accepting my art was not accepting me. 

The comparison made it worse. There is no winning that game. There is always someone more skilled, more prolific, more followed. If my worth lives somewhere in that ranking, i am going to be always losing, searching for a pin in that deep blue ocean. 

i can learn all i want. But if i don’t stop the comparison, i will never be good enough. Not in my own eyes. 

What shifted wasn’t my skill level. It was the question i stopped asking. i stopped asking is this good? And instead, I started asking, how am i feeling?

And that changed everything.

i was staring at a canvas full of colours i couldn't make sense of when my art coach said, in Mandarin:

慢慢畫就知"道"了咯。

Take my time to paint, and you'll find the 道: the Way.

That 道 is Taoism. The idea that there's a path, a flow, a way of things and your job isn't to force it, or to find it. While a painter may not be a therapist, an artist finds their way of life through the act of making. 

As Erich Fromm put it: "Creativity requires the courage to let go of certainties."

That courage doesn't start in the mind. You can't think your way into self-expression. You have to move your way in. The body knows before the brain does. Which is why we always settle in first, before we move, make, or reflect.

The process is the wisdom. The canvas doesn't need to look like anything. It just needs to be honest.

Someone who drew portraits as a teenager, covered her own walls with graffiti, and spent years chasing the perfect artwork, before realising there’s no end to that road. 

Someone who journaled before i knew what it was. Who turned her imagination into paintings when words stopped working. Who followed that thread all the way into expressive arts facilitation, and still following it. 

i completed my certification through Dr. Mark Pearson and Paula Huggins at the Gentle Art of Expressive Therapy, grounded in Mark’s person-centred expressive arts framework. i am not a therapist. i’m a facilitator. And i’ve been in the mess of it myself, which is the reason i can hold space for anyone else in it. Including this blog. Writing is my expressive arts too.

And with all of that, i can say, without apology:

i’m an artist, i’m a writer, i'm a dancer, i’m everything i want to be.

Not because of what i produce. Because of how i live. 

A wise classmate of mine once asked me: “what is the difference between a scientist and an artist?”

i will let you sit on that. Drop me a message or leave a comment, i’d genuinely love to hear what you think.