How To Be Unapologetically Yourself
i will soon become the same color as my
suit because i’m very
oh i’m so nervous uh hi everyone um
this is me my name is paulina um
yeah you might have seen me on social
media looking ridiculously as this
as you can tell i really like glitter
and i will explain later why
um and it first seemed like a really
narcissistic idea
idea to talk about myself and my story
but i realized that
the meaning of you is a very big part of
my journey and i thought it’s a very fun
way to show how you can become or how
you can be or how i was
and still am being unapologetically
myself
and yeah i think i’m the most qualified
person to talk about how to be
unapologetically yourself
looking like this um a little bit about
myself
and what makes me me i’m from the
biggest country in the world russia
uh that tiny tiny dot is where i’m from
it’s a
ridiculously small city of 300 000
people
i was really bad at maths i was really
bad at science i was really bad at
everything honestly
and my parents decided to put me into
art school
so when i was seven and all my
classmates were 14
because nobody wanted to be enrolled in
a school that was so traditional
serious was where we were learning about
like art theory and art history and
drawing with charcoals nobody wanted to
put their kid through that stress
except my crazy parents and
because i loved bright colors and
experimenting
i was told to repeat the year
in the history of a hundred year old
establishment
i was the only one who ever repeated a
year so that was really really
embarrassing
and but i managed to graduate when i was
and funny enough years later this was
one of my first art pieces that i’ve
done with glitter
it was done in singapore and this is a
world map where i covered
russian glitter and that was kind of my
first steps towards realizing
or remaking a painful memory something
happy by using glitter
and i think everybody has different
like ideas of what their childhood was
and mine was
a very strange salad of emotions
and having that experience made me
actually a really angry kid
and i wasn’t able to process things
properly and i became really angry and
i had to change like three schools in
one month and
i remember my last experience of a
school um
in russia they they told my parents that
i’ll never be able to speak english
because i’m so bad in subjects so that’s
interesting
uh but what i learned from all of this
is that
though i never was good in school and
it’s funny that i’m saying this in front
of like
inside of a school but um i never gave
up on like being my authentic self
um i learn how to manage my anger
because it’s not cute to be angry nobody
likes that
and direct it into something useful and
prove to everybody that you can be
whatever you want if this is what you
want to look like
do it and another very important thing
is that not really everybody is ready
for your authentic self
you might push it down to people’s
throat but it’s not for everybody
so just know when to step back and
for the topic of angry art i made a
bunch of that
in my past school life
and this were pieces inspired by um
riot
who i found out about when i was in
school and i was really i was
it was a lot of pain to go through
realizing what happened to them as a
russian
and also a woman artist and this was
kind of a first time that i experienced
using my body as a medium
and also a first experience of creating
kind of like an alter ego
i didn’t i could pretend to be really
anyone and i pretended to be this
powerful
badass woman but i also experienced and
made a lot of art from a happy place
and i think trying to reconnect with my
russian roots
relearning my family history and bonding
with my granddad who’s
the keeper of all these stories uh made
me kind of come up it’s still an ongoing
project where i
transform portraits of my family and now
trying to transform portraits of other
people
and i feel like those photos are so like
sad and grim
and i am highlighting women in the
families because
to me all of them carry the pain of so
many families
um so i’m using sparkles and fun
materials to kind of give it a new life
and yeah when my
parents decided when i was 12 that they
want to move
to a different country it was a whole
different shock
and it was really scary because me and
my little brother we were put in a
english-speaking school we both didn’t
even know how to introduce ourselves in
english and my first class was
literature and they were reading macbeth
and i was like what is going on
and um however it brought us really
close as a family
and i remember that one thing that was
going through my mind all the time is
that
i am not capable to speak english but
what i have
is art and what i have is creativity and
that doesn’t need much of a translation
so i quickly found the people who are
creative
classmates got everybody together and
started doing
art and like i don’t know trying to
create some kind of commotion
and a lot of really happy art is for me
is
like has to do with that memory because
the moment you become comfortable
you start using fun and bright colors
and experimenting
and i truly found like my tribe and
the people who were you know encouraging
the process
and funny enough um so the place that i
moved to which is also important is
cypress
and a cypress is a small tiny beautiful
island and three years in
i decided that i’m really bored and i
need to keep moving and my crazy father
was like okay
where do you want to go and i was like
singapore it’s really far away and
sounds weird
and and he was like okay so at um
16 i moved to singapore completely alone
uh got accepted to lasalle i don’t know
how it happened i just packed my bags
and left
and yeah i’m not encouraging anyone to
quit school at 16.
do i wish that my parents stopped me yes
a lot of strange things happen because
of it and delays in education
but what i truly encourage is to listen
to yourself and now i would
i don’t regret my decision but what
that experience made me is grow up
really fast as well as be extremely
lonely
because i feel like back then 10 years
ago there were not many people in the
same situation as me
and believe me no people from russia or
europe were interested to come and
pursue their art education in singapore
yeah it was really weird and again i was
trying to find comfort in like
art so i was the first one to come to
school at 7 30 a.m
and the last one to leave at 12 midnight
because i really had nothing else to do
and i was like i’m just gonna make it
work
and even in singapore i was told that i
should quit being an artist because
i paint cartoons and i should stop
embarrassing my parents
um and yeah i decided to turn that
around because i realized i’m in such a
beautiful and giving space
and through that i created a lot of
really beautiful pieces because i miss
my family a lot
so this is my graduation work where i
kind of use my family portraits and used
flowers which is the significance of
love
in russia to you know just share a
little bit of family history with
everyone
and then i graduated and i thought i’m
awesome i know everyone i’ve done
so many internships so many cool events
i couldn’t find a job for eight months
it was miserable time and i was like how
can i and i was like going through that
emotion of like oh my god it’s all
because i quit school
now it’s gonna bite me in the ass and it
took eight months
of like and i’m telling you i did every
job possible
a waitress a nanny a tour guide
translator
muralist like everything and
when i was almost ready to give up
somebody remembered that i was russian
and took me to moscow to build festival
of singapore with singapore tourism
board
and then somebody else on the way to
that
found me and said do you want to come
and try to work for
uh experiential marketing agency and i
was like what
okay um so i started this
strange during journey of being an adult
and i think
some of the things that i learned from
it is that you can’t give up being
curious
have no fear because in my case i
literally have nothing to lose
nobody to impress here so i was like
okay and be positive
be resourceful and i think the
resourcefulness definitely comes from
art school days you literally can make
something out of trash so i was like
this i will apply that to my
professional life and don’t stop
learning
and while i was experiencing a very
strange and
like life-changing and
like life of a working adult i also
started experimenting with
my favorite material which was somehow
became glitter and it’s a joke now you
will see it
it’s everywhere follows me everywhere i
go and you will have it at home
tomorrow all of you so my classmates
started joking and somebody even called
me the herpes of our world
once and
all of this started because i had an
amazing mentor in my performance class
who told me
what scares you the most and for me it
was being alone
and not being able to like talk to
people just being in this like
i don’t know confinement and he said
okay
take that and your favorite material and
put them together
so my experience and with performance
and how this piece came about
is me literally covering myself in
glitter and
sitting in this strange trance-like
state for
hours and it’s it’s very strange but
i’ve never experienced anything like
this and i still to this day chase the
feeling
and i wanted to briefly talk about some
of my favorite
pieces that i’ve done first one where i
look really shocked is the first time i
am in glitter
um in front of people uh blue piece is
done with
lasalle students who are doing an
exhibition on
color indigo gold one is
when a really big gallery in singapore
noticed me and wanted to use me as like
help them invite people into a gallery
and i think the fourth one is
a piece that um is very painful was very
painful to talk about and i was
encouraged not to
post it and i was encouraged not to
release anything about it because of
criminal
um circumstances in russia
and this is a piece that was a
collaboration with a london-based
photographer who photographed
naked women all around the world so this
is the first time that i went
nude which is also very unlike me in
support of a russian lgbtq
artist an activist who was persecuted
for six years
for spreading of pornography for
illustrations of body positivity
so a bunch of women around the world
came out and did this beautiful series
and i decided to use color red because i
thought that
this is a color that will make people
like stare
and notice and it’s associated with a
lot of powerful things
and a lot of people ask me like why do
you do it because
it’s pain in the ass to wash off it’s
it’s
um now i only use environmentally
friendly choices but before it wasn’t
um why do you do it like it’s so strange
it takes up so much of your time i
ask myself this question every time as
well but then for those moments
you see that little girl so this is a
piece that i’ve done
for sentosa cove um
we kind of wanted to create if i was a
real person
how would like my surroundings look like
and we built this shimmer shack
where they gave where we gave kids
cotton candy and they get to like talk
to me
and while i was performing and this girl
she was legit convinced that i was a
fairy
and she would come every weekend from
her like house in santosa cove she will
run
and she will sit next to me and just
look at me and then she’d be like can
you come home with us
and this is her and me and her mom are
still in touch
so i think in moments like this i’m
definitely like
very glad that i get to experience a
world of performance art
and i think another really great
positive thing about getting to know
so many singaporean creatives and never
really giving up
on like trying to push myself up in the
scene is being trusted with amazing
project my friend narelle
mu local musician trusted me to build
and create
and art direct her whole music video so
this is kind of a process
from sketch to um building to how it
looks like on a video
my best friend bella helped me with
painting those walls
it was a group effort but yeah it’s
it’s so fun and i think another really
important thing for somebody who is
a working professional but also
struggling to
keep up this persona of like this
creative badass
i started overthinking everything and i
was like wait but now that i have a job
nobody knows i have a job everybody
thinks that i’m a full-time
artist somehow and um this
this like i don’t have a ton of
followers on instagram but that like
idea to keep up and always try to
impress people started
really ruining my creativity and
only last year i convinced myself not to
overthink and just let things
guide you and yeah when you create
things
authentically everybody else can see it
and i think today there’s so many things
that i am made out of
always evolving definitely always
passionate
somebody who still doesn’t know how to
accept rejection
um still someone who’s learning the
value of my work and myself
and extremely anxious
and yeah in that period of like
trying to impress myself and push myself
to do things
i was like i need to stop everybody
everybody can tell i can tell that i’m
unhappy
so i just started making things whenever
i feel like it and i think people start
noticing
and last year almost in the same time i
had a
best birthday present when vogue
singapore did a
like a few pages on me and that was
insane
and you guys contacted me in the same
time so it was like
i realized that whenever people like
when people feel that you’re happy
a good things will come to you as well
and i think
what’s really important and what i want
to tell everybody is that
being out unapologetically yourself will
have a lot of sacrifices a lot of
missing your family a lot of fights with
people around you but it’s definitely
worth it and i encourage you all to do
the same
thank you
thank you