From Spice Routes to Scarlet Threads: Kumari Nahappan’s Homecoming With ‘Chromatic Currents’

When Kumari Nahappan describes her art, she often returns to one colour: scarlet. To her, it is more than pigment — it is vibration, rhythm, and emotion. It is Shakti, a life-force running through memories and mythologies, connecting ritual with cosmology. For decades, her sculptures, paintings, and installations have carried this colour across the world — from the polished floors of Changi Airport, where her iconic Saga seeds bloom into a cultural landmark, to the collateral programme of the Venice Biennale. Now, at 72, the Singapore-based artist is bringing that scarlet thread back to its ancestral soil.

On September 12, Pristine Contemporary in New Delhi opens Chromatic Currents, Nahappan’s first-ever solo exhibition in India. Curated by John Tung, the show is a kind of homecoming, tracing the ancient spice routes that once connected India and Southeast Asia while opening portals into ritual, memory, and cosmic energy.

“More than showing work, it’s about reconnecting with my cultural roots and sharing decades of artistic exploration with the diaspora. These pieces have travelled the world, creating trails across different cultures, and now they return to the soil that nurtured the cultural memories they embody,” Nahappan reflects.

The Spice Routes as Compass

Spices and seeds have long been at the heart of Nahappan’s visual vocabulary — humble forms elevated into monumental installations. Nutmeg, mace, pepper: all appear across her body of work, transformed into sculptures and canvases that speak of both fragility and endurance. For Chromatic Currents, she returns to these motifs, drawing from the ancient maritime spice routes that linked Kerala’s coastlines with Southeast Asia’s trading ports.

“The spice routes mirror my own artistic journey,” she says. “Pathways of cultural exchange where traditions flow across borders, adapting and enriching each place they touch.” Born in Malaysia to Indian parents and now based in Singapore, Nahappan has always inhabited this fluid in-between space. Her work emerges from these intersections — where hibiscus flowers from her childhood altar sit alongside garlands steeped in red, where Malay and Chinese influences mingle with Hindu cosmology.

Seeds, for her, are not just botanical forms but metaphors: “They hold potential energy, mystery, and transformation within their forms. Like the aromas of spices that travel across cultures, seeds embody infinite potential and continuity. They bridge the tangible and the mystical, rooted in earth yet reaching toward transcendence.”

Entering Chromatic Currents

The exhibition itself unfolds like a journey across time and space. At its entrance, two works — Dance of Surya and Auld Lang Syne, created two decades apart — are placed in dialogue, inviting reflection on memory, renewal, and cycles of existence. Inside, visitors encounter her reimagined Monument, first made in 1996, now revisited with fabric, mirror, and turmeric. “Nearly three decades later, revisiting it allows me to explore how its meanings have deepened and how it continues to speak to contemporary audiences,” she explains. “Like seeds, works can be planted, grown, and flourish in new contexts.”

A suite titled Pooja transforms the gallery into a black-and-white room, a stark shift from Nahappan’s signature chromatic energy. Here, Chandra (Moon) and Shani (Saturn) are honoured in opposing hues, evoking duality and unity, shadow and illumination. In another section, a spiral installation titled Cosmic Conches references the cosmos itself. The exhibition as a whole becomes a sensorial landscape — one that invites not just looking, but feeling, smelling, remembering.

“Monumental scale transforms art from object to environment, from viewing to experiencing,” she notes of her dual practice across public and gallery contexts. “In public spaces, I create ‘doorways to experience’ where viewers become participants. Gallery contexts, on the other hand, allow for more intimate contemplation.”

Curator John Tung, known for his work with the Singapore Biennale, frames the exhibition through the lens of colour as energy. “Curating Chromatic Currents meant framing Nahappan’s art so colour could be felt as energy, not just seen as pigment,” Tung explains. “The exhibition brings together works that move between ritual, cosmology, and everyday life, rooted in her heritage yet speaking in a universal, contemporary language.”

For Tung, Nahappan’s work oscillates between cultural specificity and universal resonance. “Her art activates the sensorial dimensions,” he notes, “where texture, weight, and scent become integral to the experience.”

For gallerists Arjun Sawhney and Arjun Butani, directors of Pristine Contemporary, the exhibition represents both a personal and institutional milestone. “It is a landmark moment for us to present Kumari Nahappan and mark her first exhibition on Indian soil,” they say. “That her work now returns to the land of her ancestry, steeped in the cultural and philosophical traditions of Kerala, is profoundly meaningful.”

At 72, Nahappan shows no signs of slowing down. “The spectrum of red feels infinite,” she says, “and I continue discovering new ways to make the abstract tangible. I’m interested in further investigating how rituals can be transformed into contemporary art forms, honouring impermanence while creating lasting impact.”

But for now, Chromatic Currents is her offering — a scarlet-threaded tapestry of memory, ritual, and renewal, planted on Indian soil for the very first time. It is a return, but also a beginning.

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