Elle India, 2025

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.