Homework (2024) is a richly layered interior scene that blends autobiographical detail, art historical technique, and symbolic reflection. Originally intended as the entrance piece for Anum’s solo exhibition at Yeo Workshop, its placement was later reconsidered—mirroring the painting's own themes of revision and reconsideration. Set in a studio-living room inspired by her former apartment, the composition features a painter figure with a mahlstick, surrounded by objects like a labyrinth-patterned carpet, a model gallery, an easel, and a goldfish lantern painting. The table nods to 1920s and 1940s design, while the verdant balcony view includes local flora such as Simpoh Air and non-native acacia, tying the interior to a specific ecological context.

The figure wears a Malaysian school uniform pinafore and yellow cleaning gloves, echoing Anum’s earlier work Yellow Gloves (2012), while the bright red edge of the easel reveals the imprimatura layer—an English Red ground that unifies and energizes the overlying colors, following a Renaissance tradition. Homework builds on studies like forest for homework (2023) and baju kurung (2022), quoting motifs and compositions from Anum’s past. Through these careful arrangements and references, the work becomes a meditation on process, memory, and the quiet rituals of daily life—anchored in both personal history and artistic lineage.

Homework is a meditation on painting, the studio, and the quiet labor behind exhibition-making. The central figure, depicted mid-process with a mahlstick, serves as an autobiographical surrogate for Anum, embodying the act of creation within a symbolic studio space. Layered with references to her past works, daily rituals, and environments of care, the room becomes a site of introspection and memory. The inclusion of an easel within the painting and recurring motifs suggest themes of recursion, parody, and artistic self-reflection. Grounded by the sloping balcony view of a real, local landscape, yet imbued with a quiet surrealism, Homework invites contemplation on how memory, labor, and identity are constructed and layered within the domestic-creative space of the home-studio.