Introduction

Welcome, stranger. You have arrived at Stone's personal self-introduction page, where she is free to write absolutely anything she wants about herself: Fictitious, imagined, or otherwise.

Just kidding, we shall stick with the facts in this house.

So hello there. My name is Jade, full name Jade Ow Yanhui or 欧颜慧 in Chinese. I'm a versatile actor-artist-writer skilled in both the performing and literary arts. That's just the tip of the iceberg, but it'll have to do for now, or I would bore you out with my entire Curriculum Vitae. Which I am about to do, so sit tight.

Villain Origin Story

This might be one of my favorite stories to tell.

For the record, I do not consider myself a director at this time, but there was a period of time in my life, from Secondary 2 through 4, where I desperately wanted to be a filmmaker, or to make films in any capacity. I put that dream aside for my studies, thinking that I would never revisit it again. How wrong I was. The next few paragraphs tells the story of how I went from prim and proper Junior College student to one of the most prominent personalities in NUS CHS, and a rising young name in the independent film/disability theatre scene. 

I cannot tell you when exactly I started dreaming of a life in the creative arts or the performing arts, but it has been a big part of my life since I started ballet at the age of 4. However, I can recall with startling clarity that the first time I wanted to be a professional actor for real was in April 2020.

As the graduating class of 2020 watched a city lockdown become national, and a national lockdown become global, the atmosphere at Eunoia Junior College was rife with tension. Every morning assembly became a grim reminder that we were still having a mass gathering of over 1000 people, and eventually when that shred of normalcy was taken away from us for safety reasons, we felt both relief and impending doom.

The lockdown was coming for us, of course it was. I was the first one to raise the possibility in late January, and as 17-year-olds who had never experienced a disaster of any sort before, we had an innocently mischievous spark in our eyes as we debated the possibility of a lockdown and a zombie apocalypse on this island. It was not real for the whole of Term 1, and then suddenly - suddenly.

Home Based Learning. I said, "Just call a spade a spade. A lockdown is a lockdown."

Back to acting and directing, those were long days of waking up at 7.55am for 8am assembly on Zoom, and staring out of my bedroom window to see yellow tape strung around the gardens - we were prisoners in our homes, not even allowed to walk in our own gardens, but it was not indignance I felt. It was real fear, a constant lack of human contact, and being so near and yet so far from my family members as they each had wildly different schedules of Zoom meetings. Alone and with no one to talk to, I discovered the wonderful world of Broadway musical bootlegs.

I thought of the Literature Festival theatre production that I directed everything but in name. I thought of all the times I begged my teacher to let me act in school productions - in Secondary 4, for example. I thought of the time I chickened out of the EJC Drama Club auditions. I thought of the countless times I have written stories, crafted characters, dreamed so vividly of going beyond mere literature.

The world was spiraling downwards into chaos, but a phoenix was rising from the ashes in my mind - I had found the thing I wanted to do at long last.

I realized for the first time that I could either pursue the dreams that I have long suppressed and continue being a people-pleaser for the rest of my life, or I could summon the courage to stand alone with myself for as long as it takes to succeed. For a long time the struggle was within, for I had to learn to accept the disappointment of a lot of people who expected me to do other things, things that I realized were great, but not for me. I was not meant to be a lawyer, or a politician, or a journalist like so many people had hoped I would. At last I learned to let go, and that inner journey led me on the greatest voyage of my life so far.

Actor, Artist, Scholar, Writer

Actor-Artist

I first experienced proper actor training under Darren Guo, who taught a short course on acting in LASALLE College of the Arts. Later, I trained in musical theatre and realist acting by various coaches and mentors whom I am very grateful to meet, but my life changed when I was introduced to Peter Sau, one of theatre doyen Kuo Pao Kun's first students. That one chance encounter turned into an audition for BEYOND DIS:PLAY, which is a two-year actor training programme for actors with disabilities at ART:DIS that is fully funded by sponsors. I am now proud to consider myself the fourth professional actor in Singapore who identifies as hard-of-hearing.

Beyond my training, I have also amassed experience with short films such as polytechnic student film Small Town Carousel (2022), competition entries such as Lapse (2022), and various experimental works under Kino Red Dot, a guerilla filmmaking collective which I served as a Core Team Member from May 2022 through April 2023. In May 2023, I was confirmed as the lead for independent feature The Damned Ones, written and directed by Singaporean filmmaker Reena Deen. The Damned Ones shoots throughout the summer and will be submitted to festivals both locally and internationally for the 2024 season lineup.

Artist-Scholar

Following my A-Level results, I was accepted into the National University of Singapore as a Theatre Studies major with no formal training or education in the subject, and there I got to interact with theatre as an academic subject for the first time. In my first two years as a TS major, I was pleasantly surprised to realize that the learning curve was not as steep as I imagined it to be. I enjoyed every moment of my TS classes, and people often ask me if I regret majoring in the performing arts. My honest response: Not once.

In June 2023, I was named the recipient of the Special Prize (Theatre Studies) for academic year 2022/2023, an NUS FASS Department-level award conferred on the top Theatre Studies student in the cohort. I also won the Hochstadt Scholarship in the Humanities (Theatre Studies) in academic year 2023/2024.

From September 2023, I will study at University College Dublin in Ireland for a semester, where I will further explore theatre studies as a subject while experiencing European theatre cultures in real life.

Scholar-Writer

My earliest affirmation of my writing came from my Primary 1 teacher, who noted that I had "a flair for language" in my report book. An astute observation, and rather poetically, my final-year English Language teacher and published author Kevin Martens Wong referred to me as an "autodidact" who has "developed a relationship with [the English Language] which transcends a need for command". Hence, my parallel career in writing was a naturally occurring pathway that would, for my worried readers, be a decent rice bowl should acting fail to rake in the big bucks.

I won my first writing competition at the age of 12, in a national flash fiction competition. I wrote my first articles (about cryptocurrency!!!) for money when I was 13. Later, I became a published short story fiction writer at the age of 15, with my Japanese Occupation-era short story The Final Hour. I continued freelancing over the years, and contributed my writing to causes such as SGExams' journalism department. When I developed an interest in Chinese-English translation, I began to pay attention to my mother tongue as well.

Today, I serve as the Production Publicity Writer for ART:DIS, where I write feature articles and visual guides for Singapore's first full length pan-disability theatre production. As a fiction writer, I continue to sharpen my craft with the occasional work of fiction or poetry. I am currently in the midst of writing a xianxia (Chinese martial arts fantasy) time-travel novel in Mandarin, an exciting new project that I hope to complete before graduation.

~

Trivia: Many have asked why my nickname is Stone. Simply put, back in my Junior College days I had a friend who insisted on going by "Hamster", and so whenever we jokingly argued I called him a rat. In retaliation, he would call me a rock, cos, y'know, jades are rocks. And it got to the point where I decided to use the username @tinygreenstone (and eventually bought that domain name too). Tinygreenstone got shortened into Stone, and it just... never got old.