“Public life is interesting because it asks you to be visible,” says Josh Kua. “While creativity requires privacy.”
It is a contradiction the violinist, composer and model has spent much of his adult life navigating.
For more than a decade, Kua has built a career that increasingly places him in the public eye. He has performed for luxury houses, appeared in fashion editorials, cultivated an audience across Southeast Asia and, more recently, launched his own music academy. Yet much of the work that matters most to him still happens away from public view: practising, composing, experimenting, reflecting and spending enough time alone for ideas to emerge.
Beneath the polished photographs and public appearances is someone far more introspective than his professional life might suggest.
“I’ve always been very quiet,” he says. “Music was the only moment when I could just let free and express myself.”
Embracing uncertainty
The contrast helps explain many of the choices that built his career and strong personal brand.
Raised in Melbourne, Kua describes himself as a studious child. Creativity was always present, though so too was a conventional understanding of success. After high school, he enrolled in industrial design before eventually transferring into law and commerce. Music remained an important part of his life, though not one he imagined pursuing professionally.
“I’ve always had a creative and slightly rebellious side,” he says. “But I never really acted on the rebellion until much later.”
That changed in 2012 when he embarked on his first international performance tour in the Philippines. It dawned on him that music can be something more than a passion or extracurricular pursuit.
“It was the first time that I saw it could be more than just a passion,” he recalls. “It could be a job in a very real way.”
His parents, he says with a laugh, were supportive, albeit cautiously so.
“They were concerned, but supportive. As far as the scale of Asian parenting goes, I think they weren’t too bad.”
Looking back, Kua does not describe his decision to pursue music as a dramatic leap away from convention. There was no single moment where everything changed. Instead, there was a succession of choices that gradually accumulated into a career.
The greater challenge, he suggests, was learning to embrace uncertainty.
“There’s no guaranteed path or fixed roadmap.”
That willingness to venture into unfamiliar territory continues to define his professional life. Music led to performance. Performance opened doors to modelling, fashion, luxury culture and brand collaborations. Each chapter appears distinct at first glance, yet Kua sees them as part of a larger process of evolution.
“Reinvention isn’t about becoming someone new,” he says. “It’s about allowing yourself to evolve honestly with each chapter of your life.”
The mechanics of refinement
For all the different directions his career has taken, Kua’s understanding of artistry was built on refinement through repetition rather than spontaneity.
He learnt the violin through the Suzuki method, which places strong emphasis on listening and learning by ear. Later, years spent serving in church exposed him to improvisation and a different relationship with music — one that required him not simply to reproduce notes on a page, but to respond in real time to atmosphere, emotion and people.
“I think something about playing by ear gives you a different level of freedom to express,” he says.
Those experiences broadened his understanding of musicianship. Technical proficiency remained important, but so did instinct, interpretation and emotional connection.
Even today, refinement remains a largely unglamorous process. Behind the performances, campaigns and public appearances are hours spent revisiting fundamentals that audiences rarely see.
“As much as I hate scales, I still do some of those every few days,” he chuckles.
It is an approach that finds a parallel in Mortlach. The distillery’s distinctive 2.81 distillation process, developed in 1896 by Dr Alexander Cowie, departed from convention in pursuit of greater complexity, creating a whisky renowned for its depth and character.
Refinement, whether in music or whisky-making, rarely arrives through dramatic breakthroughs. More often, it emerges through repetition, experimentation and a commitment to incremental improvement over time.
More than a musician
“Musicians are expected to be more than just musicians now,” he says. “We sit at the intersection of storytelling, image, brands, culture and digital presence.”
Technical ability alone is no longer enough. Artists are expected to cultivate audiences, create content, maintain visibility and navigate a highly competitive creative landscape.
Kua does not seem resentful of those demands. If anything, they allow him to draw from interests that have existed alongside music for years. His fascination with design, aesthetics and visual culture predates much of his public profile, making fashion and image-building feel less like departures from music than extensions of the same creative instinct.
“It’s demanding, but it’s also exciting,” he says. “It creates space to express myself across different mediums.”
Yet visibility brings its own challenges. Networking, public appearances and maintaining professional relationships require a very different type of energy from composing or practising. For someone who readily identifies as an introvert, those demands can be draining.
“It takes a lot of energy,” he admits.
Perhaps the more complicated challenge has been preserving his relationship with music after turning it into a profession.
Once creativity becomes a livelihood, other considerations inevitably enter the picture. Survival, growth, visibility and long-term planning begin competing with the instinctive joy that drew many artists to their craft in the first place.
“You have to balance commercial interests — not just surviving but also thriving — with doing work that makes you feel something,” he says.
The pandemic gave him an opportunity to reflect on that balance. Like many people, he found himself reassessing not only what he was doing, but why he was doing it.
Those reflections would eventually lead him towards a different kind of creative ambition.
Beyond the centrepiece
The result was Modus Music Academy — a music school which represents a new chapter in Kua’s life — one that is less centred on himself as a performer and more focused on helping others discover their own creative voices.
“Before this, my work always involved me as the artist,” he says. “I wanted to expand beyond something that involves me being the centrepiece.”
The idea emerged from years of conversations with students and adults who had abandoned music after difficult childhood experiences. Again and again, he encountered people whose relationship with music had become defined by examinations, grades and obligation rather than curiosity or enjoyment.
“A lot of people have said they didn’t really enjoy it,” he says. “They were traumatised by the rigidity of the experience.”
Modus aims to offer an alternative. Rather than forcing every student through the same framework, the academy seeks to understand what motivates each learner and build from there.
“We need to find what keeps each person coming back to the craft,” he says.
For some students, that may be classical repertoire. For others, it may be improvisation, songwriting or simply the satisfaction of learning something new. Underlying the approach is a question that increasingly occupies Kua’s thinking: how can creativity help people feel more connected to themselves?
The long view
Despite the public-facing nature of his career, Kua’s day-to-day life remains surprisingly grounded. Away from performances and campaigns are rehearsals, planning, administration and the quieter routines that sustain creative work. Given the choice, he prefers intimate gatherings over crowded events.
That preference extends to the way he approaches whisky, which appreciates around a table with friends at the end of a long week.
“It’s a social thing for me,” he says. “I’m more likely to have a whisky on the rocks.”
For Kua, appreciation comes through exploring new flavours and different styles of whisky. Mortlach Neverbound Release 01 is his latest find. It’s the house’s first expression to experiment with French oak casks, a choice that enhances its savoury character while bringing notes of red fruit and demerara sugar into balance with hints of soy sauce and smoked meat.
The preference feels consistent with the rest of his outlook. Throughout our conversation, Kua rarely speaks in terms of singular breakthroughs or grand ambitions. Instead, he returns repeatedly to ideas of refinement, evolution and the cumulative effect of small decisions made over time.
“My north star is creating work that feels meaningful and lasting,” he says.
These days, he speaks less about milestones than impact. The question that interests him is not how many people encounter the work, but whether it remains with them afterwards.
“As long as people feel something, feel alive in that moment, and can take that into their life — a moment of joy, realness, reset or reflection — I’d be happy.”
At 37, Kua appears comfortable with complexity. Musician and entrepreneur, performer and introvert, he seems less interested in resolving those contradictions than allowing them to coexist.
“Reinvention isn’t about becoming someone new,” he says. “It’s about allowing yourself to evolve honestly with each chapter of your life.”
editor-in-chief MARTIN TEO | creative direction MALLIE MARAN & RONN TAN | interview AZIMIN SAINI | photography HERRY CHIA | assisted by DAVID ONG | videography DENNIS KHO | video editing JACKIE MAH | hair and makeup ERANTHE LOO | styled by BIRDY LEE | assisted by JOYCE CHUA | wardrobe DAN JOHN, DICKSON LIM, HUMAN ISSUES, ONITSUKA TIGER, PRADA, SWAROVSKI | special thanks THE CHAMBER & JW MARRIOTT KL
Note : The information in this article is accurate as of the date of publication.