About the Exhibition

The Back Room is proud to announce our latest gallery collaboration with Jakarta-based ara contemporary, presenting the solo exhibition of Iwan Effendi. Titled Co-Presence, the exhibition marks Iwan’s second time exhibiting in Kuala Lumpur, having previously exhibited Two Shoes for Dancing at the Valentine Willie Fine Art Project Room in 2009. Over a decade has passed in the time since, and Iwan Effendi is now one of the leading names in Indonesian contemporary art, having shown and participated in residencies all around the world. 

Iwan Effendi is based in Jogjakarta, where he also serves as the co-founder of Papermoon puppet theatre. Under Papermoon, Iwan has become renowned for his distinct style of depicting figures, featuring large, round heads with beadlike eyes and tiny, worried mouths, giving off the impression of childlike innocence and a mix of wonder and fear. His beloved, larger-than-life puppets (known as boneka in Indonesian) have delighted audiences all around the world with their unique appearances, their impressive mechanisms for movement, and their immersive set designs and stories. He extends the immersiveness of puppet theatre to exhibition-making, creating sculptures and murals to accompany his artworks. Co-Presence is no different, featuring a site-specific, mixed-media charcoal mural alongside several new paintings on canvas. 

Papermoon informs Iwan’s art practice, which explores deeper considerations of the relation of the body to art, and image with reality. The themes of Co-Presence explore the inseparability of the self from the performance of the self, the puppeteer (consciousness) from the puppet (the body). Within the context of performance art, the body serves as both medium and narrative, a living stage that continually reinterprets the meaning of its own existence. In Iwan’s practice as an artist and puppeteer, the body serves as the point of departure for a profound philosophical and theatrical exploration, where the boundaries between subject and object, the living and the crafted, become blurred. Though featuring only simplified facial characteristics, the figures in Iwan’s paintings and drawings effectively convey a great fear of the unknown, expressed through dark criss-crossing shadows and a lack of contours to the figure. Some of the drawings feature snippets of dark scenes, perhaps fragments from nightmares or fairytales. 

Iwan’s artistic practice explores the tension latent in performance, between presence and absence, immersion and expression, resemblance and concealment. It is through the artist-as-actor’s continuous negotiation between these factors that the inanimate objects of his artworks and puppets are able to transform into beloved creatures for audiences to believe in, sympathise with, and love, reducing the artist’s own body into a vessel for channelling the great forces of the imagination. Co-Presence seems to be testing the limits of this vessel, and how much of himself the artist can give to his work before the boundaries give way completely. 

Exhibition dates:
12 June – 12 July 2026

Opening reception:
Thursday, 11 June from 7pm onwards

Enquiries:
hello@thebackroomkl.com

About the artist

Iwan Effendi (b. 1979) is an artist and puppeteer based in Jogjakarta, Indonesia. His artistic practice spans painting, drawing, puppet-making, and performance, grounded in narrative and emotion. He is one of the founders and artistic directors of Papermoon Puppet Theatre, a puppet studio and collective based in Jogjakarta which also organises Pesta Boneka, an international biennale of puppet-related practitioners. Iwan’s puppets are famous for their signature expressionless, naive faces, which invite viewers to project their own emotions upon them and their own interpretations of their narratives. 

Iwan has exhibited all around the world. Notable recent solo exhibitions include articulate (2024, Mizuma Gallery, Tokyo), preload (2023, Mizuma Gallery, Singapore), Daydreaming Face (2021, Ruci Art, Jakarta), Face to Face (2019, Mizuma Gallery, Singapore), Eye of the Messenger (2011, Yavuz Gallery, Singapore), and Two Shoes for Dancing (2009, Valentine Willie Fine Art, Kuala Lumpur). He has participated in group exhibitions across Bulgaria, Singapore, Australia, the Netherlands, the Philippines, France, Japan, the USA, and Mexico. He has been a resident artist with the Kochi Museum of Art, Japan (2015), Federation Square Melbourne (2014), and the Asian Cultural Council in New York (2009–10). 

About the collaborators

ara contemporary is a contemporary art gallery in Jakarta, established in 2025. Its name is an abbreviation of its founders: Arlin, Ramadanti, and Chandra. Beyond that, the word holds a layered meaning that aligns with the gallery’s philosophy, with ara meaning a place of shelter, adaptability, and consideration of others in Sanskrit. These values are at the heart of ara contemporary, shaping its role in the Southeast Asian arts community. 

The Back Room is an alternative space for intimate exhibitions within The Zhongshan Building, in Kuala Lumpur. The Back Room is more than just a space: it is an opportunity for new and ongoing collaborations between artists, creatives and curators. The Back Room also hopes to position itself as an easily accessible platform for new audiences to discover, appreciate and collect art.

Installation

Artworks

Exhibition Introduction

by Ellen Lee

Silas tells me a story about a cat that inspired one of the drawings. He was watching this cat that was trying to cross the road, apparently alert and waiting for its chance to run to the other side. The road was empty, yet the cat never moved, though it kept tensing up and darting its head from side to side. Then a motorcycle came speeding down the road, and the cat took this as its cue to finally make its attempt. It died.

“Technology is moving faster than nature’s attempts to adapt to it,” Silas says. Either the cat couldn’t trust an open road unless the danger was within its sights, and that’s why it chose to run at that moment, or it thought that the speeding cars and motorcycles were some sort of game, something for it to chase. “Cats can be so stupid.”

The exhibition is about technology and nature, and about drawing, but at its core it’s about fear. All his life, he’s lived with the fear that something bad could happen to him at any moment. There could be many reasons for what made him this way: an idealistic father, an anxious mother, the sudden world-halting threat of Covid in 2019, the ceaseless noise of social media and the thought that someone somewhere is in the same position as you, but somehow they’re happier, and you’re just missing a crucial part of the bigger picture. Or it could be perma-trauma from the memory of that cat being run over.

Whatever its source, the fear has been sublimated into a fascination with roadkill. Those sudden and jarring reminders of death in our daily commute which we avert our eyes from, but the shock of which persists at the back of our minds throughout the day, interpreted as a bad omen.

It’s not simply a fascination with the macabre, although that has always distinguished Silas’s practice, but more a fascination with the symbolism of an innocent, unthinking creature of nature which didn’t know any better pitted against a speeding, manmade metal machine. If they can’t make it, what makes us think that we can? Even if we’re the ones at the wheels and making the cars, how much control do we really have over our lives? Certainly not as much as a perfectly engineered machine does.

In the ten drawings of Roadkill, these animals are given a second life through the transmogrification of their composes into a collage of car parts: the metal organs of motor vehicles replace the animal viscera which bursts out of their little bodies upon impact.

Silas has always explored themes of fear and death in his practice. His earliest drawings, produced during his time at The One Academy circa 2017–2018, featured characters from children’s pop culture trapped in a twisted world of carcasses and creatures, a sort of echo of Banksy’s Dismaland project, which subverted the fantastical world of Disneyland to show that things don’t always end “happily ever after” in the real world. In the post-Covid years, his practice shifted toward sculpture and childhood themes were replaced with gothic motifs, with the addition of chrome and metal elements which added a layer of cool, futuristic detachment from their subject matter. Recent drawings have become more aggressive in his direct engagement with bodily matter, including a series of dental-themed drawings made for CULT Gallery in 2024 and the present series of drawings. This intensification perhaps reflects a desire to get closer to the nature of death, and life; instead of gothic skeletons or universally-recognised cartoons, the present series of work engages with the fresh corpses of animals actually encountered on the road—fresh, banal reminds of death and its unpredictability.

The monster stalking his paintings, drawings and sculptures throughout the years is the artist himself, and his black anxiety over the precarity of life, the transience of its joys. Growing up in a turbulent household, Silas’s early years have always been filled with some degree of existential anxiety, as if the smallest misstep or indulgence in sin could trigger a hidden doorway of future pain and punishment; and you’ll never see it coming. Like an agile field mouse that doesn’t shake the grass, only to be ran over once it steps out momentarily from its natural surroundings.

Despite how morbid and personal the themes of the show may be, the exhibition nevertheless presents one of the finest draughtsmen working in Malaysia today at the height of his practice. Custom-made frames encase these hybrid animal-machine specimens like an artefact for a future museum.

Exhibition dates:
9 May – 7 June 2026

Opening reception:
Saturday, May 9 from 3pm – 7pm

Enquiries:
hello@thebackroomkl.com

About the artist

Silas Oo (b. 1996) is a multidisciplinary artist based in Kuala Lumpur who specialises in ink drawing and sculpture. The themes of his works explore the human psyche and existential conditions, with a tendency to fixate on death. His works often blend surrealist fantasy with sci-fi retro-futurism, aesthetic sensibilities that he picked up on from pop culture and childhood influences. 

Oo graduated from The One Academy, Kuala Lumpur, in 2017 and won the Bronze prize in the UOB Painting of the Year Award (Emerging) in 2018. He has exhibited extensively in group exhibitions, with notable recent shows including Immersio by Filamen (2024, GMBB, KL), Ways of Seeing (2024, CULT Gallery, KL), The Studio Spectrum (2023, temu house, KL), and Leaving Traces (2023, Hin Bus Depot, Penang). From 2024–25, he was an artist in resident at Hin Bus Depot, Penang, which resulted in 余 Oo: A Post-Residency Showcase in 2025. In the same year, he collaborated with local fashion label Huntilanak on a capsule collection for KL Fashion Week. Roadkill is his first formal solo exhibition. 

Website
Instagram

Installation

Artworks

About the exhibition 

Welcome April, the beginning of spring and the blossoming of young things. We are delighted to invite you to the opening of our next show, an exhibition of new photography from a group of emerging, Malaysian contemporary photographers. 

With motifs of fleeting youth, the precarity of time, and the abundantly incidental beauty of nature, the photographs in April express a mood of calm, quiet contemplation. All three photographers are established in their respective image-making fields which run parallel to the art world. The work of a professional photographer is busy and there is rarely time to contemplate one’s photos on a human scale, i.e. in a size larger than a phone screen. April presents photography in real life, as something to gaze at rather than scroll past, something you can own rather than merely Like, something that can accompany you through life rather than be drowned among the flood of images that we consume daily. 

Our three featured photographers are Alvin Lau, known for his photographs of urban terrains and textures, who has shifted his lens away from concrete and manmade structures to contemplate the precarious fragments of the natural world that bloom secretly within urban surroundings. Amani Azlin is an editorial and fashion photographer who is sharing with us a selection of diaristic photos of her observations while on location and in between scheduled shoots, betraying a more intimate and personal gaze which is at once the core and the reverse of her studied editorial style. Conversely, Nadirah Zakariya, known for her personal meditations on womanhood through self-portraiture and floral still lives, has shifted her lens outward to present tender portraits and landscapes captured during her residency at an artist commune near Mt Fuji, Japan, in 2025. 

Exhibition dates:
11 April – 3 May 2026

Opening reception:
Saturday, April 11 from 3pm – 7pm

Enquiries:
hello@thebackroomkl.com

Exhibition Text

 by Ellen Lee

“Pictures came and broke your heart…” 

—The Buggles, Video Killed the Radio Star

Welcome April, a month in spring that harkens the blossoming of young things. Though we don’t experience “spring” as such in Malaysia, the month and its ebullient name (which seems to capture the youthful promise of spring closer than its predecessor, “March”), along with how it begins on the first with laughter, was chosen because it reflected the spirit of the exhibition, which presents three emerging photographers to an art audience that rarely gets to see contemporary photography being exhibited. For a medium that continues to struggle for recognition as “serious” art, why not abandon that striving altogether and embrace its romance instead?  Photographs possess a power like that of the spring, an ability to stir emotions and wake up the soul with their promise of open-ended possibilities.  

Spring—and its associations with youth and childhood—finds expression in the choice of Amani Azlin’s photograph of a kid goat by the sea for the exhibition poster. The rest of Amani’s photographs are slices from a stylised photo diary, capturing places she’s been on her travels or while on location. Yet they are often unmoored from context, unfolding instead within a kind of visual void, like illustrations accompanying a fairytale. A baby goat by the sea, playing among the wildflowers; a large bundle of leaves caught blurrily travelling along a country road like a benign monster. Her full-time work of being a fashion and editorial photographer is often that of transforming ordinary things and people into fairytale images, pictures that are meant to inspire desire, whether in the form of a desire to possess the subjects of the photos, or to look like them, or to simply live alongside them within the perfectly crafted, stylised fairytale world of the photograph, fixed in beauty. The same sentiment is brought over to her candid photos; the image-makers can’t stop fabricating a different, more beautiful world on top of the real one. 

 Nadirah’s photographs likewise project a sense of untouched, almost incorruptible purity, set against the serene presence of Mount Fuji. Produced during her residency at an artist commune near the mountain in January 2025, these images function as postcards from a time spent among strangers who eventually became friends. Together, these fellow artists ushered in the new year, sharing in that delicate and delicious threshold of time when everything still feels ripe for the taking. The photos linger on the people she met, often captured shyly and slyly, from behind her subjects or while their eyes were closed. They are supplemented by photographs of empty rooms (kitchen, lounges, bathrooms) captured in an early morning light, before everyone else has woken up, or during the fading light of dusk, after they’ve all scattered. Viewers are left to piece together their own narrative, to imagine what life was like in the commune beyond the camera. The power of the photos lie in this gap between the subjects and the viewer, the way one can feel the traces of people, and imagine echoes of their laughter or the residual heat of their recently vacated seats… 

The fairytale of Alvin’s photographs takes the form of a secret garden, echoing the title of one of his works. Within this secret world that only he knows, blades of grass and wiry strands of branches pulse with life and the alien message of their vegetal existence. The photographer discovers these secret gardens through hours of journeying by train, bicycle, and walking. The physical exertion of the journeying is belied by the vulnerability of the objects photographed—sharp and careful images of a fern, or a branch—or perhaps the latter is the result of the former, perhaps it’s the hourslong active search for the photograph that induces states of heightened perception and keenness of feeling to capture the moments when they present themselves. The images thus condense a philosophy of living—a union of body and vision, where what is worth capturing is inseparable from the act of seeking.

In closing, like spring itself, the photographs are a young promise: they open fantasy portals for the viewer to step into and spin their own stories from, they capture fleeting feelings and moments, objects fixed in time that may not appear the same in the next cycle of the seasons. Photography, here, becomes a medium for dreaming. 

About the artists

Alvin Lau (b. 1994) is a full-time photographer and artist based in Kuala Lumpur. His works are centred around a constant exploration and investigation into life and death, often using his images as a way of condensing or documenting larger ideas and narratives. His work has been exhibited around the world, notably in the Jeonju International Photo Festival, Landskrona Photo Festival, Sentul Biennale: To Our Friends (2025, A+ Works of Art, KL), Swallow & Spit (2023, A+ Works of Art, KL), holes (2023, The Back Room, KL), and we will have been young (2018, ILHAM Gallery, KL). In 2024, he organised his own debut solo exhibition, titled I Want to Go Home, which took place at 293, an artist-run space in Kuala Lumpur. Aside from exhibitions, he was a participant in the SUNYI Artist Residency by the National Gallery of Art (Langkawi), Malaysia, in 2024 and represented Malaysia in the Southeast Asian Masterclass supported by Goethe-Institut Malaysia, Ostkreuz Photographers’ Agency, Berlin and OBSCURA Festival in 2017. 

Amani Azlin (b. 1994) is a photographer and director based in Kuala Lumpur. She received her BA in Graphic Media Design from the University of the Arts, London, but pivoted to professional photography soon after graduating, thus embracing her teenage passion. In her commercial work, she has done fashion and editorial shoots for ANAABU, Nelissa Hilman, the United Nations, Grazia, Harper’s Bazaar, and more. In her capacity as a photography artist, she has shown work in group exhibitions around Kuala Lumpur. Notable recent exhibitions include the recollection project: an exercise in learning (2024, HARTA), Realpolitik (2023, CULT Gallery), and Angkat Berat (2021, Tun Perak Co-op). Her work is in the collection of and on display at Momo’s and The Chow Kit hotels in Kuala Lumpur. 

Nadirah Zakariya (b. 1984) is a Malaysian photography artist whose work explores themes of place, memory, and intimacy. She graduated with a BA in Fine Arts from the Fashion Institute of Technology, New York, in 2010 and is currently based in Kuala Lumpur. She has had solo and group exhibitions in Kuala Lumpur, Singapore, New York, London, and Japan; exhibitions of note include FLOWERS: Flora in Contemporary Art and Culture (2025, Saatchi Gallery, London) and Times to Come (2024, DECK, Singapore). Her most ambitious solo show to date was Feeling Feelings Makes Me, Me (2023, temu house, KL), which featured nearly 40 works and offered an expansive reflection on her artistic journey. This exhibition was followed by the multimedia installation Air Mata Air in 2025, which was shown first at The Back Room, KL, before travelling to the Indonesia Contemporary Art & Design (ICAD) 15: Earth Society in Jakarta. That same year, she was an artist-in-residence at the 6okken Artist Residency near Mt. Fuji, Japan. Outside of her artistic practice, Nadirah is an in-demand commercial photographer, producer, and director, the co-founder of Layar Lucida creative studio, and the co-founder of the Exposure+ Photo Festival. 

Installation

Artworks

About the exhibition 

The Back Room invites you to Innocent Bystander, the second solo exhibition by Malaysia-born, China-based artist Ong Hieng Fuong. The exhibition collects several new paintings made between 2024–2025, when Hieng had just graduated with his Bachelor’s from the China Central Academy of Fine Arts in Beijing and was starting his Master’s at the Sichuan Fine Arts Institute in Chongqing. 

The paintings record, with a heavy touch of dry humour, the observations and experiences that make up everyday life for the artist, living between China and Malaysia. Viewers may amuse themselves trying to figure out which painting subject was observed where — the man squatting on a bollard while smoking must surely be in China, while the immigration clerk on her phone in front of a “No Handphone” sign must surely be in Malaysia. Though the paintings don’t make a pointed statement about either country, Hieng’s compositions capture subtle cultural nuances between the two countries — scenes that are characteristic of daily life there but would never be represented in an official way. 

Amidst the variety of weird and wonderful scenarios in Hieng’s paintings, the artist himself is positioned as an “innocent bystander”, a witness standing by the side whom chance happened to make audience to these random events. The mere act of living and going about his day is ripe for inspiration. In his paintings we can make out the elements that make a place and culture unique, but we also enter into the perspective of an individual with a unique relationship to his world. Through Hieng’s eyes, the world seems neither bleak nor wonderful, nor matter-of-fact… The paintings recreate prosaic scenes with an attention to detail that betrays a genuine fascination with the world, yet undercut by a dry line of irony that is expressed in the grotesque or blank-eyed expressions on some of his subjects.

Selected for the exhibition poster visual is the artist’s self-portrait at 30, bundled up indoors during a blue Chongqing winter. In the corner, we see another blue scene, a painting within a painting, the WIP of Shalimar Saloon, which depicts the artist’s young cousin having his head shaved in a Malaysian-Indian barbershop with psychedelic interiors. This dedication to memory and the painting routine brightens up an otherwise grey existence and transforms the continuation of mere life into something lasting and meaningful.

About the artist 

Ong Hieng Fuong (b. 1995, Selangor) is an emerging artist who is currently pursuing his Master’s in Fine Art at the printmaking department of the Sichuan Fine Arts Institute in Chongqing, having previously graduated with his Bachelor’s from the Central Academy of Fine Arts in Beijing. Hieng hails from Tanjong Sepat, a small fishing town where the pace of life is much slower and where he got to experience all aspects of daily life to their fullest, experiences and observations that, despite his move to China, are still his core source of inspiration. 

Hieng’s work has been included in group exhibitions locally and internationally, including the ILHAM Art Show 2025 (ILHAM Gallery, Kuala Lumpur), Narrating Localities (2025, University Malaysia Sabah), Art Jakarta (2024, Indonesia), and ART SG (2024, Singapore). He has been selected for the UOB Painting of the Year Award several times, winning Bronze (Established) in 2025, Gold (Established) in 2019, and the Grand Prize (Emerging) in 2017. He was an artist-in-residence at the Rimbun Dahan Southeast Asian Art Residency for six months in 2021. His debut solo exhibition was That day, I was sketching on the street (2022, The Back Room, KL) followed by Innocent Bystander (2026, The Back Room, KL). 

Installation

Artworks

About the exhibition 

The Back Room is pleased to announce our first show of 2026, Ecstasy, a solo exhibition by Malaysian painter Hoo Kiew Hang 胡久汉. The exhibition marks Hoo’s return to the local art scene following a nearly decade-long hiatus that began in 2017. 

Since his graduation from Dasein Academy of Art in 2006, Hang has participated in residencies and exhibitions locally and abroad, including a solo exhibition at White Box, Publika, in 2013. But since 2017, he has been on a hiatus from exhibiting in order to pursue job opportunities as a professional set-painter on theme parks around the world. The pause in his exhibition history did not mean a pause in his art-making, however, and Ecstasy sees him returning to the art scene with a portfolio of new works that are significantly different from his paintings prior to his hiatus. Always an avid fan of the American pop art movement and pop culture generally, in the present body of work Hang has tried to release his brush from the formal coldness of pop art, and to explore pop art’s qualities through a more intuitive and expressionist style. 

Colour, symbols, and cultural icons overflow in Ecstasy, which features several large works on canvas and rice paper, and a majority of small paintings on cardboard. Drawing from his memories, dreams, and pop culture, Hoo allows his subconscious to guide his hand and saturate his surfaces with fantasy faces and creatures, just as how images saturate our attention in the 21st century. But despite the chaos and layers of painting, certain stories and hints can still be registered through the glut of image and colour, rewarding the eye patient enough to see through the noise. 

We invite you to join us at the opening reception of Ecstasy: A solo exhibition by Hoo Kiew Hang this January 17th (Saturday) from 3pm to 6pm. All are welcome. 

Enquiries: hello@thebackroomkl.com

Artist Statement

 Ecstasy takes you on a journey through the subconscious. This series of works stems from my ongoing exploration with free-style painting and subconscious symbolism. The inspiration for the characters, forms, and scenarios featured in Ecstasy arise from my dreams and the intuitive way I experienced nature when I was a child. Each painting doesn’t tell a particular story, rather they are tapestries of my emotions, memories, and fragments of the visual cultures that surround me. 

Dancing artists, ecstatic monks, alien beings, vampires, spirits, bones, bats (endless bats), soaring birds, smiling and crying faces, distorted visages,.... The series for me unfolded like a visual rhapsody, in which I poured dreams, myth, and subconscious images onto the paper. It’s a chaotic narrative without a beginning or an end, rich with psychological cues and symbolism that remain a mystery even to me. Every stroke feels like a fragment of feeling, every figure an echo of a memory. The riot of colour and overlapping forms flow organically from an inner reservoir, mirroring the layered logic of dreams. 

I draw inspiration from pop art, outsider art, primitive art, graffiti, and comics—forms that are outside convention and allow for a more direct expression of inner states. This entire series explores the tension between reality and the imagination, in a quest to find a spiritual outlet through artistic means. 

It is my hope that these works disrupt fixed ways of reading images and invite viewers into an exploration of their own subconscious. To me, art is not just self-expression—it’s a conversation, a medium for understanding ourselves and others. This series is my mapping of a psychic landscape, and a reconstruction—perhaps even a rebirth—of cultural memory.

—Hoo Kiew Hang 

About the artist 

Hoo Kiew Hang 胡久汉 (b. 1982, Perak; based in Kuala Lumpur) is a painter whose practice has been heavily influenced by the American pop art movement. Hoo graduated from the Dasein Academy of Art, Kuala Lumpur, in 2006 and has since had exhibitions all over the world. 

After having been on a hiatus from exhibiting (but not from art-making) over the past decade in order to pursue other professional opportunities and to raise his children, Ecstasy re-introduces Hoo to the local art scene. Previous exhibitions prior to his hiatus include the solo exhibitions Paradise of Gods (2013, White Box Publika, Kuala Lumpur) and Our Unnatural Disaster (2009, Malihom Artist-in-Residence Programme, Penang), along with group exhibitions in Nanjing, Kuala Lumpur, Penang, Manila, Hong Kong, and Taiwan. His paintings are in the collections of The AFK Collection, Rimbun Dahan, Tanjong Public Limited Company, Malihom, and the Royal Bank of Scotland (all in Malaysia) and the Beppu Art Museum (Japan).

Installation

Artworks