About the Exhibition
“What is missing from your scene?”
Missing from the Scene is a solo exhibition by renowned Malaysian visual artist Sharon Chin, her first in Kuala Lumpur since 2017. Curated by Eric Goh, this exhibition will run for five weeks from 26 September till 1 November at The Back Room in The Zhongshan Building, Kuala Lumpur. It features wayang kulit-style animal puppets; collagraph prints, made from those puppets; and linocut prints of those animals’ habitats—but with the animals absent. These works are backdropped by a live feed of an oil refinery’s flare stack, seen from Chin’s home in Port Dickson.
Missing from the Scene is an earnest meditation about many absences from many different scenes. From the personal (Sharon’s own relocation from KL to Port Dickson) to the national (the holes in Malaysian art scene, left by policy or market trends) to the global (the collapse of biodiversity by habitat loss in the Anthropocene). It is a play on words: suggesting that absence constitutes the mise-en-scene of the lives we live today.
Missing from the Scene invites you to be present. The show’s run will be punctuated by artist talks, informal tours and forum discussions. It is accompanied by a zine publication, featuring essays by Eric Goh, Azzad Diah, and Nau Suter; and a questionnaire, asking audiences: “What is missing from your scene?”
The show’s opening on 26 September will culminate with a shadow puppet-led walk from The Back Room to Moutou, where there will be a music party hosted by DJ collective Spinning Out.
Exhibition dates
26 September – 1 November 2026
Opening programme
Saturday, 26 September 2026
3–7 pm // Opening reception at the gallery
7 pm // Shadow Puppet Walk departing from The Back Room
8.30 pm – 12 midnight // Afterparty with music by Spinning Out. Tickets here.
Zine
The exhibition is accompanied by a zine featuring writing by curator Eric Goh, Azzad Diah, and Nau Suter.
About the Artist
Sharon Chin (b. 1980 Petaling Jaya) is a Malaysian artist and activist. She studied sculpture at Victorian College of the Arts in Melbourne, Australia, graduating in 2004. Her early site-specific, installation-based solo exhibitions strove to establish cultural moorings as a Western-educated returnee, and critically analyzed Malaysia’s socio-political realities through subjects like censorship and immigration.
At the same time, Sharon was embedded in the local and regional performance art scenes. She performed in Singapore, Vietnam, Myanmar, and Thailand, and co-founded Buka Kolektif, which organized the first ever performance art festival at National Art Gallery of Malaysia in 2011. Residencies in Sydney, Birmingham, Sapporo, Berlin, and Lucerne broadened her geographic sphere, and deepened her collaborative, participatory, and performance-based practice.
In 2011, Sharon relocated to the small coastal town of Port Dickson. This era of the Arab Spring and Occupy coincided with a grassroots push for democratic change in Malaysia. Sharon participated in the 2015 Asia Pacific Triennial with a series of weeds painted on political party flags. She staged large-scale participatory performance works inspired by the Bersih protests for free and fair elections at the 2013 and 2019 Singapore Biennales, as well as Columbia University, New York, in 2021.
The pandemic brought a profound shift towards the local. Since 2020, her art and activism have embodied a deepening relationship with her adopted town of Port Dickson.
In 2024, with support from the Prince Claus Fund Mentorship Award for Cultural and Artistic Responses to Environmental Crisis, her organizing efforts resulted in Port Dickson’s oil refinery reducing its smoke emissions to within regulatory limits.
Sharon's work is in the permanent collections of ILHAM Gallery, Singapore Art Museum, National Gallery Singapore, and Queensland Art Gallery | Gallery of Modern Art.
Installation
Artworks
Coming soon