About the exhibition
The Back Room is delighted to announce the first gallery solo by Silas Oo, an emerging artist from Kuala Lumpur with a pronounced talent for ultra-fine line drawing. Having exhibited copiously in group exhibitions around Kuala Lumpur, including being shortlisted for the National Art Gallery’s Bakat Muda Sezaman competition in 2024, Silas is no stranger to the art world. Still, the exhibition marks his first time exhibiting solo in a gallery, and his first fully articulated series of works: Roadkill, which features ten drawings made on paper and framed in custom, cut-to-size acrylic mounts.
With a deadpan bluntness akin to the way we encounter dead animals on the street, the show’s contents are precisely what its title suggests. The ten drawings depict various forms of roadkill encountered by the artist on the streets of the city, streaked, smeared, and slathered across hot tar, organs steaming in the tropical heat… but with some of their gorier elements transmogrified into a collage of car parts, making a chimera of machine and animal matter.
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 locked 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 the distance of gothic skulls and 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. At its core, the artist’s fixation is a personal one, part of an ongoing reckoning with a tumultuous, anxious childhood that was filled with religiously-inflected sermons on death and the afterlife.
Despite how morbid and personal the themes of the show may be, the exhibition nevertheless presents one of the finest drawing artists working in Malaysia today at the height of his practice.
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.
Installation
Coming soon
Artworks
Coming soon