A Patchwork of Identities
An essay on the work of Dexter Sy
by Ryan Francis Reyes

The Chinese diaspora has resulted in the formation of distinct identities as a vibrant cultural exchange took place between the Chinese migrants and the various local communities where they settled. In Southeast Asia which is home to the largest overseas Chinese population in the world, the encounter blossomed into ethnicities such as the Peranakans – characterized by a hybrid of ancient Chinese and local cultures of the Nusantara region, further layered with Western influences brought by the region’s colonial history. In the Philippines, they are colloquially known today as the Tsinoys. Though far less in number than people with Chinese ancestry in Malaysia, this group has nevertheless contributed significantly to the shaping of the country’s social, cultural, and economic life. 

The intersection of Chinese and Filipino heritage lies at the heart of Dexter Sy’s art practice. Born to a Chinese father and Filipino mother, the artist constructs his self-identity along these two different cultures. His works on the one hand pay homage to and celebrate the rich legacies of his Chinese and Filipino lineages – acquiring values, traditions, and lifeways from two distinct sources, hence experiencing a diverse upbringing. On the other, he also expresses the difficulties of growing up in a family with a mixed cultural background, at times confronted by a crisis of identity and grappling with a sense of belonging on both sides. As part of a distinct ethnic community, he often deals with expectations, misconceptions, and stereotyping of Chinese-Filipinos, which include being affluent, traditional, and conservative, to name but a few. He challenges these assumptions by juxtaposing Chinese and Filipino symbols and imagery with those drawn from pop culture and other facets of his personality which are seemingly incongruous with the local perception of Tsinoys.  

In this exhibition, Sy revisits his affair with identity crisis and interprets the experience of navigating between two different worlds in a collection of intermedia works. In two-dimensional pieces, he recreates some old portraits – a foremost medium used in recording, idealizing, and immortalizing identities. Faces of individuals and couples dressed in traditional Chinese garb are transformed into highly stylized paintings layered generously with meticulous pen and ink drawings and accentuated by patches of carpets and strands of red threads. In this intervention, individual identities are blurred, and they morph seamlessly into dreamlike, flat compositions in vibrant palette. They become unrecognizable and are woven into tapestries with a sumptuous gathering of visual elements that embodies the pastiche of influences defining the artist’s personal identity. Catholic iconography and Philippine folklore represented by the recurring imagery of the Sacred Heart, Eye of Providence, and monster-like creatures are laid out in an overall composition reminiscent of Chinese folk paintings and a predominantly red color scheme evoking an auspicious symbol in Chinese tradition. 

Sections of these intricate and detailed drawings reappear as large patches in nude figures covered with a constellation of lines, dots, and Chinese texts. These networks indicate meridians in the human body, a key concept in Chinese medicine. While these sculptures give another nod to the artist’s Chinese roots, they can also be symbolic of the confluence of Chinese and Filipino identities in what can be regarded as the ultimate site of identity expression – the body. In these forms, we see the body marked and analyzed according to Chinese knowledge system. At the same time, it is embellished with configurations similar to body paint or tattoos that blend harmoniously with the plotted meridian points and easily turn into nodal regions of the entire anatomy.          

Exhibition dates: 15 – 31 March 2024
Opening reception: Saturday, 16 March from 3 pm – 7 pm

About the Artist

Dexter Sy (b. 1979, Manila, the Philippines) graduated with a degree in Fine Arts with a major in Advertising from the Far Eastern University in Manila, where he also currently teaches as a special lecturer. Sy mostly works in two-dimensional media, often combining painting with pen and ink drawing. Characteristics of his work include colourful figures that are rendered and stylised with minute details, such as lines, textures, and patterns drawn from diverse cultural references including pop culture, Philippine folk mythology, and Christian iconography. Through his art, he explores the complexities of identity, memory, kinship, and belonging. 

Sy has had numerous solo exhibitions since 2008, in the Philippines at Kaida Contemporary, UP Vargas Museum, Ayala Museum, West Gallery, Boston Gallery, 1335 Mabini, Artcube Gallery, and Bencab Museum, and internationally at Haslla Art World Museum in South Korea and Centre Intermondes at La Rochelle, France. He has received the Philip Morris Philippine Art Award several times, securing the Jurors’ Choice in 2010 and 2012 and the Grand Prize in 2016.

Installation shots

Selected Artworks

Folded Lines brings together the works of UK-based artists Laura Porter and Gabriela Giroletti with those of Malaysia-based artists Lee Mok Yee and Mark Tan, spanning 3D and 2D works including sculptures, reliefs, drawings, paintings, and prints. The body of work explores personal and universal interactions with urban environments, man-made materials, and architectural spaces through a process-driven approach to making. All four artists transform shape and form through simple gestures, exploring in-between spaces that feel both static and alive, organic and inanimate. 

Gabriela’s work straddles the space between painting and object, refusing to be confined to the boundaries of the canvas. Through her build-up of layers and colour, her style is characterised by the gradual development of surfaces, which become a hazy field of both micro and macro sensibility, referencing the monumental sensation of being submerged within the landscape and the microscopic beauty that lays the foundation for the natural world. 

Mok Yee explores the organic world through the lens of found and industrial woods. In the works he presents for this exhibition, he tears and layers cork wood—a heavily processed material used in manufacturing and construction—using low-tech processes and elements of chance, in an attempt to capture the natural form of the material, where it exists somewhere between the organic and the man-made. The investigation of material language is expanded upon by combining the cork wood with deconstructed furniture, thinking about how our bodies move and interact with objects and space.

Laura Porter also uses low-tech bodily processes to deconstruct and reconstruct material, cutting down used items of clothing into minuscule fibres and using organic substances that transform the textiles into rigid structures. Combining this ‘new material’ with distorted metal frameworks, she subverts the soft fabric into solid material, and the solid material into something seemingly unstable, challenging our material world and reimagining these forms as quasi-living entities. Thinking about how material consciousness becomes imbued within the fabric of spaces, Laura’s work explores how the body becomes a site of action, and a renewable energy source, whilst referring back to the manufacturing process of the garments themselves. 

Similarly, Mark Tan is concerned with the spaces we inhabit and traverse, exploring the hidden and forgotten moments, the unseen spaces, and the corners in which our consciousness gets lost and found. Taking visual references from these built environments and urban spaces, Mark creates textured surfaces that constantly refer back to the tradition and processes of printmaking and drawing, where the hand of the artist is ever present. 

Folded Lines explores the transformation of materials and forms, and the hand-made processes that are at the root of the artist’s explorations. Against the backdrop of an urbanised, digitised culture, Mok Yee, Mark, Laura and Gabriela choose a physical, slow approach to making, pushing the boundaries of their mediums whilst remaining grounded in the traditions of their craft. 

Text by Laura Porter

Exhibition dates: 17 February – 10 March 2024
Opening reception: Sunday, 18 February from 3–7pm
Artist tour: Sunday, 18 February at 3pm

About the Artists

Gabriela Giroletti (b. 1982, Brazil) is a Brazilian painter currently living and working in London. In 2018, she received her MFA in Painting (distinction) from the UCL, Slade School of Fine Art, where she held a position as an Honorary Research Fellow from 2019-20. In 2015, Giroletti graduated with a BA in Fine Arts (first class) from the Middlesex University, London. In 2024, she will have solo presentations in Paris, Palm Beach, and São Paulo. 

Laura Porter (b. 1991, England) is an artist and curator, having studied BA Fine Art at Middlesex University and MA Sculpture at University of the Arts London. Her work has been exhibited across the UK, commissioned by galleries, and shortlisted for awards. Laura is the founding director of Studio KIND. CIC, an artist-led gallery in Devon.

Lee Mok Yee (b. 1988, Klang, Malaysia) is a Malaysia visual artist currently based in Kuala Lumpur. He graduated with a Diploma from the Dasein Academy of Art and a Bacherlor’s in Fine Art from Middlesex University in London. Mok Yee has exhibited in Singapore, France, South Korea, UK and Germany, received awards such as the UOB Painting Award, and has undertaken residencies at Rimbun Dahan and in Arles, supported by the Institut Francaise.  

Mark Tan (b. 1991, Kuala Lumpur) is an artist based in Kuala Lumpur. He received his BA in Drawing and Applied Arts from the University of West England. Mark is one of the recipients of the Khazanah Nasional Residency in 2022/23 and over the years he has exhibited both locally and internationally in Singapore, Indonesia, France, and the UK.

Installation shots

Photos courtesy of Laura Porter

Selected Artworks

The Back Room at ART SG 2024

The Back Room is proud to announce its first-time participation in a regional art fair at the second edition of ART SG 2024. Located in the FUTURES section at Level 1 of Marina Bay Sands Expo & Convention Centre, the main section of the booth presents works by Antonio Pichillá Quiacaín (GT), Marcos Kueh (MY/NT), and Red Hong Yi (MY), all of whom will be showing large, textile-based works broadly revolving around themes of identity and independence. The booth is anchored by a fluorescent, multi-work woven installation by Marcos Kueh that touches on themes of the postcolonial subject, flanked by textile works by Antonio Pichillá Quiacaín inspired by his indigenous identity, and a new piece by Red Hong Yi on motherhood.

A separate viewing experience is the “back room”, a specially-built corridor at the back of the booth that features a mixed hang of works by Hoo Fan Chon, Liew Kwai Fei, Minstrel Kuik, Ong Hieng Fuong, and W. Rajaie, all of whom represent some of the most promising contemporary artists working in Malaysia today.

In addition, we are working with Marcos Kueh and Galerie Ron Mandos to present “Woven Billboards: Nenek Moyang” by Marcos Kueh, a public art installation from his Kenyalang Circus series for ART SG PLATFORM.

ART SG 2024 Fair dates: 18 January 2024 (VIP Preview & Vernissage), 19 – 21 January 2024 (Public viewing)

Installation shots

Photos courtesy of Esmond Sit

Marcos Kueh, “Woven Billboards: Nenek Moyang” public installation

Photos courtesy of Allen Tan

VIP Preview Day and Vernissage (18 January 2024)

Photos courtesy of Esmond Sit

At the Fair

A group exhibition featuring artists on view at The Back Room booth at ART SG 2024

A mixed-hang group exhibition presenting five of the artists exhibiting at our booth at ART SG 2024, namely Hoo Fan Chon, Liew Kwai Fei, Minstrel Kuik, Ong Hieng Fuong, and W. Rajaie.

On view are new paintings by Liew Kwai Fei from his “Gesture. Abstraction. Painting” series (2019—ongoing) and W. Rajaie, along with new prints by Ong Hieng Fuong made during his ongoing studies at the China Central Academy of Fine Arts in Beijing. Minstrel Kuik will be showing her three-part graphite drawing “Durian Queen and Her Reign” from 2022 and Hoo Fan Chon will be showing selections from the Finnish Landscape Painting series, initiated during his residency in Finland in 2022.

Exhibition dates: 6 January – 4 February 2024

Installation shots

Selected Artworks

The Back Room is pleased to announce our upcoming exhibition and our last exhibition of the year. Titled Favouritism Is My Favourite -Ism, this group show will be produced by the artist chi too and will feature 11 artists at varying stages of their careers. As the title may suggest, the exhibition compiles 11 of his favourite artists, namely: Binti, CC Kua, Dipali Gupta, Foo May Lyn, Hoo Fan Chon, Jerome Kugan, Jun Kit, Liew Kwai Fei, Siti Gunong, Syahnan Anuar, and Wong Hoy Cheong.

The inception of the show’s premise is drawn from chi too’s own observations and experiences as an art worker in the Malaysian art scene. It marks the first time that chi too has produced an exhibition that is not his own. chi too, who works as a project manager for a private art museum and has been active as an artist in Kuala Lumpur since the late 00s, has always had a healthy skepticism towards the prestige and power that curators wield in the art world, observing that most shows that feature a curator byline are merely roll calls of the curator’s (or gallery’s) favourite artists. In alignment with the aims of chi too’s own art practice, the present show’s title and its premise poke fun at the conceits, assumptions, and everyday delusions of grandeur with which people flatter themselves. It pokes holes through the language that people use to ascribe importance to their work (and being important is a particular worry for art world professionals, who are aware of their industry’s recreational status in the wider function of society) and bluntly delivers the obvious in such a way that the delusions no longer seem tenable. 

On a secondary level, the show also serves as a snapshot into the artists who emerged around the Central Market Annexe milieu during its heyday of the late 00s. Wong Hoy Cheong was a large influence on chi too’s own artistic practice, while Hoo Fan Chon, Jerome Kugan, Jun Kit, and Liew Kwai Fei were his peers. All of these artists have a shared history with chi too. Many of them began their art careers making socially-engaged art, yet have since developed more “purely art” concerns or are presenting subtext-less works for the present exhibition; all the same, their works are united by a generous dose of humour. This sensibility—socially-conscious, yet also humorous and detached—perhaps also explains chi too’s taste in selecting his favourite emerging artists within this exhibition. Binti, CC Kua, Siti Gunong, and Syahnan Anuar all make works that have a whimsical and punk-ish humour. Dipali Gupta and Foo May Lyn are outliers, having both emerged in different contexts from the rest, but similar sensibilities in their works can still be found. 

As with most of chi too’s endeavours, it is a show that will lead you to thinking in circles the more you think about what sort of point it’s trying to make, while at the same time realising that there may not be a point at all. With such thoughts in mind, we invite you to visit and delight in chi too’s “curated” selection of his favourite artists (who also happen to number among our gallery’s roster of artists) and to join us in tasteful mingling at the opening of this group show on December 9th, from 7pm onwards.

About the Producer

chi too is an art worker and artist. He is also a journalist, filmmaker, carpenter, and baker. His goal in life is to be a kitchen assistant where all he does is cut up ingredients and clean kitchens.

About the Artists

Binti is a poet, sister, daughter. Binti's works follow the frequencies of being by Binti for Binti, reclaiming the derogatory term often labelled to artists of being “Syok Sendiri” (“In one's own head”) as a benchmark to invite innovation.

With a tertiary education in cinema, Binti puts this forward through unrestricted channels that include poetry performances, film screenings, and art exhibitions. Past poetry performances include the JB Writers Readers festival (2017), Rantai Art (2019), performance artist for Lunadira and I-Sky’s 'Suara Kamar' (2020), and at CIMB Artober (2021, 2022). She has screened films through the Open Screen platform at Seashorts Film Festival in 2022. Her art has been included in group shows at CULT Gallery including Ways of Seeing (2022), Momento (2022), and Realpolitik (2023). 

Besides individual approaches, Binti is also a part of the Malaysian collective duo, Mati, and the Creative Advisor of local multidisciplinary platform, Mulazine.

CC Kua (b. 1991, Kedah, Malaysia) is a visual artist, graphic designer, and lecturer based in Kuala Lumpur. She obtained a BA (Hons) in Graphic Design and Illustration from The One Academy (degree conferred by the University of Hertfordshire) before pursuing a Master of Fine Arts from the Graduate Institute of Plastic Arts at Tainan National University of the Arts, Taiwan. She works primarily in contemporary painting and drawing, finding inspiration in the simple joys of everyday life and dreams that dance through her head.

Her debut solo exhibition was Mosquito Bite in 2016, followed by Left A Bit, Right A Bit, Up A Bit, Down A Bit in 2019, both at Lostgens’ Contemporary Art Space, Kuala Lumpur. In 2020, she was selected for the Southeast Asian Arts Residency Programme at Rimbun Dahan, Malaysia. Shortly after, she had her third solo exhibition, featuring works produced during the residency, titled All By Myself at The Back Room, Kuala Lumpur (2020). Her works have also been selected for group exhibitions around Kuala Lumpur and Taipei. 

Dipali Gupta (b. 1977, Mumbai, India) is a multidisciplinary artist based in Kuala Lumpur who explores society’s constructs and contradictions from the angle of the feminine. She received her BA in Fine Arts from Lasalle College of the Arts, Singapore, in 2018, winning the Chan Davies Art Prize for her series, Her Pleasure. Her concerns and research span Foucauldian biopolitics, Deleuzian societies of control, religious habits, socio-political dogmas, and psychosomatic effects. Her art attempts to interrogate normative prescriptions for behaviour and reclaim space by defying gendered myths and subverting notions of patriarchy, androcentricity, and binarism. Dipali’s research interests focus on feminist theory, post humanism, the body and identity politics and her multi-disciplinary practice appropriates from genres across Eastern and Western art canons.

Her works have been shown in cities around the world, including Kuala Lumpur, Singapore, Hong Kong, Helsinki, New Delhi, London, and Miami. In 2022, she was selected for inclusion in the inaugural ILHAM Art Show at ILHAM Gallery, Kuala Lumpur, and was a finalist in the Sovereign Asian Art Prize in Hong Kong. She has had smaller showcases of her work in Mutual Aid Projects (Uncertain Relaxation, 2020) and Suma Orientalis (2019), both in Kuala Lumpur. Her debut solo exhibition was Desire Lines at The Back Room, Kuala Lumpur, in 2022.

fml (Foo May Lyn) was a performer for over 20 years, but by unfortunate circumstance found herself making art instead. To sustain herself she was also a waitress, a cleaner and a shopgirl. She makes her art by expressing theatrical scripts or characters, tales, and injustices through varied materials that include paper, textiles, wood, and more. As she works, she often plays all the characters she creates in the process.

Her debut solo exhibition was 10,000 Mosquito Hearts, curated by Sharon Chin, at OUR ArtProjects, Kuala Lumpur, in 2019. Since then, she has been featured in the group shows Asynchronicity at Charim Schleifmühlgasse, Vienna, Austria, in 2022, and Fracture/Fiction: Selections from the ILHAM Collection at ILHAM Gallery, Kuala Lumpur, in 2019. 

She lives still. In Penang.

The practice of visual artist Hoo Fan Chon (Malaysia, b. 1982) explores food consumption as a constant negotiation between nature and culture. His incisive and humorous works investigate value systems surrounding taste as social and cultural constructs. Growing up in Pulau Ketam, a fishing village off the coast of Klang, Hoo has an affinity with fish, which has become a recurring motif in his artwork. His most recent solo exhibition was The World is Your Restaurant at The Back Room, Kuala Lumpur, Malaysia (2021); in 2023, he re-presented some works from this exhibition in the group show Table Manners, curated by Tan Siuli, at Appetite, Singapore. He was selected for the 3rd edition of the Makassar Biennale, and participated in the SEA-AiR Studio Residencies organised by NTU CCA Singapore and the European Union in Helsinki, Finland (2022) as well as Nusantara Archive’s No Man’s Land Residency, Taiwan (2017-2018). He was the co-founder of art collective Run Amok Gallery (2012-2017).

Jerome Kugan (b. 1975, Kota Kinabalu) is an artist based between Kuala Lumpur and Kota Kinabalu. Graduating with a BA in Writing from the University of Canberra in 1998, he has worked in various capacities as a writer, event organiser, musician, and queer activist in Kuala Lumpur. 

In 2008, he co-organised Seksualiti Merdeka, a gender and sexuality rights festival in KL, until it was banned by the Malaysian government in 2011. In 2012, he founded Rainbow Rojak, a series of queer-inclusive themed parties in KL. 

Although he has been exhibiting his artworks since 2005, it was only in 2016 that he began pursuing his art practice full-time, presenting his first solo Red & Gold at Raw Arts Space in Kuala Lumpur. In 2017, he moved back to his hometown of Kota Kinabalu, where he has continued to explore themes of queerness, spirituality and the self, in his mixed media paintings. In 2022, he staged his second solo show in two parts, HURT|NEED|UNDO|LIVE and RESIST, at The Back Room, Kuala Lumpur. 

Jun Kit is a graphic designer and illustrator. He has contributed to a range of projects within the realms of art, publishing, theatre and activism, and has exhibited drawings and photographs in Kuala Lumpur, Singapore, and Tokyo.

Liew Kwai Fei (b. 1979, Kuantan, Pahang) is recognised today as among the most exciting new generation of contemporary painters in Malaysia. Spanning over a decade, his practice explores the hybridity of the painting medium and its capacity to communicate ideas spanning class, race, and language to the humbling experience of the unspeakable when we encounter art.

In recent years, his painting practice has been concerned with exploring the formal possibilities of both modern and contemporary painting. The idiosyncrasy and hybridity of his styles are also manifested in his playful creations of three-dimensional paintings and modular paintings.

Liew has had twelve solo exhibitions to date and has participated in numerous group exhibitions in Malaysia and Singapore. His work has been collected by institutions such as the National Art Gallery, Kuala Lumpur and the Singapore Art Museum.

Siti Gunong is a self-taught multidisciplinary artist who expresses herself across various mediums, including sewing, collage, printmaking, tattoos, drawing, and paintings. Her artworks reflect a special mix of thought-provoking insight and humour. The themes of her art are inspired by her personal experiences and the people and influences throughout her upbringing. She has exhibited her work in several group exhibitions, including 1000 Tiny Artworks at The Back Room, KL (2023); Wanita Merdeka at Rumah Api, KL (2023); Saturday High-Tea by Papu at Publika, KL (2022); and Instalasi & Intisari by Tandang Record Store at The Zhongshan Building (2019).

Syahnan Anuar is a visual artist hailing from Machang, Kelantan, but currently based in Kuala Lumpur, where he also runs the Bogus Merchandise silkscreen printing company. He works primarily in the medium of silkscreen across different surfaces. His works explore the personal and political tensions in his lived experience as a Malay-Muslim male living in 21st-century Malaysia. 

His debut solo presentation was Potret Diri at The Back Room, Kuala Lumpur, in 2023. He has also participated in numerous group shows, including Realpolitik at CULT Gallery (2023), New Editions at Chetak17 (2023), Art is Fair at Fahrenheit 88 (2021), Wonderwall at The Back Room (2020), Awan & Tanah at CULT Gallery (2019), and Rethinking Editions at OUR ArtProjects (2019); all in Kuala Lumpur. 

Wong Hoy Cheong was born in Penang, Malaysia, in 1960. He received a BA in literature from Brandeis University, Massachusetts, in 1982, and an M.Ed. from Harvard University in 1984. In 1986, he received an MFA in painting from the University of Massachusetts, Amherst, and in 2011 was awarded the Rockefeller Foundation Bellagio Creative Fellowship. In an attempt to escape the solitude and stasis of painting, Wong now employs mediums that he considers collaborative, and which effectively mix historical depth with human immediacy; he works in drawing, photography, video, installation, and performance. During the 1990s, he developed an interest in the migration of plants. This inquiry led him to investigate human migration and the related subjects of race, colonization, and indigeneity. 

Wong has been the subject of solo exhibitions at the National Art Gallery, Kuala Lumpur (1996 and 2004), and at other venues around the world including Kunsthalle, Vienna (2003); Pitt Rivers Museum, Oxford (2004); NUS Museum and Gallery, Singapore (2008); and Eslite Gallery, Taipei (2010). His work has also been included in group exhibitions internationally, including the Asia Pacific Triennial, Brisbane (1996); Art in Southeast Asia: Glimpses into the Future, Museum of Contemporary Art, Tokyo (1997); Fukuoka Asian Art Triennial, Japan (1999 and 2009); Venice Biennale (2003); Liverpool Biennial (2004); Guangzhou Triennial, China (2005); Asian Contemporary Art in Print, Asia Society, New York (2006); Naked Life, Museum of Contemporary Art, Taipei (2006); Istanbul Biennial (2007); Taipei Biennial (2008); Lyon Biennial, France (2009); Negotiating Home, History, and Nation at the Singapore Art Museum (2011); and PhotoEspana (2011). Wong lives and works in Penang, Malaysia. 

INSTALLATION SHOTS

Photos courtesy of Kenta Chai.

SELECTED ARTWORKS

Pagar & Padi is a collaborative project by Sabah-based artists, Catriona Maddocks and Gindung Mc Feddy Simon. It has travelled to Kuala Lumpur by way of Kota Kinabalu, where it was first exhibited throughout August–September 2023 at Kota-K Art Gallery.

Pagar & Padi presents the documentation of a piece of land art created by Maddocks and Simon in collaboration with community members of Kampung Kilimu, a rural village at the foothills of Mount Kinabalu. In 2022, the artist collaborator duo participated in the annual “Mongomot” rice-planting event, using heritage rice grains to spell out the word “JAMIN” (“guarantee” in Malay) into the earth at Kampung Kilimu. In March 2023, the artists harvested the padi and documented the process through drone photography and videography. The documentation was presented first at Kota-K art gallery. In early November the artists will once again return to the Padi fields in Ranau to re-plant the land art, and the documentation will be exhibited, in a slightly adapted form, at The Back Room gallery, Kuala Lumpur. 

The 20-feet piece of land art commemorates the formation of Malaysia and the terms by which Sabah agreed to its role in the building of the Malaysian nation. “Jamin”, the chosen word planted in padi, references the Keningau Batu Sumpah of 1964, on which a plaque stated that the Malaysian government guaranteed (“jamin”) the rights to freedom of religion, land autonomy and the practice of customs and traditions.

The work also celebrates the role that rice plays in the daily lives and traditional belief systems of rural Sabahans, and the necessity for community members to come together in the spirit of “gotong-royong” (collective clean-up) to assist one another in the annual harvest.

Maddocks said of the work, “Rice has been cultivated by communities in Borneo for countless generations, and in return rice has cultivated customs, beliefs, traditions and rich oral histories throughout this island. To take this significant staple food and utilise it to create an artwork was really exciting, especially as we had the opportunity to work alongside local community members and learn from them techniques, songs and taboos that have been passed down from their ancestors.”

Opening reception: Saturday, 11 November 2023, from 4 pm onwards

About the Artists

Gindung Mc Feddy Simon is an artist, musician and researcher from Ranau in Sabah, Malaysian Borneo. He is the co-founder of the printmaking art collective Pangrok Sulap, and a revivalist of the traditional boat lute from Sabah, the sundatang. Learning techniques, songs and folklore from community elders, he is an instrument maker and also the founder of Tuni Sundatang, a contemporary ethno-fusion six-piece band. As a child, he helped his family plant and harvest padi, but this is the first time that he has returned, as an adult, to padi-planting to produce the land art that forms the centrepiece of Pagar & Padi.

Catriona Maddocks is a curator, artist, and researcher from the U.K., currently based in Sarawak, Malaysian Borneo. Her cross-disciplinary work focuses on collaborative platform-building and developing spaces in which to explore identity, community narratives, and cultural heritage within a contemporary context. She is the co-founder of Catama and Borneo Bengkel, and lead researcher for Borneo Boat Lute Revival, focusing on museum collections around the world that contain Bornean artifacts, ensuring that they and Bornean voices are correctly represented. She has worked with rural communities documenting cultural practices for a decade but this artwork is the first time she has combined her art, research and creative practices to explore land activism and indigenous rights.

INSTALLATION SHOTS

Photos courtesy of Kenta Chai.

The Home Inside Our Mind is the first-ever Malaysian showcase for Indonesian ceramic artist, Sekarputi Sidhiawati (known to friends as “Puti”). The show features a mix of wall-mounted and three-dimensional ceramic works. Taken together, the works are an externalisation of Puti’s attempts to uncover her true self amongst the demands of her shifting identities and roles as mother, wife, artist, and business owner (to name a few). 

Puti’s preoccupations with the stories of women and the domestic are reflected in both her choice of medium and the final pieces. Ceramics are often associated with women and the domestic sphere, and here Puti’s expression of her inner landscape takes the form of sculpted book covers with titles that reflect distinct thematic concerns. The titles of these books, such as “How to Break A Pattern” or “Mistakes Over Mistakes”, could conceivably be found on the bookshelf of any young woman trying to improve herself, and they hint at the friction that this journey into the self has created. While the bright and thoughtful use of colours hint at happier growth, Puti resists easy answers to her search. 

The three-dimensional ceramics in the show are made with the pinching and coiling handbuilding technique and demonstrate a shift towards sculpture. These works feature prominent holes that represent Puti’s dogged dissatisfaction despite her pleasure in the process and her achievements. In this way, the works resist closure and the simplistic solutions of self-help literature.

Opening reception: Thursday, 28 September, from 4pm onwards

About the Artist

Sekarputi Sidhiawati (b. 1986, Jakarta) is a visual artist who creates stories about the empowerment of women in the domestic setting and at the intersection of culture. She works primarily with ceramic, a material that is often associated with the home and women in general. 

Her formal education was at the Faculty of Art and Design ITB-Ceramic Art studio. She is now known as the founder of the studio Arta Derau, while consistently working in the art world. After working in Bandung for a time, she moved to Bali to expand her ceramic studio business. With her works that are centered around issues related to women, Puti has been a finalist in several fine art awards such as the Soemardja Art Award (2010) and the Bandung Contemporary Art Award (2013). She has joined several prestigious exhibitions including the Jakarta Contemporary Ceramic Biennale, National Gallery of Indonesia (2014); Temperature Affect, Museum of Fine Arts and Ceramics Jakarta (2017); Manifesto, National Gallery of Indonesia (2017); Termasuk, Darren KnightGallery Australia (2018); Southern Constellations: The Poetics of the Non-Aligned, Museum of Contemporary Art Metelkova, Ljublana, Slovenia (2019). The Home Inside Our Mind is her second solo exhibition and her first exhibition in Malaysia.

EXHIBITION ESSAY

By Deborah Germaine Augustin

“The ability to bend an inch at a time while seeming to stand up straight is a useful and gendered skill. Most women I know do it regularly,” writes Isabel Kaplan in her viral essay ‘My boyfriend, a writer, broke up with me because I’m a writer’. She continues: “They bend until they’re pretzeled and then blame themselves for the body aches.” Artist Sekarputi Sidhiawati is all too familiar with this pretzling. As a mother, artist, business manager to her artist husband and business owner, to name just a few of her many roles, she has had to put her art on the back burner to attend to domestic affairs.

Around 2015, she returned to ceramics after a five-year hiatus. Ceramics were at once a practical way to make money and a natural material for an artist reconciling her artistic ambitions with her role as a wife and mother. As a Javanese Muslim woman, Sekarputi grew up with the idea that a woman must serve her husband. Similarly, ceramics occupy a lower tier in the hierarchy of artistic materials. They are often relegated to crafts rather than capital-A art. The craft aspect of ceramics and their tie to the domestic space also attracted her to the material.

In The Home Inside Our Mind, Sekarputi searches for her self outside of the many roles ascribed to her. The pieces in this exhibition are an intimate exploration of her inner landscape through a distinctly feminine point of view.

INSTALLATION SHOTS

Photos courtesy of Kenta Chai.

SELECTED ARTWORKS

Prices available on enquiry. Get in touch with us at hello@thebackroomkl.com.

The Back Room is proud to announce our latest collaborative effort, a solo exhibition of works by Indonesian printmaker AGUGN, in collaboration with Kohesi Initatives (JOG) and Plus Six Zero, APW Bangsar (KL). Titled Human Supremacy, the exhibition will re-present a selection of works by the distinguished artist that was previously shown at Kohesi Initiatives’ space at the Tirtodipuran Link Building A in Yogyakarta, Indonesia, in early 2023. The Kuala Lumpur iteration of the exhibition will take place in the APW (A Place Where) food and retail hub in Bangsar, in a new space called Plus Six Zero. It will be the first exhibition to launch this exciting new space for art and exhibitions.

Agung Prabowo, better known by his artist name AGUGN, uses the printmaking technique of reduction linocut to convey themes related to his surroundings and present his reflections on life. The complexity of his technique and drawing style has created a highly recognisable aesthetic that has remained consistent over the years, both in terms of creation and medium. Reduction linocut printing is an elaborate technique of printing in which each colour layer is progressively carved into the same lino block. 

In this solo exhibition, AGUGN presents a critical perspective on the roles that humanity plays in nature’s various ecosystems, particularly those of animals. Being a vegan himself, he considers veganism a personal ideology of being opposed to the mass exploitation of animals by humans for food products that happens all over the world and all throughout human history. Looking back upon the history of human civilisation, animals are often regarded as mere meat to be used, a lesser existence born to serve humans, who consider themselves on a higher level. This inequity in the form of supremacy that human beings have over other living beings is the subject of Human Supremacy. The works are presented as single, framed prints on hand-made abaca paper and also as large, multi-print installations.

Opening reception: Saturday, 30 September, from 4pm onwards at Plus Six Zero, APW Bangsar

About the Artist

Agung Prabowo (b. 1985, Bandung), who goes by the artist name AGUGN, is an Indonesian printmaking artist who is known for his distinct style of illustration and his proficiency with linocut reduction printing. Having graduated from the Bandung Institute of Technology (Institut Teknologi Bandung), AGUGN is currently based in Bali. His themes include fear, nature, ancient Indonesian arts, and challenging anthropocentric perspectives. His recent works have focused on human exploitation of animals in the meat industry. 

His debut solo exhibition was Natural Mystic in Bentara Budaya Jakarta, Yogyakarta, Solo, and Bali, awarded to him for winning the first prize of the Triennale Seni Grafis Indonesia IV in 2012. This was followed by Unguarded Guards at Jogja Contemporary in 2015; AGUGN: Printing Live in the Cosmos at Vinyl on Vinyl, Manila, in 2016; Molasses at Mizuma Gallery, Singapore, in 2017; and Human Supremacy at the Tirtodipuran Link Building A by Kohesi Initatives, Yogyakarta, in early 2023. He has also shown at the Machida City Museum of Graphic Art, Tokyo (2020) after his artist residency there in 2019; at Darren Knights Gallery, Sydney (2019); International Print Centre, New York (2018); and Institut des Cultures d’Islam, Paris (2018). His art was also used for the cover of the music album Om by Mooner in 2019. 

INSTALLATION SHOTS

Photos courtesy of Kenta Chai. Captured on opening night, September 30th, 2023.

SELECTED ARTWORKS

Prices available on enquiry. Get in touch with us at hello@thebackroomkl.com.

The Back Room KL is pleased to announce our next exhibition, Story Time: A solo exhibition by Minstrel Kuik, on view from September 2nd to 24th, 2023. The exhibition will feature a new body of work from mid-career, Malaysian artist Minstrel Kuik in which the artist meditates upon the art-making process. Through a series of 22 colour pencil and graphite drawings engaging with the myth and figure of Medusa, Kuik investigates the deep forms of intuition—feeling and imagination—necessary for acts of artmaking, creation, and storytelling.

Story Time is a significant departure for Kuik who, in recent years, has exhibited mostly photography, mixed-media installations and fabric assemblages with socio-political themes and personal histories. The present exhibition explores literary, mythological, art-historical, and philosophical sources to meditate on how art might be released from the pressure to comment on contemporary issues in a direct or immediate way. In particular, the myth of Medusa, associated with sight, fear, destruction, beauty, and creation, becomes an apt symbol for the examination of artmaking itself. 

In these drawings, wigs, frills, ponytails, bows, and heels are repeated as principal motifs and transformed into monstrous assemblages of once-familiar objects. Faces emerge and fade out from view, as if they had been hallucinated into presence. Exploring the potency of images to forge connections between the eye, the hand, and the soul of the artist, Kuik circles in on the idea of picture-making as a cognitive exercise. In particular, she approaches it as a deeply interior process requiring self-reflexivity, feeling, and heightened modes of attention, with the ability to synthesise previous experiences and memories. For Kuik, these discrete practices of perception and habits of mind build towards a robust and true artistic imagination. 

Kuik says, “In storytelling, there is a crucial question that concerns everybody across all times: how do we learn from experience? I imagine there are two types of articulations, one from the mind and the other from the heart. Feeling is the anchor that grounds the mind; in feeling, not only is there room for the unknown, but there is also a place of openness to welcome others. And imagination is a powerful tool helping us to break away from the conditioned mind and body, like poetry does to language.”

Opening reception: Saturday, 9 September, from 7 pm onwards

About the Artist

Minstrel Kuik (b. 1976, Pantai Remis, Perak) is a Chinese-Malaysian artist who works across a range of mediums, including photography, drawing, poetry, textile, mixed-media assemblage and installation. Kuik’s practice is interested in the role of experience, memory, women’s writing (Écriture féminine), and pattern-making. She obtained Bachelor of Fine Arts in Western Painting from National Taiwan Normal University, thereafter leaving for the Ecole des Beaux-Arts de Versailles in France for a training in photography. She completed her Master of Fine Arts in photography at the Ecole Nationale Superieure de la Photographie of Arles, before moving back to Malaysia.

Kuik’s works have been exhibited at National Gallery Singapore, Bangkok Art and Culture Centre, ILHAM Gallery Kuala Lumpur, Museum of Contemporary Art Taipei, Photoquai Paris, and Horsham Regional Art Gallery Australia, among others. Her works are in the collections of the Linda Neo and Albert Lim Collection, Michelangelo and Lourdes Samson Collection, Singapore Art Museum, Higashikawa International Photo Festival, Hokkaido, Japan, and the United Overseas Bank, Singapore. In 2014, she was awarded the UOB Painting of the Year (Established Artist Category, Malaysia). Story Time is her tenth solo exhibition.

EXHIBITION ESSAY

Minstrel Kuik: Story Time

By Samuel Lee

“That old co-ordination of the soul, the eye, and the hand,” says Walter Benjamin, “is that of the artisan which we encounter wherever the art of storytelling is at home.” It is apt that the artisan and storyteller are both implicated in Benjamin’s observation, for the interconnection between affect, visuality, and gesture governs not only the art of storytelling, but the storytelling we do about art. In other words, what we say about the practice of artmaking, and how we say it. Such a provocation arises in Minstrel Kuik’s new body of work, Story Time, which is not only a “retelling” of Greco-Roman myths relating to Medusa and the Gorgons, but an extended meditation on the artistic imagination and the mechanics, indeed even of the phenomenology, of artmaking. Across 22 graphite and colour pencil drawings on paper, the series establishes a relationship between the facility of the hand, the observational powers of the eye, and the capacity for sensuousness and feeling by returning to the medium of paper, one more at home in the humanist cabinets of prints and drawings than in the institutional spaces of the exhibition gallery. Echoing Benjamin, Story Time has an artisanal quality to it: for the series, Kuik developed a new technique of shading and colouring, involving a careful, almost obsessive, application of graphite layers scrabbled tightly over underdrawings worked through in colour pencil. This process allowed her to create a range of effects, from a gauzy, diaphanous transparency to a hard-edged, jewel-toned illumination. According to Kuik, there is a special incandescence to the pictures that result from the mixing of colour pigments with graphite, “like light is trapped inside.” 

By limiting the range of colours to hues of violet, pink, lavender, and grey, Kuik makes a direct citation of Georgia O’Keeffe’s Petunia No. 2, the American artist’s early experimentation with close ups and scale (Kuik herself tacked a smaller postcard reproduction of the painting above her drawing desk for reference). To arrive at such visualisations, O’Keeffe worked with optical lenses and photography, exploiting the camera’s ability to both represent as well as distort the visual field. Kuik, who studied photography in Arles in the early 2000s, has likewise always been canny about the practice of image making. While projects such as Mer.rily, Mer.rily, Mer.rily, Mer.rily, Part 1 (2008–12) and the Kuala Lumpur Trilogy (2007/2017) evoke the style of “snapshot” photography to document everyday realities, the artist’s interventions in the process of making the pictures point towards the slipperiness of memory and identity. There is a sense that the act of pushing and pulling at the surface of an image, warping our own sensation of its objectivity along with our memory of time past, is ultimately a manual process, if not in actuality, then in effect. 

[…]

INSTALLATION SHOTS

Photos courtesy of Kenta Chai.

SELECTED ARTWORKS

A3 Drawings

A5 Drawings

Portret Diri is a mini-showcase of recent works by Syahnan Anuar, a visual artist who is mostly known as the founder of silkscreen production company Bogus Merchandise. The exhibition collects a selection of Syahnan’s recent works since 2018, establishing him as a visual artist in his own right. 

The works reflect upon the artist’s various identities: as a son, the 7th child in a family of 10, as the head of a company, a Malay Muslim man, and as a young person living in a Malaysia built in the shadow of Mahathir’s Vision 2020. Featuring the artist’s own parents and national authority forces as subjects, the showcase reflects the intractability of the personal from the political in the artist’s lived experience. 

Opening reception: Friday, 18 August 2023 from 7 pm onwards

About the Artist

Syahnan Anuar (b. 1992, Kelantan) is a visual artist and founder of Bogus Merchandise. He works primarily in the medium of silkscreen across different surfaces. His works explore the personal and political tensions in his lived experience as a Malay-Muslim male living in 21st-century Malaysia. 

He has previously shown in numerous group shows, including New Editions at Chetak17 (2023), Art is Fair at Fahrenheit 88 (2021), Wonderwall at The Back Room (2020), Awan & Tanah at Cult Gallery (2019), and Rethinking Editions at OUR ArtProjects (2019); all in Kuala Lumpur. Portret Diri is his first solo presentation. 

INSTALLATION SHOTS

Photos by Kenta Chai.

SELECTED ARTWORKS

Paintings

Silkscreen prints

(M)othered Meat is the debut solo exhibition by Malaysian visual artist, Kara Inez. The exhibition presents several of Inez’s recent silicone sculptures and assemblages that comment on the taboos of female experience, showcased within a quasi-domestic exhibition layout meant to simulate a woman’s intimate sphere. Having previously shown in group shows and art fairs, including S.E.A. Focus and Gajah Gallery, The Back Room is proud to be presenting the first comprehensive showcase of Kara’s recent works. 

Over the past four years, Kara has come to be known for her use of silicone and dye which she casts within stockings to create soft sculptures that resemble organs, lumps of flesh, or other mysterious meats. In previous showings, the pieces have a reputation for making viewers recoil at their ambiguous, life-like appearance, accentuated by their glossy, rubbery surfaces, the addition of hair (human and synthetic), and the use of dye mixtures that give them the appearance of bruises or varicose veins. Feminine accessories such as holographic acrylic nails, a batik scrunchie, a porcelain vase, and a jasmine flower are uncanny embellishments on the meats; their attempt to dress up the fleshy sculpture’s abject appearance to make it pretty only doubles down on its abjection. The works push against viewer’s sense of disgust and challenge their capacity to embrace these grotesque forms as art. In doing so, her works serve as a vessel for viewers to have some closure with the more undignified aspects of human existence, like the realities of bodily fluids, ageing, disease, pain.  

Some of the works on show are from Kara’s MFA project, which drew on myths of female monsters in Malaysian folklore, particularly the pontianak, to challenge male-dominated forms of thinking and provoke more honest discourse on issues surrounding the female body. Other works, such as Nasi Le, Mak! (2022) questions the subordinate place of the mother in issues of parentage, inspired by the Malaysian government ruling that children born overseas to Malaysian mothers and foreign fathers will not be recognised as citizens (this ruling has since been overturned in February 2023). Other works deal with the failures and frustrations of the human body to live up to societal expectations, particularly when it succumbs to ageing and illness. Presented in a moody, intimate, quasi-domestic set-up, the exhibition joins the intimate with the performative, giving viewers the impression that they’ve walked in on something they shouldn’t be seeing — but why not? The assemblages and sculptures of (M)othered Meat visualise the taboos and deficiencies that are inextricable from the female experience, and human experience more broadly.

Opening reception: Friday, 14 July 2023 at 7 pm

About the Artist

Kara Inez (b. 1991) is a Malaysian artist who draws from her personal experiences to touch on issues surrounding the female body and mental health through mediums such as performance art and sculpture. She is known for the use of abject materials and silicone to create life-like grotesque bodily forms. Her works evoke the feeling of disgust in her audience as a means to challenge the social constructs set in place surrounding these suppressed topics. 

Kara is currently based in Melbourne, where she is pursuing her Master’s in Fine Arts. Previously, she was based in Singapore, where she received her Bachelor’s in Fine Arts from the Lasalle College of the Arts in 2019. Also in 2019, she was the recipient of the Winston Oh Travel Award, which enabled her to venture to Tirupati, South India, to carry out research on the hair trade. Her works have been exhibited locally and internationally in galleries and exhibition spaces such as the Institute of Contemporary Arts Singapore, S.E.A. Focus (Singapore), Art Expo Malaysia, Gajah Gallery (Singapore), nATTA Gallery (Bangkok), and White Box (Kuala Lumpur). (M)othered Meat is her first solo exhibition.

INSTALLATION SHOTS

Photos courtesy of Kenta Chai.

SELECTED ARTWORKS

The Back Room is pleased to announce our next exhibition, Holes, featuring three installations by Alvin Lau, Tep York, and W. Rajaie. The exhibition is curated by our own gallery assistant, Ellen Lee, and presents the diverse styles of creative thinking and approaches of three young contemporaries, all of different backgrounds but based in Kuala Lumpur.

The entire exhibition takes place “off the wall”, with the three installations being crafted specifically for the site of The Back Room and taking a more conceptual, experimental approach in their execution. Alvin Lau presents a mixed media photography piece on plywood that continues his recent forays into three-dimensional styles of showing photography; Tep York presents a readymade CCTV and television installation that injects a street sensibility into the gallery space; while the ever-enigmatic W. Rajaie presents a long congak board crafted out of cow dung. Like the artists’ own personalities, the installations are guarded and unapproachable (perhaps even borderline offensive).

Among the three artists, W. Rajaie (b. 1997, Kelantan) is the youngest and the only one with formal training, having recently graduated with his Master’s in Fine Art from the MARA Institute of Technology (UiTM). Alvin Lau (b. 1994, Kuala Lumpur) is a self-taught photography artist with an exhibition resume of showing at A+ Works of Art, Blank Canvas Penang, OBSCURA Festival, ILHAM Gallery, and The Back Room. Tep York (b. 1988, Kuala Lumpur) is a multi-disciplinary creative who made a name for himself in the Kuala Lumpur creative scene first as a skateboarder, skate filmer, and founder of skate brand QUIT KL; since 2022, he has begun building an art practice and showing in group exhibitions. Despite the differences in their backgrounds, all three have found a home for themselves in art.

The title of the exhibition, Holes, is suggestive of underground networks and also of hidden movement. It considers different styles of installation and conceptual art and their implications within the space of the contemporary art gallery, hopefully paving a way for more serious consideration of installation art in Malaysia. And it is also a celebration of ingenuity and the drive to create, which can spring from all sorts of unexpected places.

This exhibition was made possible with support from Vans Malaysia.

INSTALLATION SHOTS

Photos courtesy of Kenta Chai.

SELECTED ARTWORKS

The Back Room is delighted to present our latest exhibition, Insistencia/Resistencia: 3 Contemporary Artists from Guatemala. This is a unique showcase featuring, for the first time in Kuala Lumpur, works by three globally-renowned Guatemalan contemporary artists: Antonio Pichillá Quiacaín, Esvin Alarcón Lam, and Marilyn Boror Bor.

Insistencia/Resistencia showcases art practices that intersect with craft and design, while delving into both contemporary and indigenous cosmologies that speak to pressing issues of cultural identity, displacement, and belonging in the context of Guatemala. Each artist brings a unique perspective to the show by exploring the issues of cultural inheritance, as well as the role of art in addressing social change.

These artists derive inspiration from their personal experiences and the broader societal and cultural concerns that drive their artistic endeavours, in a nation grappling with entrenched racism. Through their work, they illustrate how visual art has the ability to generate evocative and imaginative expressions that encourage dialogue and narrow the gap between Guatemala's Indigenous and non-Indigenous communities.

INSTALLATION SHOTS

SELECTED ARTWORKS

ABOUT THE ARTISTS

Antonio Pichillá Quiacaín (b. 1982, Guatemala) is an artist from the Maya Tz’utujil tradition and a healer and spiritual guide within his community of Lake Atitlan. His practice is driven by anthropological research across the urban and rural regions of Guatemala, and integrates a variety of methods, materials, forms, objects, and rituals. 

Antonio has exhibited extensively in Central America and beyond. Notable solo exhibitions include Entre hilos, Cuerpo y Sanación at La Nueva Fabrica, Antigua, Guatemala, 2022; La Tierra Habla at Hessel Museum of Art, New York, 2020; Saq B’eey (camino blanco) at Galería EXTRA, Guatemala, 2018; Registro at Centro deInvestigación Científica y Cultural, Guatemala, 2017; B`atz at Museo de Diseño y Arte Contemporáneo, Costa Rica, 2015; and Poderes Ocultos at Centro Cultural de España, Guatemala, 2010. He also participated in the travelling group exhibition, Garden of Ten Seasons, organised by Para Site, Hong Kong, from 2020 to 2022. In 2017, he was a recipient of the prestigious Juannio Award. He has participated in three editions of the Arte Paiz Biennial, Guatemala, in 2002, 2010, and 2014, along with the Kathmandu Triennale, and the Berlin Biennale (2014). He will be participating in the 2024 edition of the Indian Ocean Craft Triennale. Pichillá’s work is in the collections of the Tate in London, UK, the Museo Reina Sofía in Madrid, Spain, Lars Romer in Copenhagen, Denmark and Dexter Lelain in San Francisco, USA.

Esvin Alarcón Lam (Guatemala, 1988) works across different media including sculpture, installation, photography, painting, sound, video, and performance. Many of his projects involve critical thinking in relation to history and the politics of displacement (human and material), often inspired by his family’s history within the Chinese diaspora of Central America. Contemporary debates interest him as part of a complex world in constant transformation.

Esvin has shown extensively across Central America and the United States. He has had solo exhibitions at MetaMiami in Miami Beach, U.S. (2020), Herlitzka + Faria in Buenos Aires, Argentina (2019), Hidrante in San Juan, Puerto Rico (2018), Casa Niemeyer in Brasilia, Brazil (2017), Henrique Faria Fine Art in New York, U.S. (2017), and more. His work has been included in group exhibitions in New York, California, Munich, Costa Rica, and Hong Kong. 

Marilyn Boror Bor (San Juan Sacatepéquez, Guatemala, 1984) is a Mayan-Kaqchikel artist whose practice challenges patriarchy and racism through various mediums, including  photography, painting, printmaking, installation and performance. She holds a degree in Fine Arts from the Universidad de San Carlos de Guatemala and currently continues to live and work in Guatemala. 

She was a Fellow of the Utopia Foundation (Spain, 2016), a three-time recipient of the Espira/La Espora Residency for Emerging Central American Artists grant from Nicaragua (2011—2014), and has participated in residencies and conferences in the United States, Central America, Mexico, Germany, Chile, and Spain. Her work has been presented at the Museo de Arte Contemporáneo de Puerto Rico (San Juan), the Museo de Arte Contemporáneo de Panamá, the Museo Reina Sofía (Madrid), the Galerie im körnerpark (Berlin), WhiteBOX (Munich), the Museum of Contemporary Art Santa Barbara (California), the Museo Precolombino de Arte Chileno (Santiago) and the NUMU (Guatemala), among others. 

She participated in the Bienal Internacional de Arte Contemporáneo del Sur, Guatemala, in 2021, the Bienal en Resistencia, Guatemala, in 2018 and 2021, and the Bienal de Arte Paiz, Guatemala, in 2014, 2016, and 2021. In 2022, she was featured in Prime - Art's Next Generation by Phaidon, a publication compiling “the most exciting rising stars in contemporary art” that featured 107 artists born since 1980.

Issues is the third solo exhibition by James Seet, one of Malaysia’s most accomplished ceramic artists. The exhibition features nine ceramic sculptures, each of which represents a contemporary social issue, namely: plastic pollution, shark finning, overpopulation, deforestation, nuclear weapons, marijuana legalisation, abortion, homophobia, and global warming.

The exhibition is not the first by James to highlight social issues. As an artist, he is sensitive towards injustices and his works reflect his belief of using art as a medium to effect change in the world. The ceramic sculptures resemble geodes, with a thick outer shell that encloses a dense interior containing miniature representations of the issue: the geode’s crystals. The surface appearance of each of them are customised to reflect the issue they contain: for example, Issues: Trees is shaped like a log and glazed in such a way as to have a wood-like texture. Unlike a geode, which is normally displayed facing up so that you may admire the glittering crystals within, these sculptures are displayed downwards, facing mirrors placed beneath them. The display and experience of the works simulates the nature of taboo, or activism, in that one must be willing to crouch down and get close to the ground in order to see the dimensions of a problem clearly. Only by lowering themselves are viewers able to see the hidden Issues. James found inspiration for the form of the Issues from the Malay proverb, ada udang di sebalik batu (translation: under every rock is a shrimp, a proverb meant to convey that every action has its hidden intention).

The exhibition offers a unique experience for pondering the big, capital-I Issues of the world through artistic intervention. These ceramics have been cast and hardened, but the future is not yet set in stone. The exhibition invites us, as members of society, to consider our own role in shaping the world — just as the artist shapes his worlds through clay.

INSTALLATION SHOTS

SELECTED ARTWORKS

Pictures of Things presents recent painting works by Gan Siong King, a mid-career Malaysian artist, in an exhibition designed by the artist himself. Here, the exhibition becomes one of Gan’s mediums for communication and making meaning.

“It’s a mood.

I want to create a mood that is both bright and dark all at once. It is a memory of an exhibition I had wanted to make in those early months of the pandemic in 2020. Quiet, not loud. [The exhibition] should feel like a crisp blank piece of A4 paper. A space that the audience can use as a mirror and project whatever is in their heads. A bright comfortable place to stay, stare, read and rest…”

— Gan Siong King, an excerpt from his exhibition text, “A Sequence of Words Describing a Group of Pictures,” edited by Wong Hoy Cheong.

About the Artist

Gan Siong King (b. 1975, Kuala Lumpur) is a Malaysian artist who has been making paintings since the 1990s and videos since 2009. His work tries to unpack and rearrange “expectations,” probing art and its capacity for meaning-making. His video essays are often portraits of others and of himself, while his painting practice is mostly invested in testing its own parameters. In recent years, he has included writing and exhibition-making as part of his practice, working across these various formats as a bridge for communication and collaboration with others. 

He has participated in residencies and exhibitions all around the world. His most recent exhibitions were My Video Making Practice at Singapore Art Museum, Singapore, and All the Time I Pray to Buddha, I Keep on Killing Mosquitoes, at PJPAC, Malaysia, both in 2022. The latter exhibition was a screening of two videos made during his residency at Koganecho Bazaar, Yokohama, Japan, in 2020. Prior to that, other notable solo exhibitions (all in Kuala Lumpur) are All Watched Over by Machines of Loving Grace at A+ Works of Art in 2019; Meeting People is Easy at the artist’s studio in 2017; The Horror, The Horror at APW in 2015; and The Pleasures of Odds & Ends at Feeka in 2014. His works have been included in the Asian Art Biennial, Taichung (2021); Biennale Jogja XV – Equator #5, Yogyakarta (2019); and ILHAM Contemporary Forum, Kuala Lumpur (2017). 

A Sea of Despair and Delight is the ninth solo exhibition by Malaysian visual artist chi too, presented jointly by the artist and The Back Room at The Godown Arts Centre, Kuala Lumpur. The exhibition features a suite of 21 paintings in an interesting size: 167 × 170 cm, the height and wingspan of the artist (yes, he is wider than he is tall). 

This exhibition is representative of chi too’s art practice of the past decade, which has seen the artist setting himself predetermined boundaries for the making of each new work. In Like Someone in Love (2015) and Sometimes When We Touch (2018), he created rigidly structured paintings using, respectively, paint injected into bubble wrap and bitumen on canvas. Lately, these boundaries that he sets for himself have taken a turn towards the calculative and mathematical, in the minimalist tradition of Sol LeWitt. In the exhibition 95 (2020), he created 95 combinations and permutations for a series of straight lines drawn on paper. 

In the paintings of A Sea of Despair and Delight, straight white lines are painted atop dark backgrounds that get lighter through incremental mixes of white paint. The first painting in the series has a black background with white lines and as the series progresses, an equal amount of white paint is added to the original batch of black paint, so that the background of each painting becomes progressively greyer until the paintings are almost completely white. The paintings are done in monotone, featuring only straight lines, in accordance with chi too’s practice of only dealing with the most basic units of a property: black and white, lines and space. 

In this, as in all of chi too’s works that seem simple and straightforward on the surface, the rigid simplicity belies a sentimental logic. There is significance in the fact that a small part of the original black paint travels through the series; no matter how much it appears to diminish, a fraction of it prevails. The paintings will be displayed in chronological order around the exhibition space, presenting a visually striking and emotionally affecting experience using minimalist actions.

About the Artist

chi too (b. 1981, Kuala Lumpur) is a self-taught multidisciplinary artist whose practice demonstrates a confident exploration of humour, satire, and visual poetics. His practice vacillates between the high-minded and the frivolous, the social and the personal, the solid and the abstract.

 chi too was also a member of the disbanded art collective The Best Art Show in the Univers. 

He has exhibited and performed locally and internationally. In 2017, he was an artist-in-residence at the NTU Centre for Contemporary Art, Singapore, and in 2011, he was selected as a Nippon Foundation Asian Public Intellectual (API) fellow.

 chi too has had eight solo exhibitions to date: It Will Be Noisy, Messy, and Very Touchy-Feely, The Back Room (2022); 95, The Zhongshan Building (2020); Sometimes When We Touch, OUR ArtProjects (2018); Like Someone In Love, Lostgens' Contemporary Art Space (2015); The Artist chi too Looks at Artworks as He Contemplates the State of the Nation’s Institutions a.k.a. How Can You Be Sure, Art Row @ Publika (2013); Longing, Black Box, MAP @ Publika (2011), all in Kuala Lumpur, and State of Doubt: Seven Actions Towards Dilemma, Art Lab AKIBA in Tokyo, Japan (2012). He has participated in group exhibitions in Kuala Lumpur, Taipei, Japan, and Singapore. 

In 2022, he was featured in the publication, Prime - Art's Next Generation by Phaidon, a compilation of “the most exciting rising stars in contemporary art” featuring 107 artists born since 1980.

About the Exhibition

TIKAR/MEJA is a show of over 30 woven mats that depict tables. The works interrogate the symbolic prestige of the table by juxtaposing its inherited colonial power against the communal character of the tikar.

TIKAR/MEJA

An exhibition by Yee I-Lann

featuring work made with weaving by Kak Sanah, Kak Kinnohung, Kak Budi, Kak Leleng, Kak Horma, Makcik Bilung, Kak Roziah, Adik Dela, Adik Erna, Abang Boby, Adik Alini, Adik Aisha, Adik Darwisa, Adik Marsha, Adik Dayang, Adik Tasya, Adik Shima, Adik Umaira, Abang Tularan

Artist Statement

These mats were largely made by women. In pre-colonial times, there was no word for table, because there were no tables in the Southeast Asian Archipelago. The table in my imagery represents colonial power, or a kind of hard patriarchy. The Malay word for table, meja, and the Philippines Tagalog word, mesa, both come from the Portuguese and Spanish word for table, mesa. 

How do you colonise someone? Instead of an army of guns, imagine an army of tables. The violence of administration. That violence of administration is more lethal, more violent, than a gun. With a gun I may just shoot you, but with a table, with administration, I will tell you who you are, what your history is, what is valuable to be kept in a museum and what is not, what language you should use, what languages you should learn, what is of value. This indoctrination of the mind becomes inherited violence. 

I see the woven mat as architectural, calling people to commune together, to share a platform. Throughout the region, all mother tongues have their own name for mat. I think of the mat as being fundamentally feminist and egalitarian. To de-colonise is to see the table and to see the mat. 

— Yee I-Lann

About Borneo Heart in KL

The wider Borneo Heart in KL project will feature yet more events happening across Kuala Lumpur. Participating venues are The Godown Arts Centre, A+ Works of Art, ILHAM Gallery, and Galeri RumahLukis. 

Borneo Heart was initiated in Kota Kinabalu, Sabah, in 2021, and was the artist Yee I-Lann’s first solo exhibition in her homeland of Sabah. It was not just an art exhibition, but a major celebration of the community, cultures, and knowledge of the indigenous peoples of Sabah, to whom I-Lann’s recent practice is heavily indebted. In the same way, the Kuala Lumpur iteration of Borneo Heart is also driven by the spirit of community and horizontal knowledge-sharing. Rather than gather the exhibition in one site, Borneo Heart depends on the hospitality and collaboration of art spaces joining their ‘tikars’ together to make use of it for their communities. It is a sharing of different mats.

Find out more at their website, Linktr.ee, Instagram, or Mereka.io.

About the Artist

Yee I-Lann (b. 1971) lives and works in her hometown Kota Kinabalu. I-Lann has also worked in art department and as a production designer in the Malaysian film industry. With rock ‘n roll subculture archivist, musician and designer Joe Kidd, she shares KerbauWorks, a cross-discipline label and space. She is currently a Board member of Forever Sabah and co-founder of KOTA-K Studio.

She has held solo exhibitions in Kota Kinabalu, Kuala Lumpur, Singapore, Manila, Taipei, Adelaide, New York and Dallas, including a major presentation at Ayala Museum, Manila in 2016 and at CHAT (Centre for Heritage, Arts and Textile), Hong Kong in 2021. She has participated in international exhibitions since the 1990s, most recently Istanbul Biennial, Aichi Triennale and Bangkok Art Biennale (all 2022), Indian Ocean Craft Triennale (2021), In Our Best Interests: Afro-Southeast Asian Affinities during a Cold War (NTU ADM Gallery Singapore, 2021 and further iterations in Manila & Busan), Looking for Another Family: 2020 Asia Project (National Museum of Modern and Contemporary Art, Korea); Asian Art Biennial: The Strangers from beyond the Mountain and the Sea (2019), Sunshower: Contemporary Art from Southeast Asia 1980 to Now (2017-2020) and BODY/PLAY/ POLITICS (Yokohama Museum of Art, 2016).

For Yee I-Lann's full biography, visit Silverlens.

Instagram: @yeeilann

Selected Artworks

About the Exhibition

Welcome to Kenyalang Circus. Translated as “Hornbill Circus” from Sarawak Malay, Kenyalang Circus interrogates the possibility of the authentic in a neoliberal culture of icons, taking a satirical eye to the commercialisation of Borneo and Sarawak as “Malaysia’s exotic unknown.” For Sarawakian textile artist and graphic designer Marcos Kueh, this project is personal: it traces the faultline of heritage between inherited past and internalised exotification.

Having spent the past few years completing his studies at the Royal Academy of Art in The Hague, Marcos is now based in The Netherlands. Kenyalang Circus is his first solo presentation in his home country of Malaysia, but his star has been rapidly rising in Europe: in recent years, he has shown in museums and galleries across The Netherlands, including the Voorlinden Museum in Wassenaar, the Stedelijk Museum and Galerie Ron Mandos in Amsterdam. Part of the tension present in Kenyalang Circus is how the errant artist, now returned, will be received by audiences in his own country. 

If home is the subject of this work, what then can we make of the “journey back home” that bookends the work? Kenyalang Circus suggests that the very idea of home is slippery. Authenticity, as defined by an original, pure conception of culture, is as much a myth as the folktales Kueh draws from for his work. If commerce is one of the many facets with which we might find an idea of home, perhaps it is a different kind of truth, one that requires the whimsical glasses of a personality like Kueh’s.

Artist Talk: 11 February 2023, 11 am at Rumah Attap Library & Collective, 84C The Zhongshan Building

Exhibition Essay

Third World High

by Lim Sheau Yun, 19 January 2023

Witness the eight woven postcards on view by Sarawakian artist Marcos Kueh. Presenting the authentic exotic, Kenyalang Circus serves us tradition remade in a culture of neoliberal icons.

Working in the spirit of re-appropriation, Marcos applies the maximalist logic of capitalism and self-exotification to simultaneously advertise and satirise. Woven Postcard #04: Burung Melodie Rezeki features the Kenyalang (“hornbill” in Sarawak Malay), that icon of icons which has become a metonymy for the state: hornbills are a popular tourist attraction and the symbol that adorns both the Sarawak coat of arms and the logo for Visit Sarawak. A central figure in blood red depicts Sengalang Burong, the deity of war and omens. Hornbills serve as intermediaries between Sengalang Burong and the human world: here, Marcos depicts Sengalang Burong with the head and feathers of a hornbill and four arms covered in ceremonial tattoos, as if in dance. The complex system of augury represented by Sengalang Burong is brought in thematic contrast with capitalist excess. Advertisements, billboards, and signs rendered in baby blue and bubble-gum pink recede as background, while “Burung Melodie Rezeki” (roughly translated to “Bird of Melodic Livelihood”) is rendered in neon-diner-1960s-Americana text. A ring of text frames the entire composition, reading “Kenyalang Circus” in both English/Malay and Chinese. It is a beautiful cornucopia revelling in self-aware excess, demonstrating how culture has been remade for the nation-state and the capitalist global order.

READ THE FULL ESSAY

About the Artist

Marcos Kueh (b. 1995, Sarawak) is a designer who has always had a desire to better understand his place and identity as a Malaysian. He graduated with his Bachelor’s in Graphic and Textile Design from the Royal Academy of Art, The Hague in 2022. His practice is about safeguarding contemporary legends onto textiles as tools for storytelling, just as the ancestors of Borneo did with their dreams and stories, before the arrival of written alphabets from the West. Currently his artistic research is focused on evoking the presence of colonial narratives in our present-day lives and conjuring new myths to what it means to be an independent country.

In 2022, he was awarded the Ron Mandos Young Blood prize for emerging artists, and his work was acquired by Museum Voorlinden in Wassenaar and Stedelijk Museum in Amsterdam. His work has been included in exhibitions all around the world, including in Three Contemporary Prosperities at Galerie Ron Mandos, Amsterdam (2022); When Things Are Beings at the Stedelijk Museum, Amsterdam (2022); This Far and Further at Museum Voorlinden, Wassenaar, Netherlands (2022); Common Threads at The Back Room, Kuala Lumpur (2017); and Unknown Asia,Osaka, Japan (2017). He currently lives and works in The Hague. 

Instagram: @marcoslah

About the Exhibition

Featuring works by Chong Yi Lin, Jerome Kugan, Liew Kwai Fei, Liew Sze Lin, and Mark Tan

Our first show of 2023 is a group exhibition featuring selected works from five Malaysian artists that play with grids and lines, especially those upon found objects. In so doing, their works expand our perception on the ideas of imposed order, offering suggestions of how order can be used as a foundation for play. The show also serves as a reprieve between back-to-back solo exhibitions at the gallery. 

The exhibition’s title is inspired by “Time & Space (A New Refutation Of)”, a track by Brooklyn hip-hop trio Digable Planets. The song’s lyrics are propelled more by rhythm than by meaning, expanding the limits of form into something more poetic. We hope that this show, our first for 2023, also offers inspiration for playing within formal structures, whether they exist as a grid or a year. We look forward to welcoming you back to the gallery again.

Selected Artworks

About the Exhibition

The point of an exercise is to work at something, then do it again, and again, and again. Taken individually, an exercise is merely a one-off activity, but taken cumulatively, exercises bring you to a place where you weren’t before. 

Over a two-month period in 2021, artist Liew Kwai Fei conducted a series of Drawing Exercises, using pencils (both graphite and coloured) to make 117 drawings of pencils on graph paper. Through the two deceptively simple elements of a pencil and a grid, Liew explores the limits of gridded form, composing scenes of rebellion, community, and pleasure that are irreverent and profound in equal measure. 

Liew’s 117 drawings have been collated in a new book titled Pencil Exercises 一只铅笔还是一支铅笔  by local publisher cloud projects. In addition to Liew’s Drawing Exercises, the book features two essay-based Writing Exercises, including a cheeky version of the notorious “Aku Sebatang Pensel” essay prompt. A Naming Exercise and Arrangement Exercise has also been conducted, where the editors have given titles and a sense of narrative order to the drawings. 

An exhibition at The Back Room – the Hanging Exercise – will accompany the book, bringing the Arrangement Exercise out of the page and onto the walls of the gallery. Together, these Exercises present a portrait of methods in the endeavour of writing and making art.

Pencil Exercises 一只铅笔还是一支铅笔 (the book) will be available for purchase at the gallery throughout the length of the exhibition; at KL Art Book Fair (2–4 December, The Godown); and at the December Godown Artist Market (10–11 December, The Godown). For online orders, please DM @cl0ud.onl on Instagram.

About the Artist

Liew Kwai Fei is not a pencil. He uses pencils to make drawings about pencils. Liew believes in the intrinsic need for art: art is never a matter of want. As a painter, Liew explores the formal possibilities of both modern and contemporary painting. 

Liew makes a living as a painter and an art teacher. For a more complete portfolio and exhibitions, please visit Liew's website at www.liewkwaifei.com. His daily and recent studio updates are documented in his Instagram account Liew Kwai Fei 廖贵辉 (@liewkwaifei).

About cloud projects

cloud projects is a maker and publisher of critical, intimate, and beautiful books. Based in Kuala Lumpur but with an eye towards Southeast Asia, we work at the intersection of art, architecture, and history. Founded in 2021, we bring together artists, graphic designers, writers, academics, and more to question form, ideas, and narratives. Through rigorous research and inventive design, we excavate knowledge networks and forge worlds of possibility.

About the Exhibition

Following Dipali Gupta’s sensual showcase exploring the domain of the feminine, The Back Room is pleased to present Lelaki Degil, a solo exhibition by Badruddin Syah Abdul Wahab. His first solo presentation since 2017’s Emansipasi at Maybank Gallery, the works on show extend his explorations of gesture and movement with several paintings of ink and wash on paper, presented in an arrangement designed by the artist himself. 

Badruddin graduated from Marquette Univerity in Wisconsin, the US, in 1997, and in 2017, the Maybank Foundation presented a survey of six years of his practice, titled Emansipasi. The works of Emansipasi took their cue from the modernist painter Latif Mohidin’s statement that a painting must have the intrinsic values of “merdeka” (independence/freedom), “serata” (the quality of being encompassing”), and “cekal” (resoluteness). His large canvasses of dancing colour were bold declarations of his artistic practice and an engagement with the modernist tradition that he emerged from. With Lelaki Degil, he explores a new mode of mark-making, one more nuanced through their presentation in largely monochrome. 

Inspired by his interest in the jemaah, the Muslim congregational prayer which is often symbolised by Muslim women surrounding the Kaaba, he has attempted to translate this abstract crowd into one comprising only male silhouettes. Foregoing the bold colours of Emansipasi, the works in Lelaki Degil asks of the viewer that they be appreciated without the stimulus of colour; in so doing, they raise a question of taste and aesthetics within a world saturated with images and colour. If Emansipasi was an interpretation of Latif Mohidin’s dictates, then Lelaki Degil questions whether the same dictates can be interpreted in the artist’s own way, a proverbial shifting of the muscles under the weight of Malaysia’s modern art tradition, with its spectres of Latif Mohidin, Syed Ahmad Jamal, and Yusof Ghani, in order to assert this artist’s own stance. 

In these works, formal abstraction gives way to a playful dialogue with representation. Here, we can discern human muscles, particularly hands and feet, but it remains unclear what the action in the painting is. The movement and action of a human body is an analogy for the movement and action of abstract painting. By taking the unity of the jemaah as his subject and inspiration, the works synthesise the actions of society, individual experience, and art: the same totality of gestures that make up a congregation, a prayer, or a painting. 

In the same way that his paintings poke and probe at the totem of Malaysia’s modernist tradition, they also break down the traditions of masculinity and manhood. Though some of the paintings feature recognisable masculine representation, like Bodyrock (which looks like a man performing planks), the solid masculine body is turned liquid by the artist’s painterly flourishes. The title, “Lelaki Degil”, might be a joke that pokes fun at the stubbornness of man, but it also suggests the artist’s resoluteness in maintaining his own artistic individuality, one formed through his own personal experience and his present moment, even within the totalising narrative of art history.

About the Artist

Badruddin Syah Abdul Wahab (b. 1974, Johor, Malaysia) received his Diploma in Art Education from the Batu Pahat Institute of Teacher Training in 2002 and his Bachelor’s of Arts from Marquette University in Wisconsin, US, in 1997. He works in the abstract expressionist style of painting, making gestural works inspired by local traditions and the Islamic faith. His works have been exhibited in various showcases around Malaysia. In 2017, the Maybank Foundation honoured him with a major solo exhibition, titled Emansipasi.

Exhibited Works

Available Works

About the Exhibition

Following Jerome Kugan’s two-part exploration of sexuality and liberation, the latest exhibition at The Back Room continues these themes from the feminine perspective and with a greater emphasis on the erotic. Desire Lines is the debut solo exhibition of Dipali Gupta, an artist born in Mumbai, India, educated in Singapore, and currently based in Kuala Lumpur. On show are a selection of paintings, video works, and lightbox installations made between 2019 to 2022. The works are investigations into the changing nature of female pleasure in the age of rapid technological advance and post-feminist attitudes towards female sexuality. 

Upon entrance, the leftmost wall of the gallery shows a salon-style display of selected works from Dipali’s Pages from the Book of Spring series, in which the artist recreates 17th- and 18th-century Japanese ukiyo-e prints in the shunga genre, but with the human features replaced with lines created by vibrators dipped in ink. The right side of the gallery presents a quasi-domestic setting furnished with a television and lounge chairs for viewers to watch a loop of videos from Dipali’s O HER! series, which pays homage to the vanitas tradition of still life paintings. 

Whether borrowing from Japanese shunga or Dutch vanitas still lifes, sampling in order to subvert is a characteristic of Dipali’s art and writing. Thus is the title of the exhibition, Desire Lines, taken from the architectural term for paths in a landscape paved by walkers off the demarcated route, traces of inhabitants’ intuition and familiarity that shapes a landscape better than any architectural design imposed from above. Dipali’s art trudges the paths laid before her by previous artists and thinkers, but spirals off into a journey that is uniquely her own. 

About the Artist

Dipali Gupta (b. 1977, Mumbai, India) is a multidisciplinary artist who explores society’s constructs and contradictions from the angle of the feminine. She received her BA in Fine Arts from Lasalle College of the Arts, Singapore, in 2018, winning the Chan Davies Art Prize for her series, Her Pleasure. Her concerns and research span Foucauldian biopolitics, Deleuzian societies of control, religious habits, socio-political dogmas, and psychosomatic effects. Her art attempts to interrogate normative prescriptions for behaviour and reclaim space by defying gendered myths and subverting notions of patriarchy, androcentricity, and binarism. Dipali’s research interests focus on feminist theory, post humanism, the body and identity politics and her multi-disciplinary practice appropriates from genres across Eastern and Western art canons.

Her works have been shown in cities around the world, including Kuala Lumpur, Singapore, Hong Kong, Helsinki, New Delhi, London, and Miami. In 2022, she was selected for inclusion in the inaugural ILHAM Art Show at ILHAM Gallery, Kuala Lumpur, and was a finalist in the Sovereign Asian Art Prize in Hong Kong. She has had smaller showcases of her work in Mutual Aids Projects (Uncertain Relaxation, 2020) and Suma Orientalis (2019), both in Kuala Lumpur. Desire Lines is her first solo exhibition. She currently lives in Kuala Lumpur, Malaysia.

Selected Artworks

About the Exhibition

HURT NEED UNDO LIVE / RESIST is a two-part solo exhibition by Jerome Kugan, comprising new works created over the past five years. Previously having lived in Kuala Lumpur since 2000, Jerome was a pivotal figure in the early-aughts independent arts scene, having been a regular presence at The Annexe @ Central Market and Art For Grabs before family matters compelled him to return to his hometown of Kota Kinabalu, Sabah, where he lived from 2017 to 2022. In between attending to his family, he continued to produce art using any available material as a surface. Distanced from the commercial abundance of Kuala Lumpur and its well-stocked art supply stores, Jerome used store-bought wares found at the nearest Daiso and recycled packaging materials, including Efavir packaging, a medication for treating HIV. 

The first part of the exhibition runs from 6—28 August and features a series of triptychs made with chopping boards from Daiso along with a series of woven paper pieces and objects that the artist calls his “talismans”. The chopping board triptychs, which have opaque, tarot-like titles like The Unyielding and The Sign, condense colour, image, and emotion into dream-like symbols and archetypes. Meanwhile, the talisman works continue Jerome’s existing practice of linking image with text (as previously seen in his last exhibition, Pondan Nation at Urbanscapes House in 2018, where he combined text and colours to create satirical aphorisms on sex and gender). In this showcase, the talismans comprise a number of paintings on woven surfaces and small objects with the recurring text (and Part 1’s title), HURT NEED UNDO LIVE. The words are arranged in a cyclical square that serves as a personal talisman—mantric instructions for living.

From 10 September—2 October, Part 2 of the exhibition, titled RESIST, will present a selection of Jerome’s figurative works, painted on various recycled materials including the medication boxes, card, and paper. Figures have been a characteristic of Jerome’s practice since his first solo exhibition, Red & Gold at RAW Art Space in 2017, yet his figure paintings do not follow the traditional conventions of the genre. The large, anonymous figures in his paintings are, like the triptychs in Part 1, archetypes that renounce identifiable sexual or racial characteristics in order to capture a complexity of feeling and atmosphere. The figures appear in assorted arrangements, some completely solitary like ascetic monks, others within surreal, spiritual surroundings. Two large gold paintings are the centrepiece of this selection, like royal banners in a palace, its figures the holy dignitaries.

For all its psychedelic colours and surrealist elements, Jerome’s works deal in subtle, subterranean emotions and the full breadth of human experience. Their emotional range spans tragedy, pain, and death, but they are also imbued with Jerome’s unique sense of comedy, satire, and joy. It is an exhibition in two parts, but a catharsis of a larger scale. 

Part 1. HURT NEED UNDO LIVE

Part 2. RESIST

About the artist

Jerome Kugan (b. 1975, Kota Kinabalu, Sabah) is a visual artist, writer, and musician based between Kuala Lumpur and Kota Kinabalu. A self-taught artist, he works across a range of materials including, predominantly, painting, but also woodcarving, illustration, and text. He has been involved in the Kuala Lumpur alternative scene since the early aughts, having shown his artworks in Art For Grabs (Epic Understatements, 2017; Talismans, 2016; Catological, 2016; and With Closed Eyes, 2013), The Annexe Gallery (2009, 2010), Reka Art Space (2003, 2005), and Urbanscapes House (Pondan Nation, 2018). His debut solo exhibition was Red & Gold, curated by Sharmin Parameswaran, at RAW Art Space, Kuala Lumpur, in 2017. 

Jerome received his Bachelor’s in Professional Writing from the University of Canberra, Australia. Outside of art, he is a published poet and a musician with two solo albums to his name, and he had past stints as the managing editor of KLue magazine, copy editor at Junk magazine, and media manager for the Annexe at Central Market. 

Selected Artworks

About the Exhibition

“I am not trying to capture a moment in time; I have no real attachment to these memories. I think of them instead as conversations. I’m not so good at talking, see, and I speak to moments this way.”

That day, I was sketching on the street is Ong Hieng Fuong’s debut solo exhibition, a display of his conversations with observed moments of life. Rendered in a variety of mediums, from vibrant poster colours to elaborate woodcuts, his works are made in the details. Much of his outlook was formed growing up in his hometown of Tanjung Sepat, a fishing village nearly 50km from Klang. Boredom led him to take up the persona of the observing uncle sitting at the corner kopitiam, eyeing the goings-on around; a facility for drawing instead of words manifested them as art rather than rant. 

Vignettes of small-town life and the urban metropolis alike are portrayed with vigour and infused with bemusement. For Hieng, the hellish, the fantastic, and the whimsical dwell in the ordinary day-to-day. The main characters that inhabit his works are the busybody auntie down the street, a vegetable seller arguing over prices, and the uncle squatting, cigarette in hand, in a corner. We invite you to meet all of them, and their friends, at The Back Room.

About the artist

Ong Hieng Fuong (b. 1995) is an artist from Tanjong Sepat, Selangor. He is currently pursuing a degree at the Central Academy of Fine Arts in Beijing, China. Growing up in a small fishing town where the pace of life is much slower, he got to experience all aspects of daily life to their fullest; these experiences and observations form the major source of his inspiration. He has received various accolades, most notably being selected for the UOB Painting of the Year Gold Award in the Established Artist Category in 2019, following his selection for the grand prize in the Emerging Artist Category in 2017. Also in 2017, he was awarded the Grand Prize in the Nando’s Art Initiative competition. In 2021, he was an artist-in-residence at the Rimbun Dahan Southeast Asian Art Residency for six months. That day, I was sketching on the street is his first solo exhibition.

Selected Artworks

Carbon Organika is a collaborative, process-driven project helmed by Jalaini “Jai” Abu Hassan, one of Malaysia’s most celebrated contemporary artists. In Carbon Organika, Jai continues his search for new ground to break into, this time through the strategy of collaborations. The project’s scope combines art, craft, and technology, jumping between past, present, and future art forms in an exciting cross-disciplinary exchange. 

A series of new drawings by Jai forms the project’s unifying centre. The drawings feature ambiguous forms, or “specimens”, inspired by organic matter in nature. The Carbon Organika specimens are brought to three-dimensional life through a collaboration with the ceramic artisans of Bendang Studio, who have turned the drawings into sculpted ceramics on which Jai works his magic with his arsenal of charcoal, graphite, and bitumen. At the same time, the project enlists Wesley Wong of Giclee Art to reproduce the drawings in limited edition museum-quality giclee prints. Wesley’s refined image reproduction allows Jai to turn his drawings into high-end “merchandise”, tapping into a rising consciousness within the art world of the need to improve accessibility to art and challenge the traditional modes of art acquisition. 

Carbon Organika is presented in three simultaneous showcases that are adapted for different contexts. The original drawings and a selection of ceramics are exhibited at The Back Room gallery with more ceramics and prints being sold at Kasa Suasa, Bukit Tunku  The project’s documentation and initial mock-ups are on display at Galeri RumahLukis in Carbon Organika: The Process, a behind-the-scenes look at the making of the works and the coming-together of the collaboration. The Process is supplemented by a programme of talks and workshops involving all of the collaborators.

Carbon Organika

A project by Jalaini Abu Hassan

The Back Room

First Floor, 80A Jalan Rotan, Off Jalan Kampung Attap 50460 Kuala Lumpur

Exhibition dates: 28 May - 12 June 2022

Opening hours: Wednesday to Sunday 12 - 6 pm

Enquiries: hello@thebackroomkl.com

Kasa Suasa, Bukit Tunku

Unit i4, Block I The Stories of Taman Tunku, Jln Langgak Tunku, Bukit Tunku, 50480 Kuala Lumpur

Opening hours: Wednesday to Sunday: 11am - 6pm

Enquiries: farha.nor@gmail.com

Carbon Organika: The Process @ RumahLukis Gallery

11, Jalan AU5D/4, Lembah Keramat Hulu Klang, 54200 Kuala Lumpur

Exhibition dates: 5 June - 28 August 2022