ROH and The Back Room proudly present The Garden Bites Back, a solo exhibition by Indonesian artist Banny Jayanata (b. 1983, Surabaya, Indonesia), whose works linger in the uneasy space between ruin and tenderness, the result of his reflections in nature during his month-long residency at Rimbun Dahan. The solo exhibition is a first in many ways: it is Banny’s first solo exhibition in Malaysia, his first time at an artist’s residency, and it is our first time collaborating with our friends ROH, who are based in Jakarta. 

Influenced by poet-critics from Baudelaire to Goenawan Mohamad, Jayanata treats nature as a mirror already fractured by human fault. Raised near the ongoing Lapindo mud volcano disaster, Jayanata’s life was shaped by highways turned to sludge and levees that kept collapsing. Verdant swamps, ghostly trees, and delicate blossoms populate his canvases like actors on a moral stage. 

Anchoring the exhibition are two large canvases—each stretching 2 metres high and over 3 metres wide. The two works are less tableau than terrain; there are surfaces to wander, textures to reckon with. In one, a barefoot painter strides through a pale turquoise pond, mangrove roots claw overhead, otters circle his drenched feet, palette clutched to his chest. In the other, five sinewed figures bend under a felled tree; their mudstreaked limbs fuse into one heaving mass as the trunk pins a prone body beneath. His thick impasto technique lays pigment on like bark.

While inspired by Romantic ideals of nature, Banny’s work must nevertheless entreat with the contradictions of the Anthropocene. Elegance is shadowed by dread: soft palettes conceal desperate grimaces, half sunk creatures, faceless screams. The Garden Bites Back dwells in these tensions, each stroke a gesture of tenderness amid a fractured ecology.

Exhibition dates
16 May – 1 June 2025

Credits
Texts by Ong Kar Jin
Exhibition identity and installation shots by Kenta.Works
With thanks to ROH and Rimbun Dahan

About the Artist

Banny Jayanata (b. 1983, Surabaya, Indonesia; based in Sidoarjo, Indonesia) received his Bachelor’s Degree in Visual Communication and Design from the Petra Christian University, Surabaya, Indonesia in 2007 and his Master’s Degree in Visual Arts from the Indonesian Institute of the Arts, Yogyakarta in 2014. Working predominantly in the margins of Indonesia’s contemporary art circles—Sidoarjo, Bali, then returning to Sidoarjo—Jayanata’s canvases enclose distorted characters in a melancholic tableau of rough, impasto brushstrokes, foreshadowing the existential human condition that he is so fascinated by. His subjects grapple with the weight of life’s transience, often appearing to be caught in moments of profound inner turmoil. And yet, amidst this struggle, there is a vividness to their presence, a living quality that makes each figure seem as though they are on the cusp of breaking free from their torment. Movement forms the primary engine of these ideas in Jayanata’s practice, holding in store an interest in both violent collisions between bodies as well as the pleasure of their entwinement. This is a formula towards achieving what the artist describes as a “living image”.

Jayanata’s overarching interest in the interplay between beauty and decay finds his paintings infused with a sense of inevitable decay, where beauty is juxtaposed with the harsh reality of its fragility. His subjects undergo a certain abstraction, not to further their artificiality, but rather to accentuate their states as living organisms that cannot resist the fate of decay and disappearance. In this decay, Jayanata finds deeper meaning, reaching for beauty as a kind of redemption and purpose in the face of life’s inevitable transience. In his paintings, Jayanata captures the essence of what it means to be human—fragile, beautiful, and inexorably bound to the passage of time.

Jayanata has participated in a number of exhibitions throughout his artistic career. His solo exhibitions are Black and Blue Mood at Museum dan Tanah Liat, Yogyakarta, Indonesia (2018) and LUKA at Independent Art Management, Yogyakarta, Indonesia (2014). Selected group exhibitions include Onsen Confidential: The Final!! at Mujin-to Production, Tokyo, Japan (2024); Basel Social Club in Basel, Switzerland (2023); murmur at ROH, Jakarta, Indonesia (2023);

Identitas yang Hidup at Museum dan Tanah Liat, Yogyakarta, Indonesia (2021); Pan-Asian Cultural Connections at Capulet Art Gallery, Vancouver, Canada (2020); Merayakan Optimisme, Taman Budaya Yogyakarta, Yogyakarta, Indonesia (2019); Virtual Territories at Jogja National Museum, Yogyakarta, Indonesia (2013); Works on Paper #2 at Aswara Heritage Gallery, Kuala Lumpur, Malaysia (2013); DEKA – EXI(S) at Biennale Jogja at Kandang Menjangan, Yogyakarta, Indonesia (2013), Museum H. Widayat, Magelang, Central Java, and UPT Gallery, Yogyakarta, Indonesia (2012).

Installation

Artworks

coming soon

Exhibition Essay

Alam dan Hal-Hal yang Tak Selesai (Nature and Other Unfinished Things) 
by Ong Kar Jin 

It began on May 29, 2006, not with fire, but with earth exhaling black mud. Within days Sidoarjo’s fields and lanes were wreathed in steam and slurry. This “Lapindo” mudflow, so named after the gas company drilling that day, has since gushed about 180,000 cubic meters of mud every twenty-four hours. In the glow of Indonesia’s evening news, it was proclaimed one of the largest mud volcanoes on Earth and the country’s most costly disaster. By now the mud has displaced more than 40,000 villagers in Sidoarjo, poisoning soil and water with toxins that has left hundreds ill. 

Six months later, the front page of Jawa  Pos  Minggu captured the catastrophe’s new, surreal register: a troupe of dukun, shaman healers, travelled from Sumatra to “seal” the wound the engineers could not, and hurled a sacrificial goat into the mud. The Jawa Pos image is brutally simple: an ashen horizon, sulphuric vapour billowing like low cloud, and—caught at the precise crest of its parabolic arc—a goat, limbs splayed, muzzle flung sky‑ward. Three men in black batik-silk baju adat extend their arms as if directing traffic. One holds the switch-thin branch that moments earlier had prodded the animal forward. Below, the mud pool looks less like earth than liquefied asphalt: opaque, industrial, bottomless. Sacrifice photographed at shutter-speed becomes choreography, catastrophe masquerades as theatre. The caption TAK MASUK AKAL (“Makes No Sense”) blames superstition, but the scene is rational in another lens: a community, abandoned by corporate indemnity and in the limbo of litigation, resorts to metaphysics because geology and government will not listen.

Growing up near this wounding landscape, Banny Jayanata learned early in his life that maps are but provisional contracts with the earth. “Yes, that’s right, especially the road to Tretes, Malang, and Batu kept getting disrupted and jammed. And the man-made dikes meant to hold the mud broke again and again”, the toll road closed “for a really long time,” and detours became muscle memory. The disaster’s taxonomy (natural-versus-man-made) was academic to a teenager: “Even though it was triggered by underground drilling, people eventually called it a ‘natural’ disaster, though clearly it wasn’t purely natural.” 

Slow disasters unnerve more than the sudden kind. An earthquake is brutal, but brief. A flood can be measured in days. But this mud kept coming. Life did not stop, it just bent around the mud. And in the wake of it: No resolution.

***

Banny Jayanata’s canvases declare their lineage before the first brushstroke dries. A lone figure wading through a turquoise swamp; mangrove roots clawing at a bruised sky; a hand reaching, quasi-Caspar David Friedrich, toward a cloud of butterflies. This is textbook Romantic staging: nature as mirror of the soul, the painter-wanderer dwarfed (and moralised) by a verdant sublime. Like Wordsworth or Emerson, Banny presents landscape as both confessional and cathedral; like Raden Saleh, who imported European Romanticism to colonial Java, he bathes the tropics in drama and reverence. Even his palette of damp pinks and luminous greens recalls that “sensation-first” ethos Edmund Burke prized when he linked beauty to pleasure and the sublime to trembling awe. In short, Banny’s Nature is capital-N Nature, an idealised elsewhere where spirit and scenery fuse. 

But to romanticise is also to risk installing what philosopher Timothy  Morton calls an “aesthetic screen”: a soft-focus filter that flatters the eye while insulating us from genuine entanglement. If Morton is right, does Banny merely repaint that screen in pastel colours?

The question sharpens when the paint thickens. Banny’s approach to nature and his dedication to thick impasto proclaims sincerity, but sincerity alone can sedate. Figuration courts empathy, yet empathy without indictment curdles into sentimentality. Consider Painter Walks Alongside Shy Otters. The copper water glints like treasure; only a second glance reveals the figure half-sinking. Is that dissonance sharp enough to pierce comfort, or soft enough to be mistaken for melancholy décor above a sofa in Jakarta?

Raden Saleh’s lions tore Dutch uniforms to ribbons; Banny’s adversary stays offstage. By universalising the wound, he risks blurring its perpetrators. Banny courts the danger Morton describes. His swamps contain no oil rig, his butterflies dodge no smoke. Set adrift from smartphones, factories or plastic, the images feel timeless—mythic bards wandering an Eden that never quite existed. That temporal dislocation offers contemplative refuge, but it can slide into nostalgia, allowing viewers to project serenity where dread is warranted. The painting becomes a sanctuary that brackets out late-capitalist scars. 

Baudelaiure knew that beauty and rot intertwine. In “Une Charogne” (“A Carcass”), Baudelaire’s lover witnesses the radiant sun making carrion “blossom like a flower”. If Baudelaire shattered complacent prettiness by making rot radiant, Banny risks the reverse—making rot look elegiac enough to escape discomfort. If the Romantic screen once empowered resistance (Saleh’s predators mauling empire), it now threatens to anaesthetise urgency. 

The show’s title declares that The  Garden  Bites  Back, but does the bite draw blood or merely graze?

Such tensions align Banny with contemporaries who pry open pastoral veneers. Consider Walton Ford: like Banny, he revives 19th-century naturalist imagery, yet Ford’s Audubon-like watercolors hide disturbing depths, straddling the lines between the fantastic and frightening. Ford’s work is overt and satirical where Banny’s is lyrical, but both inject unease into pastoral panoramas. In the same spirit, the late Bree Jonson (1991 – 2021) flooded her canvases with snakes, simians, and wild dogs that stand in for human appetites and ecological precarity. In her depictions of feral entanglements, she delivered a brooding cautionary tale—less a landscape than an autopsy of paradise lost. Others confront crisis head-on: Olafur Eliasson famously hauled melting icebergs into city plazas to dramatize climate change (asking, “Can an encounter with art be more effective than cold, hard facts?”). 

By contrast, Banny prefers gentleness. He does not place ice in our hands but holds up a painted mirror. Through close detail and symbolic gesture, he attempts a quiet re-tuning of the viewer’s gaze, trusting lyric tenderness over shock-and-awe.

It is a kind of leap of faith that an artist offers to his viewers. Yes, nature here may be drawn as refuge, but it is no innocent sanctuary. The anticipated communion with nature never quite arrives: butterflies alight then flutter away, the pastoral god never appears. The line Banny navigates is thus: he romanticizes nature yet simultaneously exposes the limits of that vision. By refusing to resolve this tension, his paintings become open-ended poems rather than manifestos, caught between affirmation and negation of the Romantic ideal.

In 2025, to paint a swamp with earnest awe is, to borrow Hal Foster’s phrase, “anachronistic on purpose.” That anachronism can read as either rebellion or retreat. Rebellion, because sincerity is unfashionable in a market that prizes deadpan irony, and to insist on beauty and emotion is to jam a crowbar into late-capitalist cynicism. Retreat, because lush brushwork risks lulling the viewer into reverie just when the planet needs alarms. 

None of this is an argument for didactic agit-prop. It is, however, a reminder that Romantic longing and Anthropocene dread occupy the same historical minute. A pastoral image today cannot plead innocence; it either interrogates its lineage or extends the lullaby. Banny’s canvases hover ambivalently between those poles. He revives an old Indonesian tradition of celebrating nature’s beauty yet floods it with ambiguity and foreboding. This double vision of nature as tender and tragic invites its audience to confront that tension in quiet meditation rather than activist outrage. It asks us, as Baudelaire did, to feel nature’s poetry while risking what Morton warns about: that we might admire the tapestry even as the threads unravel.

Frank O’Hara once greeted his own poem with the cheeky fanfare, “Here I am, the centre of all beauty!”, a line equal parts swagger and self-mockery. Banny emulates that audacity each time he centres subjective wonder on a canvas. Despite his reserved nature, Banny seems willing to gamble that Romantic feeling still carries teeth. 

***

If we search these paintings for prescriptions, we repeat the Lapindo error: imagining that one more engineer, one more ritual goat, will finally seal the vent. Banny offers, instead, what Pramoedya Ananta Toer once demanded of literature: the capacity to “menciptakan kenyataan baru”, to conjure a new reality beside a broken one. His canvases practice a politics of tremor: they vibrate rather than resolve, keeping the viewer in a state of ethical aftershock where neither cynicism nor sentimentality can fully land.

What remains, then, is a grammar of suspension: objects, bodies, even colours held mid-air, neither falling nor saved. Banny’s canvases adopt that tense. In Painter Walks Alongside Shy Otters the central figure advances yet never arrives: one foot poised above water the hue of corroded copper, the other already vanishing in silt. In Fallen Tree and the Nature of Men five torsos strain under a trunk that appears to hover one brush-hair above complete collapse. Both scenes feel paused at the same impossible apex as the goat: the split-second before gravity reminds everyone who rules.

Just like the goat caught mid-flight, arced between faith and futility, Banny’s compositions hover inside an interval unresolved. The animal never lands, the mud never closes, the prayer never quite works; likewise, his figures never reach shore, his fallen tree never finishes crushing or being lifted. Painting, for him, is the perpetual freeze-frame of an unfinished calamity: a way to stare at the mess while it is still moving and say this is the truth of the moment, because nothing has healed yet. In those arrested gestures we hear the same verdict Lapindo passed on an entire district: there will be no neat ending, only the discipline of living inside the pause.

It could be that is why his canvases remain stubbornly figurative in an age of data dashboards and climate graphs. Where numbers flatten, paint trembles; where policy offers deadlines, mud offers the unceasing. Banny gambles that sincerity (an unfashionable word perhaps) can still wound, that to hold a moment of paralysis on canvas is to keep the pondering open long enough for inflection, or at least memory, to seep in.

Perhaps that is the most radical gesture available to a painter growing up in the backdrop of a disaster that will outlive him: to build images that stay unfinished, as Lapindo is unfinished; to insist, with every trembling brushstroke, that beauty and responsibility are not mutually exclusive but mutually aggravating. When the mud finally cools, perhaps decades or centuries from now, these surfaces may read as field notes from a crisis that was never declared over. Until then they ask us, in Goenawan Mohamad’s quietly devastating question, “Tapi apa arti roh tanpa tubuh yang buncah dan terbelah?” / What is the meaning of the soul without the ruptured and split flesh? 

If Lapindo taught him that maps are provisional contracts with the earth, painting offers a counter-contract: an agreement to stay present while the ground keeps shifting. Aye, we remain in the realm of unfinished things, but here, unfinishedness is not a failure. It is the only honest grammar left.

— ONG KAR JIN, May 2025

Catatan Pinggir/Side Notes: A Practice in Over-Analysis

1. Lapindo Mudflow as Modern Sublime

Indonesian courts continue to circle the Lapindo Brantas drilling company, but the mud keeps rising. Each day Lusi discharges roughly 180,000 m³ of scalding slurry, enough to fill the Louvre pyramid nineteen times before breakfast. Geologists call Lusi a “mud volcano,” yet its trigger was human: a burst drillstring, a failed blowout preventer, a corporate shrug. Edmund Burke’s eighteenth-century concept of the sublime prized towering mountains that “fill the mind with that sort of delightful horror”; Lusi updates the formula by replacing alpine peak with corporate negligence. Banny’s minorkey Romanticism therefore faces a structural opponent: the spectacle of nature weaponised by capitalism. 

2. Chromatic Budgets

Every square metre of oil-painted canvas locks a few grams of carbon in linseed varnish: trivial, but symbolically pungent. Meanwhile Indonesia sells REDD+ forest carbon credits to Norway for US$103 million. Which sequestration is more honest: bureaucratic carbon or aesthetic carbon? 

3. Agrarian Dreams, Plantation Nightmares

Java’s landscape has been cultivated since Majapahit, but the colonial plantation—and its latecapitalist heirs—reorganised everything. In 1995 the state held 1.13 million ha of oilpalm; by 2024 the figure exceeded 16 million. Clearing for palm is now Indonesia’s leading driver of forest loss, sending orangutan and hornbill into the same limbo that swallowed Sidoarjo’s villages. The result is a contradictory visual regime: touristic postcards of emerald riceterraces versus the charred grid of plantation blocks. When Banny overpaints mangrove roots until they resemble scar tissue, he is, whether consciously or subconsciously, touching that national wound. His thick impasto technique lays pigment on like bark, but bark without forest is just scab.

4. Genealogies of Green Melancholy

Nature in Southeast Asia is never just pastoral; it is always post-traumatic:

• Raden Saleh staged lions and tigers as proxies for colonial predation (see Lion Hunt, 1841 – “humankind as brutal and somewhat wild like an animal”).

•  In Hutan Terbakar (1985), S. Sudjojono painted a forest ablaze—trees twisting under lurid skies, earth scorched into hallucination. Cast out from the political centre after 1965, the father of Indonesian Realism turned to landscapes not of nature, but of unspoken psychic terrain. These were no longer nationalist backdrops, but haunted inner worlds, where valleys, shadows, and fire stood in for memory, exile, and disillusionment. Nature, in the end, was what remained when ideology burned away.

• Working with Muara Angke fishermen, Tita Salina & Irwan Ahmett lashed Jakarta’s own plastic detritus into an artificial raft, then tugged it from the garbage‑choked mouth of the Ciliwung River out into Jakarta Bay, turning the capital’s waste and the state’s neglect into literal ballast. (1001st Island: The Most Sustainable Island in the Archipelago, 2015)

5. Beauty is a wound

Timothy Morton warns that “clinging to a capital-N Nature becomes an arbitrary aesthetic screen … a bit of a disaster”. Yet Goenawan Mohamad reminds us that pure abstraction also fails: “Keindahan tak bisa jadi total. Ketika ia merangkum total, ia abstrak, dan manusia dan dunia tak akan saling menyapa lagi. / Beauty cannot become total… when it grows total, it becomes abstract, and man and world no longer speak.” Banny’s middle path is to paint the abstraction and the wound at once. 

6. Mangrove testimonies

In 2021, the Constitutional Court of Ecuador granted legal personhood to mangroves; Philippine lawyers cite the case to protect Palawan reefs. If Java’s mangroves ever gain such status, Banny’s clawlike roots begin reading as courtroom sketches—botanical witnesses testifying under oath. 

7. Scapegoat, Sacrificial Goat, Commodity Goat

Lapindo villagers hurled goats into Lusi’s maw believing blood might plug the vent. Anthropologists will recognise a classic scapegoat ritual: sin transferred, body discarded. But Indonesia’s goat economy is itself tied to land conversion; pasture follows cleared forest. Sacrifice thus repeats the violence it symbolically repairs. 

8. The Eden Industry

Tourism boards across ASEAN have monetised “untouched paradise” even as bulldozers idle behind the billboard. Art history, too, runs an Eden industry: Rousseau’s noble savage, Emerson’s oversoul, Walton Ford’s bestiary … Banny’s gambit is to perform paradise with the brakes half-on. Paradise rendered, but tonally dissonant; Eden scored for minor key and offstage siren.

9. To Matter Once

Chairil Anwar’s wartime lyric “Aku” shouts, “Sekali berarti / Sudah itu mati!”/ “To matter once, then die!” The independence poets framed nature as revolution’s drumbeat; the New Order converted it into park décor and infrastructural canvas. Banny inherits both rhetorics: swamp as existential stage, blossom as décor. He leaves them unresolved; petals look like exit wounds.

10. Painting after Policy

A final perversity: oil paint is a petrochemical byproduct. Banny’s luminous turquoises are literally Lapindo’s kin, distilled from the same carbon chain that fuels drilling and deforestation. To paint a swamp in cadmium and cobalt is to acknowledge complicity. 

“Humankind is able to create new conditions, a new reality… We are not fated to swim forever among the realities that are here now.” – Pramoedya Ananta Toer

By insisting on making pictures, even though they may be anachronistic, Romantic, tactile, Banny enacts Pramoedya’s wager. The garden may bite back, but the painter’s reply is to keep planting colour in the wound, one deliberate stroke at a time.

About the Writer

Ong Kar Jin is a curator, researcher, and cultural strategist based in Kuala Lumpur. He is a co-founder of cloud projects, a research‑forward collective operating at the intersections of art, architecture, and history to produce critical interdisciplinary practice. He has held a variety of roles in the tech and public affairs industries. Notable curatorial projects include All the Lands Within the Seas (The Back Room, Kuala Lumpur, 2021), Strategies of Dissent: Works from the collection of Ng Seksan (+n by Ur-Mu, Kuala Lumpur, 2024, co-curated with Lim Sheau Yun), and Zamboanga Encounters: Where Land and Sea Meet (National Museum of the Philippines, Zamboanga, 2025, co-curated with Noelle Rodriguez). He holds a BA in History, with distinction, from Yale University. His work has been supported by institutions such as the Yale Law School (2015–2017), the DAAD Artists-in-Berlin Program (2020), the Foundation for Arts Initiatives (2020), Malaysia’s Cultural Economy Development Agency (CENDANA) (2022), and the National Research Council of Korea (2024).

SUKE. DASH. NORTH SOUTH EXPRESSWAY. DUKE. In zooming on highways across counties, countries, continents, eyes and wheels dead set on destination, what are we blinded to? What lies beneath the flyovers?

This is the question that Singaporean artist Yeo Tze Yang circles around. His first solo exhibition since moving to Malaysia, Observations Under The Flyover marks not a grand migration, but a drift into a different rhythm. Where his earlier wanderings traced the contours of an entire island city-state, here Tze Yang’s attention settles on Pandan Jaya, a neighbourhood neither central nor peripheral, pinned between the arterial highways of the Klang Valley. Working, walking, seeing every day in the area around his studio, Tze Yang’s practice is shaped by routine. In this act of dwelling, he paints not from nostalgia, but from being somewhere long enough to notice the shape of a footpath, the lean of a stall, the glow of a shop sign after dark. 

Through this slow attention, and in his stubborn resolve on painting the ordinary, he renders what most would pass by: a muddy drain under the MRR2, graffitied concrete walls, a car left to rust, a celup tepung stall clinging to the edge of a lot, a lone figure crossing a dimly lit street under the glare of a streetlamp. 

It is not grand commentary, nor romantic ruin. But in the works, there is an insistence: that even in the in-between, there is something worth seeing. The Back Room invites you to see.

Exhibition dates
18 April – 11 May 2025

Credits
Texts by Ong Kar Jin
Exhibition identity by Ejin Sha
With thanks to FOST Gallery

About the Artist

YEO Tze Yang (b. 1994, Singapore; based in Kuala Lumpur, Malaysia) is a self-taught painter whose evocative, representational works capture the overlooked, liminal spaces of urban life. Since 2013, his practice has remained rooted in an enduring fascination with the unseen: fragments of daily existence that often escape notice.

Acting as a visual archivist, Yeo navigates his surroundings with an acute sensitivity, documenting forgotten people, places, and objects through his phone camera before distilling these fleeting moments into paintings. His approach, driven by intuition, transforms the ordinary into the profound, forging a dialogue between lived experience and the social frameworks he encountered during his studies in Southeast Asian Studies at the National University of Singapore. While painting remains central to his practice, he extends his explorations into sculpture, electronic media, and writing, expanding his engagement with materiality and narrative.

Yeo’s work has garnered significant recognition, including the Silver Award at the UOB Painting of the Year competition in 2016. In 2022, visual arts journalist Helmi Yusof hailed him as “the fastest-rising figurative artist of his generation” in Singapore. His works have been exhibited extensively at institutions such as The Substation, National University of Singapore, and Nanyang Academy of Fine Arts, alongside regional exhibitions and art fairs in Hong Kong, Malaysia, the Philippines, and Indonesia.

His paintings are held in prominent collections, including those of the National University of Singapore and UOB, as well as private collections across Singapore, Malaysia, Thailand, the Philippines, Australia, Switzerland, Denmark, Italy, the United Kingdom, and the United States.

Yeo Tze Yang is represented by FOST Gallery, Singapore.

Installation

Artworks

‘I have something to give you,’ is the title of a work by CC Kua. The “something” in the work is a menacing sea urchin resting on an outstretched palm offered to the viewer. Ha-ha. 

Many of the paintings in the show, and indeed in CC’s practice more generally, are characterised by this same drollness. They are jokes that aren’t particularly funny, whimsies that aren’t particularly whimsical, and nostalgia for memories that aren’t particularly fond. In the present exhibition, a new set of works, spanning three years (2022–2025) and multiple mediums, offer a variety of new “jokes” and propositions for the viewer’s amusement. 

A welcoming section of light paintings on canvas offer a good-natured yet languid opening to the show, like a collection of guests idling post-lunch and making torpid jokes and chit-chat in the mid-afternoon heat. A series of paintings promise “something nice” in naive handwriting (like a child gripping a pencil with their fist), but most of the painting is obscured beneath a white wash, with the only colour being the textual promise of something “nice”. Meanwhile, another pair of twins, the ‘Chinese Duck’ and ‘Ang Mo Duck’, consist of two painted icons that each symbolise the concept of “ducks” in Chinese and Western culture, respectively: one, a drawn and halved, spread-eagled duck covered in brown glaze, representing an advertisement for roast duck; and the other, the silhouette of the classic yellow duck that adorns bathtubs the world over. Yes, ha-ha. 

‘Tomorrow is coming,’ one painting announces, like the last hiccup of a drunken guest struck by a sudden burst of awareness of their mortality and the passage of time, right before passing out in a golden slumber. 

Further along in the show, the visions become slightly more tortured. Laughing, gay faces rendered in black and white start to seem rather sinister. Five drawings in pastel and graphite seem to bring us into an underworld of ‘Hidden Rooms and Secret Doors’ or ‘Hehe Haha Heehee’ where all light has been inverted, yet the normal procession of human affairs carry on. These drawings are made with dark graphite scrubbed onto white paper, with a lighter graphite pencil applied later to create the outlines of figures and shapes appearing out of the black clouds. The drawing scheme seems counterproductive, everything seems to be lit in the wrong direction, and there is the sense of something demonic about the black faces. 

Some other drawings here seem to show the artist at a pitch of mild psychosis, like the way a child or a cat gets when it’s having too much fun and suddenly starts trying to bite everyone. There is an underbelly of aggression beneath all of the drawings, which, as the artist will tell you, are inspired by her “lived experiences” and “childhood memories” — innocent ruses for the primal, manic energy that suffuses them. A drawing depicting a children’s puppet show taking place outdoors is disturbed by stormy colour and the unsettled expressions of all the figures in the scene. And another one, mysteriously titled ‘Welcome to the land’ shows an evil-looking magician, with hands like eels, a beak like a stork and another, smaller bulb of a face emerging from his head, appear to cast spells on turnip-looking people before him while an upside-down volcano erupts overhead. Welcome to the land!!! 

And so we have a tale of two CC’s, as hinted at by the watercolour painting titled ‘And’, which depicts a pair of conjoined twins drawn in different mediums. At one end of the spectrum of CC’s practice, we have paintings that are like a collection of friendly, idle guests in a sunlit sitting room and which are the sort of paintings that explain how words like “whimsical” and “naive” have attached themselves to descriptions of CC’s art over the years; at the other end, there are drawings that give pause and make you recall all those stories you’ve heard about artists going off their nut. Together, these two ends constitute the duality that is CC. Just as one is about to get taken in by the inviting pastel hues of the first type, the jarring creatures and expressions in the second type jump in and disrupt the mood, leaving one with a rather mixed impression overall. One searches for words and finally settles upon something along the lines of a stunned, ‘Oh, I see… I see.’ 

And so, to return to the beginning of the text, the artist is waiting for an answer. Will you accept the gift that she is offering to you, this spiked thing conjured up by her hands? 

written by ellen lee

Exhibition dates
22 March – 13 April 2025

About the Artist

CC Kua 
b. 1991, Sungai Petani, Kedah 
based in Kuala Lumpur 

CC Kua is a visual artist, educator, and graphic designer currently based in Kuala Lumpur, Malaysia. She works primarily across the mediums of drawing and painting, viewing her art as a tool for provoking thoughts and tickling minds. Her art explores narrative possibilities, often with a twist or a touch of dark humour. 

Kua received her Master’s in Fine Arts from Tainan National University of the Arts, Taiwan, in 2019, and her Bachelor's in Graphic Design and Illustration from The One Academy (conferred by the University of Hertfordshire, UK) in 2013. Including the present exhibition, she has had four solo exhibitions to date, all in Kuala Lumpur: All By Myself (2020, The Back Room), Left A Bit, Right A Bit, Up A Bit, Down A Bit (2019, Lostgens’), and Mosquito Bite (2016, Lostgens’). In 2020, she was an artist-in-residence at the Rimbun Dahan Southeast Asian Art Residency in Kuang, Selangor. 

Installation shots

Artworks

The Back Room is pleased to present Sorga Rawa (‘Bog Paradise’) by W. Rajaie, a solo project by the artist at The Back Room that takes the form of a single installation filling up the entire gallery space. For the past few years, the artist has made a name for himself with his “earth paintings”: protruding paintings made of compacted dirt, marked by networks of deep cracks across the surface. The present show expands on his existing interest in soil as artistic medium. It attempts to create a more transubstantial experience for the encounter with the medium, pushing the medium into metaphysical territory. Sorga Rawa is a dreamy, abstract terrain where matter transforms into myth and ritual becomes religion. 

Sorga Rawa is equally an experiment in site-making as it is a maturation of the artist’s proficiency in using soil as his primary artistic medium. Behind its enigmatic appearance, the installation is backed by a world of myth of the artist’s own making, revolving around a fisherman’s village in a swamp, a tragedy, toxic waters, a pregnant girl, a fire, a burning jetty, and, somehow, paradise. 

The installation plays on the aura of sacredness that suffuses art galleries, along with their attendant list of restrictions that are associated with proper conduct in the encounter with art. Sorga Rawa explores a sacred dimension to the encounter with art through the fabrication of its own rituals and guidelines surrounding the work that are essentially similar to existing guidelines for visiting a gallery, only now revolving around a different nature of sacredness. In the end, it is part of the artist’s own continuing interest and thought into the nature of how meaning is fabricated and how the artistic encounter can be pushed into more sublime territory. 

On most days of the exhibition period, visitors may only view the installation from the threshold of the gallery entrance. On specific days during the exhibition, we will observe an Upacara Cemar Tapak (‘Ceremony of Stained Feet’), which are days on which visitors will be allowed to enter into the space and walk through the mud barefooted. During this ceremony, certain guidelines will apply. 

Sorga Rawa will be on view from 16 February to 9 March 2025. Our gallery’s opening hours are Wednesday to Sunday, 12:00 p.m. to 6:00 p.m. The Upacara Cemar Tapak (‘Ceremony of Stained Feet’) will be observed on the dates of 27 February, 8 March, and 9 March, with timing following our opening hours. 

Exhibition dates
16 February – 9 March 2025

Upacara Cemar Tapak
(Ceremony of Stained Feet)
Special days when visitors are allowed to enter into the site barefooted.
❊ Thursday, 27 February 2025
❊ Saturday, 8 March 2025
❊ Sunday, 9 March 2025
First come, first served from 12pm – 6pm

About the Artist

W. Rajaie (b. 1997, Kuala Lumpur) is an artist exploring the connection between materiality and spirit through his artistic practice. Rooted in the cultural heritage of his region, his work engages with the primordial nature of regional materials and their intrinsic energies. Known for his distinctive materials and forms, his work evokes a sense of metaphysical dimension and the unseen forces that shape our reality and experience.

His practice is an epistemological and ontological mode of confronting reality and its paradoxes. By working with the interconnectedness between material substances and their cosmic nature, the artist uses this engagement to reflect on the complexities of truth and existence. 

Sorga Rawa is W. Rajaie’s second solo exhibition to date. It follows his debut solo exhibition Ruh Geluh at TAKSU, Kuala Lumpur, in 2024. Recent group exhibitions include Sunyi at Hospital Lama Langkawi (organised by the National Art Gallery, Langkawi, 2024), Not just in Black and White: Works from the Steve Wong Art Collection at GDP Campus (Kuala Lumpur, 2024), ART SG 2024 (presented by The Back Room, Singapore, 2024), CIMB Artober Art & Soul (presented by TAKSU KL, 2023), and holes at The Back Room (Kuala Lumpur, 2023). In 2024, he participated in the SUNYI Artist-in-Residence programme organised by the National Art Gallery in Langkawi. Parallel to his art practice, he is also the co-founder and artistic director of Rumah Batas.

Installation shots

For our gallery’s debut presentation in S.E.A. Focus 2025, we are thrilled to be presenting new works by Ain and Hoo Fan Chon.

The Back Room @ S.E.A. Focus 2025
Tanjong Pagar Distripark
39 Keppel Road #01–05
Singapore 089065

18–26 January 2025

Vernissage (by RSVP only):
Friday, 17 January | 6pm – 9pm

General admission:
18–26 January 2025 | 1pm – 8pm

For a pdf copy of our sales catalogues, please click the links below.

Installation shots

Artworks

AIN

Ain, an emerging artist currently based in Putrajaya, will be showing new works from her Ciplak Retellings series. Ciplak Retellings began during her studies in the Royal Academy of Art in The Hague, Netherlands, and has expanded for the S.E.A. Focus presentation.

Ciplak Retellings is an installation featuring multiple small works crafted out of air-dry clay and made to resemble familiar cultural artefacts in Malaysia, with slight modifications. The inspiration for this artwork stems from a reflection on Malaysian identity and cultural phenomena, particularly the prevalent practice of “ciplak” — a Malaysian slang term used to describe counterfeit goods. Drawing upon this concept, Ciplak Retellings serves as a commentary on authenticity, ownership, and the evolving nature of artistic expression within a cultural context.

At its core, Ciplak Retellings explores the tension between authenticity, replication, and reinterpretation, inviting viewers to contemplate the complexities of artistic ownership and authorship. In addition, it also partakes in discourse around cultural appropriation and the commodification of cultural heritage.

The creation of Ciplak Retellings involves a meticulous process of replication and distortion, echoing the evolution of the phenomenon of “ciplak” goods. Each edition of the artwork undergoes deliberate modifications, resulting in subtle variations that challenge traditional notions of originality and artistic ownership.

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Nurul Ain Binti Nor Halim (b. 2000), “Ain” for short, is an artist born in Bangkok, Thailand and raised in Indonesia, Malaysia, and Japan, which makes her have a diasporic identity and longing for belonging. Her practice includes videos, audio, and installations that focus on themes such as belonging, language, memories, and national and cultural identity. Her work reflects her interest in post-colonial discourses, such as cultural preservation, exoticism, craftsmanship, and archives.

Besides that, she questions the position and role of artists in decolonization, with references to Aimé Césaire’s concept of the “Man of Culture”, and how one embraces a post-colonial history and reconstructs itself through culture and arts.

Ain has participated in group exhibitions in Malaysia, the Netherlands, and Belgium, the most recent of which was ⏊IWE, curated by Christina Li, at Blank Canvas in George Town, Penang (MY) in 2024

HOO FAN CHON

‘Familiar Strangers’ is a series of watercolour paintings based on found photographs collected from around antique shops and flea markets in George Town, Penang. I have a habit of visiting these markets and collecting old photographs, particularly photographs where I don’t always immediately understand the content or context, or photographs that look slightly odd. 

Since its designation as a joint UNESCO World Heritage site, both the state of Penang and local businesses have promoted George Town as a popular destination for cultural tourism.  This branding exercise has stimulated a trade in nostalgia, particularly manifested in the recycling of found objects as novel souvenirs for tourists or interior decoration for business owners. 

Other than looking at the typical photographs we see in antique stores that feature social rites (such as weddings, birthdays, funerals, etc.) or the prized Peranakan family studio portraits, I am more interested in the anonymous, amateur everyday candids that are sometimes awkwardly posed, performative, blown out, underexposed, or in soft focus. I am intrigued by how these time-eroded personal keepsakes, nibbled away by silverfish, ended up being recirculated. Reading these photographs is an act of narrating everyday histories, even if they have to be excavated from other people’s staged realities, through lenses both voyeuristic and literal.

If photographing is an act of appropriating the subject being photographed, then painting a photograph is to look at a photograph intently, like studying a map of unfamiliar routes, to familiarise oneself with a foreign image. I blow up these photographs by tracing the original image through layers of watercolour paintings. Painting can sometimes be described as photographic and photography as painterly; this series of works intends to combine both the representational function of a painting and the mimetic nature of a camera to put together an album of anonymous and discarded memories.

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Hoo Fan Chon (b. Pulau Ketam, Selangor; based in George Town, Penang) is a Malaysian visual arts practitioner working across the mediums of painting, sculpture, photography, and film. His research-driven projects reframe everyday life with irony and wry humour, examining how our value systems fluctuate between cultures while interrogating notions of cultural authenticity. 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.

Hoo graduated with a BA in photography from the London College of Communication, University of Arts London (2010) and co-founded the Run Amok art collective (2012–17) in George Town. He was one of the recipients of the first cycle of the Studio Residencies for Southeast Asian Artists in the European Union (SEA AiR), organised by the NTU Centre for Contemporary Art Singapore in 2022, which allowed him to pursue his research in Finland. Notable recent group exhibitions include The Ocean and the Interpreters at Britto Arts Trust (Dhaka, Bangladesh, 2022); Myth Makers: Spectrosynthesis III at Tai Kwun (Hong Kong, 2022); The Ocean and the Interpreters at Hong Gah Museum and Solid Art (Taipei, Taiwan, 2022); and the ILHAM Art Show 2022 at ILHAM Gallery (Kuala Lumpur, 2022). His solo exhibitions include Let Them Eat Salmon (NTU CCA, Singapore, 2023) and The World is Your Restaurant (The Back Room, Kuala Lumpur, 2021).

He is currently a fellow at the apexart Fellowship programme in New York City, from November–December 2024.

We are pleased to announce our second year participating in ART SG, one of the region’s most prestigious art fairs.

For the FOCUS section in ART SG 2025, we will be presenting a solo booth by Marcos Kueh comprising 7 artworks from four distinct series, spanning works made between 2022–2024. Included are Expecting (2023), an immersive, four-panel installation; Thread in Loving Mother’s Hands (2022), a large piece inspired by a traditional Chinese poem; Hunger (2022), a single, long banner piece inspired by the Hungry Ghost Festival; and Double Happiness (2024), four pieces themed around marriage and the four seasons.

The central themes that connect all four artwork series are the themes of motherhood and fulfilling (or failing to fulfil) parental expectations. Kueh, who hails from a Chinese-Malaysian family in Kuching, Sarawak and moved to The Hague, Netherlands, in 2018, where he continues to be based, has always battled with familial expectations and Chinese filial customs, especially as concerns marriage and children.

The Back Room @ ART SG 2025
Booth FC32
FOCUS section, Level 1
Marina Bay Sands Expo & Convention Centre
Singapore

VIP Preview (by invitation only):
Thursday, 16 January | 2pm – 5pm

Vernissage:
Thursday, 16 January | 5pm – 9pm

General admission:
Friday, 17 January | 12pm – 7pm
Saturday, 18 January | 11am – 7pm
Sunday, 19 January | 11am – 5pm

For a pdf copy of our sales catalogue, please click the link below.

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 of 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 presented in art fairs and exhibitions all around the world, including ASIA NOW Fair 2024, Paris, France; ART SG 2024, Singapore; Three Contemporary Prosperities (2022) at Galerie Ron Mandos, Amsterdam; When Things Are Beings (2022) at the Stedelijk Museum, Amsterdam; This Far and Further (2022) at Museum Voorlinden, Wassenaar, Netherlands; Common Threads (2017) at The Back Room, Kuala Lumpur; and UNKNOWN Asia (2017 & 2023), Osaka, Japan. His debut solo exhibition was Kenyalang Circus at The Back Room, KL, in 2023. Recently, he unveiled a nine-part installation under the Hanya Satu Single programme at the National Art Gallery of Malaysia, Kuala Lumpur, in December 2024. 

He currently lives and works in The Hague. 

Installation shots

Artworks

EXPECTING (2023)

Expecting (2023) is an immersive installation made out of four large textile pieces depicting a porcelain urn decorated with Chinese characters. It is inspired by a conversation the artist overheard between his parents, in which the elderly couple had discussed looking into cremation plans—a sombre reminder of their inevitable death and his own anxieties as their adult son. Each artwork features stock phrases of how people are normally mourned after death, with one of them, “Grieving over her grandmotherhood” cutting slightly closer to home and being the only one of the pieces in which it is not the mother being mourned, but rather where the mother is the one doing the mourning — for a baby that the artist will likely never have, represented by an empty silhouette in the centre of the artwork. The four panels of Expecting are hung in a tight cuboid format, with visitors invited to enter into the chamber and experience the work as though they are the souls who have been cremated in the urn. On the reverse side of the works (visible to the viewers inside the textile chamber), the phrase 對不起, the Chinese characters for “I’m sorry” (duìbùqǐ) are woven repeatedly.

THREAD IN LOVING MOTHER’S HANDS (2022)

Thread in Loving Mother’s Hands (2022) relates to the themes of estranged family relations that can be found in the other works in this presentation. This large, fluorescent image depicts a masked, female figure sitting cross-legged atop a lotus, weaving a garment with her hands. The image is a collage of various figures typically associated with feminine nature and is inspired by “Song of the Travelling Son”, a Han dynasty-era poem by Meng Jiao 孟郊 about a mother who crafts a garment for her travelling son, who is about to go away for a long period of time.

HUNGER (2022)

Hunger (2022) is a long, pastel-coloured banner that is inspired by symbolism from the Hungry Ghost Festival, a festival celebrated by Buddhists and Taoists that typically occurs around the autumn season, when it is believed that the presence of spirits are strongest. Believers perform various rituals that help to “guide” the lost souls of their ancestors into a peaceful afterlife. Hunger links the themes of the other artworks to the question of the afterlife and asks difficult questions about customs of filial piety and the life-long tensions these customs can generate between close family members, even unto death.

4 SEASONS OF SEPARATION (2024)

Four Seasons of Separation (2024) is a series of four works that are themed around the four seasons and feature the phrase “囍” (the Chinese word 喜, xǐ, meaning “joy” repeated twice and turned into a single character), referring to the Chinese calligraphy/ornamental design of shuāngxǐ (double happiness), which is typically associated with marriages. All of the artworks are split down the middle, separating the two “happiness”es and condemning each character to live in their own separate realm, held together by loose threads. In this, the artist explores his failure to fulfil his parents’ expectations for him to get married, but also explores how he, as a son who currently lives apart from his family, has also had to adapt to the “seasons of separation” and find his own identity and happiness as an individual.

For our first show of 2025, The Back Room is pleased to announce a solo exhibition of new paintings by Chok Yue Zan, titled Between Us. The show will be Zan’s third solo exhibition and his first solo exhibition in Malaysia. It will feature five new paintings from his ongoing series, De Upside Down, of realistic upside-down landscapes. 

De Upside Down is a series that Zan has been preoccupied with over the past two years. The process consists of him sourcing landscape photography from open-source image websites and collaging various different genres of landscapes together in a single painting, with some being upside down, creating a picture of an uncannily perfect, serene world that is also wrong and alienating. 

Zan’s paintings tend to have a nostalgic quality to them, with memory and uncertainty being prominent themes and nature a recurrent motif. Previous series like Mind Paradiso (2019–2023) explored the lost natural landscapes of his childhood in Tawau, Sabah; the paintings in that series were often filled with unpeopled natural landscapes painted in dreamy pastel colours, sometimes combining paint with image transfer to achieve a blurry, nostalgic effect. The Family Series (2017–2021) explored his relationship with his family members and featured their faceless silhouettes against idyllic, serene backdrops. 

In the present series of paintings, Zan continues to reflect upon the lost past and the uncertain present. His idyllic, upside-down landscapes celebrate nature’s beauty but also meditate upon the strained relationships between individuals, society, and nature in the world today. 

Opening reception: Saturday, 4 January 2025 from 3pm – 6pm
Exhibition dates: 4 – 26 January 2025

About the Artist

Chok Yue Zan (b. 1994, Tawau, Sabah; based in Kuala Lumpur) is a young contemporary painter working across various mediums using a contemplative, conceptual approach. Born in Tawau, Sabah, Zan grew up with his grandparents in a forested environment surrounded by lush greenery and breathtaking landscapes. It was his sanctuary, a space of unbridled happiness that he considers his lost paradise, by which his art continues to be inspired. 

Zan graduated with a Diploma in Fine Arts from the Dasein Academy of Art, Kuala Lumpur (MY) in 2015. In 2017, he was awarded the UOB Painting of the Year (Malaysia). Since then, he has undertaken residencies in Shanghai (UOB Art Gallery, 2018) and Japan (Fukuoka Art Museum, 2018), on top of participating in numerous group shows and art fairs across Malaysia, Indonesia, Singapore, China, and beyond. His debut solo exhibition was Retrospect of Paradiso in 2018, followed by Throughout in 2022, both at Art Porters Gallery in Singapore. Between Us is his third solo exhibition. 

Installation shots

Artworks