About the exhibition
Where do all the artworks go when a show gets taken down? Do they just disappear into the ether, never again to see the light of day?
There is a place where all our artworks go after they’ve had their time under the gallery spotlights, and this place has the same name as our gallery (or rather, the other way around) — the artworks return to The Back Room’s back room. It is a gesture of real egalitarianism that both gallery and holding area are referred to in the same manner. An artwork that has had its time in one ‘back room’ will have its time in the other and vice versa.
In our current exhibition ‘Back Room back room’, running from 15 – 31 August 2025, we are presenting 25 works by ten different artists, among which works are some that we’ve exhibited in the past, while others have either never been exhibited in Malaysia or never been exhibited at all.
Within our trove, you will find: new pieces by Hoo Fan Chon that we exhibited at S.E.A. Focus Singapore earlier this year; a large, gold, statement-making tableaux by Jerome Kugan; a never-before-shown vibration drawing by Dipali Gupta; a never-before-shown painting by Ong Hieng Fuong alongside two pieces we showed in his debut solo in 2022; small drawings by foo may lyn that were last seen six years ago; and a selection of paintings and mixed media works by CC Kua, Marcos Kueh, Liew Kwai Fei, and Minstrel Kuik that may be familiar from recent exhibitions, now re-shown in a new configuration.
Featuring…
CC Kua (b. 1991, Sungai Petani; based in Kuala Lumpur) 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. She has had four solo exhibitions to date, all in Kuala Lumpur: I see, I see (2025, The Back Room), 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’). Her art has been included in group shows around Malaysia, including ILHAM Gallery. In 2020, she was an artist-in-residence at the Rimbun Dahan Southeast Asian Art Residency in Kuang, Selangor.
CC Kua, Night Tour, 2023, Mixed media, 29.7 × 21 cm (paper size), 25 × 26 cm (framed size)
Dipali Gupta (b. 1977, Mumbai) is a multi-media artist whose practice explores societal constructs from the domain of the feminine. Influenced by Foucauldian biopolitics, religious habituations, socio-political constructs, and its psychosomatic effects, Dipali’s experimental works question the normative and strive to reclaim space and meaning. Her concepts usually defy myths of domestication, reproduction, spectatorship, self, and identity. Set amongst Deleuzian societies of control, her practice subverts notions of patriarchy, androcentricity and binarism. Her multi-disciplinary approach re-appropriate less significant genres by layering concepts with artistic and social canons. Her research interests include feminist theory, post humanism, the body and identity politics.
A graduate of LASALLE College of the Arts in Singapore and Goldsmith’s University in London, Gupta has accumulated accolades over the years including nominations for the Chan Davies Art Prize (2018, winner), Young Master’s Art Prize (2019), the Wells Art Contemporary Award (2020), the Sovereign Asian Art Prize (2022, finalist). Her work has been exhibited in Singapore, Hong Kong, and Kuala Lumpur, with expositions and symposiums in Portugal, London, Miami, Paris, and New Delhi. Outside of her art practice, she was the co-moderator of a reading group called Constructing the Body at Malaysia Design Archive, Kuala Lumpur, and a part-time lecturer in Cinema and Sociology at Multimedia University (MMU), Kuala Lumpur.
After several years spent in Singapore and Malaysia, Gupta is currently based in her native Mumbai. In 2025, she will be undertaking a fellowship at the Virginia Centre for the Creative Arts in Virginia, United States.
Dipali Gupta, Cyborg Venus, 2021, Ink on Chinese rice paper, 69 × 46 cm (paper size), 91.3 × 68.2 cm (framed size)
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 Titik Garis Bentuk: Drawing as Practice (2024, ILHAM Gallery, KL), Favouritism Is My Favourite -Ism (2023, The Back Room, KL), Asynchronicity (2022, Charim Schleifmühlgasse, Vienna, Austria), and Fracture/Fiction: Selections from the ILHAM Collection (2019, ILHAM Gallery, KL).
She lives still. In Penang.
Hoo Fan Chon (b. 1982, Pulau Ketam; based in Penang) is a 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 was recently a fellow at the apexart Fellowship programme in New York City, from November–December 2024 and an artist-in-residence at NEXT ART TAINAN 臺南新藝獎, Tainan, Taiwan in early 2025. Currently, he is in Stockholm, Sweden, as a resident in IASPIS – International Programme for Visual and Applied Arts by the Swedish Arts Grant Committee.
Jerome Kugan (b. 1975, Sabah) is a multidisciplinary artist whose practice spans writing, music, and visual art. His work is deeply personal, sensual, textual, dreamy, queer, punk, poetic, irreverent, silly, and surreal. A graduate of the University of Canberra with a BA in Writing (1998), Jerome has also worked as a writer/editor, arts event organiser, DJ, queer activist—and once even launched a line of designer grilled eggplant. He is currently based in Kota Kinabalu, Sabah.
In 2024, Kugan undertook a residency in Basis, Frankfurt, under the auspices of the Goethe Institut. At the end of the residency, he presented an exhibition titled Time is a Donut. The work explores the cyclical nature of time and memory, placing raw, physical, and unfinished experiences at its core. The exhibition also travelled to Malaysia, where it was showcased at Temu House in Petaling Jaya in 2025, where a few newer works were included and its title was adjusted to All Life is Recycled + Time is a Donut.
Jerome Kugan, The Multitudes, 2020, Graphite and acrylic on paper, 106.5 × 100.5 cm (paper size), 120 × 103 cm (framed size)
Joshua Fitton (b. 1987, England; based in Kuala Lumpur) is a visual artist and fashion designer. He received his MA in Architecture from the University of Lincoln in 2012, following which he pursued a brief career in architecture before founding a menswear atelier called Atelier Fitton, which he continues to operate in The Zhongshan Building, Kuala Lumpur. As an artist, he is known for his work with ceramics, having spent some time in 2019 learning from a raku specialist, and showing a hundred pieces of ceramic eggs for his debut solo exhibition, What Dreams May Come, at The Back Room, Kuala Lumpur, in 2022. In 2023, he was awarded the Tiger Uncage Fund to create a large sculpture crafted out of broken porcelain pieces that was later exhibited at APW Bangsar, Kuala Lumpur. In 2024, he was a participating artist in the second edition of 1000 Tiny Artworks by Artists of SEA at The Back Room, Kuala Lumpur. In 2024, he held his second solo exhibition, Shadows in Time, at The Back Room.
Joshua Fitton, High Castle, 2024, Japanese ink and English porcelain plate pieces (“Neuschwanstein”, 1990s) on cotton paper, 76 × 56 cm (paper size), 84 × 64.5 cm (framed size)
Liew Kwai Fei (b. 1979, Kuantan; based in Kuala Lumpur) 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.
Currently, he is undertaking a residency at The Godown Arts Centre in Kuala Lumpur. In the latter part of 2025, a monograph of his practice will be published by cloud projects and an exhibition of his works will be held at Tintabudi bookshop in Kuala Lumpur.
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Marcos Kueh (b. 1995, Sarawak; based in The Hague, Netherlands) 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.
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Minstrel Kuik (b. 1976, Pentai Remis; based in Kuala Lumpur) left her hometown Pantai Remis at 18 years old. After earning a Bachelor of Fine Art degree in Taiwan, she obtained her master’s degree in photography in Arles, France. Kuik works across a range of mediums, including photography, drawing, poetry, textile, mixed-media assemblage and installation, with a focus on women’s writing (Écriture féminine).
The access to different cultures through her multilingual education has come amid the first awareness about the politics of place, gender and identity, to which her migratory body has to constantly conform or reinvent. With a belief that the private space is the major battlefield of ideological, political and economic interests, she explores art as a historical trajectory where the personal mutation through the process of reading, thinking, making, revisiting and counterbalancing is traceable, and hopefully, reflective and transformative.
Kuik has exhibited widely in Southeast-Asia and overseas institutions such as National Gallery Singapore; Singapore Art Museum; Museum of Contemporary Art Taipei; Horsham Regional Art Gallery, Australia; Ilham Gallery, Malaysia; FotoFest, Houston; Photoquai, Musée du quai Branly, Paris; Higashikawa Photo Festival, Higashikawa, Japan; and at the Lishui Biennial Photography Festival in China.
Her awards include the Regional Winner of one-month Fukuoka Asian Art Museum residency (2015); Winner of the UOB Painting of the Year (2014) for the Established Artist Category, Malaysia; Winner of the International Photographer Award (2013), Higashikawa Photo Festival Japan. Public collections include: the Michelangelo and Lourdes Samson Collection, Singapore Art Museum (SAM), Higashikawa International Photo Festival (Japan), United Overseas Bank (Singapore).
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Ong Hieng Fuong (b. 1995, Tanjong Sepat; based in Chongqing, China) is an emerging artist who is currently pursuing his Master’s in Fine Art at the print-making department at the Sichuan Fine Arts Institute (SFAI) in Chongqing, China, having previously graduated with his Bachelor’s from the Central Academy of Fine Arts in Beijing. 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. His debut solo exhibition was That day, I was sketching on the street at The Back Room in 2022.