Orang-Orang Suka Makan (“People Like to Eat”) is a group exhibition of food motifs in art, featuring works by Chin Kar Yern, Hoo Fan Chon, and Liew Kwai Fei. The title is inspired by a 2012 painting by Liew Kwai Fei and can be read in multiple arrangements.
The exhibition is an idiosyncratic exploration of food and our relationship to it through the different lenses of each of the artists.
Chin Kar Yern’s multi-media installation themed around pineapples is a quirky way of exploring this dynamic fruit — which is also commonly associated with prosperity and luck — through all of the senses except, ironically, taste. Through a pair of headphones, visitors will get to experience the sonic sensation of the artist scooping and mashing a pineapple to make shaved pineapple ice in an encounter with the pineapple that is probably more intimate than one ever imagined necessary.
Hoo Fan Chon’s I have never seen a swimming salmon in my life (2022) is a humorous installation of an aquarium with a swimming salmon fillet that speculates on how it would look like to domesticate a fish species such as the salmon, an imported fish that is commonly used in food dishes and regarded as a sign of class in Malaysia.
Liew Kwai Fei’s wall of paintings presents food as a tactile playground of symbolic objects, playing with the springy, stretchy, and evocative delights of different foods like eggs, noodles, fishballs, and fruits, while also touching on the decadent and graphic pleasures of food as visual objects in our optical age.
Exhibition dates
15 October – 16 November 2025
About the Artists
Chin Kar Yern (b. 1994) is a researcher, writer, and artist. He works with sound to interrogate the affects of labour, ritual, and rhythm permeating the folds and disjunctures of time. His historical scholarship has been published in Modern Asian Studies, Indonesia and the Malay World, and History Workshop. He is currently pursuing an MPhil in World History at the University of Cambridge as a Gates Cambridge Scholar. He is also a member of Malaysia Design Archive and curatorial and publishing collective cloud projects. In 2025, his book Modern Pangs: the Politics of Food and Hunger after Merdeka, which compiles his research on the beginnings of modern Malaysian food practices, economies, and discourses from 1957–1969, was published by cloud projects.
Hoo Fan Chon (b. 1982, Kuala Lumpur; based in Penang) is a visual arts practitioner whose work often begins at the interface of the everyday and the uncanny. He holds a BA in Photography from the London College of Communication (2010), co-founded the Run Amok collective (2012–17), and has held solo shows such as The World Is Your Restaurant in Kuala Lumpur (2021) and Let Them Eat Salmon at NTU CCA, Singapore (2023). His work has also travelled through residencies like HIAP (Helsinki, 2022) and was selected for the Prince Claus Fund’s Moving Narratives programme (Cycle II) in 2025.
Liew Kwai Fei (b. 1979, Kuantan; based in Kuala Lumpur) is recognised as one of Malaysia’s foremost new-generation painters. Originally trained in traditional ink painting, his practice in the years since has seen experimentations across a range of mediums and styles. Over the past decade he has mounted over a dozen solo exhibitions – most recently 排一排 Side by Side (2025, Harta Space, Kuala Lumpur), Pencil Exercises (2023, China House, Penang) and Nothing Personal (2022, Rissim Contemporary, Kuala Lumpur) – and shown widely in group shows across Malaysia and Singapore. His works are held in the national collections of the National Art Gallery, Kuala Lumpur, and the Singapore Art Museum. Liew has also undertaken international residencies, including the Australia–Malaysia (AMI) visual-arts residency in Melbourne (2011) and the Khazanah Artist Commissioning Programme in Mumbai (2010). A monograph of his career is currently in the works with cloud projects, a Kuala Lumpur-based publishing collective, and scheduled to be released in early 2026.
Installation shots
Coming soon
Artworks
Coming soon