Multidisciplinary artist, Tomi Heri, explores socio-cultural contexts by documenting events, objects, spaces, people and circumstances - the encounters in his daily life environment - translating his thoughts into a journal and rendering his ideas into digital media, sculpture and installation works.

Geometric symbolic patterns carved out of acetate sheets or stenciled onto wooden panels are some of his techniques to illustrate episodes of his life in a representational manner. Traditional motifs are then manipulated into digital media coalescing heritage with technology creating a contemporary language. 

Presented at The Back Room in The Zhongshan Building, Kuala Lumpur from 12 December 2020 until 10 January 2021, SG. features six new works by Tomi Heri. Developed during his stint as a beneficiary of the third cohort for the Khazanah Nasional Associate Artist Residency Programme at Acme Studio in London in 2019, SG. is a culmination of Tomi Heri’s five-year milestone as a professional artist and a moment of introspection. The concept of SG., the title of Tomi Heri’s inaugural solo exhibition is a celebration of homecoming. An abbreviation for Sungai, or river, SG. - holds a significance to the return to roots - metaphorically represents life. All rivers have a starting point where water begins its flow and aptly for Tomi Heri, the ribbon-like journey begins here and now. 

About the Artist

Tomi Heri (b.1991) is a multidisciplinary artist based in Kuala Lumpur, Malaysia. The visual and conceptual aspects in Tomi’s pieces, ranges from digital to installation works. Tomi graduated with Bachelor of Creative Technology from University Malaysia Kelantan (UMK) and has participated in various group exhibitions across Malaysia, including the National Visual Art Gallery and the Terrenganu State Museum. He has also participated in group exhibition around the region, Indonesia and South Korea. He has also awarded the Sembilan Art Residency (2018) in Negeri Sembilan, Malaysia as well as the Khazanah Nasional Berhad Artist Fellowship (2019) at Acme Studios in London, UK.

The Back Room is pleased to announce Carving Reality: Contemporary Woodcut Exchange Exhibition from East Asia, a group exhibition focused on social realist woodcuts curated by Krystie Ng, opening from 7 November to 6 December. This exhibition will be showcasing woodcut prints from Malaysia, Indonesia, East Timor, Hong Kong, Taiwan and Japan, it aims to serve as a platform to feature local and international printmakers while further promoting exchange among art practitioners and art lovers.

To discuss the development of modern woodcut printmaking in an inter-Asian context, one cannot disregard the historical moment in the 1930s when Lu Xun (魯迅) introduces European Social Realist woodcuts to modern China. From this point onwards, offshoots of woodcut practice start turning away from Romanticism and instead take on a more realistic and expressive approach. Woodcut develops such that it not only portrays social reality and offers social commentary, but also often takes on the responsibilities of educating the masses and of disseminating propaganda, in addition to being adopted as a tool for mass organisation.

Although woodcut is generally categorised as an art form, it is essential to apply an alternative lens by viewing woodcut as the product of cultural activisms emerging from a leftist perspective. A common feature of these woodcuts is that they provide a medium for artists to engage directly with the masses, especially with precarious groups in the lower stratas of society, such as farmers, labourers, migrant workers, the homeless, and sexual minorities. In these woodcut prints, marginalised communities are not only the target audience but more importantly are also the subject matter.

Carving Reality invited 11 individual artists and 6 artist collectives to take part, they are Anti-War, Anti-Nuclear, and Arts Block-print Collective (A3BC, Tokyo), Bayu Widodo (Jogjakarta), Chen Wei-Lun (Taipei), Djuwadi Ahwal (East Timor), Denpasar Kolektif (Bali), Dodo Irwandi (Jogjakarta), Fitri DK (Jogjakarta), Li Ning (Hong Kong), Memeto Jack (Sabah), Mohamad ‘Ucup’ Yusuf (Jogjakarta), Nur Seto Setiawan (Jogjakarta), Pangrok Sulap (Sabah), Print & Carve Dept. (Taipei), Printhow (Hong Kong), Propagila (Bali), Taring Padi (Jogjakarta) and Yunanto (Jogjakarta). Interestingly, despite working in different localities and on various issues, these artists and collectives have been influencing and supporting each other, hence building solidarity across the region.

The exhibition will be installed at two locations at The Zhongshan Building, besides taking up The Back Room Gallery, it is curated to an expanding site–The Courtyard @ The Zhongshan Building. This is an initiative to reach out non-regular gallery visitors, where large-sized prints created by the collectives together with their communities are installed and hung from the 4-storey building, we wish to deliver extraordinary visual viewing experience and sensual impacts to the viewers. In conjunction with the exhibition, we will also publish a book entitled An Outline of the Development of Social Realistic Woodcuts in Malaysia to further provide perspectives on the topic of printmaking, particularly in the contexts of the local art scene.

In an unprecedented collaboration in the art world, five galleries across Kuala Lumpur and Petaling Jaya are coming together for a novel weekend-long showcase of contemporary art. Right Here! Right Now!, conceived during the height of the Movement Control Order, is a burst of energy in a time of diam diam, of stillness. 

Each of the five galleries has put forth one of their represented artists, who has been tasked with creating a series of five new works. These works will then be distributed across the galleries, with each gallery showing one work from each artist for a total of five works per space. In the playful spirit of a scavenger hunt, visitors are encouraged to travel between galleries for the full experience, driving the motion of the moment as they traipse across the city over the course of the weekend.

Featured in the shows are the following artists and galleries: CC Kua from The Back Room KL, Syahbandi Samat from Artemis Art, Joshua Kane Gomes from Richard Koh Fine Art, Jane Stephanny from Suma Orientalis and Haafiz Shahimi from Core Design Gallery. Working in painting or mixed-media sculpture, these young artists – all below the age of 35 – bring an explosive formal sensibility to their experimentations. Charting their diverse practices across the geography of the city, Right Here! Right Now!is a kinetic transposition of the gallery-as-room to the city-as-gallery. There is no time or place like the present.

In 1974, the opposition MP Lim Kit Siang declared that a “batik curtain” had fallen over Malaysia. Calling for parliament to enshrine equal political and social rights of all, especially between Malaysians in Borneo and the peninsula, Lim remarked: “Mankind has dismantled the ‘Iron Curtain,’ the ‘Bamboo Curtain,” but we in Malaysia are erecting the ‘Batik Curtain’ to separate Malaysians from Malaysians.”

While batik was no more than a metaphor for Lim, it belied a set of national cultural politics that set the scene for textile culture. The tradition of textile art, memorialised in textbooks and tourist traps, is most often characterised between the twin techniques of batik, where lines of wax are applied to cloth then dyed, and weaving, which plays with the interlaced grid of the warp and weft. The former, lauded as national heritage, was widely disseminated as culture and industry. It is also the only textile genre to have definitively crossed the elusive boundary from craft to art with the development of batik painting in the 1950s.

Weaving traditions, however, took upon a different fate. In Borneo, indigenous weaving traditions such as ikat and anyaman were side-lined: the 1988 Sarawak State-Wide Art Competition infamously allowed only three mediums, “oil, watercolour and batek.” In the shadow of the 1971 National Culture Policy, weaving has only recently been reclaimed in a public imagination. Yet weaving and batik capture only a small fraction of textile practices, which are oft relegated to the realm of domestic work.

Common Threads pulls back the batik curtain, revealing ongoing conversations and developments in the world of contemporary textile art. Taken as a whole, these spirited explorations are bold declarations in the incipient language of contemporary textiles in Malaysia. Embroidered, woven, stitched, beaded, glued, pinned, knotted, stretched, these works collapse the boundaries between genres to imagine geographies and mythologies anew.

Marcos Kueh’s work interrogates the cultures and systems of textile production: Paper Tiger sardonically pastiches tiger rugs as commercial and national icons, while We came from the waterfalls is a sensitive exploration of origin stories, blending Sarawakian myths with the Malay tradition of songket weaving. Iona Danald then turns the process of production inward, using the act of making to reckon with her past. Aba Muas and Dirty Laundry traverse a memory realm of the domestic, where cloth bears a historical relation to the pleasures and pains of womanhood. Like Danald, Lim Shan Shan uses emotion as a generative process: Swayambhu systematises specific feelings into colours, juxtaposing the controlled self-as-data with the blurry, inconsistent quality of dyes. Finally, Tetriana collapses the boundaries between painting and textile, revealing the surface of painting – canvas – itself as cloth. The Thing in Between II is a meditation on the duality of gender, but also on the instability of medium, flickering between painting, sculpture and textile.

The Iron Curtain, the Bamboo Curtain, the Batik Curtain. Where cloth has historically been a metaphor for division, Common Threads works toward reconciliation. We find that commonality cannot be taken for granted: it must be narrated; it must be threaded. We have caught these artists in the moment of making.

Works Cited

Lim, Kit Siang. Time Bombs in Malaysia. Kuala Lumpur: Democratic Action Party, 1978.

Yee, I-Lann. “Love Me In My Batik.” In Narratives in Malaysian Art Volume I: Imagining Identities, 262-278. Edited by Nur Hanim Khairuddin, Beverly Yong, with T.K. Sabapathy. Kuala Lumpur: Rogue Art, 2012.

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Text by Lim Sheau Yun

Rasa Rahsia is Riaz Ahmad Jamil’s first solo exhibition in twenty years, marking the explosive return of an artist into the public eye. His years spent denying the eye of the commercial world have seen him turn his characteristically bold brushstrokes inward to build a deeply personal practice: this exhibition is a portrait of an artist making his way through the jungle of a teetering world, in a futile attempt to hold the world around him in representation such that the ground, rather than shaking like an earthquake, merely becomes a tremor. On display in The Back Room is a wide range of paintings and drawings treading the fine line between figurative portraits and abstraction, as well as a selection of Riaz’s handmade brushes. It is an exploration into Rasa Rahsia, the feeling or taste of secrecy, where private gestural expressions are coaxed into life on the surfaces of the everyday.

About the Artist

Riaz Ahmad Jamil is a painter and printmaker. He graduated with a Diploma in Art and Design from the MARA Institute of Technology in 1986. Riaz’s exhibitions in Malaysia include a solo, Over The Time, at Space 2324 by the Goethe Institute, Kuala Lumpur, 2000. Selected group exhibitions include Bara Hati Bahang Jiwa: Expression and Expressionism in Contemporary Malaysian Artat the National Art Gallery, Kuala Lumpur, 2003; and Maya at Galeriwan, Kuala Lumpur, 1990. He has exhibited internationally in Bangladesh (12th Asian Art Biennale Bangladesh, 2006); Paris (Standard Format, 2001), Yogyakarta (October Gallery, 2002) and Osaka (Soul of Fire, Osaka International House Gallery, 1993). He lives and works in Klang.

Follows the artist’s Southeast Asian Arts Residency Programme at Rimbun Dahan from January to April 2020, which was further extended into May as a result of Malaysia’s Movement Control Order (MCO).

“With the residency, I was excited for the space and time to isolate and reconnect with myself. During the first few months, I also had other artists at Rimbun Dahan with me. However they all left prior to MCO, and as the world started to shut down, I was all by myself in having to think through and make sense of what was happening to us. Also, what else could I do but to continue being an artist and producing work”, shares CC on her experience through the residency.

On view in this exhibition, visitors will be able to look through CC’s keen and observant eye, combined with her unrestrained playful thoughts on her experience amidst the lush tropical rainforest garden of Rimbun Dahan, juxtaposed against a sense of anxiety given the global pandemic situation. With CC’s artworks, nothing is spared her free flowing questioning mind; from daily routines, to people she meets, and even encounters with the animal world; each experience looked at with a whimsical and humorous lens. “I often try to capture first-hand impressions or feelings, and not what I’m looking at directly. We live in an  image-saturated world, with each of us having a ‘visual bank’ in our minds. To create, we will need to be conscious of this bank, and throw it out. Do not be lazy to see differently”, elaborates CC on her artistic process.

Curator Sharmin Parameswaran further offers “Having had four months to explore in isolation, CC spent her time creating artworks and studies traversing drawings, paintings, digital mediums, and even experimenting on making paper from leaf, grass, and flowers. For this mixed media exhibition, we selected works inviting audiences into an uninhibited visual diary akin to a kaleidoscope”.

Additionally to accompany the exhibition, a zine publication titled ‘Hello How Have You Been?’ is available digitally and in hard copy. The zine contains a compilation of other artworks and thoughts from CC’s residency, and was made possible with the support of the CENDANA Create Now Funding Programme 2020.

Exhibition curated by Sharmin Parameswaran

About the Artist

CC Kua (b. 1991, Malaysia) is a Kuala Lumpur based visual artist. Born in Sungai Petani, Kedah, CC obtained a BA (Hons) in Graphic Design and Illustration, The One Academy (degree conferred by the University of Hertfordshire). She then pursued her Master of Fine Arts from the Graduate Institute of Plastic Arts, Tainan National University of the Arts, Taiwan. CC currently resides in KL, and All by Myself is her third solo exhibition. 

Other available works by CC Kua

The Back Room KL is proud to present Fish in Pure Water 水至清则无鱼, a selection of 20 paintings by Liew Kwai Fei, emerging from the artist’s lifelong investigations and experimentations in the art of painting.

In this series, Liew tests the conventions of his own artistic practice and also the conventions of national painting history in order to unlock a new visual language in his poetry of painting. “水至清则无鱼” translates as “water that is too clear has few fish”, a caution against strictness and purity that best sums up Fei’s own intellectual yet joking approach to painting and his fusion of both Eastern and Western art historical influences. 

Despite Liew’s serious study, the paintings are playful at heart. In contrast to the structured and minimalist paintings of his recent past, Fish in Pure Water 水至清则无鱼 is more open and free-spirited, embracing viewers’ interpretations over artistic intention. 

They are accompanied with an experimental text of a fictional censorship debate (Socratic discourse updated for the Zoom generation) on the subject of Liew’s works, set in a speculative future, written by Ellen Lee and inspired by conversations with Liew. 

About the Artist

Liew Kwai Fei explores high and low culture alongside issues associated with the legacy of colonialism such as class, nationalism, and race through the language of painting. Spanning over a decade, his practice is contextually specific to the artistic and political landscapes of the time, both locally and globally. The idiosyncrasy and hybridity of Liew’s style are clearly manifested in his modular paintings and installation art.

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

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About the Writer

Ellen Lee graduated with a degree in Comparative Literature from the University of Kent, England, in 2017. KL-born and based, she currently works in the local visual arts sector as a project manager and research assistant while also pursuing writing on a freelance basis.

With all the recent efforts to support artists and keep art relevant during this pandemic; museums and galleries around the world has opted to go virtual, bringing art to the comfort of our homes through our screens. However, seeing art is important, therefore our next exhibition, Wonderwall, is a response to comply with social distancing rules using its window display to create an exhibition of 12 artworks by local artists.   

You can see art safely from the corridors of The Zhongshan Building. 

Selected Artworks

In collaboration with Rismilliana Wijayanti, Octo Cornelius, Prihatmoko Moki, Wicked Music People, Wkshps Design Studio

In the history of colonial encounters, moments of conflict also allowed for cross-boundary learning. Using principally 'found digital objects' - songs, images, stories, poems that are currently available freely in the public domain - The Tyger and the Navigator stages a historical epic on 18th-century cultural encounters in the Malay World. The protagonists in this epic are two figures locked in combat but also in embrace. The Navigator charts the sea and makes the world known for the purpose of surplus accumulation through a new system of extraction and exchange, in the belief that free intercourse will ultimately confer upon humanity both truth and freedom. Meanwhile, the Tyger is the unruly spirit of dissent, an open-source language of resistance for those displaced and marginalised.

The artwork takes the form of a sekolah gambar, a picture school, which historically is used to describe the 'museum'. In the 21st century, however, it more closely resembles an image board. An overwhelming amount of historical documents exist on the internet today, they float across the world wide web, often unattended to as digital debris. Through assembling some of them on the image board, the artist to explore hidden connections amongst historical materials. When assembled together anew, they are given a new context and a new story. The technique is both a nod to 20th-century modernist collage as well as our contemporary culture of post-internet mash-up and cloud-computing. 

This pattern of thinking can also be traced back to history, in an early modern form of Malay poem called, the Syair. Contrary to popular opinion, the syair is not so much a 'classical' literary genre. It emerges as a literary form sometime in the 17th century with a rhyming scheme that suggests the interconnected nature of all things and phenomena. It is as if, the Malay language took acid. The Tyger and the Navigator plays with such possibility, re-centering imagination in a process of adaptive reuse of historical materials. It allows the artist to create an atlas of memory and tell a story about the durabilities of our past in our present-day lives. 

The Tyger and The Navigator was first commissioned for a group exhibition ‘An Opera for Animals’ curated by Cosmin Costinas and Claire Shea. The exhibition ran from 23 March – 2 June 2019 at Para Site Hong Kong. The exhibition then traveled to Rockbund Art Museum, Shanghai, from 22 June – 25 August 2019 with Cosmin Costinas, Hsieh Feng-Rong, Billy Tang, and Claire Shea as curators.

Simon Soon is a senior lecturer at the Visual Art Program, Cultural Centre, University of Malaya in Kuala Lumpur. He researches across 19th-20th century modern and contemporary art and architecture in the Malay archipelago. Simon is co-editor of Narratives of Malaysian Vol. 4 (2019) and a member of the editorial collective of the journal Southeast of Now: Directions in Contemporary and Modern Art in Asia, published by NUS Press. He is also a team member of Malaysia Design Archive (www.malaysiadesignarchive.org) and co-edits a blog O for Other (wwww.oforother.malaysiadesignarchive.org). He is also the co-host of the BFM Night School, a weekly radio program focusing on the arts and humanities. Occasionally, he also curates and makes art. Having only exhibited his works overseas, this is his first time exhibiting in Malaysia and is also his first solo exhibition. 

The booklet of this exhibition was designed by Jun Kit, and it is one of the most beautiful booklet that draws on the aesthetics of early 20th century Malay printed books. The booklet is for sale or you can download it here.

After 27 years of adventure in SOMNIA.XYZ-G, a planetary system with three planets, two suns and three moons, he has returned to Earth and has brought to The Back Room the evidence of these adventures - objects, drawings, maps, and other ephemera.

27 Years of Lazarian Delights is a brief journey into an obsessive mind. From acid lakes to fiery planes, from suicide ceremonies to a cipher for a script, this explorer records it all with the precise eye of a scientist unwrapping the logic of a new system. In doing so, he takes the language of scientific knowledge and bends it to a world of fiction and speculation, reapplying these tools to fanciful and radical ends. The world the explorer captures is fantastical, but in its essence it is a project in seeing, pushing us Earthlings to reimagine life with eyes anew.

About the Artist

Chong Yan Chuah is a Digital Artist & Architect, a multi-disciplinary spatial thinker who builds imaginary worlds through film, drawing and installation. He studied architecture at Newcastle University and then at the Architectural Association School of Architecture, receiving the 2014 RIBA President’s Medals nomination and AA Scholarship.

He has worked for award winning architectural practices in London and Singapore and has given workshops in film and media at the Architectural Association. He has collaborated on film pieces with Unknown Fields Division and has had his work exhibited extensively; including Noise GIF Fest in Gillman Barracks, Singapore in 2019 and the Royal Academy Summer Exhibition, London in 2018 and 2019. In 2017, Chong Yan co-founded Inferstudio, a design and media practice that reveals and crafts narratives of human societies through diverse range of time based media and 3D environments.

www.chongyanchuah.com