About the Exhibition

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

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

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

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

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

About the Artist

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

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

About cloud projects

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

About the Exhibition

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

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

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

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

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

About the Artist

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

Exhibited Works

Available Works

About the Exhibition

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

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

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

About the Artist

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

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

Selected Artworks

About the Exhibition

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

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

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

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

Part 1. HURT NEED UNDO LIVE

Part 2. RESIST

About the artist

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

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

Selected Artworks

About the Exhibition

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

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

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

About the artist

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

Selected Artworks

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

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

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

Carbon Organika

A project by Jalaini Abu Hassan

The Back Room

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

Exhibition dates: 28 May - 12 June 2022

Opening hours: Wednesday to Sunday 12 - 6 pm

Enquiries: hello@thebackroomkl.com

Kasa Suasa, Bukit Tunku

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

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

Enquiries: farha.nor@gmail.com

Carbon Organika: The Process @ RumahLukis Gallery

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

Exhibition dates: 5 June - 28 August 2022

Opening hours: Saturday & Sunday: 2 - 6pm

Enquiries: galerirumahlukis@gmail.com

About the artist

Jalaini Abu Hassan or “Jai” (b. 1963, Selangor) is a contemporary Malaysian artist whose works are inspired by current events, expressed in local and familiar imagery and focused through his personal lens of nostalgia and history.

He received his bachelor’s degree from the MARA Institute of Technology (UiTM) in 1985. Following that, he received scholarships to pursue further studies at the prestigious institutions of the Slade School of Fine Art in London (1988) and the Pratt Institute in New York (1994), where he obtained his master’s degree and master of fine art respectively.

A process painter, Jai is interested in the exploration of the act of creating a work, the exploration of materials and mediums, and the marks that form a drawing. He is always pushing boundaries in search of new processes and methods of presenting a Malaysian visual vernacular which would accurately capture his identity and culture.

Acclaimed at home and internationally, Jai has held solo exhibitions in Malaysia, Singapore, Indonesia, and the US. Recent exhibitions of note include Landskap Daerah Samar at Segaris Art Center, Kuala Lumpur (2021); Cerpan-Cerpen at OUR ArtProjects, Kuala Lumpur (2018); Painting Industry at Equator Art Projects, Gilman Barracks, Singapore (2015); and Bangsawan Kebangsaan at Tyler Rollins Fine Art, New York (2011). In recent years, he has been pursuing possibilities of cross-industry art collaborations, of which Carbon Organika is the latest, following from Barang2 Jai with Kasa Suasa in 2021 and Ghost with Bell & Ross Asia at The Godown in 2019.

Jai’s works are in the collections of the National Art Gallery of Malaysia, PETRONAS Gallery, the National Gallery of Victoria, the Cultural Center of the Philippines, and other  private, corporate, and institutional collections around the world.

In Chrysalis, a collaboration between Artemis Art and The Back Room, we present a new body of work (literally!) by Kimberley Boudville, an emerging Malaysian artist whose youth belies her intimacy with a range of difficult emotions. Since her first solo exhibition, titled My Journey, a collection of drawings and paintings at Artemis Art in 2020, Kimberley has embarked on a new chapter in her life. In 2021, she graduated with her Bachelor’s in Fine Art from the Nanyang Academy of Fine Arts, Singapore. Chrysalis is the second solo exhibition of her career and the first since her return. The widening of horizons—the new experiences, the matured outlook—is palpable in her works, which have moved beyond drawings into the territory of mixed media and installation. 

This collaborative effort takes place in The Back Room gallery at The Zhongshan Building, Kuala Lumpur. In the middle of the gallery space is the exhibition’s central focus, an installation of a crystallised resin-cast skeleton atop a mound of dirt, raised upon a pedestal, titled Memento Mori, Memento Memorias. Surrounding the walls are limited edition prints from the Psyche series, in which the artist has rearranged the skeleton’s bones to create new forms and imaginary bone creatures. By using a crystallising technique on the skeleton assemblage, she fixes it in place and time, turns it into an object of art. In doing so, she also immortalises her emotions and memories of a specific time.

Our memories are our personal touchstones, reconnecting us to important events and individuals that have contributed to shaping who and what we are. But seldom is a second thought given as to how, what, and why we remember. Or, if what we remember is a complete and unembellished representation of a given experience. Some might recollect only the highlights, others the full details. Some may even try to forget certain events, particularly those that were unpleasant or painful – however, these remain in our memory (albeit suppressed), whether we like it or not. 

These are among some of the observations, questions, and thoughts present in Chrysalis. The works here are an elaboration of the works in My Journey, which documented the events and emotions surrounding the death of Kimberley’s father in 2020. But if My Journey explored the depths of her grief towards the passing of her father, then Chrysalis is a reckoning with the time that has passed since then, and how her memories have evolved along with it. While My Journey was akin to memento mori, a reminder and reflection upon death, Chrysalis is more like a memento memoria, a reflection upon the processes of memory itself. 

While time cannot always heal all wounds, it does give space for us to rationalise and put experiences into perspective. Important people and events may be preserved in our memories, but the manner and scope of our recollection are bound to change as time goes by. And just as how we transition from one stage of life to another, so too do our memories transform with us.

Accompanying Memento Mori, Memento Memorias and the Psyche series are The ABCs of Loss, a series of alphabets formed out of animal bones, and the Chrysalis series, a collection of delicate flowers formed out of butterfly wings and encased in bell jars for eternal preservation. Taken all together, they make up a more complete image of Kimberley’s creative maturation and the continuation of her journey of mourning and reconciliation.

About the artist

Kimberley Boudville (b. 1999, Kuala Lumpur) is an emerging artist who works across a range of mediums, including painting, ink drawing, installation, and assemblage.  Her works are deeply intimate, drawing from her own experiences and emotions; in particular, her recent works have explored the complex subjects of grief, death, and memory.

Kimberley received her Diploma in Fine Art from The One Academy, where she was awarded the Best of Fine Arts in 2017 and 2018. She went on to receive her Bachelor’s in Fine Art Practice from the Nanyang Academy of Fine Arts (NAFA), Singapore, where she was awarded Best of the Best in 2021. Her first solo exhibition, My Journey, debuted at Artemis Art, Kuala Lumpur, in 2020. The exhibition was selected by a regional website to be featured in their online exhibition showcase. Select group exhibitions she has participated in include: Best of the Best: NAFA Grad Expectations, Nanyang Academy of Fine Arts, Singapore (2021); What Real, Rational, Reasonable Women Think, Segaris Art Center, Kuala Lumpur (2020); and the Xavier Art Fest, Manila, Philippines (2019). In 2020, a children’s storybook that she wrote and illustrated, titled Mean Millie, was selected for publication by Di Angelo Publications in the US.

The most impossible kind of artist

These things in the gallery are called sky dancers, also known as “tube men” or “tall boys”, and they are commonly placed outside car dealerships to catch the attention of drivers. Sometimes the impossible makes you ecstatic, it makes you deliriously, deliciously happy, because you know you could never achieve it, not in a thousand lifetimes. Sometimes it’s better to have your heart broken. Desire blooms through withheld gratification. chi too is in tune with the reality of never enjoying the possession of something as much as the turmoil of desiring it — when it is still ripe for your projection and daydreams.

Projection is, in fact, a creative act. Don’t think too much about what the work means. It’s here today and gone tomorrow. This exhibition (if it can even be termed as such) only spans a little over a week. Should it be taken seriously as an entry in chi too’s oeuvre? If there’s anything I know about his work, where he seemingly riffs off ideas that pop randomly into his mind, it’s that nothing matters and everything matters. All at once, all the time.

— EL

About the Artist

chi too (b. 1981, Kuala Lumpur) is a self-taught multidisciplinary artist whose educational background is in Mass Communication and Sound Engineering. His practice demonstrates a confident exploration of humour, satire, and visual poetics. It is at times difficult to say exactly what he does as an artist, largely because his artworks touch on a large spectrum of themes and issues. His practice vacillates between the high-minded and the frivolous, the social and the personal, the transparent and the esoteric.

His experimental music, performances, and playful self-organised public art projects such as Main Dengan Rakyat, Everything’s Gonna Be Alright, and Lepark display an interest to engage with urban spaces and audiences that form his practice's complex multifaceted approach to his practice. chi too was also a member of the disbanded art collective The Best Art Show in the Univers. He has since participated in various exhibitions and performance events in Malaysia and abroad, on top of being an artist-in-residence at the NTU Centre for Contemporary Art (NTU CCA) Singapore in 2017 and a Nippon Foundation Asian Public Intellectual (API) fellow in 2011.

Including the current exhibition, chi too has had seven solo exhibitions to date: 95, The Zhongshan Building, Kuala Lumpur (2020); Sometimes When We Touch, OUR ArtProjects, Kuala Lumpur (2018); Like Someone In Love, Lostgens' Contemporary Art Space, Kuala Lumpur (2015); The Artist chi too Looks at Artworks as He Contemplates the State of the Nation’s Institutions a.k.a. How Can You Be Sure, Art Row @ Publika, Kuala Lumpur (2013); State of Doubt: Seven Actions Towards Dilemma, Art Lab AKIBA, Tokyo, Japan (2012); and Longing, Black Box, MAP @ Publika, Kuala Lumpur (2011). He has participated in OPEN GATE 2017, Sapporo International Art Festival, Japan; OPEN GATE 2016, Aichi Triennale, Japan; and OPEN GATE 2015, Hin Bus Art Depot, Penang, Malaysia. His works have also been included in The Body Politic and The Body at ILHAM Gallery, Kuala Lumpur, Malaysia (2019); Stories We Tell To Scare Ourselves With at the Museum of Contemporary Art, Taipei, Taiwan (2019); The Breathing of Maps at the Yamaguchi Centre for Arts and Media, Yamaguchi, Japan (2018); and Singapore Biennale 2013: If the World Changed. In 2022, he was featured in Phaidon's latest publication, Prime - Art's Next Generation, a compilation of "the most exciting rising stars in contemporary art", featuring 107 artists born since 1980.

Following a successful career as the mind behind Atelier Fitton, Joshua Fitton has recently focused his attention on the art of ceramics. Having long practised ceramics as a hobby, in 2019 he undertook a deeper study under the guidance of a master raku ceramicist in Terengganu. Since then, he’s been consistently developing his skills and aesthetics, finally emerging into the art world with What Dreams May Come, a collection of a hundred ceramic eggs created over the course of a year. 

Ceramics isn’t easy. Especially if you’re using an ancient burnishing method known as terra sigillata, meaning sealed earth, a Roman method of sealing ceramic pieces combined with smoke firing. All the eggs are fired in his own homemade kiln at temperatures of almost 1000°C, then polished, pigmented, re-fired, and polished again. Through repeated fires and polishes, the pigments are seared into the texture of the ceramic work, transforming them into the smooth, self-contained orbs presented in the exhibition. 

The varied hues of the eggs are the result of happy coincidences, achieved by experimenting with different salts and minerals, thrown in with random fragments of fruit peel, rice husk, leaves, ground coffee, and even strands of the artist’s own hair (which give some of the eggs the illusion of fracture). Each egg is enclosed in a foil saggar (protective cover) sealing them into individual microcosms within the wider macrocosm of the kiln. From then on, they are beyond the artist’s control and each egg that emerges will be unpredictably, charmingly unique.

As a symbol, eggs have the positive connotations of birth, regeneration, and hope. But an egg also inspires fragility: its embryonic form contains mysteries of a life not yet born and easily destroyed. Riffing on these mixed associations, these hundred eggs are a catalogue of desires, hopes, and dreams, but also failures, disappointments, and heartbreaks. They are as personal and opaque as dream interpretation or palm-reading, requiring a certain vulnerability and imaginative faith in order to establish a connection. We invite you to take your time exploring this library of the undefinable and unquantifiable; they are as much a product of your own experiences and sentiments as they are the artist’s. 

Joshua Fitton received his Masters in Architecture from the University of Lincoln, UK, in 2012. Upon returning to Malaysia, he worked in architecture for a time before moving on to fashion. In 2013, he founded Atelier Fitton, a bespoke menswear atelier based in The Zhongshan Building, Kuala Lumpur; in the same year, he made his debut at Kuala Lumpur Fashion Week and has been a regular presence at the yearly event. His interest in ceramics precedes his fashion career, but it was not until 2019 that he undertook a deeper study in ceramics under the guidance of a master raku ceramicist. Joshua is also a Level 2 practitioner of Reiki healing, which inspires some of the themes and concepts in his creative practices. What Dreams May Come is his first solo exhibition as an artist.

Garden of the Mind is a multimedia presentation of paintings, textile works, and drawings created by the artist during her 4-month residency at Rimbun Dahan in mid-2021. In her signature style, she blends embroidery with painting and drawing to create a layered depiction of her experiences within Rimbun Dahan’s lush environment. 

The works that she has brought back to the city retain the tactility of a life spent amidst nature. The dense embroidery on everyday handkerchiefs brings to mind, upon touch, the barks of trees or the ridges and valleys of a nut shell. Through the repetitive weaving of her thread through fibre, she turns the common handkerchief into one of her personal effects, embedded with her emotions and daydreams. The subject of her Rimbun Dahan works is dreamt-up combinations of observational nature drawings and her own whimsy. It seems that she has successfully asserted her own mastery over the wilderness around her, but not without suffering some of the doubts and insecurities that such a close encounter with nature provokes. 

Man’s relationship with nature is a theme as old as art itself, but it has become increasingly uncommon with the rise of large metropolitan cities where art centres are clustered. For many of Malaysia’s young contemporary artists, Rimbun Dahan is likely their first and only encounter with nature in such a varied and majestic state, and it is no surprise that many artists who embark on the residency often emerge with artworks centred on these surroundings. Likewise for Yi Lin, nature has a special place in her recent works.

An avid hiker, nature opens up the world to Yi Lin. In nature, she encounters various new ways of being that thrive unseen by civilisation. She described her time in Rimbun Dahan—alone, in the middle of a pandemic and lockdown—as like “playing hide and seek with [her]self.” For the artist, whose past work is concerned with memory and the gaps in being, the quiet and unfamiliar natural world perhaps offers her a way to be reconciled to herself. Yi Lin “seeks” out her own self by drawing on forms and metaphors from nature and subtly combining them with her own impressions to produce new forms and landscapes that are laden with affect. Mystery encloses her works, where pencil and charcoal are layered thickly and negative space seems to be an active presence. The mind maps she is fond of creating give an insight into her thought processes; interestingly, she connects nature with emptiness and death, perhaps a reflection of the insecurity that nature can provoke. 

Garden of the Mind shows an artist’s struggle with herself and her profession but also, on a more cosmic level, with Mother Nature in all Her chaos and glory. It invites thought as to what humans can gain out of a relationship to the natural world, how it can inspire our creative productivity and perhaps even answer some of our questions about our place in the universe. 

About the Artist

Chong Yi Lin received her Diploma in Fine Arts from the Dasein Academy of Arts in 2013, before receiving her Bachelor of Fine Arts from Taipei National University of Arts, Taiwan, in 2019. 

Her works explore the politics of sentiment through a fusion of nostalgia, symbolism, and daily personal rituals in an attempt to capture the complexities of life, love, and loss. She approaches sentiment through a kind of reconciliation via objects; for her, objects have a certain permanence and stability that she finds comforting. Her works tend to feature drawing and textiles, in particular embroidery with thread, which she favours for its malleability and softness. Through the back and forth of her needlework, she embeds her emotions into her objects.

In 2015, she had her first solo exhibition, titled Ashes of Time, at Lostgens’ Contemporary Art Space in Kuala Lumpur. Since then, she has exhibited in various art spaces across Kuala Lumpur and Taipei. In 2021, she was selected to undertake a three-month residency at Rimbun Dahan. Garden of the Mind presents a selection of works made during her time at Rimbun Dahan, and is her second solo exhibition.