The Back Room are proud to be participants of ART JAKARTA 2024, taking place at JIEXPO Kemayoran from 4 – 6 October 2024.

Our booth (A12) presents a line-up of Malaysian artists that we’ve frequently worked with in the past, namely: Chong Siew Ying, Liew Kwai Fei, Marcos Kueh, Nadirah Zakariya, and Ong Hieng Fuong. The presentation will span various mediums, including painting, photography, and drawing.

The Back Room @ Art Jakarta 2024
Booth A12
JIEXPO Kemayoran
(Jakarta International Expo)
Jakarta Pusat 10620, Indonesia

VIP Preview (by invitation only):
Friday, 4 October, 1pm – 6pm

Vernissage:
Friday, 4 October, 6pm – 9pm

General admission:
Saturday, 5 October, 11am – 8pm
Sunday, 6 October, 11am – 8pm

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

Installation views

Artworks

CHONG SIEW YING

Chong Siew Ying (b. 1969, Kuala Lumpur) is a Malaysian painter best known for her dynamic gestural brushstrokes and expressive compositions. These paintings embrace broad themes such as nature, human sentiments, human connection, homeland and belonging, as well as references to literary themes and concepts. Chong left Malaysia for France in 1990 to pursue her studies in Fine Art. There, she enrolled at the École des Beaux-Arts de Versailles and later at the Parisian printmaking centre, Atelier63. Returning to Malaysia in 1998, she held her first solo show in Kuala Lumpur in the same year. From 2000–2001, she travelled to the United States of America where she spent 7 months in New York City and 2 months at the Vermont Studio Centre in Vermont. She returned to Paris in 2001 and travelled back and forth between Paris and Kuala Lumpur until 2011. She has since moved back permanently to Kuala Lumpur. Her career has spanned a large number of solo and group exhibitions in Asia, as well as across Europe and the USA.

LIEW KWAI FEI

Liew Kwai Fei (b. 1979, Kuantan) 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, with his thirteenth set to open at Harta Gallery in Kuala Lumpur in November 2024. His work has been collected by institutions such as the National Art Gallery, Kuala Lumpur and the Singapore Art Museum.

Instagram: @liewkwaifei

MARCOS KUEH

Stamps were “tiny transmitters” of dominant state ideologies, historical narratives, and cultural values. Long before Borneo was marketed as an exotic tourism spot for adventure seekers, the storyline of a mysterious jungle filled with exotic animals have already been propagated over to the world, innocently bypassing national borders as parasitic visual cues on letters.

Invented by the United Kingdom, it gives clues to how the imagination of the identities of our ancestors were understood incrementally from the perspective of the West — most of the time independent of how the actual narrative of how the locals understand themselves. It is a testament of how biological science, for example, were promoted into dominance over indigenous knowledges and how ideas of hierarchy and commodity permeates subconsciously through the pairing of subject and value.

The woven postcard series is about the alienation of perceived identities. It is about the incompleteness of what it means to not fit into colonial descriptions no matter how hard we try, and attempt to make peace with existing in between self-rejection and self-acceptance.

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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 included in exhibitions all around the world, including the Indian Ocean Craft Triennial satellite exhibition in Kuala Lumpur (2024), Manifesta 15 Barcelona (2024), and group exhibitions at Galerie Ron Mandos, Amsterdam (2022); Stedelijk Museum, Amsterdam (2022); Museum Voorlinden, Wassenaar (2022); The Back Room, Kuala Lumpur (2017); and UNKNOWN Asia, Osaka, Japan (2017 & 2023). His debut solo exhibition was Kenyalang Circus at The Back Room, KL, in 2023. He currently lives and works in The Hague, Netherlands.

Instagram: @marcoslah

NADIRAH ZAKARIYA

This series of photographs delves into the artist’s relationship with idol culture, exploring the complexities of fandom as she navigates the delicate balance between personal joy and global sorrow. Her still life works capture her emotional responses to the world around her, shaped by both personal experiences and current events.

The first piece, “Spring Day In A Box” featuring a McDonald’s BTS promotional meal carton, was created in May 2021, marking her early exploration of what it means to be in the BTS ARMY fandom and its impact on her art and identity. In contrast, the second piece, “Lost Laughters (Louder Than Bombs),” made in June 2024, responds to the tragic news of the death of a child named Ahmed Al-Najjar in Gaza, processing the loss of innocent lives amid ongoing genocide.

Both pieces, instinctively composed at the same location, in the artist’s home, reveal an unexpected yet striking similarity that connects her personal experiences to broader socio-political realities.

Nadirah’s awareness and deep concern of the situation in Palestine has altered her consumer habits and complicated her relationship with the BTS fandom. Their silence on humanitarian issues, despite their advocacy for peace, has created internal conflict for her as a fan.

The two works titled “A Field of Obsession: Save Me I” and “A Field of Obsession: Save Me II” illustrate the tension between the joy derived from fandom and the weight of global turmoil. These pieces also critique the effects of capitalism on fandom culture, as each object or merchandise represented in the works were purchased or received out of a sense of fixation, raising questions about consumerism and its role in shaping her identity as part of the BTS ARMY. This process prompts her to reflect on the para-social dynamics of fandom, examining the one-sided relationships that can develop between fans and idols.

With these staged studies, the artist invites viewers to reflect on the complexities of pop culture devotion in a world marked by conflict, questioning the interplay between personal joy and collective grief.

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Nadirah Zakariya (b. 1984, Kuala Lumpur) is a Malaysian photographer who explores the intricate relationship between identity and emotion through her artworks. Her work serves as a personal investigation, capturing the nuances of human experience and the layers of connection that define us. She received her Bachelor’s of Fine Arts from the Fashion Institute of Technology in New York City and is currently based in Kuala Lumpur.

Nadirah's work has been showcased in various notable exhibitions. In 2011, she held her first solo exhibition, Daughters Ago at the Lomography Gallery in New York City. This was followed by another solo show, GIRLHOOD, at the Leica Gallery, Kuala Lumpur, in 2016. In 2018, her series Fuji-san Love Letters was exhibited at ILHAM Gallery, Kuala Lumpur. Most recently, Nadirah presented her largest solo exhibition to date, Feeling Feelings Makes Me, Me, featuring nearly 40 photographic works, at temu house, Kuala Lumpur, in 2023.

As an internationally published photographer, Nadirah's work has appeared in publications including The New York Times Magazine, VICE, Dazed and Confused, Refinery29, and Vogue Italia. In 2022, her artwork was included in Thames and Hudson's Flora Photographica: The Flower in Contemporary Photography, edited by William A. Ewing and Danaé Panchaud.

Nadirah is also the co-founder of Layar Lucida, a women-led creative studio based in Kuala Lumpur, and co-founder of the Exposure+ Photo Festival in Kuala Lumpur.

Instagram: @nadirahzakariya

ONG HIENG FUONG

Ong Hieng Fuong (b. 1995, Tanjong Sepat, Selangor) 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.

Instagram: @hieng_9389

Nomad presents 11 new paintings by Wong Xiang Yi (b. 1987, Kuala Lumpur), in her seventh solo exhibition and her first presentation with The Back Room. These new works see the artist, who specialised in ink painting, continuing in her explorations of the beautiful boy archetype with new developments in style, composition, and figuration from over the past four years. Already established within the Malaysian art scene for her paintings of beautiful, young male models in languid poses, these new paintings present a style of figuration that is more “chibi”-like, allowing the artist to place greater emphasis on nuances in her subjects’ expressions and gestures, instead of on their beauty. 

In the paintings of Nomad, the figures are all ageless wanderers who move in clouds of smoke, connected to each other through a secret truce, a mysterious thread of fate with terms that viewers can only guess at. Xiang Yi combines the fine elegance and elaborate patience of Chinese and Japanese ink painting traditions with the androgynous grace of the “beautiful boy”, the immortal muse of artists and poets since the ancient Greeks. Each painting is a secret, smoke-filled chamber that opens upon a new scene celebrating youth, beauty, and its expressions. 

Using subject matter that is “beautiful, immobile, and cheap” (echoing Georgia O’Keeffe’s rationale for making her flower paintings), the groups of boys are simplified into clones, with each boy being an “avatar” for a different facet of personality. Each tableaux thus becomes a way for the artist to have a private conversation with herself. The boys appear as innocent, blank vessels upon which the viewer can cast their gaze and project without fear, yet their detachment — conveyed through ambiguous and enigmatic expressions — maintains a cold front across all the paintings. Through shifts of expression, gesture, and composition, the pictures keep various subtle tensions and moods in a delicate balance. 

Opening reception: Sunday, 22 Sept from 3pm – 7pm
Exhibition dates: 22 September – 13 October 2024

About the Artist

Wong Xiang Yi (b. 1987, Kuala Lumpur) received her Bachelor’s of Fine Arts from the Chinese University of Hong Kong in 2010 and her Master’s of Fine Arts from the Taipei University of the Arts in 2016. 

Wong majored in ink painting, having been trained in traditional Ling Nan Chinese ink painting. Aside from that, notable influences in her work also include the new ink painting movement in China, Japanese style of ink painting (Nihonga), and the discourse surrounding ink painting in Taiwan that she encountered during her Master’s studies. Since returning to Malaysia, she has experimented with combining her learning in ink painting with local visual arts styles, traditional and contemporary (including batik and Islamic painting), in order to develop her own particular style. 

Wong is passionate in matters related to gender studies and her work frequently features the motif of groups of male models, captured through a female gaze. By combining her meticulous and airy style of ink painting with this perspective on male subjects, she attempts to create a unique visualisation of modern intimacy and sensuality. 

Recent exhibitions include Kaleidoscope Japan, an online group exhibition (2022), NAFAS - Emerging Women Artists (2021) at Maybank Gallery in Kuala Lumpur, Survival of the Exceptional (2020) at the Tainan Art Museum in Taiwan, amongst others. Her last solo exhibition was Casually Peeking at Suma Orientalis, Kuala Lumpur, in 2019. Besides that, Wong was selected as the Artist in Residence at Rimbun Dahan in 2019 and she has been featured in the book 100 Painters of Tomorrow by Thames & Hudson, published in 2014. Nomad is her seventh solo exhibition. 

Installation shots

Coming soon.

Artworks

Coming soon.

Budi Agung Kuswara, known to friends as “Kabul”, presents his latest exhibition, Tiba Anak Cucu at The Back Room this August. Translated into English, the Indonesian title means “The Descendants Emerge”. The exhibition is produced in collaboration with Mizuma Gallery.

At the heart of Kabul’s work is the cyanotype, a technique where sunlight exposure transforms photo negatives into distinct blue and white images. It is a technique with a deep sensitivity towards the movements of the sun, articulating a relationship with time, memory, and the past.

In his previous series, Anonymous Ancestors, Kabul delved into the colonial archives to explore the visages of various Balinese women who were left unidentified. These nameless women became subjects of his imagination, becoming dressed in European regalia as a way of reclaiming their agency. In Tiba Anak Cucu, he extends this vision to create a family tree, a genealogy of the descendants of those nameless women. Here, the modus is excess, extravagance, an embrace of the figure of the tycoon as a way of reimagining these descendants as taking back the prosperity that should have been their ancestors’. The result is a blend of traditional Balinese aesthetics with lavish elements to create fantastical legacies, ones which leap out from the canvas with unapologetic flourish.

Through his cyanotypes, Kabul invites us to see the sun not just as a source of light, but as a bridge connecting past and present, a storyteller of untold histories and imagined futures.

Please join us in welcoming Kabul and his works to Kuala Lumpur with an artist talk and opening reception this August 3rd (Saturday).

This exhibition is made possible with the support of PNB Merdeka Ventures and Think City.

Artist Talk: Saturday, 3 Aug, 3:00pm
Malaysia Design Archive, 84B The Zhongshan Building
Moderated by Ong Kar Jin

Opening reception: Saturday, 3 Aug, 5:00pm
Exhibition dates: 3 – 25 August 2024

About the Artist

Budi Agung Kuswara (b. 1982, Bali, Indonesia), also known as “Kabul”, is an artist known for his multi-media practice that crosses cyanotype printing, photography, and painting. Kabul graduated with a BA in Fine Art from the Indonesia Institute of Arts (ISI), Yogyakarta, in 2009. Trained in kamasan painting (a traditional Balinese narrative painting style, in the past used to decorate temples and palaces on the island), Kabul retains the intricacy and delicate linework of this traditional art form in his contemporary works. His paintings celebrate the treasury of aesthetic and cultural influences on the Indonesian archipelago, marrying these baroque sensibilities with observations on social tensions and dynamics.

Notable past exhibitions include Repose: Under The Sun at Kiniko Art Room, Yogyakarta, Indonesia (2023); Residual Memory at Mizuma Gallery, Singapore (2021); Arus Berlabuh Kita at the Asian Civilization Museum, Singapore (2018); Love Me in My Batik at ILHAM Gallery, Kuala Lumpur, Malaysia (2016); and The Wax on Our Fingers, a collaboration with Singaporean artist Samantha Tio (Mintio) at the Indonesian Contemporary Arts Network, Yogyakarta, Indonesia (2012); and his debut solo exhibition, i.self at Komaneka Fine Art Gallery, Bali, Indonesia (2009). He has also undertaken residencies at Bamboo Curtain Studio, Taipei, Taiwan (2016); Fukuoka Asian Art Museum, Fukuoka, Japan (2012); and TAKSU, Kuala Lumpur, Malaysia (2012). Budi Agung Kuswara currently lives and works across Singapore and Bali, where he co-founded Ketemu Project Space, a visual collective and social enterprise with a focus on social engagement.

Installation shots

Artworks

Warisan Rahasia di Hutan Kolonial (2024) — Artwork Reference and Narrative

Warisan Kembang Desa (2024) — Artwork Reference and Narrative

Warisan Sang Penjual Air (2024) — Artwork Reference and Narrative

Warisan Rosa (2024) — Artwork Reference and Narrative

The Back Room is pleased to announce our upcoming exhibition, Shadows in Time, a solo exhibition by Joshua Fitton. Shadows in Time will be Joshua’s second solo exhibition with the gallery and will feature 13 new ink drawings made with pieces from broken ceramic plates. Using the existing illustrations on the plates — which are all from his own personal collection that he’s amassed over the years, having inherited his father’s interest in history and archeology — as a portal for entry, Joshua creates imaginary worlds that are inspired by his own memories and experiences.

Joshua depicts his world in shards and symbols, drawing on actual places in time that he has had formative experiences in, but also embellishing them with symbols and motifs that render them more faithfully in terms of his subjective experience of them. Hence the anachronism of architectural styles from different periods and nations sitting alongside each other in a single composition, like ruins from classical Greek structures next to stately English country houses, or the curved eaves of Chinese temples adorning a modern shophouse, or a 19th-century German castle that’s the stuff of fairytales appearing in a tropical jungle scene.

Such anachronisms prevail in fact in contemporary architecture, and perhaps arise from the same sentiment for the exotic and extravagant which generated such a craze for chinoiserie in 18th-century Europe. In Joshua’s works, this romantic tendency to borrow elements from other cultures in order to express one’s own sensibility or to tell one’s own stories is only the natural result of the modern condition, with its ease of access to foreign knowledge, experiences, and influences and fluidity of exchange across human societies. Through his work, Joshua also explores questions of storytelling and identity that perhaps trail anyone who has any serious interest in history, attempting in the process not to arrive at any hard truths but instead to make sense of one’s own life and times, as faithfully as one is able to.

This exhibition is made possible with the support of PNB Merdeka Ventures and Think City.

Opening reception: Saturday, 29 June at 6:30pm

Exhibition dates: 29 June – 28 July 2024

About the Artist

Joshua Fitton (b. 1987, Bath, England) 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. Shadows in Time is his second solo exhibition to date. 

Installation shots

Selected artworks

The Back Room is pleased to announce our upcoming show, Inventory of Intimacies, a group exhibition featuring three emerging Malaysian artists working with textiles: Ang Xia Yi, Cheong See Min, and Nia Khalisa. Within their practices, textiles, found fabrics, and fibres are used as means for recording time and history on a more intimate scale, against the backdrop of grander societal narratives. Represented in the show are a range of textile and fibre mediums, including pictorial patchwork quilting, weaving, and batik drawings. 

Inventory of Intimacies looks at three practices that harness textile’s ability across its diverse sub-practices to capture the fluid and indistinct quality of memory. Less faithful than photography or statistics, less crystallising than language, all of which fix memory in too precise a representation, textiles, by their very nature, convey impressions that appeal to the sensual side of human nature and the soft comfort of nostalgia. 

In Ang Xia Yi’s practice, found fabrics are selected from household fabric stockpiles accumulated over generations or found at old-school fabric shops. Fabrics are selected for the ways they correspond to the fashions of a certain era in her childhood or the youth of her mother, aunts, and grandmother, as gleaned through photographs or through anecdotes shared at home. The fabrics are used to recreate the mise-en-scene of old photographs dug out of the family archives, as sewn patchwork. In the translation of photographs into textiles, not only are old black-and-white photographs transformed into colour, but they also accrue new sentiments through the found fabrics used to create them which, despite their personal significance to Xia Yi, are yet familiar and common enough to evoke memories in anyone. In the translation, like any translation, they also evoke the gap between the artist’s own present with the time of the photographs, and her attempt to reach over it. 

Batik tjap pictures by Nia Khalisa (who goes by “Lisa”), also evoke a sense of nostalgia through the sepia tints of the wax and the faded, rustic appearance of the hand-dyed fabrics that they are printed on. Her imperfect images with ragged outlines and liberal amounts of negative space create a dual sense of serenity and alienation. The subjects of her stamps, which are custom-made according to her drawings, are inspired by creatures, plants, and patterns from her surroundings. A long spell in Indonesia to study art and batik, frequent collaborations with Bon Ton Resort in Langkawi, built on an old plantation site, and frequent day trips into the jungle while back in Selangor keep her in contact with nature. The spaces in her pictures convey a sort of spiritual calm and perfect isolation within nature, but could also be interpreted as a disquieting emptiness by those used to the density of cities. A new line of experiment within her practice are the three hanging pattern chains made of stamped fabric cut-outs cast in resin and linked together, like those mobiles that hang above children’s cots to lull them to sleep. 

Cheong See Min also plays with a sense of incompletion within her practice. Presented in the Inventory are two new woven pieces along with a few smaller, earlier works that are suspended in the space in order that viewers may see the works’ front and back. Many of the works are finished with loose threads at the back, a picture of soft and tantalising disorder to contrast the rigid locked fibres at the front. The yarns have been carefully selected through processes of research and experimentation and many have been dyed using natural pigments derived from plants such as pomegranate, gambir, and tumeric. Research into the properties and histories of the plant inform See Min’s subject matter for the artwork, and vice versa. It is through all these small choices made that the works are realised. Her subject matter is inspired by daily observations of her surroundings and elements in stories told by her friends and family. 

Such practices are a way of forming intimacy with others, even with strangers. The small stories, memories, and impressions that make up a life are woven into the work and are the essence that the works try to express. Like a sewing box, often kept by female members of a family and filled with scraps of fabric, threads, needles, and spare buttons from every single piece of buttoned clothing that every member of the family has ever bought. The exhibition invites thinking into how textiles express notions of memory, personal and shared, and how they can be analysed as documents of time on a human scale, in contrast to documents of photography or writing. The Inventory is an intimate archive, an ordered sewing box (if such a thing could possibly exist), and gaps that are also bridges.

This exhibition is made possible with the support of PNB Merdeka Ventures and Think City. 

Artist Talk with Ang Xia Yi, Cheong See Min, and Nia Khalisa
Date: Saturday, 1 June 2024
Time: 3pm - 4pm
Venue: Changing Room, 82B The Zhongshan Building
Free entry, no registration needed, open to all

Opening reception: Saturday, 1 June at 5pm

Exhibition dates: 1 – 23 June 2024

About the Artists

Ang Xia Yi (b. 1996, Kuala Lumpur) is an artist from Kuala Lumpur, Malaysia. Her practice focuses on history, memory, identity politics and the emotional consequences of colonialism, as well as wider issues concerning Southeast Asia. She embraces a mixed-media approach moving seamlessly between photography, drawing, painting and archival intervention using everyday materials such as inherited domestic textiles. Her interest lies in the vernacular aspects of material culture, viewing materials as carriers of intimacy, trauma and violence that transcend beyond generations.

 In 2017, she briefly pursued her BA in Fashion Journalism at Central Saint Martins, London and has previously worked in image- and garment-making. In 2021, she was selected to participate in a residency programme by Openbooks International (Wales) with The Godown (Kuala Lumpur) and China Academy of Art (Hangzhou). Her most recent group exhibitions include Interwoven Realities (2024) at HARTA Space, Kuala Lumpur; Ways Of Seeing (2023) at CULT Gallery, Kuala Lumpur; and 1000 Tiny Artworks (2023) at The Back Room, Kuala Lumpur. 

Cheong See Min (b. 1994, Johor) is a multidisciplinary artist currently practising between Malaysia and Taiwan. See Min's practice interrogates the relationship between human nature and the tropics. She considers weaving an act of communication that mediates between the past and present. Informed by social behavioural observations made during her international travel and residency experiences, See Min's textile works seek to reflect on the boundaries of life, employing tactile materials in an attempt to embody different layers of spatial and experiential narratives.

 See Min holds her BA in Fine Art from Tunghai University and an MA from Tainan National University of Art, Taiwan. She was awarded second runner up for the Nando's Art Initiative (2017), shortlisted for Bakat Muda Sezaman Young Contemporaries (2019) and the International Biennale Exhibition of Micro Textile Art in Scythia, Ukraine (2021). Her works have been shown in galleries and art fairs in Malaysia, Taiwan, Bangkok and Ukraine. Recent residencies include Islands Art Park (Taichung, Taiwan, 2021), Rimbun Dahan (Kuala Lumpur, Malaysia, 2022), and Gasworks (London, United Kingdom, 2023).

Nia Khalisa (b. 1995, Selangor), who goes by Lisa, is an artist who explores alternative approaches to art-making, often incorporating craft techniques into her work. In 2019, she spent some time in Indonesia to study Batik Kriya in Surakarta, which led to her present interest in the batik craft. Historically, the humble batik is "a cloth with purpose", and reflects the culture and traditions of the people who practise it. 

 As Batik motifs draw inspiration from its surrounding ecosystem, Lisa similarly adapts the elements and motifs of traditional Batik design towards an expression of her own personal experiences and observations. In her practice, she also experiments with the use of natural dyes and botanical printing. The modest tones of naturally-dyed textiles harmonise gently with her quiet and delicate imagery.

Nia Khalisa graduated with a diploma in Fine Art from the Malaysian Institute of Art in Kuala Lumpur. She has participated in residencies locally and abroad, including a residency in Solo, Indonesia, and at Bon Ton, Langkawi. Recently, she has been conducting batik-making workshops with the tjanting (drawing with a wax drip) and tjap (wax stamping) in Kuala Lumpur.

Installation shots

Photos courtesy of Kenta Chai.

Selected artworks

The Back Room is pleased to announce our upcoming exhibition, wtfing it then omging it, a solo exhibition by Yogyakarta-based artist Galih Johar. The exhibition will showcase works from Galih’s ongoing Manipulative Object Alteration (MAO) Project, which sees him modifying everyday objects and turning them into dysfunctional or otherwise non-functional “sculptures” that possess a “broken logic”. 

Galih’s artworks fall more comfortably within the artistic tradition of the “readymade” rather than sculptures, at least in the sense that general audiences might be familiar with. His artworks are made like visual puns or jokes, by taking everyday objects with an immediately recognisable function (like a pair of work boots) and modifying their form in such a way that subverts said function (by turning the work boots into slippers). Thus the object develops a new function in a literal sense (from work boots into slippers), or becomes dysfunctional, but they also adopt the newer function of becoming “art”, with all the ambiguous connotations that such a label might entail. 

Having just emerged from two major achievements in 2023, namely, his first participation in a large institutional show (the group show Voice Against Reason at Museum MACAN) and the mounting of his third solo exhibition (Manunggal at Cemeti Institute for Art and Society), we are excited to be bringing Galih, his works, and his individual sense of humour to our humble gallery this May. 

The exhibition is accompanied by a collaborative zine by Galih Johar and Indonesian curator Grace Samboh, with interpretive texts by Grace Samboh for each of the individual artworks. Linked below.

This exhibition is made possible with the support of PNB Merdeka Ventures and Think City. 

Opening reception: Saturday, 11 May at 5 pm 

Exhibition dates: 11 – 26 May 2024

Exhibition Essays

About the Artist

Back in the day, Galih Johar (b. 1990, Yogyakarta, Indonesia) graduated with a major in ceramics from the Institut Seni Indonesia (ISI) in Yogyakarta. At the time, the use of clay had become a daily fixation for him, on the pretext that some of the substances contained in clay formed from soil are the same as those found in the human body, such as calcium, magnesium, ferrum, potassium, and silica. At the time, Galih assumed that perhaps the composition of soil was the result of the decomposition of living things. Over time, he discovered that soil elements were also present in other familiar objects from everyday life. If all things are ultimately material, then many questions arise about the meaning and value of life. From there, Galih Johar started playing around with values, using any available materials for his art. His works are an attempt at expressing his point of view, using a unique visual language. 

Since graduating from ISI in 2017, Galih has had three solo exhibitions: Alterasi at BACKSPACE Art Lab & Museum, Yogyakarta, in 2020; Ruang Rekayasa, Alterasi Chapter Sukabumi at Rumah Mesra, West Java, in 2021; and Manunggal at CEMETI - Institute for Art and Society, Yogyakarta, in 2023. He has participated in group exhibitions, including seeing things at Kohesi Initatives, Tirtodipuran Link Building A, Yogyakarta (2024); Voice Against Reason at Museum MACAN, Jakarta (2023); The Things Are Things Whose Things Do Not Only Mean Things at ACE House Collective, Yogyakarta (2023); and the 13th edition of the Indonesian Contemporary Art and Design showcase at Grandkemang, Jakarta (2023). wtfing it then omging it will be Galih’s fourth solo exhibition and his first time exhibiting in Kuala Lumpur. 

Installation shots

Selected artworks

The Back Room is pleased to present our upcoming exhibition, Siklus, a solo exhibition by Octo Cornelius. A visual artist and woodworker based in Yogyakarta, Indonesia, Octo is known for his assemblages of wood, stone, and other found materials from his everyday surroundings. Siklus presents a number of small assemblages and sculptures created by Octo in his first solo exhibition in Kuala Lumpur. 

The exhibition is curated by Nala Nandana (Bandung, ID) who has chosen the title Siklus (or “cycles”) in reference to ideas of repetition, patterns, and flows. The concept of siklus reflects the nature of various phenomena in the universe, in which things tend to experience cyclical patterns of change and recurrence over time. 

Octo works using found objects that have gone through various types of processing (such as being used previously as furniture or decoration) before they wind up in his hands to be transformed into an artwork. Octo's ideas attempt to provide a narrative for forgotten or overlooked materials, believing that they possess a compelling story and unexpected potential. Through stories of the past retold and dreams of the future realised, the found object can become a symbol of eternity and continued life. A once dead place now resonates with new life, proving that it is possible to rebuild and start again.

This exhibition is made possible with the support of Incopro, The Mogus, PNB Merdeka Ventures, and Think City. 

Exhibition dates: 6 – 28 April 2024
Opening reception: Saturday, 6 April from 5 pm onwards

Talks

Artist talk with Octo Cornelius
6 April, 11 am – 12 pm
Malaysia Design Archive, 84B The Zhongshan Building

A case study of 10 years of creative interventions in the Bandung art scene
A talk by Nala Nandana
6 April, 3 pm – 4 pm
Malaysia Design Archive, 84B The Zhongshan Building

About the Artist

Octo Cornelius (b. 1981, Rembang, Indonesia) is a visual artist currently based in Yogyakarta. He was educated at the Institut Seni Yogyakarta (ISI). Octo has had solo exhibitions in Indonesia and Singapore, including "Mengukur Ulang" at C On Temporary, Bandung (2023), "Langkah Tak Berhenti" at Kedai Kebun Forum, Yogyakarta (2020), and "Unpredictable Scenes" at Jogja Contemporary, Yogyakarta (2017). He has participated in group exhibitions and art fairs around the world, including at Para Site Hong Kong, Cemeti - Institute for Art and Society, Art Jakarta, Indonesian Contemporary Art & Design (ICAD), and more. He was previously also an active maker and performer with Papermoon Puppet Theatre.

About the Curator

Nala Nandana (b. 1985, Bandung) is a lecturer in the Department of Film and Television, Faculty of Arts and Design Education, Universitas Pendidikan Indonesia in Bandung and a curator for several art exhibitions and film festivals. Nala is also active in conducting research into cultural studies and new media in various artistic practices.

Installation shots

Selected Artworks

A Patchwork of Identities
An essay on the work of Dexter Sy
by Ryan Francis Reyes

The Chinese diaspora has resulted in the formation of distinct identities as a vibrant cultural exchange took place between the Chinese migrants and the various local communities where they settled. In Southeast Asia which is home to the largest overseas Chinese population in the world, the encounter blossomed into ethnicities such as the Peranakans – characterized by a hybrid of ancient Chinese and local cultures of the Nusantara region, further layered with Western influences brought by the region’s colonial history. In the Philippines, they are colloquially known today as the Tsinoys. Though far less in number than people with Chinese ancestry in Malaysia, this group has nevertheless contributed significantly to the shaping of the country’s social, cultural, and economic life. 

The intersection of Chinese and Filipino heritage lies at the heart of Dexter Sy’s art practice. Born to a Chinese father and Filipino mother, the artist constructs his self-identity along these two different cultures. His works on the one hand pay homage to and celebrate the rich legacies of his Chinese and Filipino lineages – acquiring values, traditions, and lifeways from two distinct sources, hence experiencing a diverse upbringing. On the other, he also expresses the difficulties of growing up in a family with a mixed cultural background, at times confronted by a crisis of identity and grappling with a sense of belonging on both sides. As part of a distinct ethnic community, he often deals with expectations, misconceptions, and stereotyping of Chinese-Filipinos, which include being affluent, traditional, and conservative, to name but a few. He challenges these assumptions by juxtaposing Chinese and Filipino symbols and imagery with those drawn from pop culture and other facets of his personality which are seemingly incongruous with the local perception of Tsinoys.  

In this exhibition, Sy revisits his affair with identity crisis and interprets the experience of navigating between two different worlds in a collection of intermedia works. In two-dimensional pieces, he recreates some old portraits – a foremost medium used in recording, idealizing, and immortalizing identities. Faces of individuals and couples dressed in traditional Chinese garb are transformed into highly stylized paintings layered generously with meticulous pen and ink drawings and accentuated by patches of carpets and strands of red threads. In this intervention, individual identities are blurred, and they morph seamlessly into dreamlike, flat compositions in vibrant palette. They become unrecognizable and are woven into tapestries with a sumptuous gathering of visual elements that embodies the pastiche of influences defining the artist’s personal identity. Catholic iconography and Philippine folklore represented by the recurring imagery of the Sacred Heart, Eye of Providence, and monster-like creatures are laid out in an overall composition reminiscent of Chinese folk paintings and a predominantly red color scheme evoking an auspicious symbol in Chinese tradition. 

Sections of these intricate and detailed drawings reappear as large patches in nude figures covered with a constellation of lines, dots, and Chinese texts. These networks indicate meridians in the human body, a key concept in Chinese medicine. While these sculptures give another nod to the artist’s Chinese roots, they can also be symbolic of the confluence of Chinese and Filipino identities in what can be regarded as the ultimate site of identity expression – the body. In these forms, we see the body marked and analyzed according to Chinese knowledge system. At the same time, it is embellished with configurations similar to body paint or tattoos that blend harmoniously with the plotted meridian points and easily turn into nodal regions of the entire anatomy.          

Exhibition dates: 15 – 31 March 2024
Opening reception: Saturday, 16 March from 3 pm – 7 pm

About the Artist

Dexter Sy (b. 1979, Manila, the Philippines) graduated with a degree in Fine Arts with a major in Advertising from the Far Eastern University in Manila, where he also currently teaches as a special lecturer. Sy mostly works in two-dimensional media, often combining painting with pen and ink drawing. Characteristics of his work include colourful figures that are rendered and stylised with minute details, such as lines, textures, and patterns drawn from diverse cultural references including pop culture, Philippine folk mythology, and Christian iconography. Through his art, he explores the complexities of identity, memory, kinship, and belonging. 

Sy has had numerous solo exhibitions since 2008, in the Philippines at Kaida Contemporary, UP Vargas Museum, Ayala Museum, West Gallery, Boston Gallery, 1335 Mabini, Artcube Gallery, and Bencab Museum, and internationally at Haslla Art World Museum in South Korea and Centre Intermondes at La Rochelle, France. He has received the Philip Morris Philippine Art Award several times, securing the Jurors’ Choice in 2010 and 2012 and the Grand Prize in 2016.

Installation shots

Selected Artworks

Folded Lines brings together the works of UK-based artists Laura Porter and Gabriela Giroletti with those of Malaysia-based artists Lee Mok Yee and Mark Tan, spanning 3D and 2D works including sculptures, reliefs, drawings, paintings, and prints. The body of work explores personal and universal interactions with urban environments, man-made materials, and architectural spaces through a process-driven approach to making. All four artists transform shape and form through simple gestures, exploring in-between spaces that feel both static and alive, organic and inanimate. 

Gabriela’s work straddles the space between painting and object, refusing to be confined to the boundaries of the canvas. Through her build-up of layers and colour, her style is characterised by the gradual development of surfaces, which become a hazy field of both micro and macro sensibility, referencing the monumental sensation of being submerged within the landscape and the microscopic beauty that lays the foundation for the natural world. 

Mok Yee explores the organic world through the lens of found and industrial woods. In the works he presents for this exhibition, he tears and layers cork wood—a heavily processed material used in manufacturing and construction—using low-tech processes and elements of chance, in an attempt to capture the natural form of the material, where it exists somewhere between the organic and the man-made. The investigation of material language is expanded upon by combining the cork wood with deconstructed furniture, thinking about how our bodies move and interact with objects and space.

Laura Porter also uses low-tech bodily processes to deconstruct and reconstruct material, cutting down used items of clothing into minuscule fibres and using organic substances that transform the textiles into rigid structures. Combining this ‘new material’ with distorted metal frameworks, she subverts the soft fabric into solid material, and the solid material into something seemingly unstable, challenging our material world and reimagining these forms as quasi-living entities. Thinking about how material consciousness becomes imbued within the fabric of spaces, Laura’s work explores how the body becomes a site of action, and a renewable energy source, whilst referring back to the manufacturing process of the garments themselves. 

Similarly, Mark Tan is concerned with the spaces we inhabit and traverse, exploring the hidden and forgotten moments, the unseen spaces, and the corners in which our consciousness gets lost and found. Taking visual references from these built environments and urban spaces, Mark creates textured surfaces that constantly refer back to the tradition and processes of printmaking and drawing, where the hand of the artist is ever present. 

Folded Lines explores the transformation of materials and forms, and the hand-made processes that are at the root of the artist’s explorations. Against the backdrop of an urbanised, digitised culture, Mok Yee, Mark, Laura and Gabriela choose a physical, slow approach to making, pushing the boundaries of their mediums whilst remaining grounded in the traditions of their craft. 

Text by Laura Porter

Exhibition dates: 17 February – 10 March 2024
Opening reception: Sunday, 18 February from 3–7pm
Artist tour: Sunday, 18 February at 3pm

About the Artists

Gabriela Giroletti (b. 1982, Brazil) is a Brazilian painter currently living and working in London. In 2018, she received her MFA in Painting (distinction) from the UCL, Slade School of Fine Art, where she held a position as an Honorary Research Fellow from 2019-20. In 2015, Giroletti graduated with a BA in Fine Arts (first class) from the Middlesex University, London. In 2024, she will have solo presentations in Paris, Palm Beach, and São Paulo. 

Laura Porter (b. 1991, England) is an artist and curator, having studied BA Fine Art at Middlesex University and MA Sculpture at University of the Arts London. Her work has been exhibited across the UK, commissioned by galleries, and shortlisted for awards. Laura is the founding director of Studio KIND. CIC, an artist-led gallery in Devon.

Lee Mok Yee (b. 1988, Klang, Malaysia) is a Malaysia visual artist currently based in Kuala Lumpur. He graduated with a Diploma from the Dasein Academy of Art and a Bacherlor’s in Fine Art from Middlesex University in London. Mok Yee has exhibited in Singapore, France, South Korea, UK and Germany, received awards such as the UOB Painting Award, and has undertaken residencies at Rimbun Dahan and in Arles, supported by the Institut Francaise.  

Mark Tan (b. 1991, Kuala Lumpur) is an artist based in Kuala Lumpur. He received his BA in Drawing and Applied Arts from the University of West England. Mark is one of the recipients of the Khazanah Nasional Residency in 2022/23 and over the years he has exhibited both locally and internationally in Singapore, Indonesia, France, and the UK.

Installation shots

Photos courtesy of Laura Porter

Selected Artworks

The Back Room at ART SG 2024

The Back Room is proud to announce its first-time participation in a regional art fair at the second edition of ART SG 2024. Located in the FUTURES section at Level 1 of Marina Bay Sands Expo & Convention Centre, the main section of the booth presents works by Antonio Pichillá Quiacaín (GT), Marcos Kueh (MY/NT), and Red Hong Yi (MY), all of whom will be showing large, textile-based works broadly revolving around themes of identity and independence. The booth is anchored by a fluorescent, multi-work woven installation by Marcos Kueh that touches on themes of the postcolonial subject, flanked by textile works by Antonio Pichillá Quiacaín inspired by his indigenous identity, and a new piece by Red Hong Yi on motherhood.

A separate viewing experience is the “back room”, a specially-built corridor at the back of the booth that features a mixed hang of works by Hoo Fan Chon, Liew Kwai Fei, Minstrel Kuik, Ong Hieng Fuong, and W. Rajaie, all of whom represent some of the most promising contemporary artists working in Malaysia today.

In addition, we are working with Marcos Kueh and Galerie Ron Mandos to present “Woven Billboards: Nenek Moyang” by Marcos Kueh, a public art installation from his Kenyalang Circus series for ART SG PLATFORM.

ART SG 2024 Fair dates: 18 January 2024 (VIP Preview & Vernissage), 19 – 21 January 2024 (Public viewing)

Installation shots

Photos courtesy of Esmond Sit

Marcos Kueh, “Woven Billboards: Nenek Moyang” public installation

Photos courtesy of Allen Tan

VIP Preview Day and Vernissage (18 January 2024)

Photos courtesy of Esmond Sit

At the Fair

A group exhibition featuring artists on view at The Back Room booth at ART SG 2024

A mixed-hang group exhibition presenting five of the artists exhibiting at our booth at ART SG 2024, namely Hoo Fan Chon, Liew Kwai Fei, Minstrel Kuik, Ong Hieng Fuong, and W. Rajaie.

On view are new paintings by Liew Kwai Fei from his “Gesture. Abstraction. Painting” series (2019—ongoing) and W. Rajaie, along with new prints by Ong Hieng Fuong made during his ongoing studies at the China Central Academy of Fine Arts in Beijing. Minstrel Kuik will be showing her three-part graphite drawing “Durian Queen and Her Reign” from 2022 and Hoo Fan Chon will be showing selections from the Finnish Landscape Painting series, initiated during his residency in Finland in 2022.

Exhibition dates: 6 January – 4 February 2024

Installation shots

Selected Artworks

The Back Room is pleased to announce our upcoming exhibition and our last exhibition of the year. Titled Favouritism Is My Favourite -Ism, this group show will be produced by the artist chi too and will feature 11 artists at varying stages of their careers. As the title may suggest, the exhibition compiles 11 of his favourite artists, namely: Binti, CC Kua, Dipali Gupta, Foo May Lyn, Hoo Fan Chon, Jerome Kugan, Jun Kit, Liew Kwai Fei, Siti Gunong, Syahnan Anuar, and Wong Hoy Cheong.

The inception of the show’s premise is drawn from chi too’s own observations and experiences as an art worker in the Malaysian art scene. It marks the first time that chi too has produced an exhibition that is not his own. chi too, who works as a project manager for a private art museum and has been active as an artist in Kuala Lumpur since the late 00s, has always had a healthy skepticism towards the prestige and power that curators wield in the art world, observing that most shows that feature a curator byline are merely roll calls of the curator’s (or gallery’s) favourite artists. In alignment with the aims of chi too’s own art practice, the present show’s title and its premise poke fun at the conceits, assumptions, and everyday delusions of grandeur with which people flatter themselves. It pokes holes through the language that people use to ascribe importance to their work (and being important is a particular worry for art world professionals, who are aware of their industry’s recreational status in the wider function of society) and bluntly delivers the obvious in such a way that the delusions no longer seem tenable. 

On a secondary level, the show also serves as a snapshot into the artists who emerged around the Central Market Annexe milieu during its heyday of the late 00s. Wong Hoy Cheong was a large influence on chi too’s own artistic practice, while Hoo Fan Chon, Jerome Kugan, Jun Kit, and Liew Kwai Fei were his peers. All of these artists have a shared history with chi too. Many of them began their art careers making socially-engaged art, yet have since developed more “purely art” concerns or are presenting subtext-less works for the present exhibition; all the same, their works are united by a generous dose of humour. This sensibility—socially-conscious, yet also humorous and detached—perhaps also explains chi too’s taste in selecting his favourite emerging artists within this exhibition. Binti, CC Kua, Siti Gunong, and Syahnan Anuar all make works that have a whimsical and punk-ish humour. Dipali Gupta and Foo May Lyn are outliers, having both emerged in different contexts from the rest, but similar sensibilities in their works can still be found. 

As with most of chi too’s endeavours, it is a show that will lead you to thinking in circles the more you think about what sort of point it’s trying to make, while at the same time realising that there may not be a point at all. With such thoughts in mind, we invite you to visit and delight in chi too’s “curated” selection of his favourite artists (who also happen to number among our gallery’s roster of artists) and to join us in tasteful mingling at the opening of this group show on December 9th, from 7pm onwards.

About the Producer

chi too is an art worker and artist. He is also a journalist, filmmaker, carpenter, and baker. His goal in life is to be a kitchen assistant where all he does is cut up ingredients and clean kitchens.

About the Artists

Binti is a poet, sister, daughter. Binti's works follow the frequencies of being by Binti for Binti, reclaiming the derogatory term often labelled to artists of being “Syok Sendiri” (“In one's own head”) as a benchmark to invite innovation.

With a tertiary education in cinema, Binti puts this forward through unrestricted channels that include poetry performances, film screenings, and art exhibitions. Past poetry performances include the JB Writers Readers festival (2017), Rantai Art (2019), performance artist for Lunadira and I-Sky’s 'Suara Kamar' (2020), and at CIMB Artober (2021, 2022). She has screened films through the Open Screen platform at Seashorts Film Festival in 2022. Her art has been included in group shows at CULT Gallery including Ways of Seeing (2022), Momento (2022), and Realpolitik (2023). 

Besides individual approaches, Binti is also a part of the Malaysian collective duo, Mati, and the Creative Advisor of local multidisciplinary platform, Mulazine.

CC Kua (b. 1991, Kedah, Malaysia) is a visual artist, graphic designer, and lecturer based in Kuala Lumpur. She obtained a BA (Hons) in Graphic Design and Illustration from The One Academy (degree conferred by the University of Hertfordshire) before pursuing a Master of Fine Arts from the Graduate Institute of Plastic Arts at Tainan National University of the Arts, Taiwan. She works primarily in contemporary painting and drawing, finding inspiration in the simple joys of everyday life and dreams that dance through her head.

Her debut solo exhibition was Mosquito Bite in 2016, followed by Left A Bit, Right A Bit, Up A Bit, Down A Bit in 2019, both at Lostgens’ Contemporary Art Space, Kuala Lumpur. In 2020, she was selected for the Southeast Asian Arts Residency Programme at Rimbun Dahan, Malaysia. Shortly after, she had her third solo exhibition, featuring works produced during the residency, titled All By Myself at The Back Room, Kuala Lumpur (2020). Her works have also been selected for group exhibitions around Kuala Lumpur and Taipei. 

Dipali Gupta (b. 1977, Mumbai, India) is a multidisciplinary artist based in Kuala Lumpur 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 Aid Projects (Uncertain Relaxation, 2020) and Suma Orientalis (2019), both in Kuala Lumpur. Her debut solo exhibition was Desire Lines at The Back Room, Kuala Lumpur, in 2022.

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 Asynchronicity at Charim Schleifmühlgasse, Vienna, Austria, in 2022, and Fracture/Fiction: Selections from the ILHAM Collection at ILHAM Gallery, Kuala Lumpur, in 2019. 

She lives still. In Penang.

The practice of visual artist Hoo Fan Chon (Malaysia, b. 1982) explores food consumption as a constant negotiation between nature and culture. His incisive and humorous works investigate value systems surrounding taste as social and cultural constructs. 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. His most recent solo exhibition was The World is Your Restaurant at The Back Room, Kuala Lumpur, Malaysia (2021); in 2023, he re-presented some works from this exhibition in the group show Table Manners, curated by Tan Siuli, at Appetite, Singapore. He was selected for the 3rd edition of the Makassar Biennale, and participated in the SEA-AiR Studio Residencies organised by NTU CCA Singapore and the European Union in Helsinki, Finland (2022) as well as Nusantara Archive’s No Man’s Land Residency, Taiwan (2017-2018). He was the co-founder of art collective Run Amok Gallery (2012-2017).

Jerome Kugan (b. 1975, Kota Kinabalu) is an artist based between Kuala Lumpur and Kota Kinabalu. Graduating with a BA in Writing from the University of Canberra in 1998, he has worked in various capacities as a writer, event organiser, musician, and queer activist in Kuala Lumpur. 

In 2008, he co-organised Seksualiti Merdeka, a gender and sexuality rights festival in KL, until it was banned by the Malaysian government in 2011. In 2012, he founded Rainbow Rojak, a series of queer-inclusive themed parties in KL. 

Although he has been exhibiting his artworks since 2005, it was only in 2016 that he began pursuing his art practice full-time, presenting his first solo Red & Gold at Raw Arts Space in Kuala Lumpur. In 2017, he moved back to his hometown of Kota Kinabalu, where he has continued to explore themes of queerness, spirituality and the self, in his mixed media paintings. In 2022, he staged his second solo show in two parts, HURT|NEED|UNDO|LIVE and RESIST, at The Back Room, Kuala Lumpur. 

Jun Kit is a graphic designer and illustrator. He has contributed to a range of projects within the realms of art, publishing, theatre and activism, and has exhibited drawings and photographs in Kuala Lumpur, Singapore, and Tokyo.

Liew Kwai Fei (b. 1979, Kuantan, Pahang) 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.

Siti Gunong is a self-taught multidisciplinary artist who expresses herself across various mediums, including sewing, collage, printmaking, tattoos, drawing, and paintings. Her artworks reflect a special mix of thought-provoking insight and humour. The themes of her art are inspired by her personal experiences and the people and influences throughout her upbringing. She has exhibited her work in several group exhibitions, including 1000 Tiny Artworks at The Back Room, KL (2023); Wanita Merdeka at Rumah Api, KL (2023); Saturday High-Tea by Papu at Publika, KL (2022); and Instalasi & Intisari by Tandang Record Store at The Zhongshan Building (2019).

Syahnan Anuar is a visual artist hailing from Machang, Kelantan, but currently based in Kuala Lumpur, where he also runs the Bogus Merchandise silkscreen printing company. He works primarily in the medium of silkscreen across different surfaces. His works explore the personal and political tensions in his lived experience as a Malay-Muslim male living in 21st-century Malaysia. 

His debut solo presentation was Potret Diri at The Back Room, Kuala Lumpur, in 2023. He has also participated in numerous group shows, including Realpolitik at CULT Gallery (2023), New Editions at Chetak17 (2023), Art is Fair at Fahrenheit 88 (2021), Wonderwall at The Back Room (2020), Awan & Tanah at CULT Gallery (2019), and Rethinking Editions at OUR ArtProjects (2019); all in Kuala Lumpur. 

Wong Hoy Cheong was born in Penang, Malaysia, in 1960. He received a BA in literature from Brandeis University, Massachusetts, in 1982, and an M.Ed. from Harvard University in 1984. In 1986, he received an MFA in painting from the University of Massachusetts, Amherst, and in 2011 was awarded the Rockefeller Foundation Bellagio Creative Fellowship. In an attempt to escape the solitude and stasis of painting, Wong now employs mediums that he considers collaborative, and which effectively mix historical depth with human immediacy; he works in drawing, photography, video, installation, and performance. During the 1990s, he developed an interest in the migration of plants. This inquiry led him to investigate human migration and the related subjects of race, colonization, and indigeneity. 

Wong has been the subject of solo exhibitions at the National Art Gallery, Kuala Lumpur (1996 and 2004), and at other venues around the world including Kunsthalle, Vienna (2003); Pitt Rivers Museum, Oxford (2004); NUS Museum and Gallery, Singapore (2008); and Eslite Gallery, Taipei (2010). His work has also been included in group exhibitions internationally, including the Asia Pacific Triennial, Brisbane (1996); Art in Southeast Asia: Glimpses into the Future, Museum of Contemporary Art, Tokyo (1997); Fukuoka Asian Art Triennial, Japan (1999 and 2009); Venice Biennale (2003); Liverpool Biennial (2004); Guangzhou Triennial, China (2005); Asian Contemporary Art in Print, Asia Society, New York (2006); Naked Life, Museum of Contemporary Art, Taipei (2006); Istanbul Biennial (2007); Taipei Biennial (2008); Lyon Biennial, France (2009); Negotiating Home, History, and Nation at the Singapore Art Museum (2011); and PhotoEspana (2011). Wong lives and works in Penang, Malaysia. 

INSTALLATION SHOTS

Photos courtesy of Kenta Chai.

SELECTED ARTWORKS

Pagar & Padi is a collaborative project by Sabah-based artists, Catriona Maddocks and Gindung Mc Feddy Simon. It has travelled to Kuala Lumpur by way of Kota Kinabalu, where it was first exhibited throughout August–September 2023 at Kota-K Art Gallery.

Pagar & Padi presents the documentation of a piece of land art created by Maddocks and Simon in collaboration with community members of Kampung Kilimu, a rural village at the foothills of Mount Kinabalu. In 2022, the artist collaborator duo participated in the annual “Mongomot” rice-planting event, using heritage rice grains to spell out the word “JAMIN” (“guarantee” in Malay) into the earth at Kampung Kilimu. In March 2023, the artists harvested the padi and documented the process through drone photography and videography. The documentation was presented first at Kota-K art gallery. In early November the artists will once again return to the Padi fields in Ranau to re-plant the land art, and the documentation will be exhibited, in a slightly adapted form, at The Back Room gallery, Kuala Lumpur. 

The 20-feet piece of land art commemorates the formation of Malaysia and the terms by which Sabah agreed to its role in the building of the Malaysian nation. “Jamin”, the chosen word planted in padi, references the Keningau Batu Sumpah of 1964, on which a plaque stated that the Malaysian government guaranteed (“jamin”) the rights to freedom of religion, land autonomy and the practice of customs and traditions.

The work also celebrates the role that rice plays in the daily lives and traditional belief systems of rural Sabahans, and the necessity for community members to come together in the spirit of “gotong-royong” (collective clean-up) to assist one another in the annual harvest.

Maddocks said of the work, “Rice has been cultivated by communities in Borneo for countless generations, and in return rice has cultivated customs, beliefs, traditions and rich oral histories throughout this island. To take this significant staple food and utilise it to create an artwork was really exciting, especially as we had the opportunity to work alongside local community members and learn from them techniques, songs and taboos that have been passed down from their ancestors.”

Opening reception: Saturday, 11 November 2023, from 4 pm onwards

About the Artists

Gindung Mc Feddy Simon is an artist, musician and researcher from Ranau in Sabah, Malaysian Borneo. He is the co-founder of the printmaking art collective Pangrok Sulap, and a revivalist of the traditional boat lute from Sabah, the sundatang. Learning techniques, songs and folklore from community elders, he is an instrument maker and also the founder of Tuni Sundatang, a contemporary ethno-fusion six-piece band. As a child, he helped his family plant and harvest padi, but this is the first time that he has returned, as an adult, to padi-planting to produce the land art that forms the centrepiece of Pagar & Padi.

Catriona Maddocks is a curator, artist, and researcher from the U.K., currently based in Sarawak, Malaysian Borneo. Her cross-disciplinary work focuses on collaborative platform-building and developing spaces in which to explore identity, community narratives, and cultural heritage within a contemporary context. She is the co-founder of Catama and Borneo Bengkel, and lead researcher for Borneo Boat Lute Revival, focusing on museum collections around the world that contain Bornean artifacts, ensuring that they and Bornean voices are correctly represented. She has worked with rural communities documenting cultural practices for a decade but this artwork is the first time she has combined her art, research and creative practices to explore land activism and indigenous rights.

INSTALLATION SHOTS

Photos courtesy of Kenta Chai.

The Home Inside Our Mind is the first-ever Malaysian showcase for Indonesian ceramic artist, Sekarputi Sidhiawati (known to friends as “Puti”). The show features a mix of wall-mounted and three-dimensional ceramic works. Taken together, the works are an externalisation of Puti’s attempts to uncover her true self amongst the demands of her shifting identities and roles as mother, wife, artist, and business owner (to name a few). 

Puti’s preoccupations with the stories of women and the domestic are reflected in both her choice of medium and the final pieces. Ceramics are often associated with women and the domestic sphere, and here Puti’s expression of her inner landscape takes the form of sculpted book covers with titles that reflect distinct thematic concerns. The titles of these books, such as “How to Break A Pattern” or “Mistakes Over Mistakes”, could conceivably be found on the bookshelf of any young woman trying to improve herself, and they hint at the friction that this journey into the self has created. While the bright and thoughtful use of colours hint at happier growth, Puti resists easy answers to her search. 

The three-dimensional ceramics in the show are made with the pinching and coiling handbuilding technique and demonstrate a shift towards sculpture. These works feature prominent holes that represent Puti’s dogged dissatisfaction despite her pleasure in the process and her achievements. In this way, the works resist closure and the simplistic solutions of self-help literature.

Opening reception: Thursday, 28 September, from 4pm onwards

About the Artist

Sekarputi Sidhiawati (b. 1986, Jakarta) is a visual artist who creates stories about the empowerment of women in the domestic setting and at the intersection of culture. She works primarily with ceramic, a material that is often associated with the home and women in general. 

Her formal education was at the Faculty of Art and Design ITB-Ceramic Art studio. She is now known as the founder of the studio Arta Derau, while consistently working in the art world. After working in Bandung for a time, she moved to Bali to expand her ceramic studio business. With her works that are centered around issues related to women, Puti has been a finalist in several fine art awards such as the Soemardja Art Award (2010) and the Bandung Contemporary Art Award (2013). She has joined several prestigious exhibitions including the Jakarta Contemporary Ceramic Biennale, National Gallery of Indonesia (2014); Temperature Affect, Museum of Fine Arts and Ceramics Jakarta (2017); Manifesto, National Gallery of Indonesia (2017); Termasuk, Darren KnightGallery Australia (2018); Southern Constellations: The Poetics of the Non-Aligned, Museum of Contemporary Art Metelkova, Ljublana, Slovenia (2019). The Home Inside Our Mind is her second solo exhibition and her first exhibition in Malaysia.

EXHIBITION ESSAY

By Deborah Germaine Augustin

“The ability to bend an inch at a time while seeming to stand up straight is a useful and gendered skill. Most women I know do it regularly,” writes Isabel Kaplan in her viral essay ‘My boyfriend, a writer, broke up with me because I’m a writer’. She continues: “They bend until they’re pretzeled and then blame themselves for the body aches.” Artist Sekarputi Sidhiawati is all too familiar with this pretzling. As a mother, artist, business manager to her artist husband and business owner, to name just a few of her many roles, she has had to put her art on the back burner to attend to domestic affairs.

Around 2015, she returned to ceramics after a five-year hiatus. Ceramics were at once a practical way to make money and a natural material for an artist reconciling her artistic ambitions with her role as a wife and mother. As a Javanese Muslim woman, Sekarputi grew up with the idea that a woman must serve her husband. Similarly, ceramics occupy a lower tier in the hierarchy of artistic materials. They are often relegated to crafts rather than capital-A art. The craft aspect of ceramics and their tie to the domestic space also attracted her to the material.

In The Home Inside Our Mind, Sekarputi searches for her self outside of the many roles ascribed to her. The pieces in this exhibition are an intimate exploration of her inner landscape through a distinctly feminine point of view.

INSTALLATION SHOTS

Photos courtesy of Kenta Chai.

The Back Room is proud to announce our latest collaborative effort, a solo exhibition of works by Indonesian printmaker AGUGN, in collaboration with Kohesi Initatives (JOG) and Plus Six Zero, APW Bangsar (KL). Titled Human Supremacy, the exhibition will re-present a selection of works by the distinguished artist that was previously shown at Kohesi Initiatives’ space at the Tirtodipuran Link Building A in Yogyakarta, Indonesia, in early 2023. The Kuala Lumpur iteration of the exhibition will take place in the APW (A Place Where) food and retail hub in Bangsar, in a new space called Plus Six Zero. It will be the first exhibition to launch this exciting new space for art and exhibitions.

Agung Prabowo, better known by his artist name AGUGN, uses the printmaking technique of reduction linocut to convey themes related to his surroundings and present his reflections on life. The complexity of his technique and drawing style has created a highly recognisable aesthetic that has remained consistent over the years, both in terms of creation and medium. Reduction linocut printing is an elaborate technique of printing in which each colour layer is progressively carved into the same lino block. 

In this solo exhibition, AGUGN presents a critical perspective on the roles that humanity plays in nature’s various ecosystems, particularly those of animals. Being a vegan himself, he considers veganism a personal ideology of being opposed to the mass exploitation of animals by humans for food products that happens all over the world and all throughout human history. Looking back upon the history of human civilisation, animals are often regarded as mere meat to be used, a lesser existence born to serve humans, who consider themselves on a higher level. This inequity in the form of supremacy that human beings have over other living beings is the subject of Human Supremacy. The works are presented as single, framed prints on hand-made abaca paper and also as large, multi-print installations.

Opening reception: Saturday, 30 September, from 4pm onwards at Plus Six Zero, APW Bangsar

About the Artist

Agung Prabowo (b. 1985, Bandung), who goes by the artist name AGUGN, is an Indonesian printmaking artist who is known for his distinct style of illustration and his proficiency with linocut reduction printing. Having graduated from the Bandung Institute of Technology (Institut Teknologi Bandung), AGUGN is currently based in Bali. His themes include fear, nature, ancient Indonesian arts, and challenging anthropocentric perspectives. His recent works have focused on human exploitation of animals in the meat industry. 

His debut solo exhibition was Natural Mystic in Bentara Budaya Jakarta, Yogyakarta, Solo, and Bali, awarded to him for winning the first prize of the Triennale Seni Grafis Indonesia IV in 2012. This was followed by Unguarded Guards at Jogja Contemporary in 2015; AGUGN: Printing Live in the Cosmos at Vinyl on Vinyl, Manila, in 2016; Molasses at Mizuma Gallery, Singapore, in 2017; and Human Supremacy at the Tirtodipuran Link Building A by Kohesi Initatives, Yogyakarta, in early 2023. He has also shown at the Machida City Museum of Graphic Art, Tokyo (2020) after his artist residency there in 2019; at Darren Knights Gallery, Sydney (2019); International Print Centre, New York (2018); and Institut des Cultures d’Islam, Paris (2018). His art was also used for the cover of the music album Om by Mooner in 2019. 

INSTALLATION SHOTS

Photos courtesy of Kenta Chai. Captured on opening night, September 30th, 2023.

SELECTED ARTWORKS

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The Back Room KL is pleased to announce our next exhibition, Story Time: A solo exhibition by Minstrel Kuik, on view from September 2nd to 24th, 2023. The exhibition will feature a new body of work from mid-career, Malaysian artist Minstrel Kuik in which the artist meditates upon the art-making process. Through a series of 22 colour pencil and graphite drawings engaging with the myth and figure of Medusa, Kuik investigates the deep forms of intuition—feeling and imagination—necessary for acts of artmaking, creation, and storytelling.

Story Time is a significant departure for Kuik who, in recent years, has exhibited mostly photography, mixed-media installations and fabric assemblages with socio-political themes and personal histories. The present exhibition explores literary, mythological, art-historical, and philosophical sources to meditate on how art might be released from the pressure to comment on contemporary issues in a direct or immediate way. In particular, the myth of Medusa, associated with sight, fear, destruction, beauty, and creation, becomes an apt symbol for the examination of artmaking itself. 

In these drawings, wigs, frills, ponytails, bows, and heels are repeated as principal motifs and transformed into monstrous assemblages of once-familiar objects. Faces emerge and fade out from view, as if they had been hallucinated into presence. Exploring the potency of images to forge connections between the eye, the hand, and the soul of the artist, Kuik circles in on the idea of picture-making as a cognitive exercise. In particular, she approaches it as a deeply interior process requiring self-reflexivity, feeling, and heightened modes of attention, with the ability to synthesise previous experiences and memories. For Kuik, these discrete practices of perception and habits of mind build towards a robust and true artistic imagination. 

Kuik says, “In storytelling, there is a crucial question that concerns everybody across all times: how do we learn from experience? I imagine there are two types of articulations, one from the mind and the other from the heart. Feeling is the anchor that grounds the mind; in feeling, not only is there room for the unknown, but there is also a place of openness to welcome others. And imagination is a powerful tool helping us to break away from the conditioned mind and body, like poetry does to language.”

Opening reception: Saturday, 9 September, from 7 pm onwards

About the Artist

Minstrel Kuik (b. 1976, Pantai Remis, Perak) is a Chinese-Malaysian artist who works across a range of mediums, including photography, drawing, poetry, textile, mixed-media assemblage and installation. Kuik’s practice is interested in the role of experience, memory, women’s writing (Écriture féminine), and pattern-making. She obtained Bachelor of Fine Arts in Western Painting from National Taiwan Normal University, thereafter leaving for the Ecole des Beaux-Arts de Versailles in France for a training in photography. She completed her Master of Fine Arts in photography at the Ecole Nationale Superieure de la Photographie of Arles, before moving back to Malaysia.

Kuik’s works have been exhibited at National Gallery Singapore, Bangkok Art and Culture Centre, ILHAM Gallery Kuala Lumpur, Museum of Contemporary Art Taipei, Photoquai Paris, and Horsham Regional Art Gallery Australia, among others. Her works are in the collections of the Linda Neo and Albert Lim Collection, Michelangelo and Lourdes Samson Collection, Singapore Art Museum, Higashikawa International Photo Festival, Hokkaido, Japan, and the United Overseas Bank, Singapore. In 2014, she was awarded the UOB Painting of the Year (Established Artist Category, Malaysia). Story Time is her tenth solo exhibition.

EXHIBITION ESSAY

Minstrel Kuik: Story Time

By Samuel Lee

“That old co-ordination of the soul, the eye, and the hand,” says Walter Benjamin, “is that of the artisan which we encounter wherever the art of storytelling is at home.” It is apt that the artisan and storyteller are both implicated in Benjamin’s observation, for the interconnection between affect, visuality, and gesture governs not only the art of storytelling, but the storytelling we do about art. In other words, what we say about the practice of artmaking, and how we say it. Such a provocation arises in Minstrel Kuik’s new body of work, Story Time, which is not only a “retelling” of Greco-Roman myths relating to Medusa and the Gorgons, but an extended meditation on the artistic imagination and the mechanics, indeed even of the phenomenology, of artmaking. Across 22 graphite and colour pencil drawings on paper, the series establishes a relationship between the facility of the hand, the observational powers of the eye, and the capacity for sensuousness and feeling by returning to the medium of paper, one more at home in the humanist cabinets of prints and drawings than in the institutional spaces of the exhibition gallery. Echoing Benjamin, Story Time has an artisanal quality to it: for the series, Kuik developed a new technique of shading and colouring, involving a careful, almost obsessive, application of graphite layers scrabbled tightly over underdrawings worked through in colour pencil. This process allowed her to create a range of effects, from a gauzy, diaphanous transparency to a hard-edged, jewel-toned illumination. According to Kuik, there is a special incandescence to the pictures that result from the mixing of colour pigments with graphite, “like light is trapped inside.” 

By limiting the range of colours to hues of violet, pink, lavender, and grey, Kuik makes a direct citation of Georgia O’Keeffe’s Petunia No. 2, the American artist’s early experimentation with close ups and scale (Kuik herself tacked a smaller postcard reproduction of the painting above her drawing desk for reference). To arrive at such visualisations, O’Keeffe worked with optical lenses and photography, exploiting the camera’s ability to both represent as well as distort the visual field. Kuik, who studied photography in Arles in the early 2000s, has likewise always been canny about the practice of image making. While projects such as Mer.rily, Mer.rily, Mer.rily, Mer.rily, Part 1 (2008–12) and the Kuala Lumpur Trilogy (2007/2017) evoke the style of “snapshot” photography to document everyday realities, the artist’s interventions in the process of making the pictures point towards the slipperiness of memory and identity. There is a sense that the act of pushing and pulling at the surface of an image, warping our own sensation of its objectivity along with our memory of time past, is ultimately a manual process, if not in actuality, then in effect. 

[…]

INSTALLATION SHOTS

Photos courtesy of Kenta Chai.

SELECTED ARTWORKS

A3 Drawings

A5 Drawings

Portret Diri is a mini-showcase of recent works by Syahnan Anuar, a visual artist who is mostly known as the founder of silkscreen production company Bogus Merchandise. The exhibition collects a selection of Syahnan’s recent works since 2018, establishing him as a visual artist in his own right. 

The works reflect upon the artist’s various identities: as a son, the 7th child in a family of 10, as the head of a company, a Malay Muslim man, and as a young person living in a Malaysia built in the shadow of Mahathir’s Vision 2020. Featuring the artist’s own parents and national authority forces as subjects, the showcase reflects the intractability of the personal from the political in the artist’s lived experience. 

Opening reception: Friday, 18 August 2023 from 7 pm onwards

About the Artist

Syahnan Anuar (b. 1992, Kelantan) is a visual artist and founder of Bogus Merchandise. He works primarily in the medium of silkscreen across different surfaces. His works explore the personal and political tensions in his lived experience as a Malay-Muslim male living in 21st-century Malaysia. 

He has previously shown in numerous group shows, including New Editions at Chetak17 (2023), Art is Fair at Fahrenheit 88 (2021), Wonderwall at The Back Room (2020), Awan & Tanah at Cult Gallery (2019), and Rethinking Editions at OUR ArtProjects (2019); all in Kuala Lumpur. Portret Diri is his first solo presentation. 

INSTALLATION SHOTS

Photos by Kenta Chai.

SELECTED ARTWORKS

Paintings

Silkscreen prints

(M)othered Meat is the debut solo exhibition by Malaysian visual artist, Kara Inez. The exhibition presents several of Inez’s recent silicone sculptures and assemblages that comment on the taboos of female experience, showcased within a quasi-domestic exhibition layout meant to simulate a woman’s intimate sphere. Having previously shown in group shows and art fairs, including S.E.A. Focus and Gajah Gallery, The Back Room is proud to be presenting the first comprehensive showcase of Kara’s recent works. 

Over the past four years, Kara has come to be known for her use of silicone and dye which she casts within stockings to create soft sculptures that resemble organs, lumps of flesh, or other mysterious meats. In previous showings, the pieces have a reputation for making viewers recoil at their ambiguous, life-like appearance, accentuated by their glossy, rubbery surfaces, the addition of hair (human and synthetic), and the use of dye mixtures that give them the appearance of bruises or varicose veins. Feminine accessories such as holographic acrylic nails, a batik scrunchie, a porcelain vase, and a jasmine flower are uncanny embellishments on the meats; their attempt to dress up the fleshy sculpture’s abject appearance to make it pretty only doubles down on its abjection. The works push against viewer’s sense of disgust and challenge their capacity to embrace these grotesque forms as art. In doing so, her works serve as a vessel for viewers to have some closure with the more undignified aspects of human existence, like the realities of bodily fluids, ageing, disease, pain.  

Some of the works on show are from Kara’s MFA project, which drew on myths of female monsters in Malaysian folklore, particularly the pontianak, to challenge male-dominated forms of thinking and provoke more honest discourse on issues surrounding the female body. Other works, such as Nasi Le, Mak! (2022) questions the subordinate place of the mother in issues of parentage, inspired by the Malaysian government ruling that children born overseas to Malaysian mothers and foreign fathers will not be recognised as citizens (this ruling has since been overturned in February 2023). Other works deal with the failures and frustrations of the human body to live up to societal expectations, particularly when it succumbs to ageing and illness. Presented in a moody, intimate, quasi-domestic set-up, the exhibition joins the intimate with the performative, giving viewers the impression that they’ve walked in on something they shouldn’t be seeing — but why not? The assemblages and sculptures of (M)othered Meat visualise the taboos and deficiencies that are inextricable from the female experience, and human experience more broadly.

Opening reception: Friday, 14 July 2023 at 7 pm

About the Artist

Kara Inez (b. 1991) is a Malaysian artist who draws from her personal experiences to touch on issues surrounding the female body and mental health through mediums such as performance art and sculpture. She is known for the use of abject materials and silicone to create life-like grotesque bodily forms. Her works evoke the feeling of disgust in her audience as a means to challenge the social constructs set in place surrounding these suppressed topics. 

Kara is currently based in Melbourne, where she is pursuing her Master’s in Fine Arts. Previously, she was based in Singapore, where she received her Bachelor’s in Fine Arts from the Lasalle College of the Arts in 2019. Also in 2019, she was the recipient of the Winston Oh Travel Award, which enabled her to venture to Tirupati, South India, to carry out research on the hair trade. Her works have been exhibited locally and internationally in galleries and exhibition spaces such as the Institute of Contemporary Arts Singapore, S.E.A. Focus (Singapore), Art Expo Malaysia, Gajah Gallery (Singapore), nATTA Gallery (Bangkok), and White Box (Kuala Lumpur). (M)othered Meat is her first solo exhibition.

INSTALLATION SHOTS

Photos courtesy of Kenta Chai.

SELECTED ARTWORKS