We are pleased to announce our second year participating in ART SG, one of the region’s most prestigious art fairs.

For the FOCUS section in ART SG 2025, we will be presenting a solo booth by Marcos Kueh comprising 7 artworks from four distinct series, spanning works made between 2022–2024. Included are Expecting (2023), an immersive, four-panel installation; Thread in Loving Mother’s Hands (2022), a large piece inspired by a traditional Chinese poem; Hunger (2022), a single, long banner piece inspired by the Hungry Ghost Festival; and Double Happiness (2024), four pieces themed around marriage and the four seasons.

The central themes that connect all four artwork series are the themes of motherhood and fulfilling (or failing to fulfil) parental expectations. Kueh, who hails from a Chinese-Malaysian family in Kuching, Sarawak and moved to The Hague, Netherlands, in 2018, where he continues to be based, has always battled with familial expectations and Chinese filial customs, especially as concerns marriage and children.

The Back Room @ ART SG 2025
Booth FC32
FOCUS section, Level 1
Marina Bay Sands Expo & Convention Centre
Singapore

VIP Preview (by invitation only):
Thursday, 16 January | 2pm – 5pm

Vernissage:
Thursday, 16 January | 5pm – 9pm

General admission:
Friday, 17 January | 12pm – 7pm
Saturday, 18 January | 11am – 7pm
Sunday, 19 January | 11am – 5pm

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

About the Artist

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 presented in art fairs and exhibitions all around the world, including ASIA NOW Fair 2024, Paris, France; ART SG 2024, Singapore; Three Contemporary Prosperities (2022) at Galerie Ron Mandos, Amsterdam; When Things Are Beings (2022) at the Stedelijk Museum, Amsterdam; This Far and Further (2022) at Museum Voorlinden, Wassenaar, Netherlands; Common Threads (2017) at The Back Room, Kuala Lumpur; and UNKNOWN Asia (2017 & 2023), Osaka, Japan. His debut solo exhibition was Kenyalang Circus at The Back Room, KL, in 2023. Recently, he unveiled a nine-part installation under the Hanya Satu Single programme at the National Art Gallery of Malaysia, Kuala Lumpur, in December 2024. 

He currently lives and works in The Hague. 

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Installation shots

Coming soon.

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Artworks

EXPECTING (2023)

Expecting
2023
4-piece textile installation
(Industrial weaving with recycled PET, 8 colours)
235 × 170 cm each
Edition 1 of 2 + 1AP

SGD 56,000
Set of 4

Back view

Front view

Left view

Right view

Expecting (2023) is an immersive installation made out of four large textile pieces depicting a porcelain urn decorated with Chinese characters. It is inspired by a conversation the artist overheard between his parents, in which the elderly couple had discussed looking into cremation plans—a sombre reminder of their inevitable death and his own anxieties as their adult son. Each artwork features stock phrases of how people are normally mourned after death, with one of them, “Grieving over her grandmotherhood” cutting slightly closer to home and being the only one of the pieces in which it is not the mother being mourned, but rather where the mother is the one doing the mourning — for a baby that the artist will likely never have, represented by an empty silhouette in the centre of the artwork. The four panels of Expecting are hung in a tight cuboid format, with visitors invited to enter into the chamber and experience the work as though they are the souls who have been cremated in the urn. On the reverse side of the works (visible to the viewers inside the textile chamber), the phrase 對不起, the Chinese characters for “I’m sorry” (duìbùqǐ) are woven repeatedly.

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THREAD IN LOVING MOTHER’S HANDS (2022)

Thread in Loving Mother’s Hands (2022) relates to the themes of estranged family relations that can be found in the other works in this presentation. This large, fluorescent image depicts a masked, female figure sitting cross-legged atop a lotus, weaving a garment with her hands. The image is a collage of various figures typically associated with feminine nature and is inspired by “Song of the Travelling Son”, a Han dynasty-era poem by Meng Jiao 孟郊 about a mother who crafts a garment for her travelling son, who is about to go away for a long period of time.

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HUNGER (2022)

Hunger (2022) is a long, pastel-coloured banner that is inspired by symbolism from the Hungry Ghost Festival, a festival celebrated by Buddhists and Taoists that typically occurs around the autumn season, when it is believed that the presence of spirits are strongest. Believers perform various rituals that help to “guide” the lost souls of their ancestors into a peaceful afterlife. Hunger links the themes of the other artworks to the question of the afterlife and asks difficult questions about customs of filial piety and the life-long tensions these customs can generate between close family members, even unto death.

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4 SEASONS OF SEPARATION (2024)

Four Seasons of Separation (2024) is a series of four works that are themed around the four seasons and feature the phrase “囍” (the Chinese word 喜, xǐ, meaning “joy” repeated twice and turned into a single character), referring to the Chinese calligraphy/ornamental design of shuāngxǐ (double happiness), which is typically associated with marriages. All of the artworks are split down the middle, separating the two “happiness”es and condemning each character to live in their own separate realm, held together by loose threads. In this, the artist explores his failure to fulfil his parents’ expectations for him to get married, but also explores how he, as a son who currently lives apart from his family, has also had to adapt to the “seasons of separation” and find his own identity and happiness as an individual.