For our gallery’s debut presentation in S.E.A. Focus 2025, we are thrilled to be presenting new works by Ain and Hoo Fan Chon.

The Back Room @ S.E.A. Focus 2025
Tanjong Pagar Distripark
39 Keppel Road #01–05
Singapore 089065

18–26 January 2025

Vernissage (by RSVP only):
Friday, 17 January | 6pm – 9pm

General admission:
18–26 January 2025 | 1pm – 8pm

For a pdf copy of our sales catalogues, please click the links below.

Installation shots

Artworks

AIN

Ain, an emerging artist currently based in Putrajaya, will be showing new works from her Ciplak Retellings series. Ciplak Retellings began during her studies in the Royal Academy of Art in The Hague, Netherlands, and has expanded for the S.E.A. Focus presentation.

Ciplak Retellings is an installation featuring multiple small works crafted out of air-dry clay and made to resemble familiar cultural artefacts in Malaysia, with slight modifications. The inspiration for this artwork stems from a reflection on Malaysian identity and cultural phenomena, particularly the prevalent practice of “ciplak” — a Malaysian slang term used to describe counterfeit goods. Drawing upon this concept, Ciplak Retellings serves as a commentary on authenticity, ownership, and the evolving nature of artistic expression within a cultural context.

At its core, Ciplak Retellings explores the tension between authenticity, replication, and reinterpretation, inviting viewers to contemplate the complexities of artistic ownership and authorship. In addition, it also partakes in discourse around cultural appropriation and the commodification of cultural heritage.

The creation of Ciplak Retellings involves a meticulous process of replication and distortion, echoing the evolution of the phenomenon of “ciplak” goods. Each edition of the artwork undergoes deliberate modifications, resulting in subtle variations that challenge traditional notions of originality and artistic ownership.

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Nurul Ain Binti Nor Halim (b. 2000), “Ain” for short, is an artist born in Bangkok, Thailand and raised in Indonesia, Malaysia, and Japan, which makes her have a diasporic identity and longing for belonging. Her practice includes videos, audio, and installations that focus on themes such as belonging, language, memories, and national and cultural identity. Her work reflects her interest in post-colonial discourses, such as cultural preservation, exoticism, craftsmanship, and archives.

Besides that, she questions the position and role of artists in decolonization, with references to Aimé Césaire’s concept of the “Man of Culture”, and how one embraces a post-colonial history and reconstructs itself through culture and arts.

Ain has participated in group exhibitions in Malaysia, the Netherlands, and Belgium, the most recent of which was ⏊IWE, curated by Christina Li, at Blank Canvas in George Town, Penang (MY) in 2024

HOO FAN CHON

‘Familiar Strangers’ is a series of watercolour paintings based on found photographs collected from around antique shops and flea markets in George Town, Penang. I have a habit of visiting these markets and collecting old photographs, particularly photographs where I don’t always immediately understand the content or context, or photographs that look slightly odd. 

Since its designation as a joint UNESCO World Heritage site, both the state of Penang and local businesses have promoted George Town as a popular destination for cultural tourism.  This branding exercise has stimulated a trade in nostalgia, particularly manifested in the recycling of found objects as novel souvenirs for tourists or interior decoration for business owners. 

Other than looking at the typical photographs we see in antique stores that feature social rites (such as weddings, birthdays, funerals, etc.) or the prized Peranakan family studio portraits, I am more interested in the anonymous, amateur everyday candids that are sometimes awkwardly posed, performative, blown out, underexposed, or in soft focus. I am intrigued by how these time-eroded personal keepsakes, nibbled away by silverfish, ended up being recirculated. Reading these photographs is an act of narrating everyday histories, even if they have to be excavated from other people’s staged realities, through lenses both voyeuristic and literal.

If photographing is an act of appropriating the subject being photographed, then painting a photograph is to look at a photograph intently, like studying a map of unfamiliar routes, to familiarise oneself with a foreign image. I blow up these photographs by tracing the original image through layers of watercolour paintings. Painting can sometimes be described as photographic and photography as painterly; this series of works intends to combine both the representational function of a painting and the mimetic nature of a camera to put together an album of anonymous and discarded memories.

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Hoo Fan Chon (b. Pulau Ketam, Selangor; based in George Town, Penang) is a Malaysian visual arts practitioner working across the mediums of painting, sculpture, photography, and film. His research-driven projects reframe everyday life with irony and wry humour, examining how our value systems fluctuate between cultures while interrogating notions of cultural authenticity. 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.

Hoo graduated with a BA in photography from the London College of Communication, University of Arts London (2010) and co-founded the Run Amok art collective (2012–17) in George Town. He was one of the recipients of the first cycle of the Studio Residencies for Southeast Asian Artists in the European Union (SEA AiR), organised by the NTU Centre for Contemporary Art Singapore in 2022, which allowed him to pursue his research in Finland. Notable recent group exhibitions include The Ocean and the Interpreters at Britto Arts Trust (Dhaka, Bangladesh, 2022); Myth Makers: Spectrosynthesis III at Tai Kwun (Hong Kong, 2022); The Ocean and the Interpreters at Hong Gah Museum and Solid Art (Taipei, Taiwan, 2022); and the ILHAM Art Show 2022 at ILHAM Gallery (Kuala Lumpur, 2022). His solo exhibitions include Let Them Eat Salmon (NTU CCA, Singapore, 2023) and The World is Your Restaurant (The Back Room, Kuala Lumpur, 2021).

He is currently a fellow at the apexart Fellowship programme in New York City, from November–December 2024.

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. 

Installation shots

Artworks

EXPECTING (2023)

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.

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.

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.

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.

For our first show of 2025, The Back Room is pleased to announce a solo exhibition of new paintings by Chok Yue Zan, titled Between Us. The show will be Zan’s third solo exhibition and his first solo exhibition in Malaysia. It will feature five new paintings from his ongoing series, De Upside Down, of realistic upside-down landscapes. 

De Upside Down is a series that Zan has been preoccupied with over the past two years. The process consists of him sourcing landscape photography from open-source image websites and collaging various different genres of landscapes together in a single painting, with some being upside down, creating a picture of an uncannily perfect, serene world that is also wrong and alienating. 

Zan’s paintings tend to have a nostalgic quality to them, with memory and uncertainty being prominent themes and nature a recurrent motif. Previous series like Mind Paradiso (2019–2023) explored the lost natural landscapes of his childhood in Tawau, Sabah; the paintings in that series were often filled with unpeopled natural landscapes painted in dreamy pastel colours, sometimes combining paint with image transfer to achieve a blurry, nostalgic effect. The Family Series (2017–2021) explored his relationship with his family members and featured their faceless silhouettes against idyllic, serene backdrops. 

In the present series of paintings, Zan continues to reflect upon the lost past and the uncertain present. His idyllic, upside-down landscapes celebrate nature’s beauty but also meditate upon the strained relationships between individuals, society, and nature in the world today. 

Opening reception: Saturday, 4 January 2025 from 3pm – 6pm
Exhibition dates: 4 – 26 January 2025

About the Artist

Chok Yue Zan (b. 1994, Tawau, Sabah; based in Kuala Lumpur) is a young contemporary painter working across various mediums using a contemplative, conceptual approach. Born in Tawau, Sabah, Zan grew up with his grandparents in a forested environment surrounded by lush greenery and breathtaking landscapes. It was his sanctuary, a space of unbridled happiness that he considers his lost paradise, by which his art continues to be inspired. 

Zan graduated with a Diploma in Fine Arts from the Dasein Academy of Art, Kuala Lumpur (MY) in 2015. In 2017, he was awarded the UOB Painting of the Year (Malaysia). Since then, he has undertaken residencies in Shanghai (UOB Art Gallery, 2018) and Japan (Fukuoka Art Museum, 2018), on top of participating in numerous group shows and art fairs across Malaysia, Indonesia, Singapore, China, and beyond. His debut solo exhibition was Retrospect of Paradiso in 2018, followed by Throughout in 2022, both at Art Porters Gallery in Singapore. Between Us is his third solo exhibition. 

Installation shots

Artworks