For all sales enquiries, please get in touch with us at hello@thebackroomkl.com.

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.

Artist Statement

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.