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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 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. 

Artist Statement

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.