by Suraya Warden

Exhibition Review: Within eleven works of art, in a small space, under fluorescent lighting can be held vision, talent and active potential. Al Cruz at Richard Koh Fine Art.

by Suraya Warden

Exhibition Review: With Chin Kon Yee: Reality in Wonderland, Wei-Ling Gallery continues its current winning streak of solo shows.

by Tunyaporn Hongtong

They say the boundary between art and psychosis is a very thin line. Sometimes, the line is so thin that it starts to blur and enables both artists and psychopaths to traffic unhindered.

oleh Yin Shao Loong

Kebelakangan ini, kita telah menyaksikan pergadohan hangat di laman ini. Tapi untuk mereka yang kurang minat bergadoh ‘seni’, bolehlah anda rilek dengan menonton filem baru Nam Ron dan Brenda Danker – Gadoh. Filem ini tidak dapat ditonton di pawagam awam, cuma di teater HELP sahaja, kerana topiknya menyentuh pergadohan perkauman di sekolah kebangsaan Malaysia.

by Yusuf Martin

Since Rafiee Abdul Ghani’s early works – Ingatan dari Gunung (Memory of Mountains -1985) and Green Park 4 (1993), an insightful care and concern for nature’s milieu has been self evident within the artist’s works.

by Bilqis Hijjas

This is a musical of how Prince Siddhartha became the Buddha — a figure whose contribution to humankind, according to the musical, was to teach them to turn away from transient and material happiness, towards more eternal themes. But when his tale of modesty is told with all the pomp and circumstance that can possibly be mustered, doesn’t the term “Buddhist musical” seem an oxymoron?

by Bilqis Hijjas

On the way to see director Loh Kok Man’s new version of his work now entitled Toilet, I was expecting lots of grit and grime, blood and guts all over the walls, grotesquerie and grimness. What I found was altogether different: light polished vignettes, all scrubbed and disinfected. And while I enjoyed the production in the end, I couldn’t help feeling that something was missing.

by Simon Soon

The Voyage To The Ends Of The World is an internalisation of the mythical heroic journey (think Joseph Campbell’s idea of the monomyth), using the photographic medium to convey the emotional weight associated with an abstract passage towards self discovery.

by Yusuf Martin

There is an image refusing to leave my head. It’s of a youth, guitar in hand, kampung serenading. This iconic image, for me, represents all that is Malaysian, the serenity of idyll, the incumbent artistic muse and preponderance to nostalgia.

by Simon Soon

On view now in Cemeti Art House, Jogjakarta, is Eko Nugroho’s spell-binding foray into the world of wayang (shadow puppetry), exploring a centuries-old performance medium that functions both as popular entertainment and as a form of culturally sacrosanct art in his ever expanding body of experimentation with different representational formats.

by Zedeck Siew

Behind Australian ape-lover Lisa Roet’s recent In-Sight exhibition are worthy sentiments: generally, that the environment is in bad shape; more specifically, that our simian kin are almost all endangered because of human activity. If you see Roet’s ten orangutan portraits – each sketching a different individual ape that she worked with in the 15 years of her enthusiasm – and are then persuaded to donate to the WWF, that’s cool. Perhaps the works have served their purpose.

by SHARON CHIN

Chuah Thean Teng passed away on 25 November 2008, just months before the opening of his retrospective at Balai. This makes the viewing of his works especially poignant, above and beyond the sense of nostalgia that runs throughout the show. I felt I was looking at a Malaysia I had never known: I can’t recognize myself in his scenes of pastoral kampung life, and the people he lovingly depicted at work, rest or play are strangers to me.