Spirit of the Studio
Spirit of the Studio (The Toffee: The Project Room, Kuala Lumpur, 6–29 September 2025) reimagines the gallery as four working ateliers that open into a common forum. Co-curated with Wong Jian Lin—with Jian Lin also serving as space designer—the exhibition replaces the white cube with partial studio reconstructions, drawing audiences into the architectures of making where sketching, tinkering, and translation move ideas into form. It positions the studio as conceptual backbone rather than backdrop, in dialogue with precedents from Brancusi’s reconstructed atelier to contemporary scenographies of the studio-as-exhibition.
Working with Toffee’s pared, raw volumes, Wong’s spatial design choreographs process over product. Each architect-artist articulates a distinct grammar of mark-making and material transformation: Hijjas Kasturi’s gestural canvases read as structures in flux; Nic Proud’s layered prints and watercolours fracture terrain into constructed fields; Greg Dall’s saturated, satirical paintings pivot on proportion and caricature; Chong Chee Ching’s animal portraits on reclaimed timber braid drawing, carving, and painting to conjure animacy from weathered surfaces.
Taken together, these practices test the studio as both private workspace and public proposition. Spirit of the Studio frames the atelier as a lens for reading intent, process, and material intuition—an intermediary between architecture’s discipline and art’s poetics. By inviting viewers into these staged working environments, the exhibition proposes that the act of making—gestural, observational, playful, or painstaking—constitutes the true spirit of practice.
