The Medium Lingers- Art Jakarta 2025 Booth

“The beautiful can indeed console forever and wound forever, even though poems and works of art may vanish. It is as if a spirit that appears and departs when words are forgotten and things wear away.” — Goenawan Mohamad

Where material is lost there remains the imprint of memory, of presence. Mediums carry these echoes. Threads have bound community traditions from pua kumbu in Sarawak to ikat across the archipelago. Charcoal, among the oldest markmaking tools, stretches from cave markings to expressionism, while plywood, long the material of shop signs and local furniture, brings painting closer to the surfaces of ordinary life.

For Art Jakarta 2025, The Back Room presents five Malaysian artists whose practices converse across charcoal, plywood, thread, clay, and paint. Placed side by side, there is no resolution, only encounters. A charcoal landscape evokes the atmospheres of an ink painting; a clay vessel sits in quiet contrast to a textile work made out of plastic strands; a scene of kitsch devotion dialogues with abstraction. We invite you to linger in these frictions.

Featured artists:

Hoo Fan Chon (b. 1982, Kuala Lumpur; based in Penang) is a visual arts practitioner whose work often begins at the interface of the everyday and the uncanny. He holds a BA in Photography from the London College of Communication (2010), co-founded the Run Amok collective (2012–17), and has held solo shows such as The World Is Your Restaurant in Kuala Lumpur (2021) and Let Them Eat Salmon at NTU CCA, Singapore (2023). His work has also travelled through residencies like HIAP (Helsinki, 2022) and was selected for the Prince Claus Fund’s Moving Narratives programme (Cycle II) in 2025.

Chong Siew Ying (b. 1969, Kuala Lumpur) trained in France at the École des Beaux-Arts de Versailles and Atelier 63, spending nearly two decades in Paris before returning to Malaysia. She has held solo exhibitions at Valentine Willie Fine Art and The Edge Galerie in Kuala Lumpur, Maison Tch’A and Galerie Café Panique in Paris, and has participated in regional platforms such as Art Stage Singapore (2015). A former Rimbun Dahan artist-in-residence (1999–2000) and recipient of the Freeman Asian Artist Fellowship at the Vermont Studio Center (2001), Chong was also awarded the Special Prize at Malaysia’s Young Contemporary Artists competition (2002) and was a finalist for the Sovereign Asian Art Prize (2009). 

Liew Kwai Fei (b. 1979, Kuantan; based in Kuala Lumpur) is recognised as one of Malaysia’s foremost new-generation painters. Originally trained in traditional ink painting, his practice in the years since has seen experimentations across a range of mediums and styles. Over the past decade he has mounted over a dozen solo exhibitions – most recently 排一排 Side by Side (2025, Harta Space, Kuala Lumpur), Pencil Exercises (2023, China House, Penang) and Nothing Personal (2022, Rissim Contemporary, Kuala Lumpur) – and shown widely in group shows across Malaysia and Singapore. His works are held in the national collections of the National Art Gallery, Kuala Lumpur, and the Singapore Art Museum. Liew has also undertaken international residencies, including the Australia–Malaysia (AMI) visual-arts residency in Melbourne (2011) and the Khazanah Artist Commissioning Programme in Mumbai (2010). A monograph of his career is currently in the works with cloud projects, a Kuala Lumpur-based publishing collective, and scheduled to be released in early 2026. 

Marcos Kueh (b. 1995, Sarawak; based in the Hague) is a Borneo-born textile artist based in the Netherlands. He has an academic background in graphic design and advertising, earning a BA in Graphic Design and an MA in Textile Design, both from the Royal Academy of Art (KABK) in The Hague. In 2022, he won Galerie Ron Mandos’s Young Blood Award and completed the associated Young Blood residency at BRUTUS Lab in Rotterdam. In 2024 he was named a recipient of a Mondriaan Fonds grant for emerging artists. Kueh’s work is in the collections of the Stedelijk Museum, the Museum Voorlinden, and The Institutum. He has exhibited internationally: key shows include the Rijswijk Textile Biennale and the 15th Manifesta (Barcelona), and he has participated in major art fairs and biennials across Asia, Europe and America (including the Armory Show in New York, ArtSG in Singapore, and Art Rotterdam).

Ain (b. 2000, Kuala Lumpur) is a Malaysian multimedia artist whose childhood in Thailand, Indonesia, Malaysia and Japan informs her work. Her practice, encompassing video, sound and installation, explores diasporic identity, language, memory and cultural belonging, with a focus on post-colonial themes like cultural preservation and craftsmanship. Ain’s debut solo exhibition da lama dah opened in 2025 at Blank Canvas gallery in Penang, and was followed by Atas Pagar in the same year at The Back Room. Her work has been included in numerous group exhibitions across Southeast Asia and Europe: recent highlights include S.E.A. Focus (2025, Singapore) and the group show My Oma (2023,  Kunstinstituut Melly, Rotterdam).