Filipina visual artist Regina Reyes spent two months at Rimbun Dahan in 2026 continuing her exploration as text as material, and using thread and embroidery to reflect on memory, labour and the history of domestic work in women. This Open Day, she will be sharing a series of new text and fabric-based works in her studio at Rimbun Dahan.
About the Artist
REGINA REYES (b. Manila, 1993) is a Filipina visual artist whose practice explores memory, domestic spaces, and the fragile intersections between the ephemeral and the enduring. Raised in an ancestral home in the Philippines, her early encounters with inherited space and material culture inform an ongoing inquiry into how memory forms, shifts, erodes, and rebuilds over time, leaving traces in lived environments.
She mainly works across painting and collage, with recent explorations on embroidery and text as material. In 2017, she received her Bachelor of Fine Arts from the University of the Philippines Diliman and has since exhibited actively across the Philippines, with recent presentations extending to Malaysia and Taiwan.
My time at Rimbun Dahan was spent continuing my exploration of text as material, as a personal attempt to marry prose and visual art. By keeping a journal, I spent my days inscribing visual forms, writing down observations, meditations, reflections, and symbolism I encountered both in nature and within myself. As the days progressed, my writings became a way of building my own relationship with the place: the time and space I occupied, all the wild things that existed in this patch of land, and the push and pull between remembering and forgetting. I reflected on how my environment shaped my thoughts and associations, and recording them gave space for these fleeting experiences to solidify and hold stories of their own–if only for a moment–even as these, in the nature of things, will inevitably shift over time.
By employing the use of thread as a way of writing, I reflect on memory, labor, and the history of domestic work in women. The acts of repetition required in embroidery, puncturing, suturing, and stitching become gestures of recording, holding, and attending to what might otherwise be lost and forgotten, and making them tangible in the world. I also worked with some local fabrics that were previously owned, holding their own traces of time and use.
For the Open Day, I will be showing a series of new text and fabric-based works that have emerged from the writings and reflections that came to me while living at Rimbun Dahan. Themes of mothering, (un)becoming, nurturing, and feminism have become quite persistent in this body of work, and I hope to continue exploring this direction. In the end, the question remains: How does one, in the futile attempt of humans, record the memory of space and time?
Filipino sound artist and kinetic sculptor Marco Ortiga spent two months at Rimbun Dahan in 2026, focusing on field recordings and deep listening, and creating a site-responsive installation. For Open Day on Sunday 25 October 2026, visitors are invited to step into the role of composer, and use the custom soundboxes to create their own acoustic landscape.
About the Artist
Marco Ortiga (b. 1984, Manila) is a sound artist and kinetic sculptor whose work synthesizes mechanical engineering, ambient sculpture, and live performance to transform the environments it occupies. Drawing from a background in production design for film and music videos as well as metal fabrication, Ortiga approaches artmaking through hands-on experimentation, translating complex conceptual ideas into interactive physical mechanisms.
His sound practice often incorporates custom-built DIY instruments, field recordings, and found sounds to create immersive, audience-driven encounters. His live performances integrate these instruments alongside audio samples to build dynamic and immersive soundscapes. In his latest solo exhibition, Ortiga transformed discarded fishing boats into kinetic sculptures to highlight the relationship between people and their environment, telling the story of local fishermen and the hardships of their daily livelihood. Most recently, he was featured in ALT Philippines 2026 as part of Vinyl on Vinyl’s Discoveries section.
Marco is also a founding member of SOMATOSONIC, an interdisciplinary art collective formed alongside Tad Ermitano and Christina Dy, with whom he creates sound installations and performs experimental electronic music.
During my two-month residency at Rimbun Dahan, I wanted to focus on my sound practice and experiment mainly with field recordings and deep listening. This stems directly from my journey as an artist living in Manila, where rapid development and poor urban planning have left almost no natural green spaces within the city. For most of my life, the surrounding soundscape has been traffic, construction, and mechanical noise. Rimbun Dahan is the complete opposite. Living here, I was surrounded by nature, and listening to intense insect choruses and canopy sounds completely shifted how I perceive acoustic space.
For this residency, I wanted to create a site-responsive installation that acts as a sonic portrait of my time here. My performance methodology relies heavily on live volume control and layer balancing. I keep multiple recordings running continuously in the background, actively fading individual tracks in and out to compose the piece in real time. This dynamic mixing technique serves as a direct artistic representation of the ongoing negotiation between natural environments and human interaction. To keep the work strictly grounded in the place itself, I follow one core rule: no outside synthesizers, sound packs, or digital instruments. Every single sound heard in the piece comes strictly from recordings made on-site or objects collected during my stay. By altering speed, pitch, and texture with audio effects while dynamically balancing layers in real time, I aim to create an immersive experience that shares my personal journey at Rimbun Dahan.
For the Open Day, I invite the audience to step into the role of composer through an interactive sound installation. I have built custom soundboxes, each loaded with a unique field recording, allowing visitors to adjust both their volume and position using a hanging system throughout the space. As people move through the area and alter the placement of each unit, they dynamically reconfigure the acoustic landscape, creating their own personalized surround-sound environment to share in my experience of Rimbun Dahan.
Filipino poet and creative writer Raul G. Moldez spent his 2-month residency at Rimbun Dahan in 2026 writing ecopoetry that seeks to give elements of the natural world their own agency, through language. During Open Day on 25 October, he will read some poems from his residency and deliver a craft talk on ecopoetry and his personal poetics.
About the Writer
I am Raul G. Moldez, a Filipino poet and creative writer based in Cagayan de Oro City, Mindanao, Philippines. My literary career spans nearly three decades, during which my poetry and fiction have appeared in various national and international literary journals, magazines, anthologies, newspapers, and online publications.
Among my most recent literary distinctions is Second Prize in the 2025 Padya Leoncio P. Deriada Para sa Panitikan (Open Category) for my poetry collection, The Memory of Forests and Other Poems. I was also a winner of the 2025 Tagik Poetry Writing Competition, sponsored by Kaliwat ni Karyapa, for my poem An Ode to a Broken Tea Cup. My recent poems appeared in Santelmo 14 (Missing Body Parts, And the Soil Speaks, Brownout Psalm), Kinaadman Volume 26 (Butterflies at Pueblo de Oro, A Love Letter from a Waterfall, The Old Narra Tree) and in the May 2026 issue of Philippines Graphic Reader (On My Father’s Tomb).
I have two poetry collections, Mga Taho Gikan sa Akong Uniberso and A Day in a Poet’s Life and Other Poems, which was published in 2005 under the Ubod: New Authors Series, a literary publishing initiative of the National Commission for Culture and the Arts (NCCA) intended to support emerging Filipino writers.
My poems, short stories, and other literary works have appeared in Philippines Free Press, Philippines Graphic Reader, Philippine Panorama, Home Life, Bisaya, Ani Literary Journal, Sunday Times Magazine, Sun.Star Weekend, Sun.Star Superbalita, Bituon Literary Journal, Crowns and Oranges, Santelmo 14, Kinaadman, Gutter, As It Ought To Be, Cannon Poets, Red River Review, Dalityapi, Mindanews, Peace Mindanao, Kabiskak, and Dagmay, among other print and online publications.
I have been a fellow of the Fourth Iligan National Writers Workshop (1997), the 37th University of the Philippines National Writers Workshop (2000), the Panagsugat: Second UP VisMin Creative Writing Workshop (2004), the 53rd University of the Philippines National Writers Workshop (2014), and the 24th IYAS La Salle National Writers Workshop (2025).
Over the years, I have received recognition in various literary competitions, including those sponsored and organized by the Davao Writers Guild, the Home Life Poetry Competition, Bathalan-ong Halad sa Dagang–Cebu (Bathalad-Cebu), Bathalan-ong Halad sa Dagang–Mindanao (Bathalad-Mindanao), the Governor Gwen Garcia Literary Contest, and the Office of the Ombudsman–Mindanao.
About the Residency
My residency at Rimbun Dahan provided me with the rare opportunity to be away from the demands of everyday life and devote myself to the work of poetry. Here, I found both the physical space and the creative solitude necessary to revisit and revise my earlier poems and write new works. More importantly, the residency allowed me to explore the subject that has increasingly occupied my imagination: the interconnectedness of human beings and the natural world, a relationship that forms the foundation of what is commonly called ecopoetry.
My interest in ecopoetry arises from the growing tension between human development and environmental preservation. In the Philippines, we have laws intended to protect our forests, trees, waterways, and other natural resources. Yet the existence of these laws does not always guarantee the protection of what they are meant to preserve. The recent cutting of trees along Quirino Avenue in Metro Manila to make way for a skyway is a painful example of how development can come at the expense of our natural resources. Trees that have stood for generations, offering shade, shelter, and a sense of continuity to the communities around them, can disappear in a matter of hours in the name of progress. Such events compel me to ask what kind of development we are pursuing, and what we are willing to sacrifice to achieve it.
In writing my poems, I wanted to move beyond the conventional portrayal of nature as merely a backdrop to human experience. I sought instead to give trees, animals, rivers, and other elements of the natural world their own agency through language. In my poems, they are no longer silent witnesses to human activity. They speak, remember, grieve, question, and protest. A tree laments its loss; a river speaks of the wounds inflicted upon its waters; a bird mourns the disappearance of the forest it once called home. Through personification and imaginative expression, I attempt to make audible the voices that humanity has too often ignored. I regard these poems as a form of protest—not necessarily my protest alone, but the imagined protest of nature itself against the indifference, exploitation, and destruction it has endured at human hands.
The result of my residency is a collection of ecopoems, which reflect both mourning and hope: mourning for the landscapes, trees, and living creatures lost to human activity, and hope that through poetry, readers may begin to recognize the value of the natural world beyond its usefulness to humanity.
I have always believed that poetry is a manifestation of social dynamics and human relationships, reflecting the attitudes, contradictions, and behavior of society. While literature may offer commentary on social realities, I do not believe that a poem, by itself, can transform society. Its power lies instead in its capacity to influence how people see and understand the world. A poem may not stop a tree from being cut down, but it may persuade someone to look at that tree differently—to recognize it not merely as an obstacle to construction, but as a living presence with a history, an ecological purpose, and a place in the shared existence of human beings and nature.
This is the aspiration behind my works: to encourage a change in human attitudes toward the environment. I do not regard development as inherently destructive or undesirable. Roads, bridges, buildings, and other infrastructure are necessary to improve human life. But development must be pursued with wisdom, restraint, and an awareness of its ecological consequences. Progress should not be measured solely by what we build, but also by what we are able to preserve. A society cannot truly claim to have advanced if, in the process, it destroys the very environment upon which its future depends.
Rimbun Dahan gave me more than the time and space to write. It offered me an opportunity to reconsider my relationship with nature and to translate that reflection into poetry. At Rimbun Dahan, I became more conscious of the many forms of life with which we share this world. If the poems in my collection accomplish anything, I hope they will remind readers that nature is not separate from humanity, nor is it merely a resource waiting to be used. We are part of it, bound to it by relationships that are both ecological and moral.
Ultimately, these poems are my modest attempt to lend language to the voiceless, to transform ecological grief into an act of remembrance, and to suggest that genuine progress begins when humanity learns not only how to build, but also how to listen, to care, and to preserve.
About the Open Day
During my Open Day at Rimbun Dahan, I intend to read the poems in my collection which I developed during my residency, and deliver a craft talk on ecopoetry and my personal poetics. I will discuss how poetry can explore the interconnectedness of humanity and nature, particularly by giving trees, animals, rivers, and other elements of the natural world a voice through personification and imaginative language. In my poems, nature becomes an active presence, expressing its grief and protest against environmental destruction.
I will also share my creative process, including how the natural surroundings of Rimbun Dahan have inspired my writing and revisions. Central to my poetics is the belief that while literature may not directly change society, it can influence people’s attitudes and deepen their awareness of social and environmental issues. Through this reading and discussion, I hope to encourage greater ecological consciousness and reflection on the need to balance human development with environmental preservation.
Australian interdisciplinary artist Zara Collins is concluding her month-long Open International Arts Residency at Rimbun Dahan with an open-studio sharing of her works in progress on Sunday 27 September 2026, from 11am to 6pm. More info about visiting Rimbun Dahan in Sept 2026…
About the Artist
Zara Collins is an Australian interdisciplinary artist working across porcelain and paper. Her practice explores memory, the trace and ways everyday objects and materials can hold personal and cultural histories. Collins uses a variety of processes and material transformation to explore absence, longing, loss and the passage of time.
She holds an MFA from the National Art School and a BVA from Sydney College of the Arts, Sydney University. Her practice has been supported by an Ian Potter Foundation Cultural Grant and residencies including the Australia-China Council Residency (Beijing), Bundanon Trust (South Coast NSW) and Rimbun Dahan (Kuala Lumpur, Malaysia) in September 2026. Zara has exhibited widely, presenting eight solo exhibitions and participating in numerous group shows since 1999. Her work has been recognised internationally in exhibitions such as Talente (Germany), Young Glass (Denmark), SOFA (sculpture objects & functional art) Chicago and the Japanese Jewellery Competition (Tokyo).
Zara is using her residency to respond to the Malay Traditional Textile Collection on site, continuing her engagement with ideas of the passage of time, the material trace, and the ways textiles can act as a metaphor for the temporality of human existence.
Working with Korean Kozo paper and copper, Zara is experimenting with drawing, layering and tracing processes to translate and abstract forms encountered within Rimbun Dahan’s architecture and textile collection. She has been weaving fine copper threads into abstract motifs, exploring the relationship between line, material and structure, while using paper to record, transform and reimagine visual and tactile encounters with the site.
The residency provides Zara with an opportunity to work slowly and experimentally, allowing new processes and ideas to emerge through sustained engagement with a series of small-scale material experiments. These A5 studies provide a space to test ideas and material combinations quickly and without judgement, allowing successful experiments to be developed further or up-scaled, while others can remain as traces of the exploratory process.
Below: Works in progress from the series “Could not be spoken”, 2026, Kozo papers and graphite
Malaysian visual artist Anas Afandi has used his 2-month residency at Rimbun Dahan in 2026 as a period of research and experimentation, cultivating a daily practice of collecting fallen kemboja flowers and experimenting with collecting and documentation methods from botanical and archaeological practices, while thinking about cultural memory and meaning.
About the Artist
Anas Afandi (b. 1991) works across drawing, painting, sculpture, and installation. His practice examines the relationship between the natural world, history, and cultural identity. Through research-driven projects and speculative methodologies, he often constructs pseudo-worlds that question how institutions shape his surroundings. In recent years, Anas’ work has expanded toward environmental politics, colonial legacies, and the construction of cultural narratives, positioning the environment not only as a subject of representation but as a method of inquiry.
About the Residency
Pictures Of You
Over the course of this residency, I focused my research on Taman Sari, a garden in Rimbun Dahan dedicated to the collection and preservation of medicinal and fragrant plants from the Malay Archipelago and its surrounding region. I approach the garden as a model for thinking about culture, investigating how plants can become carriers of history and identity, and how systems of preservation construct cultural narratives.
I am interested in the kemboja; a naturalised, non-native species that holds deep personal significance for me. It became the entry point for this research. Its continued presence in Taman Sari exposes a tension between botanical classification and its cultural significance. Even though it has been part of the garden for almost forty years, it will not be replanted once it dies, keeping with the garden’s commitment in preserving species native to Southeast Asia.
Hence, the anticipated disappearance of the tree one day raises questions beyond botany that shape this project; (1) what happens when something culturally meaningful no longer fits within systems of preservation and (2) how do we preserve forms of attachment and meaning that extend beyond physical material?
One of the projects that I worked on was creating a daily ritual of walking through the garden and gathering kemboja flowers that had fallen from the tree every morning. The flowers were then preserved. By conducting this, I am reflecting how cultural meanings are formed gradually over time and imitating as well as speculating how such meanings come to exist.
In another series, I have conducted fieldworks at Taman Sari. If the garden metaphorically represents the culture itself, the plants within it were imagined as elements that constitute cultural identity. I mapped the garden, marking the locations of each plant. Some of the plants were collected and pressed, along with botanical illustrations that do not adhere to any scientific rules. The color viridian green was chosen as I was looking for a color that gives an almost artificial representation of nature, or in other words, another version of nature rather than the nature itself.
Rather than focusing on producing finished works, this residency has been a period of research and experimentation. Methods from botanical and archaeological practices have been adopted, including collecting, documenting, and examining fragments. This process allowed me to investigate different materials and forms, from which several projects have gradually emerged and will be developed more in the near future.
I am Khin May Moe (born 1996), also known as May Moee, a full-time visual artist based in Yangon, Myanmar.
I mainly work with watercolor and ink, creating paintings and urban sketches. I enjoy painting historic buildings, cityscapes, and scenes from everyday life. I am a member of Urban Sketchers Yangon and often draw outdoors. For my urban sketches, I usually use brush pen ink and twig ink, and in my recent work I have been exploring detailed experimental watercolor techniques.
I graduated with a Bachelor’s degree in German from Mandalay University of Foreign Languages (MUFL) and worked as a German-speaking tour guide from 2018 to 2020. Although I have loved drawing since childhood, I began studying academic painting in 2019 and later graduated with a Diploma in Painting from the National University of Arts and Culture, Yangon (NUAC). Since then, I have been actively creating artworks and participating in group exhibitions in Myanmar.
In 2024, I received an artistic residency scholarship through the EMPM programme and spent six months as a resident artist at Beaux-Arts Nantes Saint-Nazaire in Saint-Nazaire, France, where I presented my work in a student exhibition. After returning to Myanmar, I also participated in the group exhibition J’ai vu le soleil dans l’ombre, organised by the European Union in Myanmar.
I am currently an artist-in-residence at Rimbun Dahan, Malaysia. The work I have developed during this residency will become the foundation of my first solo exhibition in Yangon.
I spent two months as an artist-in-residence at Rimbun Dahan (May and July). During my residency, I had a lot of time to think, explore, and focus on my art practice every day. Being in a place where I could work freely gave me the opportunity to try a new art practice and experiment with ideas that were different from what I usually draw. As the residency progressed, I created a completely different body of work from the proposal I had written before coming to the residency.
It was also a time to dive into my own mind. I started to enjoy gazing at plants and trees every day, something that is difficult to do regularly in my daily life in Yangon. I enjoyed exploring the garden and drawing from my surroundings. During this process, I broke the boundaries of my own thinking and started making imaginative work that I never thought I could create. I discovered a new way of making art that came not only from what I saw in front of me, but also from what I imagined and felt inside my mind.
At the same time, I did not want to lose my favourite habit of observational sketching. I walked around the garden and made sketches during my first month here. As someone who enjoys drawing old buildings, I especially loved sketching the heritage houses at Rimbun Dahan. After sketching, I often stepped out of my comfort zone and experimented with new ideas. This became an important part of my art practice.
During the residency, I also faced my long-term problem of insomnia. Being awake at night gave me time to think about my emotions and inner thoughts. I wanted to connect this experience with my artwork. Through these paintings, I explore different aspects of mental health, emotions, sensitivity, and the expressions that come from my deep subconscious during sleepless nights.
The objects embedded in the paintings are like illustrations that can be imagined by the viewer’s eyes, with faces, figures, and intestine-like forms appearing in random patterns. I try to draw intricate patterns by combining ambiguous shapes, different leaf shapes, creatures, and animal parts that I found in my surroundings.
Inspired by nature, leaf shapes, animals, and my daily observations in the garden, I began creating experimental watercolor paintings with intricate, floating forms. I want to build a living visual world that reflects my own inner experiences.
This personal project began with Bipolar creatures, an idea I had been developing since I was in Yangon. These creatures slowly changed and became connected with roots, plants, and natural forms. They grew into mysterious and unique beings. The title of this project is credited to my fellow resident artist, Brisa. While viewing my artworks, she mentioned that they evoked a sense of pareidolia, and I chose Pareidolia as the title of this project.
This residency encouraged me to face the negative thoughts and emotional struggles that I usually keep inside. For the Open Day, I will share my new experimental watercolor paintings, works in progress, ink sketches on Shan Sakku (Shan paper from Myanmar), and observational drawings created during the residency. This body of work will become the starting point for my first solo exhibition in Yangon, inspired by my time at Rimbun Dahan.
Visual artist Brisa Amir from the Philippines has been in residence at Rimbun Dahan for two months in 2026, working with the flora and handmade ink as her primary material to explore the displacement of nature in urban settings. She will be sharing the results of her residency on Open Day on Sunday 26 July.
About the Artist
Brisa Amir paints across layers and draws through texture, working from her studio and its peripheries. Her practice embraces unfinished spaces — cracks in walls, rainwater stains, and the imprints of everyday movement — creating tactile, collage-based paintings rooted in paper’s fragility and resistance. Her walks become acts of noticing and collecting, stitching urban traces into visual, botanical rhythms.
A BFA Painting graduate from the University of the Philippines, Diliman, she held her first solo exhibition at Artinformal in 2018, This was followed by a solo presentation at the inaugural S.E.A. Focus in Singapore in (2019), a feature in Artforum, and a cover feature in Vogue Philippines in (2023).
She received the Ateneo Art Awards Embassy of Italy Purchase Prize in 2021. Her work continues to be seen in local and regional exhibitions, including UP Vargas Museum and a cultural collaboration with the Embassy Of Spain through Instituto Cervantes.
A leaf represents my first connection with nature. The sprouting of a leaf holds deep meaning for me as a human being who grew up on ancestral land that has been paved over with concrete. I grew up seeing corners of gray walls and a mere square of blue sky, reached only by plants thriving amidst the concrete-layered, congested informal houses as they stretched toward the sunlight. The plants I have observed cresting among the urban grid and on gated, abandoned lands mirror my relationship with –and understanding of– the messages of ancestors living on disputed territories. These ancestors fought and continue to fight back, reclaiming and protecting Mother Nature.
II. Organically Unfolding ੈ
Like a seed constantly in motion, flying through the air, hitching a ride on birds, and waiting to burst open to scatter itself 𓇢𓆸 — I spent the first month of my artist residency gallivanting through the forest and swimming. I expanded my introspection by browsing the library and examining the inventory of pressed leaves, observing the diverse flora turning empty ground into life, identifying themselves as either native or invasive. I traced some leaves, preserved them through the guidance of Rimbun Dahan’s intern Kah Wei, and adopted them as my primary material.
A leaf that fascinated me among the other leaves that I encountered possesses two distinct colors: shades of green on the front and a deep magenta on the back. I used the dual characteristics of this leaf as a visual guide to build my paintings into collages. Through this process, I explore the concepts close to my heart, such as the displacement of urban birds whenever decades-old trees are cut down to gentrify the land. In the second month of my residency, I collaborated with Haya Ibrahim of Waste to Weft to create my own ink using bamboo charcoal and mangosteen combined with store-bought ink, translating these environmental friction points into illustrations.
At the open day, I plan to present all these bundles of thoughts into installation pieces, with the hope of creating an interactive experience using the handmade ink.
Interdisciplinary artist Anusorn Tunyapalit, from Chiang Mai, Thailand, presented a trio of terrariums at the KL Festival in May 2026, as the outcome of his 2-month residency at Rimbun Dahan.
About the Artist
Anusorn Tunyapalit (born in Phrae, 1992; lives and works in Chiang Mai) is an interdisciplinary artist who works across various media, primarily installations art. His practice aims to stimulate or create new sensory experiences by translating, transforming, and manipulating information across different mediums. He also employs intense research into history, culture, and society to distill large-scale narratives into detailed and complex objects or processes, rich with layers of thought for exploration.
His interests span environmental ecology and politics, ethnology, beliefs, local wisdom, and contemporary crises, and the study of ethnographic knowledges linked to reflection and critique of power structures, analyzing their impact and presenting them through art forms. He was selected for the Brandnew Art Project in 2017, Guandu International Nature Art Festival in Taipei, Taiwan, in 2019 & 2024, GMS Artist Residency 2024, and co-founded Pootorn Connect, a decentralized art operation network, in 2022. In the same year, he was chosen to present the exhibition ‘Point of No Concern: return to the rhizoic state’ at MAlIAM Pavilion for the Thailand Biennale, Chiang Rai 2023. Most recently, he has expanded his curatorial concepts and established the Rhizomia Art Network.
Anusorn presented the outcomes from his residency at the Tiffin Picnic on 23 May 2026, part of KL Festival 2026, coordinated by Greenpeace Malaysia.
Anusorn”s installation project explored the relationship between the native flora of Southeast Asia and the heritage wooden architecture at Rimbun Dahan. The installation — a series of terrariums containing found material — traced the transformation of wood from living trees that once hosted smaller plants and other living organisms, to its conversion into buildings and furniture.
The native plants at Rimbun Dahan signify botanical locality, and the heritage houses represent cultural identity. Both use wood for shelter. In this artwork, Anusorn looked at questions of interdependence, locality and migration, and the roles of host and guest in cultural exchange.
Mao Sovanchandy, a multidisciplinary artist from Cambodia, and her collaborator Yuryphal Tum, spent two months at Rimbun Dahan in 2025, drawing inspiration from the regenerative nature of mulch, with experiments with water hyacinth pulp, plaster, photography, food and performance.
About the Artists
Mao Sovanchandy (b. 1998) is an independent multidisciplinary artist exploring mixed-media works that reflect environmental and social issues, as well as societal norms, drawing from self-reflection and personal experience. A self-taught artist with a B.A. in Architecture, Sovanchandy’s practice is deeply informed by the rapid transformation of Phnom Penh — a city where historical, cultural, and ecological values are constantly shifting. Her practice evolves installation, performance, moving image, and social engagement, often centered on the tension between what is visible and what is forgotten. https://www.instagram.com/sovanchandymao, https://shorturl.at/TUjNk
For her residency at Rimbun Dahan, Sovanchandy has invited Yuryphal Tum to be her collaborator.
Yuryphal Tum (b. 1992) is an independent artist and architect from Cambodia. She earned her Bachelor’s degree in Architecture and Urban Planning. As the daughter of a sculptor, Yuryphal was surrounded by art from an early age, which deeply influenced her creative journey. Her practice encompasses sculpture, installation, architecture, and archival work, often assembling meaning from small fragments and found materials. She values the hand-crafted process and the sculptural quality of her work, always striving to capture the beauty and integrity of handmade art. https://www.instagram.com/yury.tum, https://shorturl.at/l4o7r
About the Residency
Chandy was accepted into a two-month residency at Rimbun Dahan in 2024, which coincidentally overlapped with her participation in the Maybank Fellowship Program 2025. She later invited her collaborator, Yury, to join her at the residency. Their time at Rimbun Dahan became a period of reflection on their recent developments and future direction toward establishing an artist-run space. It envisions a space that would eventually become an artist collaboration, residency, library, and kitchen in Phnom Penh, Cambodia, where they now live and work.
Within Malaysia’s cross-cultural environment, Chandy and Yury explore community work and personal experience on how trace, memory, and transformation shape connection through dialogue and experimentation. Their practice interlaces folklore, belief, and fragments of the past to reveal how time, place, and identity intertwine—drawing inspiration from the mulch process and its regenerative nature.
About a five-minute walk from Rimbun Dahan, they discovered a low-lying pond filled with water hyacinth and its purple blossoms—a plant that grows wild in Cambodia and throughout Southeast Asia’s freshwater ecosystems. Locals called it keladi bunting, meaning “pregnant yam.” We brought the plant back to the studio and experimented with transforming every part of it—from root and stem to flower—into handmade paper. Working in the kitchen, we cut, cooked, blended, pressed the fibres under weight, dried them in the sun like laundry, and even ironed them to counter the humidity of the rainy season. The process taught us patience, impatience, time, and a feeling of the timeless. This led us to further experiment with photography, collage, and layering prints on tracing paper, fabric, and our handmade water-hyacinth paper.
Education and exchange formed the core of their residency. They hosted the Re:Present workshop with 13 students at Buku Jalanan Chow Kit — an alternative school in Kuala Lumpur — where students aged 9 to 17 imprinted found objects brought from home and school onto clay, then cast these impressions in plaster. Through this process, everyday materials became moments of formation, unfolding like a mechanical dialogue. The resulting works will be presented at the open studio at Rimbun Dahan.
Meeting people here and travelling to nearby islands — such as Langkawi and Pulau Ketam (Crab Island) — has inspired Chandy and Yury to write stories and poems in their tracking journal, in which they collage photography, drawing, and handwriting created from handmade water-hyacinth paper and found fabric from the Cambodian community. This journal is currently on display at Balai Seni Maybank until 12 December 2025, as part of the Maybank Foundation Artist Fellowship Programme. Inspired by their poems and daily experimental photography during the residency at Rimbun Dahan, Chandy and Yury also compiled their work-in-progress into a video art piece shot inside and outside Rimbun Dahan, involving body performance and a poem-reading voice-over, collaborating with local residents and friends, which will also be shown at the Open Studio.
Just five kilometres from their studio, Chandy and Yury found a small Cambodian market—a pocket of home in an otherwise unfamiliar place. Speaking their own language with the people there helped them understand the community’s daily struggles, their resilience, and the paths that brought them to Malaysia. With familiar ingredients close by, they began cooking and sharing meals with residents and guests on-site. It became a simple way to ease homesickness and to stay connected to their food roots.
Here at Rimbun Dahan, nature, forest, and art blend in a beautiful dance, surrounded by a flourishing garden, giving us a sense of peace and home. Chandy and Yury swam in the pool and the lotus ponds, where the otters live, and one day we discovered a sunken boat beneath the deck. It somehow evoked a sense of longing, as if they had finally found a hidden treasure beneath the water—a dream come true. The boat later became part of their installation and inspired a section of their poem.
Lastly, Kantael Komplork (Keladi Bunting’s mat) is the title of an interactive installation inspired by traditional Khmer living practices. In Cambodia, almost every family owns a mat—an object used for many purposes: sleeping in place of a mattress, welcoming guests, or kneeling in prayer at the temple. The cooked, ground, and pressed water hyacinth in this work becomes a delicate illustration of migration, displacement and geopolitical history—echoing land movements that stretch and disperse along the waterways. By inviting people to sit on the floor and engage with the handmade water-hyacinth paper, the installation encourages visitors to touch, draw, relax, and interact with the artwork through their bare feet, hands and body. This collective act of gathering on the ground evokes the intimacy of family, warmth, and a profound sense of home—an environment where people come together, share space, and feel deeply connected.
Thai textile artist Awika Samukrsaman was in residence at Rimbun Dahan from September to November 2025, creating site-specific weaving projects which make visible lines and trajectories that once existed, whether of humans on the pickleball court or of plants interacting with manmade structures.
About the Artist
Awika Samukrsaman (b.1991, Surin, Thailand) received her Bachelor of Fine and Applied Arts (BFA), Thammasat University, residing and working in Ratchaburi, Thailand. She is interested in learning and developing basic weaving for everyday use and communication which is rooted from traditional culture and has been a part of everyday life. Awika’s interest in texture in textile works has brought her into folk wisdom among local ethnic groups. She has been a member of Baan Noorg Collaborative Arts and Culture since 2018 and was a manager in 2018-2019. Awika co-founded Wisdomative* in 2019, a platform for developing local weaving art and crafts and in 2021 she co-founded PhiFa collective that runs art-based research projects to retrace, reinterpret and restore Thai northeastern (Isaan) ancestors and heritage.Co-founded Yoonglai Collective,and t-rex veggie brand.
She was a representative artist of Baan Noorg Collaborative Arts and Culture in Churning Milk: the Rituals of Things project for documenta fifteen, Kassel, Germany (2022), Jakarta Biennale, Jakarta, Indonesia (2021), and artist in residency program at Bamboo Curtain Studio, Taipei, Taiwan (2019). In 2020 Awika participated in the Exhibition and a prize winner of the Early Year Project by Bangkok Art & Cultural Centre, Thailand (2020), joined Klongsan Fest, Suvarnabhumi Mosque and Charoen Rat, Bangkok, Thailand (2019), Bangkok Layers contemporary art exhibition curated by Baan Noorg Collaborative Arts and Culture, Bangkok Art and Culture Center, Bangkok, Thailand (2017) and Pop Up Museum project curated by Baan Noorg Collaborative Arts and Culture, Nong Pho, Ratchaburi, Thailand (2014).
Traces of What Once Existed and the Conditions of Allowing Relationships to Form
This project explores the “conditions of coexistence” between human–human, human–structure, and human–nonhuman life forms. It draws on ecological modes of relating — ranging from mutual support (Mutualism) to restricted, competitive, or extractive forms of connection (Competition / Parasitism) — as a way to think about the varying degrees of benefit, loss, and negotiation embedded within every relationship. At the same time, it engages with the sensibility of Object-Oriented Ontology (OOO), which regards all things as possessing their own agency and ontology. Walls, fences, grids, branches, and threads each have histories, capacities, and ways of acting upon one another.
Here, “traces” are not treated as mere residues of the past, but as evidence of collision, contact, exchange, permission, and proximity. They function as markers of where something was once allowed to exist, and where it was denied.
Certain human relationships resemble plants that are “allowed to grow only in some directions”—not because the relationship lacks authenticity, but because invisible systems, circumstances, and timings quietly govern the shape it is permitted to take. This project investigates these “traces of permission”: moments of connection that once took place—clear or faint, intentional or incidental—and asks what form a relationship might assume if it were never cut back, redirected, or prematurely pruned.
Work 1: Tracing the Intrusions of Boundaries
This piece begins with the relationship between human-made structures and the plants that attempt to grow alongside them. Fences, grids, and walls become objects with agency structures whose functions, limits, and permissions are defined by human hands. In contrast, branches and vines navigate those limits, seeking small openings through which to enter, attach, spread, or slowly encroach upon spaces that were never built for them.
The threads in this work act as an “extension” of branches that have been cut away. They return possibility to what has been silenced. By weaving new paths beyond the point where growth was interrupted, the work temporarily restores visibility to life that once occupied the space but has since been removed. It becomes a record of intrusion, resilience, and the desire to exist within a system that grants only partial permission.
Work 2: Do you see the line between us?
This piece shifts toward human-to-human relationality, articulated through the language of textile processes. The weaving process as metaphors for the fiber of relationships, tight, loose, fluid, obstructed, directionless, patterned, intermittent, responsive, or delayed. Each thread reflects a rhythm and the frequency of exchanges, the pace of response, the distance one person allows, and the extent to which another is permitted to enter their emotional space.
In the ongoing project Social Weaving, the warp functions as the net of a Pickleball court, while bundled threads (Weft yarn) act as the movement of the ball being hit back and forth. This recreates conversation as an energetic exchange. Each passage of a thread (Weft yarn) through the warp becomes a “sentence,” an action, or an emotional gesture. The gaps between threads, the tension and looseness of the textile, record the intervals, uncertainties, and shifting stability of communication.
Together, they form a tactile archive of a relationship that once existed.
