Southeast Asian Arts Residency

Anas Afandi

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Anas Afandi

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.

Khin May Moe

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Khin May Moe

About the Artist

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.

https://www.instagram.com/maymoe.e

http://facebook.com/MayMoeeSketches

About the Residency

Pareidolia ( A World Within)

Screenshot

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.

Brisa Amir

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Brisa Amir

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. 

https://brisaamirstudio.carrd.co

Instagram: @fierydaisy_

About the Residency

I. A Leaf Reaching Out is a Leaf Reaching in 𓂃

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.

Anusorn Tunyapalit

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Anusorn Tunyapalit

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.

https://www.facebook.com/Shumoo
https://www.instagram.com/anusorn_tunyapalit

About the Residency

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

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Mao Sovanchandy

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.

Awika Samukrsaman

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Awika Samukrsaman

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).

https://www.instagram.com/awika_s
https://www.instagram.com/imnualnin


About the Residency

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.

Hewodn

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Hewodn

Agus Nur Wahidin, known as Hewodn, is a traditional instrument-maker and sound artist from East Java. He spent a month at Rimbun Dahan in September 2025.

About the Artist

Hewodn was born in Banyuwangi, East Java, and currently lives in Tuban. He attended the Islamic University of Malang, where he was a member and administrator of the student theatre group. He also joined their music group, and later a Jamaican percussion group in Banyuwangi, eventually forming the ethnic reggae group The Power Rengel in Tuban.

This group, now called Unen-Unen Rengel, continues today, with a focus on playing ancient folk instruments from East Java, some of which are rare or almost extinct. Hewodn has learned how to construct these instruments, and often shares his knowledge through workshops and performances. He also experiments with making sound with stones and instruments made of rontal palm leaves.

Hewodn has created works of music and performance at Melaka Art+Performance Festival, Bantengan Nuswantoro in East Javan, Bandung Art Festival and many other festivals across Indonesia.

About the Residency

Before arriving at Rimbun Dahan, Hewodn attended the Melaka Art+Performance Festival in Melaka, as a sound artist. While he was at Rimbun Dahan, he made a site-specific music instrument installation, ‘The Trees’ Longing for Fertile Soil in the Industrial Age’ . The installation in his studio is welcome to be played by visitors on Open Day on 30 November 2025.

During his residency, Hewodn conducted a workshop in making and playing the traditional instrument karinding towél at Rimbun Dahan. He also performed in Serious Play Improv Lab #93 at Percussion Store in Kota Damansara, with musicians Kok Siew Wai, Yii Kah Hoe, Yong Yandsen and Rogan Kahale Tinsley (USA), and performers Rithaudin Abdul Kadir and Kien Faye.

Joella Kiu

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Joella Kiu

Joella Kiu, a visual arts curator and art historian from Singapore, spent a month at Rimbun Dahan in November 2025, experimenting with writing with a more personal voice and pushing past the thorny exterior of the durian.

About the Curator

Joella Kiu is a curator and art historian based in Singapore. She studies how artists employ the visual, textual, counter-cartographic, speculative and mythological to communicate urgent ecological conditions and contemporary lived realities.

Her writing has been published in AAA Like A Fever, Field Journal, The February Journal and PR&TA. Forthcoming written contributions include a chapter within Tastes of Justice: The Aesthetics and Politics of Food-Art Practices in Asia and Australia (Routledge, 2025).

In terms of independent initiatives, Joella started the discursive online platform, Object Lessons Space, and was host, writer and producer of Mushroomed, a podcast about the visual arts produced in collaboration with Singapore Community Radio. She holds an MA in History of Art from the Courtauld Institute of Art (2017), and a BA in History of Art from the University of York (2015).

https://www.instagram.com/joellaqkiu

About the Residency

For the Open Day programme on Sunday 30 November, I’ll be presenting a new text. A Prickly Affair was written over the short time I spent at Rimbun Dahan, but it has been fermenting in my mind for a long time.

The first iteration of this research was presented in a conference in 2022. That paper was then turned into a chapter, which will be published in an edited volume that’s scheduled to hit the shelves in a month or so. That book, unfortunately, is woefully expensive (£150) and therefore largely inaccessible.

This new text is a spin-off of that research, and is largely borne out of my interest in experimenting more pointedly with a personal voice or embodied perspective within academic or curatorial research. A Prickly Affair is interested in pushing past the thorny exterior of the durian (its exotic stereotype, its reputation) towards a quieter and hopefully more attentive understanding of the fruit.

The text will be printed as physical booklets that will be free to take (while stocks last!) on Open Day. A digital copy will also be available.

Jenny Logico-Cruz & Blonski Cruz of Langgam Performance Troupe

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Jenny Logico-Cruz & Blonski Cruz of Langgam Performance Troupe

The co-founders of Langgam Performance Troupe from Manila spent two months at Rimbun Dahan in 2025, developing the auto/biographical performance “The Inheritance of Taste”.

About the Artists

Jenny Logico-Cruz is a contemporary performance-maker, educator, and cultural worker. Her works have been featured locally and abroad including Manila, New York City, Honolulu, San Francisco, and London. She has also collaborated with notable arts organizations and cultural institutions such as The Cultural Center of the Philippines, St. Scholastica’s College of Music, The National Asian American Theater Company, The New York International Fringe Festival, The V&A Museum- Theatre and Performance Department, and Goethe-Institut Philippinen. Jenny holds a BA in Literature at De La Salle University, Manila, Philippines, and a Master’s degree in London’s Theatre and Performance (Viewing, Making, Writing) at the University of Roehampton (London, UK) where she received a Distinction Award. She also taught at the Theater Arts Department of De La Salle- College of St. Benilde (Manila, Philippines), with research interests focusing on contemporary practices and performance theories.

For the past 10 years, she is the co-founder and artistic director of Langgam Performance Troupe, a contemporary performance company focusing on experimental, process-based, interdisciplinary approaches, and practice-as-research works. Under her and Blonski Cruz’s (company manager) leadership, Langgam Performance Troupe has gained significant cultural notoriety in the independent theater landscape, becoming known as a producer for bold and innovative underground performance works.  Her directing credits include: SOMEWHERE ELSE INSTEAD (2019-2020), SANA DEL MUNDO (OR HOPEFULLY OF THE WORLD (2020), [KOSMOS] (2021), THREAD/WARP (2021), and her most notable to date, PANGULONG BANGAW (2023), a one-man adaptation of William Golding’s LORD OF THE FLIES. As of 2025, she is an artist-of-residence for Goethe Institut Philippines’ Performance Ecologies, and Rimbun Dahan’s Southeast Asian Residency in Malaysia.

FB: https://www.facebook.com/jenny.logico
IG: @logicocruz

Blonski Cruz is a dramaturg, producer, filmmaker, and photographer based in the Philippines. He is a Production Design graduate from the De La Salle – College of Saint Benilde. He was a recipient of production grants with the Goethe Institut, National Commission for Culture and the Arts (NCCA), and Cinema One Film Originals. He has also partnered with heritage institutions such as Fundacion Santiago and the Emilio Aguinaldo Shrine in Kawit, Cavite to create interactive historical tour.

Blonski co-founded Langgam Performance Troupe with professional/personal partner Jenny Logico-Cruz. He operates as the resident dramaturg and company manager. His collaborations with Langgam were featured in the Lacuna Festivals (Spain), BST Journal (UK), the Singapore Biennale, and XSCENA Festival (Manila). Blonski recently finished a training program called Psychological First Aid organized by the Mekong Cultural Hub (Taiwan/UK). This program aimed to equipped cultural workers with the basic tools in establishing safe spaces and support systems for their respectively fields of practice. Currently, he is an artist-in-residence in Rimbun Dahan (Malaysia) for an auto/biographical performance titled “Inheritance of Taste”.

FB: https://www.facebook.com/blonskicruz
IG: @raygcruz

An Inheritance of Taste

An Inheritance of Taste is an auto/biographical performance project that explores the intersections of food, memory, grief and longing, and the reflection of one’s family legacy and its impact on one’s identity. Utilizing an old family recipe book as the main text for performance, An Inheritance of Taste embarks on a performative dialogue between the past and the present. The past: a deceased matriarch (performed by Jenny Logico-Cruz) whose voice remains in the faded pages of a generational recipe book of Filipino dishes she once composed and compiled for her family before her passing. And the present: a daughter (also performed by Jenny Logico-Cruz) who decides to revisit the dishes of her childhood through the same recipe book, after more than 20 years ago since her mother died.

The central action of this dialogue between past and present is the very act and process of cooking—as dictated by the family recipe book itself. The performance aims to tackle the cooking process as a form of seánce that reconnects ancestors and descendants into the familiar reunion taste and smells, as well as create further discourse and communion between the subjective narrative of the performer (cook) and the objective experience of the audience (diners). 

Mother and daughter.
Garilao-Logico Cook Book
Mother and son.

During the residency at Rimbun Dahan, and immersed in the backdrop of Kuang’s slow-paced, leisurely nature, artists are finally afforded the time and space to dive deep into these heirloom recipes with invested attention into their time-intensive, laborious cooking process—which otherwise would have been unmanageable if conducted in the artists’ home city (fast-paced Metro Manila). Apart from committing to the recipes’ element of traditionally durational process, the artists further investigate on the notion of “taste memory,” as asserted by Jenny Logico-Cruz’s mother, as the only powerful “secret ingredient” in recreating these inherited dishes. The artist’s mother notes in her letter dated September 17, 2003: “The secret is this […] you have to remember how you have tasted the dish.” Taking up on this challenge, the artists explore on how such recipes can still maintain the same flavor profile despite being uprooted from their original Philippine locality and transposed using locally available produce in Malaysia. The challenge transforms, beyond just a mere exercise on cooking, but more so as an exercise on memory—memory as a potent muscle that intersects intuition, communal/personal history, and intangible inheritance; memory as the unquantifiable yet ultimate ingredient that navigates and instructs a dish together, transcending limitations and differences in cultural produce.

More info about Langgam Performance Troupe:

Website: www.langgamperformancetroupe.com
FB: https://www.facebook.com/LanggamPT
IG: @langgampt

SEA Dance Collective

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SEA Dance Collective

Trần Minh Hải (b.1993) is a contemporary dance artist and choreographer based in Hanoi, Vietnam.
Ny&Khun: Sreynoch Khun (b.1996) and Ny Lai (b.1997) are a contemporary duo based in Phnom Penh, Cambodia.
Muhamad Erdifadilah (b.1997) is a musician from Bangka Island, Indonesia.
Pebri Irawan (b.1997) a dancer-choreographer of the Indonesian Institute of the Arts in Yogyakarta, Indonesia.
Briefly accompanied by Chan Kar Kah, artist and educator of Marrow Collective and Suiyi Dance Company, Malaysia.

We are Southeast Asian artists who met at Southeast Asian Choreolab 2024 in George Town, Penang. During the program, we formed a strong connection not just through training, but through deep conversations about our work, ideas, and what matters to us. We shared how we create, what inspires us, and our thoughts about art, culture, and the world. Even though we come from 3 different countries, we found many similarities in our culture, how we think and work. This connection is still new, yet we want to keep exploring it. We hope to create something special together. We believe in strong visuals and the idea of “less is more.”

On Sunday 24 July, together with invited members of local dance community, we will perform a short outdoor ritual in the garden at Rimbun Dahan. What you’re about to witness is a living painting. Over the past two months, we’ve been living, listening, moving, and creating at Rimbun Dahan. In the stillness surrounded by nature and time, we found something we now want to share with you, not to impress but to express. This is a spiritual offering and meditation in motion. We’re not here to show off yet we’re here to show up. With every step, every pause, every breath, we’re painting. Painting with the colors of silence, of calm, of curiosity. This is a time for simply being.