Malaysian painter Tan Choon Ting undertook a 3-month residency at Rimbun Dahan from March to May 2025.
About the Artist
Tan Choon Ting was born in Johor Bahru, Malaysia in 1992. Graduated from the Fine Arts Department of National Changhua Normal University in Taiwan in 2019. In recent years, he has been focusing on painting as his main creation. In his creation, he is interested in accident, expressiveness of painting and microcosm.
At Rimbun Dahan, I created works about nightscapes, portraits, plants, and passive imagination.
What impacted me the most when I first arrived here was the nightscape. I enjoy gazing into the night—it feels mysterious, and at the same time, there’s a strange pleasure in being conquered by it. I tried to find a subjective color that could represent this feeling within the night.
Portraits and plants always seem to “appear” together. My understanding of the plants didn’t come from actively studying them, but rather through the words of speakers during the guided tours here—those moments of “Ah, so that’s what it is.” This way of encountering things is a kind of escape I long for, a way to receive what we often call inspiration.
As for passive imagination—one day, on my way out to buy groceries, I saw some common roadside plants, and suddenly felt a sense of rediscovery. Perhaps this feeling came from the contrast with having stayed in the jungle of Rimbun Dahan for some time. It refreshed and reversed my perception, creating an alternating relationship between subject and object. At one moment, the inside becomes the outside; at another, the outside turns into the inside—pointing freely in either direction.
Malaysian musical artist Bumi Liar (real name Izuan Shah) undertook a six-week residency at Rimbun Dahan in April-May 2025.
About the Artist
Izuan Shah is a songwriter/composer and multi-instrumental musician based in Kuala Lumpur. He has a music repertoire stretching back 20 years with his art band Auburn, his pop duo Emmett I, and various other featured appearances. He trained at the Australia Institute of Music in Sydney, majoring in composition. Returning on break in 2013, he was awarded for his music video treatment to Auburn’s song, “Youth”, in the Best Digital Music Video category at the Malaysian Digital Film Awards that year. In 2019, his rock song for Emmett I, “Mogok”, was featured in the Southeast Asian blockbuster film, Polis Evo 2.
In January 2024, his song “Jiwa Kuala Lumpur”, written for his hometown on a routine LRT commute to the studio, was performed by the Kuala Lumpur’s DBKL Orchestra. At the end of last year, he was made honorary member of London-based collective Bill Dury And The Healers in Camden’s vibrant pub scene.
His songs have arced from the third culture idealism of his youth towards a more seasoned, rustic worldview which expresses his Southeast Asian consciousness while preserving his sense of romanticism for a just world.
A writer at heart, his lifelong journaling and lyrical practice has crystallised over time as one with his musical output, evolving him into an artist striding further into the realm of poeticism. Izuan’s current residency brings him back home full circle to the essence of his creative purpose: storytelling.
My tenure at Rimbun Dahan has removed me from the racing machinery of city existence, and opened me up to redirect my musical journey. Here I am given license to pursue a solo album that accepts realist commercial standards, while crucially returning to the beauty and parity of nature and the communal. My main focus here has entailed the sharpening of an artistic style where an East/West fusion serves the universal receiver, ideally sparking a conjunct spectrum of response and activation from both the proud listener and the inspired arts practitioner. The lyrical work meanwhile should speak for a silent majority, beyond the introspection and catharsis of the songwriter. For my current process, I have deliberately eschewed the luxury of modern studio approaches, making do with only voice, guitar, the humble dabruka hand drum, and maracas to shape the harmonic and rhythmic foundations. With a white canvas to express melody lines and inflections to my taste, I am also prompted to record previously suppressed traditional rhythms myself without relying on the touch of specialist players.
Unique synthesis options are also available to me here, such as live gamelan ensemble, prepared piano, and field recordings. Digital treatment has been only necessary for the rendering of these found sounds into the raw song material to complete these album demos, which will be reproduced in Jakarta as a full-length to be mixed and mastered in London. In a concerted move away from the rock band format, the original spirit of my previous ouvre–truth, resistance, rebellion, protest, amplified dissonance–has not been abandoned, but merely augmented with a matured emotional quotient in resilience towards the external chaos of the times. These dramatic elements have not been necessarily softened, but refined with subtler textures and refrained tones in the performance of my present Bumi Liar vessel (a stage name which translates simply to ‘wild world’) and my personal constitution of what could be defined as contemporary Malaysiana. This Bumi Liar aesthetic was conceived with a view towards preserving the musical, literary, visual, and cultural tenets of my birth heritage, descendant of my multi-strained ‘Nusantaran’ lineage, with all its inherent spiritual, mystical, and folklore aspects. The bi-lingual Melodis Pasca Silam (Post-Ancient Melodist) album may be preceded by an EP, entitled Kehalusan (Refinery), and will be made available into physical formats as a touring card along with its requisite digital presence.
Thai visual artist Pare Patcharapa Inchang was in residence at Rimbun Dahan for one month in April 2025.
About the Artist
Pare Patcharapa Inchang (b. 1984) is an artist based in Thailand. She began painting in her mid-thirties. Her painting work primarily focuses on themes of emotions through poetics, memories within individuals or communities, and the interaction of social issues and political conditions, reflecting personal experiences.
Pare holds a BA from King Mongkut’s Institute of Technology Ladkrabang. Her works have been exhibited across Thailand. Her photo book Touch Me is published by 89books, Italy (2022). She was a fellow at apexart in New York in 2024.
Whisper from the Ground : Soundscape Between Soil and Sun
Time is the creator of what we are and what we desire to become. We live in the moment, whether because it has not yet happened or because it has already passed.
Music is an art that conveys sensations in another form, is the aesthetic of time without consuming space.
The process of this project started with exploring the area around Rimbun Dahan, examining the traces of living beings. It presents stories of the passage of time that moves through the story of life, labor for whom the completeness of plant species is never ending, in the form of paintings to represent the feeling of being enveloped by movement of colors in raw linen, as well as sound recordings of insects and wind to create a music about space between the creator and the sun, reflecting the state of something that resembles reality.
All painting and music experiments emerge at the atmospheric crux between present and past, conjuring the liveness of place where I was.
Malaysia sculpture artist M. Sahzy was in residence at Rimbun Dahan for one month in March 2025.
About the Artist
Born in 1996, M. Sahzy, an artist and sculptor residing in Kuching, Sarawak, draws inspiration from the lush jungle surroundings, crafting surreal sculptures from organic materials found within.
Each artwork is a testament to his deep connection with nature, reflecting the intricate interplay between materials, environment, and his boundless imagination. Spending weeks or even months on each piece, Sahzy infuses his sculptures with personal narratives and experiences, creating a captivating visual journey for the viewer. In addition to natural elements, Sahzy seamlessly incorporates discarded man-made objects, further enriching the storytelling aspect of his creations.
Through his artworks, Sahzy invites people to think about change, strength, and the cycles of life. He also highlights his deep interest in forgotten objects and the spaces they inhabit.
About the Residency
During my one-month art residency at Rimbun Dahan, I embraced the challenge of creating an installation and sculptures that carried a familiar narrative—but using entirely new materials and spaces, far from my usual resources in Sarawak.
The lush forest of Rimbun Dahan became both my muse and my source of materials. I collected discarded objects scattered throughout the woodland, transforming forgotten fragments into something meaningful. With my studio nestled so close to the forest, I was able to fully immerse myself in the creative process.
Each day, the symphony of rustling leaves, the earthy scent of damp soil, the presence of monkeys, birds, and frogs, and the textures of bark and trees guided my hands.
What began as an experiment in adaptation became a month-long dialogue between nature and creation.
Now, Gerbang Alam / Portals stands complete—a testament to the beauty of reinvention and the quiet whispers of the forest that shaped it.
The Otters sculpture, crafted from driftwood and ironwood, will find its place by the lake at Rimbun Dahan—a fitting home for its spirit.
In July 2024, Kieu-Anh Nguyen undertook one month of residency at Rimbun Dahan. Due to other visa challenges, her second month of residency has been postponed to 2025, but her studio will be open for Open Day on Sunday 25 August 2024, although she will not be present.
About the Artist
Kieu-Anh Nguyen (b. 1997) is an interdisciplinary artist based in Hanoi, Vietnam. She enjoys creating spaces to foster inclusive conversations around underrepresented bodies and narratives, notably about women.
Her art practice has foregrounded olfaction as the core line of inquiry to explore memory tracing and care practice, as it has taken the forms of participation and soft sculpture, and often suggests travels between time, spaces, and sensory experiences.
Her work has been exhibited in various spaces, including VIVA ExCon, Vietnamese Women’s Museum, Asia Art Archive and documenta fifteen.
About the Residency
Kieu-Anh has been immersed in inter-liminal spaces, either those given to her or those she created herself through her continuation of work and current exploration in the natural and cultural landscape of the residency.
During the first month of her residency, Kieu-Anh found belonging and familiarity in creating themed bouquets from collecting plants and found objects from the garden at Rimbun Dahan and from Hindu temples on Jalan Ipoh. She then narratively recorded the experiences to reexamine and study means of nativity in nature through the smell of flora and fungi in the garden — those that share similarities and differences with species in neighboring countries. The scented rituals in the Hindu temples, coming from a religion foreign to Kieu-Anh, brought her interest to a fictional discovery of a flawless faunt of protection that came to her in a dream.
When she is not walking around and smelling plants, she is probably in the studio, doing nails eternally — stretching the reality of time and other beings that she encounters on the tiny surfaces of nail replicas. The work experiments with traditional lacquer techniques, and explores “standards of beauty” in both lacquer craft and nail aesthetics. It captures organic encounters with people through a made-up service — “one Eternailty later” — continuing its first chapter from Berlin in May and June this year. At Rimbun Dahan, she has documented every encounter into little nail copies, scanning them onto fish scales found near the pool (thanks to the otter season!), and repeats it in her eternailty.
Ironically, while spending most of her headspace living and creating in a borderless world of scent and other means of counting time, Kieu-Anh is unfortunately absent for this Open Studio, not because it was her birthday, but due to an actual border problem. She has been forced to suspend her second month of residency. The flowers she has prepared have wilted, the milk-scented prayers need her presence to recharge their magic, so for now the open studio relies purely on the nail shop’s instruction to continue her residency project.
Please leave Kieu-Anh a copy of your nails, and pretend that we have actually met! Until Kieu-Anh returns to RD, let her take care of your nails in the meantime until you meet (again).
In August 2024, Filipina visual artist Noelle Varela spent one month in residency at Rimbun Dahan.
About the Artist
Noelle Varela (b. 1993) is a Filipina visual artist who studied and earned her degree in Fine Arts at the University of the Philippines- Diliman. She mainly works with three-dimensional pieces and continuously constructs contemporary images using sawdust through flora and female imagery to depict female and women experiences, sensuality and societal standings.
Continuing my exploration around sawdust as textile during my residency, I delved into a more narrative imagery about finding familiarity — similar and the same, within a new environment to cope with the sense of place. There is a challenge for me to expand and allow myself to experience new places, to have myself familiarize and notice similarities between my home back in the Philippines and here in Malaysia has encouraged me to attain a sense of ease.
To establish one as ‘usual’, we ought to progressively obtain familiarity with the environment through routines, finding similarities and by building practical inhabitation around our surroundings. We tend to gravitate towards things and experiences that seem familiar to us, something we had experienced and played into beforehand to which our repetitive encounter with the unknown becomes familiar. There is a hand-in-hand relationship between our personal experiences and daily routines to the place itself. Our cognitive aligns with our intimate perception of reality — to be able to distinguish similar against ‘the same’ happenings. Activities revolving the practical use of the place and landscape afforded a sense of ease and belongingness.
For the Open Day, I will be showing a series of sawdust work and drawings in which both portray places and objects I interact with daily here in Rimbun Dahan. These images range from the path to and from my studio space and home, depictions of the daily routines I continued and imposed during my stay, familiar plants, interactions with the pets and areas in the house I inhabit with my usual doings. Places are experienced, new landscapes develop to “normal experiences” processed by the body and its senses.
From June to August 2024, Sabiq spent three months in residence at Rimbun Dahan.
About the Artist
Sabiq is a visual artist based in Bandung, Indonesia, born in Tasimalaya in 1994. His artistic practice explores the potential of sequential images across diverse mediums, including comic illustration, animation, code-generated art, and installation.
Typically, his main themes arise from the mundane, transforming everyday observations and experiences into visual narratives. His recent work focuses on the interplay between logic and aesthetics, seeking to find tension between these two seemingly disparate concepts.
At Rimbun Dahan, Sabiq tried to grow plants from the collection at Rimbun Dahan and observed them as they grew day by day. He took pictures of the plants almost every day.
During the residency, Sabiq continued his exploration of drawing with systems and nature as his main references. He sought to understand how nature grows and to imitate its processes using logical lines. He found it interesting because, while logic is often seen as stiff and rigid, nature is fluid and organic.
The main work he focused on during this residency was procedural animation. The animation had no traditional keyframes; instead, its movements were driven by instructions from a function, such as timeframe, randomness, noise, or oscillation. The values and parameters of the animation were based on the photos of the plants he took almost every day.
Malaysian filmmaker Gogularaajan Rajendran undertook a two-month residency at Rimbun Dahan from June to July 2024.
About the Artist
Gogu (Gogularaajan Rajendran) is a filmmaker based in Kuala Lumpur, Malaysia. He focuses on telling stories about Malaysian Indians, blending horror and humor through both provocative and poetic approaches. The short film “Walay Balay”, which he co-directed, premiered at the 2024 Cannes Directors’ Fortnight. He received the Krishen Jit Fund for his ongoing project “Araro Ariraro”, documenting the stories of Malaysian Indian plantation workers. Gogu is also currently developing his first fiction feature film, “Kaali: Depth of Darkness”, which received the inaugural mylab FINAS Award and was featured at the 2021 Seapitch Bangkok and the 2022 Film Bazaar Co-Production Market in India.
Gogu developed his feature film project “Kaali” during a two-month residency at Rimbun Dahan. The peaceful and calm natural environment played a crucial role in helping him find the essence of the story and build its structure after conducting intensive research on how folklore, fairy tales, and myths can be translated into the medium of cinema. Below is the logline for the film, “Kaali”:
1966, a plantation bordering a lush forest in Malaysia. Kali (24) is a young wife and plantation worker of the Indian diaspora community who struggles with her mother-in-law Chellammal’s impatience to have an heir. She begins to feel accepted when she eventually gets pregnant, but a wrong decision triggers a miscarriage. Suddenly, Kali faces the wrath of Chellammal, who turns everyone against her. Left alone, Kali discovers her divine connection to the forest and uses it to take revenge.
Scenes from the Residency
Showing on Open Day, 25 August 2024
“Every day when I wake up, I open the window panels that overlook a beautiful pond filled with lotus flowers. This pond has become my best friend. I gaze into it, share my thoughts with it, and it returns some back to me. I observe it daily, noticing how it changes and connects with the people and animals around it. This is a love letter to the Rimbun Dahan lotus pond.”
Thai artist Naraphat Sakarthornsap is undertaking a one-month residency at Rimbun Dahan in August 2024.
About the Artist
Naraphat Sakarthornsap is a Bangkok-based artist whose work explores societal inequalities and gender discrimination through the medium of photography and installation. Flowers serve as central motifs in his practice, imbued with profound symbolic meaning. These floral elements function as keys to unlocking the complexities concealed within his work, often reflecting his personal and emotional depths. Naraphat’s early artistic inquiries focused on the ephemeral nature of flowers, mirroring a broader exploration of challenges imposed by the natural world. Over time, this interest evolved into a critique of societal power structures, as expressed through his floral imagery. His work invites viewers to look beyond the superficial beauty of his compositions and to contemplate the deeper messages embedded within them. In doing so, Naraphat’s work resonates with the experiences of many who grapple with societal norms and inequalities.
The complex visa application process and stringent document checks faced by many Asian citizens highlight the unequal treatment of people based on one’s country of origin as indicated on their passports. In a similar vein, the garden within Rimbun Dahan can be seen as a microcosm of a nation, where the gardener is the supreme ruler. Cultivated plants represent legal residents, coexisting with ‘outsiders’ such as grasses, weeds, and creepers whose seeds are carried by wind or animals. These uninvited plants strive to establish their presence and claim the right to exist within a space that isn’t their native habitat. Their presence creates conflicts within the garden’s ecosystem, sometimes competing for nutrients with the primary plants selected by the gardener, yet simultaneously demonstrating a desire to secure a place to survive.
The attempt to capture the individuality of these plants through black and white portraits against a white background is akin to passport photos that establish a clear identity, serving as a starting point for seeking residency. This is a way to affirm their existence and claim the right to live, even as unauthorized outsiders. However, the ultimate decision-making power rests with the gardener, leaving these plants vulnerable to expulsion or eradication. This raises questions about the circumstances of these plants’ existence as outsiders. Will they be granted the right to coexist with other living beings when all life seeks a better place to thrive?
Malaysian writer Lim Wan Phing is in residence at Rimbun Dahan for 3 months from July to September 2024.
About the Author
Wan Phing Lim was born to Malaysian parents in 1986 in Butterworth, Penang. She lives in Penang and is the fiction editor of NutMag zine. Her first short story collection ‘Two Figures in a Car’ was published by Penguin SEA in 2021. Her second collection, ‘Adorable’ is forthcoming in 2025.
About the Residency
Wan Phing is working on her third short story collection. The plong trees found in Rimbun Dahan have inspired her first piece, entitled ‘Spirit of the Plong’. It has been completed, workshopped and submitted to speculative fiction magazines online. Her current work-in-progress is another short story, tentatively titled ‘Paris’, inspired by the moulded and woven sculptures created by Kristi Chen, a recent resident artist, from Canada.
4-5:30pm in the Dance Studio at Rimbun Dahan, Sunday 25 August 2024
Engage with the senses as you participate in short, guided writing exercises, inspired by the nature and architecture of Rimbun Dahan. Describe sights, sounds, smells, touch and taste using clear, vivid and imaginative prose as we find inspiration in our immediate surroundings. Wan Phing will read from her own current works created at Rimbun Dahan.
Bring your own pen, notebook, or write on your phone or tablet. Pen and paper will be provided just in case. Free entry, just show up, no need to register.
