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).
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.
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.
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”.
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 BookMother 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.
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.
Renz Baluyot (b. 1989, Saudi Arabia) focuses his art practice on the relevance of the past to the present, specifically in socio-political narratives situated within present-day urban realities. His work centers on urban decay (rust, tarpaulins, and objects) and artifacts, alongside traditional still life and landscapes. From these elements, he questions the temporality of urban destruction and investigates how these marks of the past have influenced the present under oppressive political and economic systems.
While primarily a painter, Renz Baluyot has worked on sculpture, textiles, and installations aiming to redefine relations with communities and collective memory. Inspired by craft practices and traditions from local artisans, he explores his identity within postcolonial societal structures. He weaves archives with oral histories in order to amplify marginalized perspectives. Baluyot discovers ways in which alternative knowledge manifests through his practice.
Baluyot received his BFA from the University of the Philippines, Diliman and completed artist residencies at the Virginia Center for the Creative Arts (VA, US), Elizabeth Murray Artist Residency (NY, US), Orange Project (Bacolod City, PH), Bellas Artes Projects (Bataan, PH), YOD AIR Program (Osaka, JP), and was selected for a fellowship grant at the Vermont Studio Centre (VT, US). In 2019, he was one of the artists presented at the exhibition Living Earth: Contemporary Philippine Art, curated by Luca Beatrice and Patrick Flores in Milan, Italy.
Baluyot received the Juror’s Choice Award of Merit in the 25th Philippine Art Awards (2020) and was one of the finalists in the Ateneo Art Awards – Fernando Zóbel Prizes for Visual Art (2021) for his exhibition, Empire at West Gallery. He lives and works in Manila, Philippines.
At Rimbun Dahan, I took the chance to play with new materials and techniques that I’ve been curious about and might bring into my practice later on. I started these experiments in May during my first month, carried them over to my residencies in New York (Elizabeth Murray Artist Residency) and Virginia (Virginia Center for the Creative Arts) in June and July, and concluded them back in Malaysia this August for my final month at Rimbun Dahan.
One of the first things I tried was batik, mixing it with my practice of dyeing fabrics with rust, to learn to utilize and control the medium better. I was especially interested in how wax works as a “resist” material, so I began using it to highlight words shared between Malay, Indonesian, and Filipino that, in their own way, have resisted Western colonial influence and still shape how our languages connect today.
I also revisited an idea that I have wanted to pursue for a while: working with copper and aluminum as grounds for painting and mixed media, which connects back to my interest in urban decay and industrial materials. As an alternative to using actual metals, I painted copper tones on paper instead, using letter decals as a resist material between paint layers, still inspired by the batik process.
Throughout all this, I made graphite drawings of the places I stayed in Malaysia and the US as a way to document my residency journey.
Travel supported by MCAD Benilde Travel Bursary (2025).
MixerJ, a visual artist of Karen descent from Myanmar, has spent two months in residence at Rimbun Dahan, creating character drawings in his signature intricate abstract style, and transforming them into portable cutouts.
About the Artist
Saw Nyan Linn Htet (b.1999), known professionally as MixerJ, is a visual artist of Karen descent from Myanmar. Originally based in Yangon until 2024, MixerJ has since continued his art practice by spending most of his time in Bangkok, Thailand, and traveling between neighboring countries.
MixerJ studied graphic design for commercial purposes, and since 2017, he has been actively participating in the Myanmar art scene as a visual artist.
His practice centers on intricate ink drawings composed of vibrant colors and dense patterns, featuring repeating lines, dots, and geometric shapes, which are influenced by his interest in design aesthetics. At first, his works may appear purely abstract—but gradually, his abstract forms turn into character-based compositions, where he uses those characters to tell stories.
Through visual storytelling, his work engages with human nature and behavior, confronting moral dilemmas and acts of rebellion tied to social and political realities that shape both his identity and his environment. MixerJ’s practice transforms personal realities into myth-like figures that exist between chaos and clarity, memory and imagination, belief and breakdown.
He has previously exhibited his work in both Yangon, Myanmar, and Bangkok, Thailand. In 2024, MixerJ took part in the “Artistic Response to Burma to Myanmar” exhibition organized by the British Council Yangon in collaboration with the British Museum. His artwork, “The Weaving Dream: A Peaceful Home with Beautiful Bedrooms,” was acquired by the British Museum for its permanent collection.
I spent two months at Rimbun Dahan, divided into two periods: the first in February and the second in August. Before coming here, I had been living mostly in Bangkok, Thailand, since leaving Myanmar in early 2024. However, after my first residency period, circumstances prevented me from returning to Bangkok.
That was the main reason I began creating small character drawings in various postures during my first month stay, using my usual intricate and abstract drawing style. These pieces were designed to be portable, something I could easily carry with me wherever I travelled. In the months between my two stays, I produced quite a number of these drawings.
When I returned to Rimbun Dahan in August, I began transforming the drawings into paper cutouts, inspired by memories of my childhood, when I would cut characters from comic journals and invent my own storylines. This project grew into a way of telling the stories I have experienced, heard, and learned from different environments, moving between countries, meeting strangers, and sharing time with people from many walks of life. I am focusing during this time to create a visual work that can be assembled easily, removed, and carried around safely.
Through this work, I aim to reflect the fragility of human nature, the hopefulness of life, and the resilience of dreams. Stories have been with us since birth as lullabies, as bedtime stories. And as we grow older, they evolve into countless forms of narrative as novels, ideologies, and news, which shape and reshape the way we see the world. I believe we are both carriers of stories, and stories themselves, carried through the world by the lives we live.
Alice Sarmiento is a full-time educator, freelance writer, independent curator, and occasional seamstress. Her writing and curatorial work centers feminist, relational, and community-engaged practices, while her work as a critic casts a feminist lens across Filipino cultural production, ranging from contemporary art to Pinoy showbiz.
As a curator, Alice has worked on the curatorial teams of the inaugural (and so far, only) Manila Biennial in 2018 as well as the Visayas Visual Art Exhibition and Conference (VIVA ExCon) in 2023. Before returning to Rimbun Dahan for the second month of her residency, she founded Spare Bedroom, a space for restaging installative and relational works, in order to extend their public programs and reactivate engagement with their community.
Alice is also a member of the Rural Women Advocates, leading creative and curatorial projects to advocate for women in the peasant sector. She has also volunteered since 2011 as an adoption counselor and humane educator for the Philippine Animal Welfare Society.
I came to Rimbun Dahan to look at the center’s textile collection, and use it as a prompt to think about heritage textiles and indigenous craft methods. As someone who had worked with textiles in different capacities in the past (first as an undergraduate in a fashion program, then as a teacher, then as a researcher for several curatorial projects) I was familiar with the anxieties around this form of cultural production, one which so heavily depends on women’s work.
Using the time and space afforded to me by this residency, as well as its proximity to a wealth of other Malaysian resources in the form of markets, museums and friendly banter, I began working on Once A Vibrant Tradition – a text that negotiates the tensions of craft and community caught in the crosshairs of capitalism.
For Open Day, Alice will be in conversation with Wen Di Sia artist, writer, and advocate from Gerimis Art, a group that documents and supports the arts, culture, and local economy of the Orang Asli. She will also be sharing printed drafts of the Malaysia sections of Once A Vibrant Tradition in zine form, in order to open these to the public for comment.
Malaysian cultural worker Low Pey Sien spent several months in residence at Rimbun Dahan in 2025.
About the Artist
Low Pey Sien (b. 1991) is a Malaysian cultural worker from Kuantan, Pahang. Her architectural background is a major influence – her works observe the relationship between space, place, and people. She often sees herself as an observer rather than a participant, a listener rather than a creator. She enjoys different perspectives and taking time to understand and put things together into a bigger picture.
She mainly works in photography, film, and graphic media, lately actively exploring themes on body, shame and identity. Her works were exhibited in “Kenduri Seni Patani” art festival organised by Patani Art Space , Thailand (2024), “Continuum” exhibition under the “Creative Access in New Media” online residency, organised by In Transit, UK and Filamen (2024), “No Self, Just Body” exhibition under the “ACAC AiR 2023: Starquakes” by Aomori Contemporary Art Center, Aomori, Japan (2023), and “Women in Film & Photography 2023: Bodies” organised by Objectifs, Singapore (2023).
Her recent video works include video art “Wani-Onna” (2024), dance documentary ”Movement: We Are Bodies” (2022), dance film “La La Li Ta Tang Pong” (2020), video art “Keroncong Kuala Lumpur II” (2017), and video art ”Invisible Old Klang Road” (2016).
When she is not creating, she freelances as curator, producer, and graphic designer, mainly working with her friends, to bring their creative works into this world.
During my residency at Rimbun Dahan in January and March 2025, I was able to revisit a project that was put on hold due to other commitments. Being in this special retreat gave me time and space to rest, and to focus on editing a short documentary, tentatively titled “Summer Camp”.
Three years ago, My friends and I had the opportunity to document the 4D3N reunion gathering attended by over 100 former Internal Security Act (ISA) political detainees. These former ISA political detainees were mostly detained in the 1960s and 1970s. They shared with us the significant events during their detention, and shared memories of collective resistance in this period of white terror. However, their struggle is not homogenous, they came from diverse backgrounds and political ideals. Even so, they began to understand each other, fostering care, love, support, and resolving conflicts between themselves. Perhaps this is the most important spirit that emerges from the political detention camps—a spirit that is very much needed in our diverse society.
The statement sounds very nice, but actually I’m still at a loss as to how to piece the materials together. At the end of my residency in March, I couldn’t see the form yet. I hope to push the progress a little bit more for this coming open studio in July.
Singaporean artist Isabella Ong has been in residence at Rimbun Dahan for two months, from June to July 2025.
About the Artist
Isabella Ong (b. 1992) is a Singapore-based artist whose work explores the relationship between data, form and environment. Working across installation, code and text, she examines how ecological, cultural and technical systems are structured and represented. Her practice engages with material processes alongside physical computation and generative methods, translating natural phenomena into spatial and visual languages.
She received her MArch in Design for Performance & Interaction from The Bartlett, UCL, and a BA (Hons) in Architecture from the National University of Singapore. She was an artist-in-residence at the Curtin Institute of Radio Astronomy (2023) and currently teaches at NUS Department of Architecture and NAFA’s Design Practice programme. Her practice is shaped by ongoing collaborations across disciplines and communities.
The word artefact has two meanings. It can refer to a human-made object, or an error in observation or representation introduced by the technique or tool involved. During my residency, I explored the duality of object and error through a body of work that interrogates the Corinthian column as a Straits artefact: a classical form adopted into the local building vernacular, often described by historians as ‘untutored’ or ‘plagiarised’ copies of the classical order. It is this act of copying that forms the basis of my experiments into techniques of reproduction.
In one series (‘coarse copy’), I made casts and bricks out of Shanghai plaster, a faux-stone finish made of stone aggregates held together in a cement-binder that results in a rough, speckled texture. As a material introduced by Chinese labourers hired to construct many of Singapore’s classically inspired buildings, Shanghai plaster embodies the material culture of labour histories and transmission. In the work, the bricks are cast patterns of botanical specimens selected from Rimbun Dahan’s native garden, their impressions read against the grain of the textured plaster. The bricks form a pedestal, presented as a pattern book of alternative ornamental motifs, indexing botanical taxonomy alongside Vitruvius’ architectural myth of the column. The coarsened medium of this casting technique challenges the assumption of fidelity, drawing attention to how imposed forms require local hands to make—and remake—them, their labour an act of translation.
In another series (‘carbon copy), I worked with carbon transfer paper to manually copy text. Using a basic black-and-white printer, I printed out copies of Vituvius’ architectural myth, sourced as a low-res scan from the Internet Archive. Enlarged tenfold, the text rendered as pixelated fragments, which I then copied by hand. The letters began to blur into artefacts. This exercise draws from the attitude towards copies and imitation in Eastern art, such as the copying of calligraphy masterpieces, where reproductions are often regarded with equal (or even greater) value than the original.
Across the works, I am interested in how forms shift through processes of transmission. Working with low-res scans, transfer materials and patterning, the project explores the methods of reproduction as both a technical and cultural act. By destabilising familiar artefacts and forms, I examine how monuments are not only inherited but also being rewritten through acts of documentation and replication. Copying thus becomes a way to look at how inherited structures—architectural, botanical, archival—are mediated through the tools, labour and material knowledge of those who remake them.
Filipino visual artist Rommel Joson is in residence at Rimbun Dahan for two months, from June to August 2025.
About the Artist
Rommel Joson is a painter and book illustrator currently teaching drawing, illustration, and print production design at the University of the Philippines College of Fine Arts where he is also taking his post-graduate studies. His various roles deal with the intersection and interaction of text and image. His art practice draws inspiration and raw material from both historical and contemporary visual communication artifacts such as reading primers, children’s books, encyclopedias, illuminated manuscripts, information graphics, comics, and even print ads.
Part of his process involves creating unreadable glyphs and ciphers that mimic the texture and structure of recognizable books and texts. These invented scripts, combined with imagery from historical and contemporary books, result in hybrid forms—artist’s books and paintings that explore the tension between the familiar and the obscure. By taking the commercial processes of book design and illustration and subverting their function, the resulting objects and artifacts attempt to engage viewers in active decoding.
My work at Rimbun Dahan—composed of paintings, glyphs, and an accordion format artist book—is my exploration of slow, branching, and mythic time through the interplay of text and image. This is the longest I’ve stayed in another country, and the largest block of uninterrupted time to work on my art, away from the demands of other tasks and duties back home. I chose to approach the experience by viewing it through the lens of language and time. During my stay, I noticed many word similarities between Malay and Filipino, no doubt because of the common Austronesian roots. I also observed how my experience of time shifted, not only because of my physical distance from other work concerns, but also the time differences in the rising and setting sun. Suddenly, as I immersed myself in the surrounding flora of the arboretum and deliberately walked into my new surroundings, I experienced a slowing down of subjective time. In Filipino, moving slowly and carefully translates as “dahan-dahan” and serendipitously also translates to “branches” in Malay. Thus, I’ve come to think of my work at Rimbun Dahan under this conceptual umbrella—a meditation on language, place, and time.
During the conceptualization stage, I was initially inspired by the Voynich Manuscript—a medieval codex written in an unreadable script and language and accompanied by plant illustrations. As part of my process, I created a kind of tree alphabet inspired by the arboretum. It has been said that typography is “thought made visible”. And these invented glyphs reveal as much as they conceal, obscuring words while at the same time placing them into forms and shapes that reflect my own subjective experience of the surroundings.
Then I searched for Filipino words and nouns that can evoke double meanings and cultural connotations when paired with images. Words like “kama” (bed), “puso” (heart), and “loob” (literally inside but can also refer to the inner self) have particular resonances during my stay at Rimbun Dahan. These words refer to my experience of bodily rest, Filipino mythical stories about the surrounding flora (such as the banana plant), and the witnessing of the Eid al-Adha sacrifice. I paired these words with surreal images and inscribed the words using the invented alphabet. Through all this, the space of the studio became a place where I attempted to explore my personal experiences of the residency, the mythic connotations of the surrounding flora, and the linguistic similarities between the culture I bring and the space I’ve been transplanted into.
Malaysian visual artist Fauzan Fuad undertook a 3-month residency at Rimbun Dahan under the Southeast Asian Arts Residency, from May to July 2025.
About the Artist
Fauzan Fuad (b. 1987, Kuala Lumpur) is a painter and photographer whose work bridges the raw aesthetics of urban culture with the experimental ethos of Abstract Expressionism. He began his artistic journey in 2012 as an assistant to renowned artist Yusof Ismail (Yusof Gajah) at Universiti Malaya, a formative experience that lasted one and a half years. Since then, he has committed himself fully to a path of self-discovery as a full-time artist.
Fauzan’s artistic vocabulary draws heavily from the worlds of punk, vandalism, skateboarding, and raw urban visuals, blending them with influences from the western Abstract Expressionist movement of the 1950s. This synthesis results in works that are bold, unfiltered, and deeply rooted in contemporary subcultures. He debuted his first solo exhibition at China House, Penang, in 2018. This was followed by his solo photography exhibition, “44”, at Zon Tiga, Kuala Lumpur, in 2020. Most recently, in 2024, he held his third solo show, titled “POV”, at Rissim Contemporary, Kuala Lumpur. Additionally, he has been invited to participate in his debut artist residency program, “SUNYI,” organized by Balai Seni Negara Langkawi, towards the end of the year. Fauzan’s work has also been featured in numerous group exhibitions both locally and internationally. Highlights include the Gwangju International Art Fair (by Hin Bus Depot Gallery), Gwangju, South Korea (2020); SH/FT: Contemporary Visual Art organized by CENDANA at White Box MAPKL@ Publika, Kuala Lumpur (2019); “Cannot Be Bo(a)rded” at Espace Commines, Paris, France (2017); Malaysian Art Expo 2015 (represented by A2 Gallery); “CONSTANT PRESENT” organized by FINDARS at FINDARS Art Space, Kuala Lumpur (2021); and the Malaysia Emerging Artist Award 2022 Exhibition by CIMB Foundation & HOM Art Trans Gallery, Kuala Lumpur.
As of 2025, Fauzan continues to live and work in Kuala Lumpur, pushing the boundaries of his creative practice while remaining deeply engaged with the cultural landscapes that inspire him.
Artist Statement
When I arrived on May 1st, 2025, I came with a clear intention: to experiment within my artistic practice—whether through photography, painting, or idea-based work drawn from the experiences of this residency. I wasn’t sure how the site would influence me or what emotions it might stir, but I arrived with an open mind.
One of the first idea-based works that emerged was a performance piece. Something about this place demanded that the work take that form—it had to be performance, and it had to be documented. This piece also became part of my ongoing experimentation with mark-making. It will be my first foray into performance as a medium, and I will be collaborating with an artist I met during my previous residency.
Another early development was a photographic installation, inspired by one of the first images I captured with my phone on the day I arrived, as well as the studio space provided for experimentation. That initial visual response became a point of reflection, helping me to reconsider and refine my own visual language and perspective.
Midway through the residency, I received a new commission that needed to be completed on-site and within a tight deadline. After fulfilling this, I returned to painting—my primary and most familiar practice. This period gave me valuable time and solitude to reflect on both myself and my work. I found myself reconsidering how I approach painting: pushing and pulling within the process, exploring layering, surface, and the materiality of marks. I allowed intuition and instinct to guide me. Often, the environment inspired me in subtle, unconscious ways. The color palette and visual moods in my work shifted, reflecting the surroundings I was immersed in.
Four of the paintings developed during this time are now part of a group exhibition, OUTSIDE-IN, at Galeri Sasha, the gallery that represents me. This show had already been confirmed just before I began the residency.
Beyond the studio, I kept up with my regular physical routine—swimming, running, and, for the first time, trying tennis, which I was introduced to here. These physical activities also became a form of mental grounding, offering balance throughout the creative process.
As I reflect on my time here, I feel deeply grateful—for the space, the solitude, the challenges, and the discoveries. This residency offered me more than just time to work; it gave me a chance to reconnect with my practice, to take creative risks, and to listen closely to my instincts. I leave with new insights, new works, and a renewed sense of direction—both in art and in self.
Fauzan Fuad’s residency at Rimbun Dahan is additionally supported by a grant from Balai Seni Negara.
