EXHIBITION: ILHAM ART SHOW 2025
Venue: Ilham Gallery, Kuala Lumpur
Date: Nov 2 to April 5, 2026
Ilham Gallery in Kuala Lumpur isn’t closing the year quietly. Its presenting the Ilham Art Show 2025, featuring contemporary artists and collectives with new works spanning painting, drawing, printmaking, photography, installation, textile, film, and video.
The exhibition opens this Sunday, with a line-up of established names and newcomers such as Gan Chin Lee, Wong Perng Fey, Roopesh Sitharan, Tiga Tawai, Eiffel Chong, Marcos Kueh, Joshua Kane Gomes, Kim Ng, Arikwibowo Amril, Syarifah Nadhirah, Kimberley Boudville, Yvonne Tan, Umar Sharif, Hieng and Afiza Abubakar.
As an open-call exhibition, it is designed to be inclusive – open to all artists based in Malaysia or abroad, regardless of background or experience. Over 270 submissions were received.
In March 2025, 20 artists and collectives were selected by a regional panel (Gridthiya Gaweewong, Sharmini Pereira, Wong Hoy Cheong, and Rahel Joseph).
Each recipient received a production grant to realise their proposed work – projects they might not have otherwise pursued.
Though not bound by a theme, shared ideas emerged: the mining of history to reflect on the present, the fragility of nature, the fluidity of identity, and shifting social and familial ties.
The triennial Ilham Art Show series was established in 2022.
More info here.
The What The Elders Left Us festival, curated by Instant Cafe Theatre’s Jo Kukathas and team, offers an informal yet meaningful way to rediscover Malaysia’s theatrical past and beyond. Photo: The Star/Glenn Guan
FESTIVAL: WHAT THE ELDERS LEFT US
Venue: DPAC, Petaling Jaya
Date: Oct 31 to Nov 2
What The Elders Left Us, a research festival at DPAC this weekend, takes a deep into Malaysia’s forgotten theatre heritage – neglected playwrights, hidden narratives, and the defining works of the 1960s and beyond. Presented by Instant Cafe Theatre, the festival goes beyond performance, acting as a living archive and a collective celebration of memory on stage.
This Friday evening, “Buka Panggung – The Idea of ‘We’” opens with Pak Romli Mahmud from Perlis presenting an Awang Batil storytelling session (with masks, the serunai, and the batil). Pusaka founder Eddin Khoo follows with “The 60s – An Elusive Romance. The Idea of ‘We’. The Notion of ‘Nation’” keynote, and Sabahan artist Eleanor D. Goroh presents “Oupus Ku”, blending music, movement, and poetry.
Saturday features storytelling, readings, and talks, including “Forefather And Storms” – an on-stage reimagining of a leftist father’s secret drawer and a political detainee’s plea letter with Ling Tang and Lim Tiong Wooi. The programme also spotlights 1960s playwright Lim Being Chew (Shi Keyang) and Usen Leong’s lecture-performance “Storm Off A Fishing Village”.
“Sound Of The Sixties” is your Saturday afternoon party groove with James Boyle celebrating his father, the legendary composer Jimmy Boyle; “Songs For The Dawn Of A New Nation(s)” with Paul Augustin explores Malaysia’s early music and the Radio Malaya days; “Surat Dari Tawau” is a radio play reimagined by Joni Atari; while fimmaker-publisher Amir Muhammad’s “Sexuality In A 1960s Short Story” promises a provocative evening of local literary discovery.
On Sunday morning, “Sus, Mr Shakespeare” presents K. Das’s lost play All The Perfumes and Patrick Yeoh’s The Need To…What? reimagined performances follow, with fest organiser Jo Kukathas taking the stage. In a heartfelt tribute, Umesh Shetty and Shankar Kandasamy honour dancer Gopal Shetty, while Stage Made Of Sweat documentary explores Armugam Letchumanan and Tamil theatre in Malaysia with Kumavannan Rajendran.
Filmmaker Mahen Bala offers a lively, selective survey of 1960s Malayan Film Unit documentaries. The festival closes Sunday night with Fusion Wayang Kulit, a live folk music set by T. Bagak, and the “Table or Mat?” discussion inspired by artist Yee I-Lann.
The festival is free, and visitors are encouraged to check the full programme, which features many other interesting events.
More info here.
A series of artworks and toys from Singaporean artist Jahan Loh at the A4 Art Fair at GMBB mall in KL. Photo: GMBB
EXHIBITION: A4 ART FAIR
Venue: GMBB creative mall, KL
Date: ends Nov2
This weekend, GMBB hosts A4 Art Fair 2025, a festival that blurs the lines between pop culture and art.
Themed “The Art of Everything”, it explores how creativity flows through art, craft, culture, and everyday life.
Over 90 artists, artisans, and designers from Malaysia, Indonesia, Singapore, Thailand, Japan, Taiwan, the US, and Argentina present work across six experiential segments: Art x Brand, Art x Sustainable, Art x Living, Art x Artisan & New Media, Art x Pop Sculpture, and Art x Prints – offering visitors fresh ways to experience creativity.
The fair, which has been set up on two floors at GMBB with an additional Grey Box area for talks, offers a playful mix of art, installations, collectible figurines, hybrid sculptures, and character art, with US street artist Stash on board and local headliners like Shafiq Nordin, Kenji Chai, and Michael Chuah. There’s plenty more to explore: Katun (Ab Hafiz Ab Rahman) brings graffiti-inspired primates and global brand collaborations, while Thai street artist Alex Face (Patcharapon Tangruen) returns with his signature three-eyed child “Mardi,” a symbol of streetwise innocence and social awareness.
As a festival highlight, Alexoid Luce (Alexdrina Chong) presents The Shape Of Obedience exhibition, a series of sculptures and paintings using pop art to explore mental health, restraint, vulnerability, and quiet rebellion.
A4 Art Fair is a ticketed event.
More info here.
Cheng will be at Wei-Ling Gallery every Saturday from 2pm to 4pm to take visitors through the new exhibition. Photo: The Star/Azlina Abdullah
EXHIBITION: CHENG YEN PHENG’S ‘SALT OF THE LAND’
Venue: Wei-Ling Gallery, Brickfields, KL
Date: ends Nov 8
Artist Cheng Yen Pheng’s new solo exhibiton Salt Of The Land gives new life to the classical Chinese phrase “salt of the earth”, reimagining it through a lens that feels both ecological and deeply personal. With a series of immersive installations, she transforms the main gallery into a quiet space for reflection – and for sensing the delicate balance between people and the land they inhabit.
Working from Batu Arang, Selangor, a former mining town shaped by its industrial past and ongoing struggles over land, Cheng gathers materials from her surroundings to create works that speak of continuity, transformation, and care. Through the four elements – water, fire, earth, and air – she explores the natural cycles that sustain life: pulp becomes paper, ash purifies, clay hardens into brick, and air gives breath to the whole.
Her process mirrors a kind of resistance – a gentle but firm insistence on renewal and resilience in the face of change. By merging traditional craft with contemporary concerns, Cheng roots her art in the politics of place, honouring the fragile ecosystems and communities that continue to nurture life. Salt Of The Land reminds us that, like salt itself, renewal is essential – a small but powerful element that sustains both land and spirit.
Cheng will be at the gallery every Saturday from 2pm to 4pm to take visitors through the exhibition. Free admission.
More info here.
Hoo’s aquarium installation ‘I have never seen a swimming salmon in my life’, which projects swimming salmon fillets, loins, and steaks over a clipped Sir David Attenborough voiceover from a wild salmon advocacy campaign. Photo: The Back Room
EXHIBITION: ‘ORANG-ORANG SUKA MAKAN’
Venue: The Back Room, Zhongshan building, KL
Date: ends Nov 16
The Back Room has put together a group exhibition featuring food motifs in art, with works by Chin Kar Yern, Hoo Fan Chon, and Liew Kwai Fei. The title is inspired by a 2012 painting by Liew and can be read in multiple arrangements.
The exhibition, which coincides with this Saturday’s Peszta festival at the Zhongshan building, is an exploration of food and our relationships to food told through the idiosyncratic lenses of each of the three different artists. There will be special festival day-long activities accompanying this show tomorrow.
What can visitors expect? Well, Chin’s multi-media installation themed around pineapples is a quirky way of exploring this dynamic fruit – which is also commonly associated with prosperity and luck – through all of the senses except, ironically, taste.
Hoo’s I have never seen a swimming salmon in my life (2022) is a humorous installation of an aquarium with a swimming salmon fillet that speculates on how it would look like to domesticate a fish species such as the salmon, an imported fish that is commonly used in food dishes and regarded as a sign of class in Malaysia.
Liew’s wall of paintings presents food as a tactile playground of symbolic objects, playing with the springy, stretchy, and evocative delights of different foods like eggs, noodles, fishballs, and fruits, while also touching on the decadent and graphic pleasures of food as visual objects in our optical age.
Free admission.
More info here.
