20 Jul 2023 3 min read

Holes: Three installations by Alvin Lau, Tep York, and W. Rajaie (2023)

Group exhibition
The Back Room, Kuala Lumpur
10 June – 2 July 2023

Holes is the first show I ever curated and marks, perhaps, a maturation in my own perspective of my role and the possibilities open to me in the Malaysian art world. I conceptualised the entire show from beginning to end, save for the artworks, which emerged entirely from the artists themselves.

Here is documentation of the show, including the press release (with a link to my full curatorial essay) and installation shots captured by Kenta Chai. A catalogue accompanying the exhibition was also published and will be available for online purchase soon at hadasbesarentertainment.com (thank you TY).

Press Release

The Back Room is pleased to announce our next exhibition, Holes, featuring three installations by Alvin Lau, Tep York, and W. Rajaie. The exhibition is curated by our own gallery assistant, Ellen Lee, and presents the diverse styles of creative thinking and approaches of three young contemporaries, all of different backgrounds but based in Kuala Lumpur.

The entire exhibition takes place “off the wall”, with the three installations being crafted specifically for the site of The Back Room and taking a more conceptual, experimental approach in their execution. Alvin Lau presents a mixed media photography piece on plywood that continues his recent forays into three-dimensional styles of showing photography; Tep York presents a readymade CCTV and television installation that injects a street sensibility into the gallery space; while the ever-enigmatic W. Rajaie presents a long congak board crafted out of cow dung. Like the artists’ own personalities, the installations are guarded and unapproachable (perhaps even borderline offensive).

Among the three artists, W. Rajaie (b. 1997, Kelantan) is the youngest and the only one with formal training, having recently graduated with his Master’s in Fine Art from the MARA Institute of Technology (UiTM). Alvin Lau (b. 1994, Kuala Lumpur) is a self-taught photography artist with an exhibition resume of showing at A+ Works of Art, Blank Canvas Penang, OBSCURA Festival, ILHAM Gallery, and The Back Room. Tep York (b. 1988, Kuala Lumpur) is a multi-disciplinary creative who made a name for himself in the Kuala Lumpur creative scene first as a skateboarder, skate filmer, and founder of skate brand QUIT KL; since 2022, he has begun building an art practice and showing in group exhibitions. Despite the differences in their backgrounds, all three have found a home for themselves in art.

The title of the exhibition, Holes, is suggestive of underground networks and also of hidden movement. It considers different styles of installation and conceptual art and their implications within the space of the contemporary art gallery, hopefully paving a way for more serious consideration of installation art in Malaysia. And it is also a celebration of ingenuity and the drive to create, which can spring from all sorts of unexpected places.

This exhibition was made possible with support from Vans Malaysia.

FULL EXHIBITION ESSAY

Installation shots