KOREA FOUNDATION

ASEAN GALLERY

Contemporary Art in Malaysia:Between the Expected Present andthe Unexpected Future

Azizi Saad’s Unexpected Future

Contemporary art in Malaysia has grown with the support of the government following its independence from the United Kingdom in 1957. In the 1970s, Malaysia’s art industry, which boasts the third largest wealth in ASEAN after Singapore and Brunei Darusalam, helped lay the foundation for contemporary art with the emergence of its experimental artists. In the 1990s, the art market expanded markedly in scale, with an unprecedented boom in the number of galleries.
Corporations were also an important part of the art market’s rise. With the help of their continued sponsorships, talented artists were discovered and nurtured every year through various art competitions and prizes. Kow Leong Kiang, the grand prize winner of the 1998 Philip Morris ASEAN Art Awards, started out as an aspiring young artist and has since gone on to establish himself as one of the leading artists in Malaysian art today. His works have been exhibited at Art Expo Malaysia and the National Art Gallery of Malaysia, as well as in Korea through Art Busan.
As is in other ASEAN countries, Malaysian artists also try to capture modernity while conveying aspects of their traditional culture. Such efforts are reflected in paintings that combine traditional elements of Islamic calligraphy and repeating geometric patterns with Western minimalism and geometric abstraction. In a rapidly westernizing and industrializing modern society, the search for Malaysian identity has been expressed in various genres. In particular, Malaysia’s unique pop art, which integrates popular culture with Islamic elements, is rapidly becoming known through galleries and art fairs, stimulating the demand for art from the middle class.