If 2022 was a year of getting back to a pre-pandemic pace of activity in the Kuala Lumpur scene, then there was a blooming of new spaces and initiatives, and dare we say, new audiences. We felt something of a shift, an expansion, and a tentative energy following the introversion and mostly quiet productivity of the past three years.

The National Art Gallery (NAG) reopened on June 21 after two years of renovations, with a very broad selection from its permanent collection—perhaps the first introduction to the national collection for some younger audiences. During the hiatus, under the helm of director Ameruddin Bin Ahmad, the NAG team undertook important outreach and decentralization beyond the immediate arts community and Kuala Lumpur–Klang Valley audiences, with art camps, discussions, and field trips across Malaysia, and, most notably, the biannual Young Contemporaries exhibition, which in 2021 attempted an ambitious format where artists created site-specific works in their locality. They also began a “Singles” program, commissioning artists to make a work for the front of the museum. Ilham Gallery, meanwhile, perhaps the only major public institution to run through most of the pandemic, broke new records in visitor numbers with its open-call “Ilham Art Show 2022” (5/17–10/23), pulling in nearly 45,000 visitors, and launched its digital education resource using more than 500 works from the Ilham Collection.

There were definite shifts in the art market—private galleries continued to “time-share” spaces for a cross-pollination of artists and audiences. Richard Koh Fine Art closed its Kuala Lumpur space, while former gallery managers from Segaris Art Center and TAKSU galleries set up their own ambitious new spaces, Galeri Puteh and Sareng, respectively. Collectors and patrons opened up new sites too. Among them, collector’s space Urban Museum (UR-MU) in the heart of the city, a venue which has seen RM 20,000 (USD 4,500) in ticket sales per month, and Temu House, a meeting space for conversation, food, exhibitions, and often a little social activism. Auctions had a humdrum year, and art fairs focused on intimate initiatives such as Art Expo’s Art Gala (4/8–10) and CIMB Bank’s Artober Art & Soul (10/1–12/31) and Hotel Art Fair (11/25–27).

There was a definite expansion of audiences with artists and collectives integrating into increasingly popular festivals, and with digital-media art proving an effective language to reach audiences beyond conventional art-world circles. The growing appreciation of arts and culture, the support of government-linked agencies, and new developments in the city, have revitalized older areas such as Chinatown, now a hipster wonderland filled with street art and cafes.

With well-developed practices of pooling support and resources, neighborhood-based Kampung Attap Arts and Culture Collective (KAMAC) organized the one-day festival, Peszta (8/27), lining up music gigs, a talent competition, a poetry fest, and exhibitions including a showcase of new-media works from the east Malaysian state of Sabah. The collective KongsiKL organized a celebration of art, heritage, community, and biodiversity in the inaugural Klang River Festival, spanning exhibitions, light projections, performances, screenings, cultural mapping workshops, markets, and dialogues. Multimedia art collective Filamen brought the exhibition “Immersio: Mengukir” (11/5–27) into Muzium Telekom. Whether an exhibition about the virtual world-building process of Chong Yan Chuah at AANTS.WORLD space (6/24–7/24), or more narrative-based solo video presentations by Gan Siong King at Petaling Jaya Performing Arts Centre (1/19–23) and Saiful Razman at the National Art Gallery (9/19–12/6), “new media” proved itself no longer an outlier KL’s current arts landscape.

Equally, traditional cultures, art forms, and mediums joined the conversation in interesting ways. American collector John Ang organized an exhibition of his formidable heritage collection of Malay textiles in tandem with the 8th ASEAN Traditional Textiles Symposium (9/25–30), while in a contemporary vein, Chang Yoong Chia showed a body of batik paintings addressing the history of colonial cash crop plantations in ”A Leaf Through History” at Cult Gallery (8/6–9/6). Beyond the Klang Valley, Perak state government’s cultural agency PORT Ipoh brought a collateral exhibition to the 59th Venice Biennale (4/23–11/27), “Pera + Flora + Fauna,” with seven artists and groups engaging the discourse around how indigenousness and nature are affected by mainstream cultural attitudes of industrialized nations. At the Hin Bus Depot in Penang, cultural collective Borneo Bengkel invited visitors to explore identity, Indigenous languages, folk music, and found sound through diverse audio-visual presentations in “sem/bunyi” (11/23–27). Meanwhile, Yee I-Lann continued to present works from her tikar (woven mat) project woven by Borneo weavers, in a solo exhibition at the newly opened Silverlens gallery in New York (9/8–11/5) and at the Aichi Triennale (7/30–10/10), Istanbul Biennial (9/17–11/20), the Bangkok Art Biennale (10/22–2/23/23), and elsewhere.

The introspection and self-searching of the pandemic years was perhaps most eloquently expressed in the form of artist-books. The Projek 555 by Malaysia Design Archive shared the outcome of public open calls in 2020 and 2021 for people to fill pocket notebooks. Notable artist-book showcases were held at Iron River Studio and Lostgens (5/21–6/12) and the KL Art Book Fair (12/2–4).

Even as the Klang Valley arts hub found its fresh groove, more individual practitioners decided to leave the fray and lay down roots in other Malaysian states. Additionally, we lost artists Cheong Laitong (1932–2022), Victor Chin (1949–2022), German-born Askandar Unglehrt (1943–2022), Indonesian-born Ahmad Osni Peii (1930–2022), and senior collectors Zain Azahari (1935–2022) and Datuk Parameswaran (1948–2022). The cultural field mourned as a whole the passing of Professor Ghulam-Sarwar Yousof (1939–2022), a trailblazer in the study and promotion of traditional arts, as well as a poet and playwright.

After two changes in prime minister since March 2020, at the time of writing, a new “unity” government led by Anwar Ibrahim and the Pakatan Harapan coalition was taking up office. We witnessed the maturation of Malaysian democracy with the 15th general elections on November 19, which also revealed deepening divisions within society along geographic, religious, racial, and economic lines. It will be interesting to see how government policy on arts and culture takes shape. In an atmosphere of hope mixed with shock over the new opposition’s continued political baiting along racial and religious lines, there is a call for healing and reconciliation, which many cultural practitioners in the country no doubt will work to answer, even as they continue to fight for space for criticality and expression.