Kuala Lumpur started at Medan Pasar, the old market square where the Gombak and Klang rivers meet. Along its western edge stand six Art Deco shophouses from the 1930s, home to traditional merchants before banks and finance houses moved in during the 1960s. On November 1, they open their doors again as Muara Arts, a roughly 20,000-square-foot not-for-profit gallery for Malaysian and Southeast Asian modern and contemporary art, and the first institution of its kind in the country.

The project belongs to Shanthi Kandiah and Brahmal Vasudevan, founders of the Creador Foundation, with the restored buildings designed by Dr. Tan LM and Sean Carpenter of Linear Vista. Muara is Malay for estuary, and the founders credit the name to “the late Valentine Willie, who was a consultant to us and spent his career connecting artists across Southeast Asia and showing their work side by side.” Staying not-for-profit is central to the idea, they say, because it “means the gallery exists for artists and the public, not the market.”

Setting the program is Lydia Yee, Muara’s Consultant Artistic Director and the former Chief Curator of London’s Whitechapel Gallery, whose three-decade career also runs through the Barbican Art Gallery and The Bronx Museum of the Arts. Some of the artists she’s now showing in Kuala Lumpur are old acquaintances. “My relationship with some of the artists actually goes back to the 1990s,” she says. “Pacita Abad exhibited at the Bronx Museum of the Arts and I helped acquire her work for the museum’s collection. I know Paul Pfeiffer from the artist collective Godzilla and the Whitney Independent Study Program in New York.” Alongside those relationships, she has tried to bring “the necessary procedures and policies for exhibition making, while leaving behind a prescriptive institutional mentality.”

Abad and Pfeiffer both feature in Muara’s opening exhibition, “A–Z of Southeast Asian Art: A Critical Dictionary,” co-curated by Yee and Zhen Feng Ang. Rather than a conventional regional survey, the show takes its cue from Singaporean artist Ho Tzu Nyen’s “The Critical Dictionary of Southeast Asia” (2017–ongoing), assigning one to three works to each letter of the alphabet across painting, sculpture, textiles, installation, video and works on paper by more than 40 artists from 11 countries. A for Animism opens with a mixed media installation by Zarina Muhammad, C for Corruption brings a new sculptural work by Pio Abad and Frances Wadsworth Jones, and Z for Zoomorphism closes things out with Pfeiffer’s Live Evil (Kuala Lumpur). Yee describes it, in part, as “a curatorial experiment using an algorithmic set of parameters to generate an exhibition.”

The founders want the space to work just as well for people who have never set foot in a contemporary gallery. They picture visitors who “might wander in on a lunch break, join a guided tour or a public talk, or bring their kids on a weekend,” and they’ve produced a family looking guide built around three prompts (Look, Wonder and Imagine) that ends with children writing their own dictionary entry. “There are no right or wrong answers,” they say. “It’s about slowing down, noticing and sharing what you think, which is exactly the spirit we want the whole gallery to have.”

The gallery is only the first chapter. Muara Arts Theatre is targeted for 2029, which will make Muara the first body in Malaysia to unite a gallery and a theatre, and Chris Lee, who spent a decade in senior leadership at National Gallery Singapore, takes over as CEO of Medan Pasar Realty and Muara Arts on December 16. Ahead of the opening, Yee spoke to Hypebeast about how the dictionary format played out in practice and why so many of the show’s artists live outside the countries they come from.

You’ve described A–Z of Southeast Asian Art: A Critical Dictionary as a curatorial experiment that uses an algorithmic set of parameters, borrowing the alphabetical structure, terms, and strategies of alliteration and repetition from Ho Tzu Nyen’s The Critical Dictionary of Southeast Asia. What did working within those constraints unlock for you and co-curator Zhen Feng Ang, and were there letters or terms that proved especially difficult, or surprising, to fill?

We started with a list of Ho Tzu Nyen’s dictionary terms and a list of artists and artworks from across the region, which a group of researchers and writers helped us to identify. My co-curator Zhen Feng Ang and I had the task of creatively assembling a puzzle of sorts – fitting artworks to terms and meeting with artists to see if they were in amenable our reading of their work. The more specific terms, such as Lai Tek or theodolite, were particularly challenging. In these cases, we either selected another word representing that letter or chose to focus on a different understanding of the term. By and large, Ho Tzu Nyen’s dictionary is generative, open-ended and contains multiple terms for each letter so I wouldn’t describe working within these parameters as a constraint.

The exhibition questions the idea of the dictionary as a definitive reference work, placing Ho’s project alongside others such as Wong Hoy Cheong’s “The Definitive ABCs of Government” and “The Definitive ABCs of Ethnography” (both 1999). With more than 40 artists from 11 countries, including Brunei and Timor-Leste, how do you present a region this varied without flattening it into a single narrative?

Initially, we considered using a few different dictionaries as sources of terms for our exhibition. There is overlap – for example, “barbarian” appears in both Wong Hoy Cheong’s and Ho Tzu Nyen’s dictionaries – but the intention and meanings are quite different. We decided to focus on Ho Tzu Nyen’s dictionary for coherence and because it was designed as a system to generate new meanings and links between words and ideas, and this allowed us explore connections across Southeast Asia, while also addressing the diversity and complexity of the region.

You’ve spoken about the gallery as a place where artists from across the region, including those of the diaspora, can “return.” The lineup includes artists such as Pio Abad, Pacita Abad, Paul Pfeiffer, and Carlos Villa, alongside many working in Southeast Asia today. Why was it important for the opening show to bring diasporic voices into conversation with locally based artists?

It was important for us to include diasporic voices as we live in a transnational age. Nearly a third of the artists don’t live permanently in their countries of origin for various reasons. Some have fled wars and other conflicts or emigrated for studies, economic opportunities and personal relationships – but they maintain strong ties to their homelands. While others divide their time between two places. The diasporic condition reflects the realities of life today.

“A–Z of Southeast Asian Art: A Critical Dictionary” opens November 1 at Muara Arts.

Muara Arts
18 Medan Pasar, Kuala Lumpur
Malaysia
Opening hours: Wednesday to Monday, 10 a.m. to 6 p.m.