When people talk about contemporary landscape painting in Malaysia, the conversation often moves between representation and abstraction.
Between what is seen and what is remembered.
Between external environments and internal states of perception.
Between the tangible and the intangible.
Yuki Mun sits quietly within this in-between space.
I first met Yuki during a Bakat Muda Sezaman workshop in 2024, although I had already encountered her work earlier in the 2021 edition of the same programme. Even then, her practice carried a quiet consistency.
Her works did not behave like conventional landscapes. They were not interested in capturing place directly.
Instead, they hovered between memory and sensation. Forms that suggested nature without fully committing to it. Surfaces that felt familiar, but never fully stable enough to be named.
Born in Kuala Lumpur in 1995, her practice has gradually unfolded through a sustained engagement with memory, time and landscape. Not as fixed subjects, but as shifting conditions. Her works often feel like they are trying to remember something that is already disappearing at the moment of looking.
In her current practice, she works in mixed media and installation, with recent developments linked to her Bakat Muda Sezaman 29 collaborative work What Lingers After / Sisa Tersisa. The shift into installation feels less like a departure and more like an expansion of the same language. A movement from surface into space.
Her interest in traces of memory and landscape continues to sit at the core of her thinking, but these are not treated as fixed themes.
They operate more like residues, fragments that surface and dissolve within the work.
When asked how ideas come to her, her answer is simple:
Observation.
Social conversations.
The surrounding environment.
There is a quiet openness in this approach. Ideas are not treated as isolated revelations, but as something formed through proximity. Through being within the world rather than outside of it.
Because of this, her works often feel less like constructed statements and more like accumulated experiences. They do not announce themselves. They settle gradually.
What becomes important in her process is the absence of fixed intention. She notes that her work can expand its form and meaning both consciously and unconsciously throughout making.
The work is not fully decided at the beginning, it becomes something through its own progression.
This sense of transformation is central.
The work is not simply executed.
It is negotiated.
Between intention and accident.
Between control and surrender.
Even when the visual language shifts, there is a continuity running through her practice. Biomorphic forms, surreal landscapes and fragmented visual languages appear not as stylistic decisions, but as recurring ways of thinking. They reappear in different configurations, as if the work is constantly searching for a language it cannot settle on.
Budak 'Small Boy' | Acrylic on canvas | 92 cm x 122 cm | 2021 (Photo credit: Yuki Mun)
When asked whether her work has ever become something different from its original intention, her response is simple.
It expands.
It moves during the process.
It is a negotiation.
This openness is where her practice finds its strength.
There is no strict boundary between idea and outcome. No separation between planning and making. Instead, there is a slow unfolding.
This becomes especially visible in her Bakat Muda Sezaman 2029 collaborative work What Lingers After / Sisa Tersisa. The work is built through cycles of encounter, response and return. Ink on fabric becomes a surface that records these repeated engagements, acting almost like a skin over structure.
What Lingers After / Sisa Tersisa | Ink on fabric | 366 cm x 3,658 cm | 2026 (Photo credit: MIA Fine Art)
Each return to a site is not repetition, but a shift in perception.
The site is not simply revisited.
It is re-seen.
What was immediate begins to drift. What was overlooked begins to surface. Over time, the work accumulates these shifts, where experience is never stable but constantly shaped by distance, memory and time.
What remains is never complete. It exists as fragments, impressions and quiet residues that resist clarity. Rather than reconstructing a fixed moment, the work holds an afterimage, something between memory and physical experience, sensed rather than fully resolved.
In this way, the process reflects how memory itself operates: looping, selective and slightly out of reach.
When asked about her daily life, she describes it simply as “normal.” A word that resists over-definition.
And perhaps that is consistent with her work. A refusal to over-structure experience.
Outside of art, she draws inspiration from books, people and places. Everything exists in relation.
Japanese War Memorial Hulu Langat | Acrylic on canvas | 32 cm x 92 cm | 2022 (Photo credit: Yuki Mun )
Even her thoughts on misunderstanding are understated. She is not particularly concerned with it at the moment, a position that feels less like indifference and more like focus elsewhere.
One of the more revealing points comes when she reflects on what younger artists often overlook.
Her answer is simple:
Process.
Not merely the act of making itself, but the entire journey that precedes it.
The observation.
The conversations.
The research.
The moments of uncertainty.
The slow accumulation of experiences that eventually become an idea.
There is often a tendency to think that the artistic process begins when materials touch the surface. When the brush meets the canvas. When the installation starts taking shape.
But for Yuki, the process begins much earlier.
It starts with paying attention.
Looking.
Listening.
Experiencing.
The making itself becomes only one part of a much longer chain of decisions, reflections and encounters. In many ways, the artwork is simply the visible outcome of an invisible process that has already been unfolding for some time.
And perhaps this perspective explains her own practice.
Her works rarely feel rushed towards conclusions. Instead, they emerge gradually through observation, repetition and response. Meaning is not imposed onto the work from the beginning. It accumulates through the process itself.
She resists the idea of a single turning point. Instead, she describes her practice as something shaped continuously through lived experience. A gradual formation rather than rupture.
Even her reference to Inner Portal, Outer World reinforces this.
Inner Portal, Outer World | Ink on aluminium | 183 cm x 122 cm (each) | 2025 (Photo credit: Yuki Mun)
A work that already suggests dialogue between interiority and external environment.
Between thresholds.
Between states.
For her, change is not an event. It is a condition. A breaking point that is always already part of the process.
Looking forward, she expresses interest in engaging with other fields that can extend her practice further. Not as expansion for its own sake, but as continuation.
A way of allowing practice to remain open to other forms of knowledge.
And perhaps that openness is what defines her work most clearly.
Not resolution.
But permeability.
A practice that does not try to fix landscape, memory, or form into certainty. But instead allows them to remain in motion.
Like something remembered, but never fully recovered.
Comments
Post a Comment