Story Time: A solo exhibition by Minstrel Kuik

The Back Room KL is pleased to announce our next exhibition, Story Time: A solo exhibition by Minstrel Kuik, on view from September 2nd to 24th, 2023. The exhibition will feature a new body of work from mid-career, Malaysian artist Minstrel Kuik in which the artist meditates upon the art-making process. Through a series of 22 colour pencil and graphite drawings engaging with the myth and figure of Medusa, Kuik investigates the deep forms of intuition—feeling and imagination—necessary for acts of artmaking, creation, and storytelling.

Story Time is a significant departure for Kuik who, in recent years, has exhibited mostly photography, mixed-media installations and fabric assemblages with socio-political themes and personal histories. The present exhibition explores literary, mythological, art-historical, and philosophical sources to meditate on how art might be released from the pressure to comment on contemporary issues in a direct or immediate way. In particular, the myth of Medusa, associated with sight, fear, destruction, beauty, and creation, becomes an apt symbol for the examination of artmaking itself.

In these drawings, wigs, frills, ponytails, bows, and heels are repeated as principal motifs and transformed into monstrous assemblages of once-familiar objects. Faces emerge and fade out from view, as if they had been hallucinated into presence. Exploring the potency of images to forge connections between the eye, the hand, and the soul of the artist, Kuik circles in on the idea of picture-making as a cognitive exercise. In particular, she approaches it as a deeply interior process requiring self-reflexivity, feeling, and heightened modes of attention, with the ability to synthesise previous experiences and memories. For Kuik, these discrete practices of perception and habits of mind build towards a robust and true artistic imagination.

Kuik says, “In storytelling, there is a crucial question that concerns everybody across all times: how do we learn from experience? I imagine there are two types of articulations, one from the mind and the other from the heart. Feeling is the anchor that grounds the mind; in feeling, not only is there room for the unknown, but there is also a place of openness to welcome others. And imagination is a powerful tool helping us to break away from the conditioned mind and body, like poetry does to language.”