Bold new exhibition reclaims the canvas for Southeast Asia's young artists

New Straits Times

20-07-2025

IN a world increasingly saturated by digital media and conceptual installations, there's something quietly radical about a return to the painted canvas.
And at G13 Gallery this month, 10 young painters from across Southeast Asia are doing just that.
Titled 10x3: Ten Painters, Three Nations, One Contemporary Voice, the exhibition is a spirited visual dialogue between Malaysia, Indonesia and the Philippines — nations separated by geography and political history, but bound by cultural threads, colonial legacies and a shared urgency to define their place within the global art narrative.
Curated as a focused reflection rather than a sweeping survey, it brings together 10 emerging artists: Abenk Alter, Addy Debil, Cedrick Dela Paz, Demi Padua, Khairudin Zainudin, Miller Laberinto, Nik M. Shazmie, NPAAW, Pongbayog and Shafiq Nordin.
Each of them engages with painting as a dynamic, evolving medium — one that continues to surprise, provoke and resonate, even in an age dominated by screens and conceptual frameworks.
What unites these painters isn't a single aesthetic or theme.
Instead, it's a commitment to using the painted surface as a site of inquiry and expression.
Their works traverse figuration, surrealism, abstraction and symbolic narrative, often emerging from a rich tapestry of influences: urban subcultures, socio-political critique, popular culture, mythology and personal histories.
Viewed together, these canvases form a composite image of a region in transformation.
This is a Southeast Asia that's defined not by fixed identities, but by movement, negotiation and multiplicity.
The result is a conversation — not in unison, but in dialogue.
The decision to spotlight painting at this moment is deliberate.
In an era when much of contemporary art privileges the digital, the conceptual, or the immersive, 10x3 turns attention back to paint — not as a nostalgic gesture, but as a living, breathing language through which young Southeast Asian artists interrogate the intersections of culture, history and the present moment.
The act of painting is not merely the making of images, but an intimate engagement with form, emotion and thought.
It's a sentiment echoed across the works on display.
From personal memory to mythic symbol, from the sharply political to the playfully surreal, these paintings articulate the internal tensions and external forces shaping their creators' worlds.
The exhibition's title, 10x3, is both literal and symbolic: 10 artists, three nations — but also a multiplication of perspectives, influences and possibilities.
The subtitle, Ten Painters, Three Nations, One Contemporary Voice, reinforces the idea of collective momentum.
It affirms the value of individual expression while recognising an emerging generational voice that's reshaping the cultural fabric of the region.
Ultimately, 10x3 is less a thematic showcase than a generational snapshot.
It captures a moment of questioning, risk-taking and reinvention — where young artists negotiate the push and pull between personal vision and collective history, between tradition and experimentation.
In doing so, the exhibition invites broader reflections: What does it mean to be a young painter in Southeast Asia today? How does one navigate the complex terrain of global attention and local expectation, and assert an authentic voice within it?