Wei-Ling Contemporary is pleased to share with you The Past Is Never Where You Think You Left It, a group show curated by Gowri Balasegaran featuring a selection of some of Malaysia’s most prominent artists namely Anurendra Jegadeva, Chong Kim Chiew, Choy Chun Wei, Gan Sze Hooi, Ivan Lam, K. Azril Ismail, Kim Ng, Minstrel Kuik and Rajinder Singh.

This exhibition takes its name from a quote from Ship of Fools, a book by Katherine Porter. It deals with our infatuation with the past.

In a world where the present is never what we hoped it would be and the future leaves little room for optimism, it’s easy to understand why we harken back to the past. We yearn for the good-old days when our lives were simpler and when technology did not rule the world. We even use the past to sell the present and the future – nowhere more than in fashion or car design.

We claim to cherish the past, and yet, with astonishing speed, relics of yesteryear are being destroyed; old buildings are being gutted, traditional practices are being phased out, and those who refuse to embrace the newfangled are simply left behind. Our quest for the latest fad or technology is never-ending.

This exhibition examines our growing predilection for nostalgia and the inter-relationship between the past and the present; how we use the past to define the present, both by rejection and appropriation, and how our perception of the past is altered by the present. Nostalgia is nothing new, but what about the way we use it to embellish our present? And how do we decide that the past is sometimes a model to copy or else a mistake to eradicate? Is the past really as good as we remember it to be, or is it merely shaped by the present?

With this exhibition, participating artists have been invited to present a work from the present in concert with an object from their past. The idea is that the two objects would be in dialogue with one another; there should be some relationship between the two. The object from the past could take any form – a photo, book, artwork, a piece of furniture, even a piece of music etc. It might represent something that the artist feels or felt nostalgic about, or perhaps something that encapsulates a moment or an era from the past, or something that was formative to the artist.

The Past Is Never Where You Think You Left It, Curated by Gowri Balasegaran previews on July 12th and remains up until August 11th 2016.

Wei-Ling Contemporary is located at RT01 Sixth Floor, The Gardens Mall, 59200, Kuala Lumpur, Malaysia.

Please call 0322828323/ 0322601106 or email weiling.shaz@gmail.com for more information.