Saffron Crossings

Wei-Ling Gallery presents ‘Saffron Crossings’, a new exhibition of paintings and sculptures by London-based Malaysian contemporary artist Rajinder Singh.

Following ‘Saffron Surrender’, Rajinder’s 2024 exhibition at Wei-Ling Gallery, which confronted colonial inheritance, Punjabi memories and stories from his childhood in Ipoh, ‘Saffron Crossings’ turns towards another vessel of personal and collective history: the SS Rajula. Built in Glasgow in 1926 for the British India Steam Navigation Company, the ship ran the Straits Service between Madras, Penang, Port Klang and Singapore for decades, carrying Indian families across the Bay of Bengal before its eventual decommissioning in 1973.

The steamship occupies a central place in the artist’s family history. Rajinder’s grandfather, his father and the artist himself all travelled on the SS Rajula, on the same route between South Asia and Malaysia, across three generations. In this exhibition, the ship becomes a moving world, a place where bodies, languages, rituals, architectures, plants, animals, labour and memory entered into one another.

Drawing on the spatial logic of Phulkari and Bagh textiles, Rajinder builds dense red painting-worlds in which stories unfold all at once, gathered together rather than laid out in sequence, much like the layered patterning of a Phulkari cloth itself. Figures, animals, ships, shrines, trains, plants and architectural fragments appear simultaneously, held together on a single surface. The works carry forward Rajinder’s ongoing concern with migrant ecologies and apertures, now operating from within the paintings themselves, with each motif becoming an opening and each surface a field where migration produces unfamiliar and shifting kinds of life.

A seven-foot bamboo model of the SS Rajula anchors the gallery, surrounded by red paintings, cream sculptural frames, gold spheres and hybrid fragments. Together, the works transform the gallery into a landscape of crossings that are part-ship, part-shrine, part-textile, and part-memory-chamber.

For a Malaysian audience, ‘Saffron Crossings’ returns to histories that remain intimate, local and shared: the ocean routes through which families arrived, communities formed and identities became layered across generations. The exhibition imagines migration as a continuing ecology of transformation, ongoing in the present rather than settled at the point of arrival.

The SS Rajula moved bodies across oceans for nearly half a century. ‘Saffron Crossings’, in turn, reimagines what happened when worlds began to move into one another.

‘Saffron Crossings‘ is featured at Wei-Ling Gallery from 1 August – 26 Septemner 2026.

Wei-Ling Gallery is located at No 8, Jalan Scott, Brickfields, 50470 Kuala Lumpur, Malaysia. Admission hours are Tuesday – Friday 10am – 6pm, Saturday 10am – 5pm.

For further assistance, please contact +60322601106 or e-mail info@weiling-gallery.com

ABOUT THE ARTIST

RAJINDER SINGH (B. 1964)

Rajinder Singh (b. Ipoh, Malaysia) is an artist and researcher working from his studio in London. His paintings, installations, photography, video and performance work explore ideas around the vulnerable body and its pain, interrogating the economies of power that deny it space and shape. Often focused on the power of ritual action in the construction of the social body, his practice explores the ways the human body unfolds around various topographic and symbolic borders.

Rajinder’s last solo exhibition at Wei-Ling Gallery, ‘Saffron Surrender’, took place in 2024. In it, he returned to three stories from his childhood in Ipoh, passed down through generations and shared by the Punjabi diaspora in Malaysia and around the world. These stories of the objectification and humiliation of the Sikh body by British colonial forces form the underlying narrative behind his poetry, paintings and sculptures, and he contemplates what decolonisation could mean in the Malaysian-Sikh context as a basis for moving from acknowledged colonial inheritance to being otherwise.

‘Saffron Songs’, held in 2022, featured a series of vibrant and dynamic paintings the artist referred to as large scores, based on a set of sounds (lok-git) that held particular meaning to him, connecting him to his community, culture and history. ‘Cage of Deliverance’, held in 2016, was a body of work rooted in the artist’s interest in the gestures, movements and rhythms of ritual practices in South Asia, and in the scarred, fragmented bodies as well as the healing, embracing unities they produce. His first solo exhibition with the gallery, ‘…the ceiling floats away with a sigh…’, held in 2014, was built on the notion of spaces that distend from apertures and portals: spaces such as the shrine, the temple and the prayer mat, all located in the real world yet connected, in some inexplicable manner, to another distant and unmapped sphere.

Rajinder graduated with a PhD in Engineering (UK) in 1993 and a Master’s in Fine Arts (Singapore) in 2010. In 2023, he was invited to show a series of sculptures at the Royal Hibernian Academy in Dublin as part of his solo presentation ‘Pale in Saffron’. In the same year he worked with dancers across the globe as an invited choreographer at the Irish Museum of Modern Art (IMMA) as well as the Festival of Irish Choreographers.

He was also recently shortlisted for both the Golden Fleece Award and the EVA International Biennale 2022. He took part in the Tulca Festival of Arts in 2019 and 2020 and is the recipient of several awards for his sculptures and movement-based work. His sculptures were shown as part of the year-long exhibition ‘Narrow Gate‘ at IMMA in 2021/22 and recently in ‘Bodywork’ at Crawford Art Gallery. Rajinder is a recipient of substantial bursaries for his body-based, movement-oriented work from the Arts Council of Ireland. He has been commissioned for new work by various museums and art festivals in Ireland.

Rajinder has taught as a guest artist/choreographer at the Irish World Academy, Maynooth University, and University College Dublin. His work is part of the national arts collections in IMMA, the Glucksman, and the Arts Council of Ireland. Rajinder is the founder of the contemporary art review magazine Drenched Reviews (www.soaked.space).