EXHIBITIONS FROM 2025

Going North is the first exhibition of the year at Hin Bus Depot, presented by CHETAK 17, a collective pushing the boundaries of printmaking. Moving beyond past studio-based showcases, this edition highlights members’ individual artistic explorations, emphasizing experimentation through diverse techniques and influences. Featuring works by CHETAK 17 members and invited artists, the exhibition blends print-based, mixed-media, and experimental approaches, showcasing evolving creative processes while reinforcing CHETAK 17’s role in fostering collaboration, discovery, and innovation in contemporary printmaking.

Void is the first collaboration between Penang-based Hin Bus Depot and Blank Canvas, showcasing works from Leong Kwong Yee’s personal collection. Through varied media and perspectives, the exhibition explores the many forms of emptiness—physical, emotional, and spiritual—asking whether every void can truly be filled, while also reflecting the roles both platforms play in addressing gaps within the local art scene.

Brought to you by a like-minded bunch from the Narrow Marrow community, ever eager to brain-flush their thoughts, emotions, and the occasional philosophical nonsense (emphasis on 𝘱𝘩𝘪𝘭𝘰𝘴𝘰𝘱𝘩𝘪𝘤𝘢𝘭, of course).

Originally conceived as a community zine project, it’s essentially an experimental mixtape in print: raw, unfiltered, and delightfully chaotic. There’s no grand curation here, just a glorious absurdity of anything printable; writings, essays, short stories, plays, scripts, code, advertisements, poetry, lyrics, drawings, doodles, sketches, collages, photos (if it fits on a page, it gets in).

This issue, titled 𝙧𝙚𝙎𝙩𝙖𝙧𝙩, leaks off the printed page and splatters unapologetically into the real, physical world. It’s a group show made up of Penang artists, plus one George Town artist (yes, apparently that’s a thing). Expect a heady mash-up of new and old works: seasoned fermentations from familiar names, stirred together with a bold dash of first-timers. Altogether, it’s a savoury spread of tropical spice, definitely compatible with local tastebuds but very likely to cause a bit of tummy trouble for Far West Asians (think Nasi Kandar banjir levels of unexpected intensity).

Presenting works by : Aboud Fares, bibichun, Caranotok, Dhavinder Singh, Hiro Namba, Hoo Fan Chon, IMMJN, J.ArtStudio, Jamie Muxian, Kangblabla, Lijynn, Max Shee, S. Teoh, Shin Yen, Sputnikforest, TAZONE, Trina Teoh, Tupperware.noise and Vinnee.

The 𝗪𝗮𝘆𝘀 𝗼𝗳 𝗦𝗲𝗲𝗶𝗻𝗴 is CULT Gallery’s annual platform spotlighting emerging artists. Curated as a group exhibition, each artist presents a body of work as opposed to a singular work, offering an entry into their individual practices at this early stage of their careers.

Now in its fifth edition, Ways of Seeing 2025 brings together seven artists, with each exploring an array of methodologies and materialities. 𝘈𝘥𝘢𝘮 𝘉𝘢𝘥𝘳𝘶𝘥𝘥𝘪𝘯 𝘚𝘺𝘢𝘩, 𝘐𝘻𝘩𝘢𝘳 𝘠𝘶𝘴𝘳𝘪𝘯 and 𝘓𝘶𝘲𝘮𝘢𝘯 𝘐𝘴𝘮𝘢𝘪𝘭 present works familiar within the fine art space, all rooted in the traditions of painting and printmaking, while 𝘈𝘺𝘶𝘦 𝘑𝘶𝘮𝘢𝘯, 𝘊𝘩𝘢𝘶 𝘟𝘩𝘪𝘦𝘯, and 𝘟𝘦𝘦𝘮 𝘕𝘰𝘰𝘳 embrace craft techniques through a contemporary lens, drawing on cross-stitch, rattan weaving, beadwork, and embroidery. 𝘚𝘩𝘪𝘯 𝘠𝘦𝘯 conjures text-based works that poetically interact with the space, using mirrors as her chosen medium.

Through their varied approaches in their art-making, these artists reveal how they see and shape the world around them, developing visual expressions that are uniquely theirs, early in their careers.

From Singapore to Penang, one island to another, the Critical Craft Collective (CCC) presents From Palais to Pulau (Penang Edition), in collaboration with Hin Bus Depot, following its successful debut during Singapore Art Week 2025. Reimagining ‘Mrs Beeton’s Book of Household Management’, a Victorian-era domestic guide, the project critically examines invisible labour, gender roles, and the decentering of colonial legacies in the home. It foregrounds the oft-overlooked cultural practices that shape domestic life, engaging deeply with how these narratives take root in specific sites of presentation.

The first edition in Singapore was staged in a heritage shophouse, responding to the layered histories of that space and shifting the conversation from the European 𝘱𝘢𝘭𝘢𝘪𝘴 to the Southeast Asian 𝘱𝘶𝘭𝘢𝘶. In this context, participating artists explored the interplay between care, ritual, and the artistic process, particularly as shaped by heat and temperature, integral elements of both creative and domestic labour. This shift from European to Southeast Asian lenses signals a deliberate decentering and recentering of what constitutes home and how its stories are told.

Curated by Adeline Kueh and Hazel Lim, the Penang edition at Hin Bus Depot expands the project’s focus on care, kinship, and island living, exploring shared & divergent understandings of home and household management. It considers how temperature, humidity, and environmental factors intersect with urban redevelopment and climate change, while reflecting on the historical trade connections between Singapore and Penang. The exhibition poses critical questions: What shared notions of belonging shape our understanding of home today? How do movement, displacement, and reciprocity influence the making and naming of home? And what other critical perspectives emerge in these ongoing conversations?

𝑾𝒉𝒂𝒕 𝒅𝒐𝒆𝒔 𝒊𝒕 𝒎𝒆𝒂𝒏 𝒕𝒐 𝒃𝒆 𝑴𝒂𝒍𝒂𝒚𝒔𝒊𝒂𝒏 𝒊𝒏 𝒕𝒐𝒅𝒂𝒚’𝒔 𝒘𝒐𝒓𝒍𝒅?

Opening in August 2025 at Hin Bus Depot, negaraku II advances a sustained curatorial inquiry into the constructs of Malaysian identity, belonging, and the socio-political conditions that underpin the formation of national consciousness. As the second iteration of an ongoing exhibition series, negaraku II mobilises contemporary art as a critical framework through which to examine the mediations of culture, power, and citizenship in Malaysia’s postcolonial present.

Curated by Ivan Gabriel and produced by Hin Bus Depot, this edition continues to draw from the private collection of Bingley Sim and Ima Norbinsha, whose longstanding engagement with politically conscious and socially responsive art practices has resulted in archives of considerable critical value. While the collection charts the formal and conceptual developments within contemporary Malaysian art, it also maps the shifting contours of dissent, resistance, and representation within the country’s visual culture.

With the inaugural edition of negaraku setting the stage for the examination of visual articulations of nationhood, negaraku II extends this inquiry by accentuating the multiplicity of subjectivities that shape the Malaysian social composition. Central to this curatorial approach is an emphasis on liminal identities, citizens, migrants, and those who occupy the interstices of official categories, whose lived experiences are frequently marginalized or rendered invisible within dominant nationalist narratives. The exhibition thus resists singular or essentialist definitions of Malaysian-ness, instead framing identity as a fluid, contested, and relational construct.

In addition to the works drawn from the collectors’ archives, the exhibition is structured around public programmes that denaturalises dominant hierarchies of access and interpretation within curatorial practice. Multilingual guided tours, in English, Bahasa Malaysia, Mandarin, and Sign Language, privilege linguistic and sensory plurality as essential modalities of engagement, reconfiguring the act of interpretation as a shared and inclusive process. Accessibility is not approached as an ancillary concern but is instead embedded into the curatorial framework as a foundational principle, positioning inclusivity as a methodology through which the exhibition interrogates the structural conditions that shape the formation of publics and the production, mediation, and circulation of cultural knowledge within the Malaysian art ecosystem.

Within the exhibition, food is framed as a foundational epistemological site, disrupting its conventional positioning as peripheral or symbolic, which in turn enables expanded readings of cultural memory, embodied knowledge, and the social formations that sustain them. Building on this framing, the incorporation of communal culinary practices, specifically the live preparation of Roti Jala and Nasi Ulam, unsettles conventional spatial and knowledge frameworks of the gallery, repositioning it as an ephemeral assembly of embodied engagement and collective meaning-making. In this context, the act of cooking becomes both a performative gesture and a pedagogical mechanism, a generative practice through which intergenerational memory is communicated and shared. By privileging the aesthetic and political significance of the quotidian, the curatorial gesture resists entrenched binaries between high culture and the everyday. Through this repositioning, the exhibition rearticulates the kitchen, the table, and the act of sharing as domains of cultural production, thereby unsettling established hierarchies that subordinate multisensory modes of engagement to the visual.

Through its curatorial framing, negaraku II reopens the question of belonging, attending to the conditions under which it is shaped and the subjects to whom it is afforded or withheld. It asks us to look again at the faces and stories that shape the life of this country, and to imagine a Malaysia expansive enough to hold all its people, however they arrived here and however they find home.

In Lost in Wanderland, ERYN mobilises the formal logic of Snakes and Ladders as a working schema for mapping affective trajectories. Her papercut compositions, ranging from intricate single layered cutouts to multi-layered dioramas, reimagines the gameboard as an endless cycle of ascents and descents, without ever reaching a conclusion. The grid constructs a procedural architecture, reframing the traditional two-dimensional gameboard into a spatial construct, reduced to fragments or expanded into corridors and stairways drawn from the architecture of Penang. Within this configuration, ladders no longer guarantee ascent, nor do serpents signify descent; both become ambivalent passages through which the artist maps shifting states of mind, each composition recording a moment of passage, pause, or return.

The work maps an exploration of choices and their consequences, animated by a varied cast of figures and the unseen forces that hold us in stasis. Material practice anchors this mapping. The act of cutting is both process and inquiry: precise, repetitive incisions externalise internal rhythms and render invisible states legible in negative space. Paper, simultaneously delicate and exact, carries the paradoxes the work seeks to make visible: vulnerability coexisting with endurance, erasure producing form, absence constituting architecture. Layers accumulate like temporal strata, while voids and overlaps register recurrence, their repeated gestures tracing a sustained exploration of the conditions of recovery. The series was produced over a prolonged period of psychological strain, and its making records that history without collapsing into autobiography.

Conceptually, Lost in Wanderland reframes play as an epistemic condition: a system in which chance, repetition and rule-governed movement disclose the structures by which we orient ourselves. The ladders’ promise of ascent and the snakes’ inevitability are held in tension to expose an economy of progress that is cyclical rather than teleological. In this reframing, wandering no longer signals failure but embodies a method, a continuous negotiation with contingency in which fragility is converted into a modality of persistence. ERYN’s paper compositions thus render a rigorous poetics of endurance, fragile in matter, exact in form, and uncompromising in their refusal of resolution.

In 𝚒 𝚛𝚎𝚖𝚎𝚖𝚋𝚎𝚛..., Sharon SS Kow presents a suite of coloured-pencil drawings that render childhood toys with meticulous, hyperrealistic precision. Working within the Realism tradition, Sharon employs the discrete, layered application of coloured pencil to arrest perceptual time: surfaces, textures and chromatic subtleties are rendered with such fidelity that the works occupy the space between accurate description and contemplative suspension. The obvious subject, familiar playthings, becomes a formal apparatus through which the artist examines how everyday objects accumulate affective weight.

Central to the exhibition is an inquiry of memory as both a material and relational process. Sharon treats objects as repositories of private histories: each drawing embodies a vessel for recollection, conveying a calibrated balance of longing, restraint and consolation. The hyperreal surface is not an end in itself but a means of amplifying the quiet registers of feeling that objects carry, the residue of use, the patina of attention, and the interstitial silences that mark lives lived around them. Through the careful attention given to these traces, the works reveal the fragmentary nature of remembrance and the subtle ways in which objects carry and shape our personal stories, summoning the joy, vulnerability, and quiet grief that accompany childhood memories and the persistent traces the past leaves on the present.

Made possible through the support of Faber-Castell Malaysia, this exhibition will donate a portion of its proceeds to The Children Protection Society Malaysia (CPSM).