The works featured at the Asian Civilisations Museum confront and reconsider the ideas and values that have come to embody “Asian” identity and the aspiration that is “civilisation” in an increasingly porous and nuanced world. Lawrence Lek’s SB2019 commission functions as a model for post-human behavioural patterns, combining the familiarity of a place some call home with an unknown future in a virtual para-fiction. In an installation combining live performances, videos, set design, and painting, Jen Liu considers the value and nature of gold’s seduction as a vector to discuss the intersections of labour activism and genetic engineering, commodification. Okui Lala unpacks the complexity of inter-generational and multilingual conditions through the history and development of language policy planning in Malaysia in a compressed snapshot of its socio-cultural reality.
Venue: Asian Civilisations Museum
When: 22 Nov 2019 - 22 Mar 2020,