Four Emerging Malaysian Artists Worth Knowing

What they look for is subtler: consistency of practice, technical command, originality, relevance, and growing recognition from respected institutions. Measured against these criteria, we have identified four artists who meet them all and whose influence is poised to deepen in the years ahead.

Ayisah Zulkifli

Ayisah hails from Sabah and is a rare exception in the world of sculpture. One moment, she is typing out her Master’s thesis at UiTM Shah Alam; the next, she is covered in sawdust, sanding repurposed meranti into large, intricately composed organic forms.

Michelle Yap, founder of Else Gallery and a champion of Ayisah’s work, notes how few craftspeople work this way and how rare it is to see a woman in this largely male-dominated field.

The foundation of her work is both wood and padi, a memory of the fields she grew up among, acknowledging our dependency on both for sustenance. She carefully considers each chosen piece of wood, its grain, density, colour, and character, before cutting, carving, and reshaping it to find balance in a gravity-defying composition.

In Orbit, shown at last year’s Archidex, shards of carved timber spiral up from a travertine base like rice stalks caught mid-dance. Her central idea is tension: strength against fragility, stability against uncertainty, one form depending on another while maintaining its own identity. Tension, she says, becomes a language, a way to give uncertainty and resilience physical form.

Brand and corporate collaborations have been arriving since her pieces were featured at Archidex through Else Gallery’s initiatives. She recently exhibited two works at Reka and is currently working on her solo exhibition for Rissim Contemporary where, she shares with a glint in her eye, her twisting wooden forms inspired by the humble rice grain may grow into towering works measuring 10 to 11 feet.

Lee Mok Yee

“An artist of his generation who doesn’t bend to anyone” is how Richard Koh, founder of Richard Koh Fine Art, describes Lee Mok Yee.

Probably the most decorated artist on this list, Lee won the Gold Prize at the UOB Painting of the Year in 2021. He completed a residency in Arles in 2022 and, in 2025, became a Khazanah Associate Artist at Acme Studios in London. In 2024, Lim Wei-Ling, founder of Wei-Ling Gallery, welcomed him into the WLG Incubator for young artists, citing his unwavering commitment to art-making. His work has been shown across Europe and Asia, and a substantial portion has already entered private and institutional collections.

Drawn to found and mass-produced objects, from incense sticks and cork to industrial materials and divination objects, Lee works across mixed media and video until they say something poignant about ritual, labour, and identity. His Taoist-Buddhist background and the material culture of Southeast Asian Chinese communities shape his process, as does a question he continually returns to: “What does it mean to be Malaysian Chinese?”

For him, Chineseness is not a fixed identity but one that is constantly evolving, redefined by local languages, cultures, histories, and social environments, and now by online communities and shifting political landscapes.

That inquiry was recently explored more deeply in Pontianak, where he completed a residency with the local collective Susur Galur for the city’s first biennale this year. Rather than reconstructing history, he became interested in how it lingers in family stories, language, food, and the things people choose not to say.

As one of eight Malaysian artists showcased in Art KL‘s Discovery installations, he presented When We Touch the Floor, which was previewed at Immersio 2026 last month. The video installation grew out of his research into tikar getah, the common PVC floor mat found across Southeast Asia. A conversation with Dr Amin, a scholar and practitioner of Malay dance who introduced him to various sitting positions and bodily gestures within Malay culture, further enriched the work. Demonstrating different ways of sitting, squatting, lying, and resting, the installation invites viewers to see the floor as an active site where bodily habits, memory, and daily life unfold.

Khabir Roslan

Being human in this day and age seems as challenging for Khabir as it is for the rest of us. Still in his 30s, he investigates our impermanence and constant state of becoming with a maturity beyond his years.

Khabir works with what most would discard: compost soil, gauze, and raw jute. His practice, informed by Islamic philosophy, Nusantara cosmology, and post-humanism, meditates on the unavoidable cycles of time, decay, and renewal.

His first solo exhibition, Sukma: Megah, Tundok, at Wei-Ling Gallery in 2025, took its title from the Malay words for soul, greatness, and humility. It presented compost-soil-stained scrolls of stitched bandage and cloth, anchored by part of a boat’s hull.

“I was drawn to compost not just for its texture and colour, but because it holds memory,” he says. “I see compost as a living body that reflects us.”

The exhibition nearly sold out, and his earlier works continue to attract collectors.

He won Most Promising Artist in the Emerging Artist category at the UOB Painting of the Year Malaysia 2020, joined the WLG Incubator in 2023, and has undertaken residencies at Sunyi in Langkawi and Inap Ilmu. Wei-Ling Gallery describes him as unwavering in his commitment to his craft from the outset and recognises a mature command of process and materiality rarely seen at this stage of an artist’s career.

Next, Khabir presents new mixed-media work at Art KL 2026, followed by Artober at Ombak KL. He is also developing a new body of work for his second solo exhibition next year. Soil and compost, which he now makes himself from organic and kitchen waste, remain central to his practice. He hopes to expand that material language to include charcoal and mycelium.

Continuing to explore cycles of decay and regeneration, he incorporates repetition, stitching, folding, and layering, building larger forms from many smaller units. Like human societies, his work reflects how individual and fragile parts can come together to form something larger.

Umar Sharif

Umar is the newest of the four artists. He had only two or three group exhibitions under his belt when a regional panel selected his work for the Ilham Art Show 2025. A material-based artist with a fondness for puns, he wants his work to feel approachable rather than inaccessible.

That work, Asuhan dan Dandanan, led him into a gently therapeutic process of unravelling Malaysian school belts, conditioning them like hair, and brushing them into soft curls and salon-ready styles.

Rahel Joseph, director of Ilham Gallery, calls it “clever work”: a subversive feminisation of a masculine symbol, grounded in real skill and his own childhood experiences of play. She sat on the panel that selected him and says the decision was unanimous, with many remarking that they could easily imagine the work being exhibited at an international biennale.

“I like the way his mind works,” she says.

His debut solo exhibition, Salon Hang, at The Back Room, pushed the belt concept further. After extensive studies and mock-ups, he took two months’ leave from his job to create the centrepiece, Dandanan I, from roughly 150 metres of white belt strap, carefully unravelled into fibre and patiently brushed out by hand.

The result was an enormous, soft, fluffy work resembling cotton wool, born from gestures that were both destructive and nurturing. It was irresistibly tactile and brought to mind everything from rocket plumes to clouds.

Being given the space to experiment and take risks, he says, taught him to remain open, an attitude he has carried into this next chapter.

That chapter is in London, where he is undertaking the 2026 Khazanah Associate Artist Residency at Acme Studios from September to December. He is using his live-work studio, along with the city’s libraries and archives, to explore domesticity through lived experience and experimental methods. Acme’s mentor sessions have already connected him with London-based artist Philip Lai, whose practice he admires for its materiality. He is also in discussions about regional residencies for next year.