30 Years of Gajah: A Retrospective
In 2026, Gajah marks three decades as a living archive of artistic exchange and critical imagination in Southeast Asia. Since its founding, the gallery has been a space for dialogue and discovery, where creative practices intersect and evolve. This 30th anniversary retrospective traces not only the arc of its history, but the entangled ideas and relationships that continue to shape its sensibilities.
Archives opens the exhibition as a reflective cartography of the gallery’s beginnings. Works by Bagyi Aung Soe, Affandi, Rusli, and others evoke a time when modernism in the region unfolded through porous borders and shared pedagogies. Many of these artists were linked to Santiniketan, Rabindranath Tagore’s experimental ashram in India. In parallel, figures such as Brother Joseph McNally and his founding of the LASALLE college were as crucial in shaping artistic education in Southeast Asia. Over the years, having long collaborated with scholars such as T.K. Sabapathy and Aminudin T.H. Siregar, the gallery continues to draw on their inquiries which frame Southeast Asian art as a field of relations. Archives extends beyond chronology: it unfolds as an ongoing conversation, situating the gallery’s past as a living condition of the present.
The second section, Artists in Focus, gathers those who have worked closely with the gallery over the decades: Yunizar’s textured lyricism, Murni’s candid mythologies of the body, Made Djirna’s alchemy of tradition and intuition, Chua Ek Kay’s meditations on memory and abstraction, alongside the distinct visions of Suzann Victor, Teng Nee Cheong, Mangu Putra, Jemana Murti, and Vasan Sitthiket. Together, they form a chorus of sensibilities, held together by an insistence on curiosity, exchange, and relation.
30 Years of Gajah: A Retrospective stands as an articulation of the gallery’s enduring commitment, affirming art’s capacity to move, to connect, and to continually imagine what remains possible.
