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 porous space for dialogue and discovery, where creative and critical practices intersect and evolve. This 30th anniversary retrospective traces not only the arc of its history, but the entangled ideas and relationships that have shaped its sensibility: from early collaborations that grounded its identity to the new constellations that continue to emerge from its orbit today.
Presented in two parts, the exhibition begins with Archives, 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 Santineketan, Rabindranath Tagore’s experimental ashram in India, where art was conceived as an ethical and aesthetic dialogue with nature, community, and the world at large. In parallel, figures such as Brother Joseph McNally shaped artistic education in Singapore, nurturing a generation of artists attuned to both craft and consciousness. 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 — a space of circulation, translation, and resonance. 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; artists whose practices continue to expand its language and imagination — 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, Nguyen Trung, Vasan Sitthiket, and Ashley Bickerton. Together, they form a chorus of distinct sensibilities, bound by an insistence on curiosity and relation.
30 Years of Gajah: A Retrospective stands as an articulation to the gallery’s enduring vision: affirming art’s capacity to move, to connect, and to continually imagine what remains possible.
