Outside-in presents new work by Fauzan Fuad (b.1987, Kuala Lumpur), Dhavinder Singh (b.1983, Kuala Lumpur), and Sanan Anuar (b.1992, Kelantan) —three Malaysian artists whose practices unfold at a distance from the institutional art world.The title gestures toward multiple thresholds—between private and public, interior and exterior, centre and margin. Across painting and mixed media, each artist turns inward, drawing from solitude, memory, and domestic space to examine how the self is shaped by its surroundings.
In part, outside-in is a study in artistic position. Fauzan and Sanan are self-taught, while Dhavinder lives and works in Penang, outside the country’s dominant art centres. Their practices unfold in relative isolation—introspective, experimental, and at times at odds with the formal structures of the art world. This sense of distance, both physical and cultural, becomes generative: creating space for alternative languages and intimate forms of resistance.
Fauzan Fuad’s recent paintings emerge from a period of reflection during his residency at Rimbun Dahan. Working through layers of paint, he allows both instinct and doubt to remain visible on the surface. Some marks feel resolved, others less so. Rather than editing them out, he treats them as part of the process. Each canvas becomes a kind of ledger—of impulse, revision, and the ongoing negotiation between intention and acceptance.
Dhavinder Singh builds uneasy interiors populated by familiar objects: plastic chairs, houseplants, folding stools. But his spaces are spatially unstable—flattened, off-kilter, deliberately estranged. These compositions resist architectural logic and instead reflect a psychological one. They ask how space can contain contradictions: comfort and alienation, memory and abstraction.
Sanan Anuar’s Sendiri series reflects on the experience of living alone for the first time. Raised in a large family, he now lives and works in solitude. His mixed-media paintings explore repetition, hesitation, and emotional drift—moments when time slows or loops. Using acrylic, pastel, and screen print, Sanan traces the textures of daily life as they shift between stillness, reflection, and quiet transformation.
Together, Outside-in presents a kind of interior weather—personal, atmospheric, slow-moving. These are not statements made from the centre, but observations from the edges. They reflect how distance can be not just isolating, but also clarifying.