Untitled

So keep looking.

(Photograph taken of one Untitled piece of artwork.)

Tucked inside one of my favourite spaces in Kuala Lumpur, an exhibition that did exactly what I think a creative experience should do. It was an invitation. To connect. To explore. To be curious. So well curated, so full of opportunity to do all of that.

It was called Untitled.

An exhibition curated by Primary Exhibitions and Danielle Lin Shannon.

No labels on the walls. No explanations next to the work. Just the art, me, and whatever I brought with me.

I went on my own. I didn’t discuss perspective with anyone. Or hear theirs. My thoughts, my connections, untainted. Just mine. It was bliss.

And something else happened.

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Each piece is part of something bigger. That’s what you get in spaces like this — when you mix with things, with people, with ideas that aren’t like the ones you already know. Each piece part of something bigger. There’s something very human about that.

I’m drawn to the ones where I can engage. Play. Immerse. Where something else happens. But I appreciated that even when there wasn’t an extra invitation to engage — even when it was a finished piece, presented in full — I could just be with it. Indulge in that. The longer I stood, the more I would feel. The more stories would emerge. The more connections I would make. The more ideas I got.

Something else happens.

I leaned in close to one piece and I could smell the pencil.

I looked for the materials alongside the work — the palettes, the tools — trying to understand something of the process. Trying to read the traces the making had left behind. I’ve always done this. Looked in the in-between. Around the edges. Not just at the finished thing.

I grabbed for clues. For reasoning. For the how as well as the what.

One piece did have an excerpt from a notebook. I went straight for it. Of course I did.

But then I went back to the work itself. And it was different now. Not because I had more information — but because I’d spent time with it first.

The exhibition is a huge circle, with pockets to explore within it. You walk round a corner and there’s even more. I kept thinking: how long do you give it? I wonder sometimes if people think they’ve seen enough, and stop. But there was always more. And nothing made me want to stop.

At one point I walked into a blue room and the air con hit me. Cold. It just added to the layers of experience. My whole body was involved.

I thought about my daughter. What will she like when I bring her here?

I wondered, at times, if the artists would even want to know what was in my head.

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Unlabelled visually, the exhibition invited me to “hold a personal dialogue with the work, untainted by any prior bias or expectation.”

I didn’t know what I was looking at. So I looked harder. I looked longer. I looked differently.

And the more time I gave, the more I understood.

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I’ve spent a lot of my life being known at surface level. Brown skin in a white family — the cover didn’t match the story anyone expected, including me. People drew conclusions quickly. Some never looked closer. Others tried, and I didn’t have a good enough answer to give them.

And I did the same. Made quick sense of things. Moved on.

But in that gallery, with no labels to anchor me, I had to slow down. I had to be with it. I had to let the work teach me at its own pace.

The more time I gave, the more I understood about the art. About the artist. About myself, in the presence of it.

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And maybe that’s it… Not the label. Not the explanation. Not the quick read.

Just the time. The curiosity. The willingness to lean in close enough to smell the pencil.

To keep going until something else happens.

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I still don’t always know what to call things, in my life. Some parts of my story don’t have the right words yet. But I’m pretty sure that untitled doesn’t mean unknown.

It just means: keep looking.