EXHIBITIONS /

ILHAM Art Show 2025

2 November 2025 – 5 April 2026 (Level 5)

We are delighted to present the ILHAM Art Show 2025 featuring the twenty selected contemporary artists and collectives whose new works range across a broad array of mediums, from painting, drawing, printmaking, and photography to installation, textile, film and video. 

Established in 2022, the ILHAM Art Show is a triennial exhibition platform initiated to encourage innovation and risk-taking by giving artists in Malaysia the opportunity and resources to make new work, and to experiment with form, medium, and concept. The ILHAM Art Show serves as a platform to support and promote contemporary art practice in Malaysia. 

As ILHAM’s only open call exhibition, the ILHAM Art Show is designed to be as inclusive as possible. There is no theme and it is open to all artists based in Malaysia, regardless of gender, nationality, experience, or medium. It is also open to Malaysian artists based overseas.  

After announcing the call for the second edition of the ILHAM Art Show in September 2024, we received over 270 entries. In March 2025, we announced the twenty artists selected to be part of the ILHAM Art Show 2025. The list of artists was interdisciplinary and intergenerational, with both emerging and established artists and collectives. Each artist or collective was awarded an art production grant to be put towards the making of their proposed work to enable them to envision the kinds of works that they may not have had the opportunity to pursue in the past. 

The twenty artists and collectives were selected by a regional panel which included Gridthiya Gaweewong, Artistic Director of the Jim Thompson Art Centre, Bangkok, Sharmini Pereira, Chief Curator of the Museum of Modern and Contemporary Art in Sri Lanka, leading contemporary artist Wong Hoy Cheong, and Rahel Joseph, Gallery Director, ILHAM Gallery.

Despite the absence of a mandatory curatorial theme, we can nonetheless see common ideas emerging across the works. Among them: the mining of history as a means to reflect on our present and to imagine our future, the growing precariousness of our natural world, the fluidity of identity, and our shifting relationships with society, family, and each other.

The ILHAM Art Show is about the fostering of new ideas and experimenting with new ways of making. In view of this, we commissioned a group of writers including Azzad Diah, Ong Kar Jin, Zikri Rahman, Ellen Lee, and Nuraishah Shafiq to interview the artists, and to write a text responding to their works. The resulting essays will be included in the ILHAM Art Show 2025 catalogue.