M Gallery Presents: Addendum – A Bold Exploration of Contemporary Art
There is an undeniable electricity that pulses through M Gallery’s latest exhibition, Addendum. Running from February 23 to April 6, 2025, this group showcase brings together an ensemble of both established and emerging artists, each offering their own interpretation of contemporary art and architecture. A celebration of the unexpected, Addendum challenges conventional structures, embracing the unpredictable, the experimental, and the uncharted.
Stepping into the gallery, one is immediately drawn into a space where deconstructivism meets abstractionism, where art becomes an ongoing dialogue between past and future. Featuring Ashraf Romli, Lee Yaw Chu, Aiesyah Azriff (a.k.a. Musuh Setan), and William Chew, this show is a compelling testament to the boundless potential of artistic expression.
Ashraf Romli: The Surreal Grotesque of Self
Ashraf Romli’s work is a hallucinatory dive into the subconscious. His piece, Selves (2023), executed in ink on paper, is a striking exploration of identity and transformation. Faces morph and melt into one another, exaggerated in their grotesque beauty, evoking the aesthetic of underground comics and outsider art. Reminiscent of both pop culture and the macabre, his black-and-white compositions pulsate with unease and fascination. With meticulous linework and surreal distortions, Ashraf invites viewers into a chaotic world where selfhood is ever-shifting, never static.
Lee Yaw Chu: The Poetry of Decay and Renewal
With The Weathered Hymn (2024) and The Dollora Box (2021), Lee Yaw Chu explores the elegance of deterioration and the quiet resilience of rebirth. The former is a meditation on nature’s transience, where fallen leaves and aged materials are reimagined as poignant tributes to the cycle of life. The latter, inspired by the myth of Pandora’s Box, is deeply personal, reflecting on the artist’s own struggles with hardship and perseverance. Using elements of woodworking, fabric, and paint, Lee constructs layered narratives that invite the viewer to find beauty in imperfection and meaning in memory.
Aiesyah Azriff (Musuh Setan): The Chains That Bind Us
Aiesyah Azriff’s Manusia Lalai (2025) is a powerful silk-screen work that confronts the invisible forces that shape our desires and choices. Accompanied by a poetic reflection in Malay, the piece speaks of unseen shackles—materialism, societal pressures, and self-imposed limitations—that weigh on the soul. Through striking contrasts and layered compositions, Aiesyah’s work urges viewers to examine their own restraints, challenging them to break free from the distractions of the ephemeral and embrace a deeper awareness of self.
William Chew: Memory and the Architecture of the Mind
William Chew’s Nowhere Building series transforms urban memory into architectural reveries. Constructed from greyboard, poster color, and digital prints, his sculptures capture fleeting impressions of cityscapes—buildings glimpsed in passing, reconstructed through imagination rather than documentation. These abstracted structures, arranged in neutral space, become characters in their own right, interacting with one another and forming unspoken narratives. By stripping architecture of its rigidity, Chew reintroduces play and fluidity, suggesting that memory itself is an ever-evolving structure.
M Gallery welcomes visitors to engage with these thought-provoking works and immerse themselves in an artistic landscape that dares to be different. To visit, M Gallery is by appointment only (message them here) on the weekdays but is open from 2pm to 6pm on Saturday and Sunday.
