Valentine Willie Fine Art is pleased to announce the latest edition of the gallery’s ongoing programme Headlights featuring a preview of works by artists participating in our 2011 programme. This sneak peak provides a glimpse into the exciting solo projects for the year ahead in the Kuala Lumpur gallery. Artists from around the region showcase a visual questioning of self, culture, race, religion as well as academic revisions of the canon of Art itself. Featuring work by Yustoni Volunteero & I Nyoman Agus Wijaya aka Koming (Indonesia), Kaloy Sanchez (Philippines), Ahmad Zakii Anwar (Malaysia), Agus Baqul Purnomo (Indonesia), Yogie Ginanjar (Indonesia), Gan Chin Lee (Malaysia), Don Salubayba (Philippines), Putu Sutawijaya (Indonesia), Kow Leong Kiang (Malaysia) and Phuan Thai Meng (Malaysia) audiences will experience a mixture of aesthetic and conceptual ideas taking place in contemporary painting in the region.

Headlights is one of the many platforms initiated by the gallery to support and expose audiences to the rich diversity of production taking place in the region. Kaloy Sanchez explores his personal feelings of alienation and angst through intimate portraits of homeless people who live around his home in Manila. By inviting individuals into his studio he discusses their lives and reveals not only their personal stories but how they portray ideas about his own emotions and experiences. Yogie Ginanjar interrogates the status of contemporary painting itself through a revisioning of classical European painting and theory. Playful samplings and elaborately staged tableaus inform a practice governed in destabilising strategies of appropriation and reproduction. Gan Chin Lee presents images of the Malaysian rakyat that looks at the frustrations and inertia of cultural and political conditions through carefully composed and technically ambitious painting. To name but a few in the exhibition these artists from various generations and cultures contribute a tapestry of conversations and subjects that deal with their personal and socio-political contexts through poetic and academic approaches.