Malaysia, Kuala Lumpur and the Gifts of a Multicultural Society
- Studio Nicola Fouché
- Jun 20
- 7 min read
[May/June 2026 [Vol. 1]
Hello dear friend! This is the monthly newsletter/blog of artist and illustrator Nicola Fouché. If you missed last month's one — The Time Keeper's Sphere (all about a new series of illustrative works that have been brewing in the studio) — you can catch up on it here. If a friend forwarded you my newsletter/blog, and you would like to subscribe (it's free!), you can do so at the bottom of this newsletter or on my website. If you enjoy my stories and ramblings, please consider sharing and subscribing. Your support means the world. |
Dear friends, family and fellow art lovers,
This month I will be sending out two newsletters. Last week I had the pleasure of making a solo trip to Kuala Lumpur. I had to leave Vietnam for a few days for visa purposes and decided that Kuala Lumpur would be a great place for my first trip, alone, in South East Asia. My husband and I have visited the city multiple times over the years, falling in love with it a little bit more each time. We would both love to live and work here (and Sam too, of course) and will actively start applying for work there with the start of the next hiring season later this year.
The five-foot covered walkways very typical of shophouses in South East Asia.
Malaysia, as a country, has a long history of multiculturalism. Part of both the Maritime Silk Route and the Spice Route, the peninsula sits conveniently at the turning point for sea-faring trade between India and China — trading relationship that is over 2000 years old. The influence which these merchants and settlers had on the Malay people and culture is undeniable, with Indian settlements dating back to as far as the 4th Century CE. In the 13th century the first permanent enclave of Chinese migrants settled in Borneo, and later in Malacca in the 16th century. As an interesting tangent, Malacca, the heart of the Spice Route, was widely considered as one of the most cosmopolitan cities in the world during the 1500s. A walk through its bustling market streets could lead to encounters with Chinese, Persian, Arab, Indian, Javanese, Siamese, Burmese and later on European traders and merchants. It was a similarly diverse melting pot for religions: Buddhism, Hinduism, Taoism, Christianity, Sunni Islam and other traditional and folk religions all co-existing. Returning to present day Malaysia, it boasts a diaspora of communities: Malay at 58.3% of the population, Chinese at 22.2%, Bumiputera at 12.3% and Indian at 6.5% (according to the Department for Statistics Malaysia).
Awesome tile patterns.
Of course, needless to say, people (being people) hardly ever co-exist peacefully (especially where differing believe systems are involved) and so Malaysia, just like any other country, has also had it's fair share of skirmishes, wars, colonisations and revolutions. I won't go into any further details about this here, as it is, like any history, a long an intricate one. Suffice to say, that even today still, Malaysia as a multicultural and multi-religious nation has it's difficulties and challenges in finding it's way towards peaceful co-existence, with the politicisation of religion (especially Islam) being a particular challenge. With that said, as a foreigner and a visitor, these are tensions which do not affect me directly; and anyway, Malaysia is looking positively utopian compared to the extremist, anti-immigration, self-righteous-power-hungry-trillionare-supported movements currently sprouting like weeds in the Western world.
Building details from in and around Chinatown and Chow Kit.
As an outsider, and a wanderer, it is also important to note that I have the unique fortune of not being emotionally rooted in the political crises (unless overt violence breaks out) of the many countries that I inhabit and visit — I anyway tend to be more devastated by the harm caused on an environmental level. So when I travel I seek out the bits of the culture that have a much longer and deeper history than the politics of the day, namely it’s architecture, culinary delights, decorative arts and contemporary explorations of art and design. And on these points, Malaysia certainly does not disappoint. Which brings me to the whole reason for the short history lesson that you have had to wade through to make it all the way here: that diversity (in all definitions and aspects of the word) and diverse freedom of movement leads to the formation of societies that are colourful, richly decorative and steeped in all the various art forms, languages, styles of literature, food and ways of life which each person and group of people bring with them when they move from one place to another. Aren't these the real gifts, the real magic, that we as a species have to offer this world and each other anyway?
There is a popular quote that goes “Equal rights for others does not mean fewer rights for you. It's not pie.”; and is one that beautifully applies to the diverse diaspora of people existing together in any one country today. Perhaps we should start to view migration as a positive and enriching addition to society, and not as a destructive subtraction.
Kuala Lumpur is filled with epic street art.
All of this diversity has ensured that Malaysia not only has a rich history of decorative arts and crafts, but also a burgeoning enclave of contemporary artists and designers, some of who are working to bring these old traditional practices into the modern world. This is quite evident in the way in which Malaysian textile artists and designers have begun to integrate Batik into their contemporary designs. Malaysia is very well known for their Batik textiles — Batik is the method of applying wax to fabric, either by block printing or by hand, in order to prevent those parts of the fabric from absorbing colour during the dyeing process — and have over time distinguished their style of Batik from Javanese Batik (which is largely considered as the birthplace of Batik). I also spotted some of the floral Batik motifs being re-imagined as murals. I spent the morning at Jadi Batek — one of the largest Batik handicraft centres in KL — attending one of their hand-drawn Batik workshops. The workshops take place right next to the workshop floor where skilled artisans create the floral and highly decorative, hand-drawn designs that Jadi Batek's Batik textiles are best known for. This gave me a nice opportunity to watch the artisans at work and to take some photographs of the process.
Image 1, 2, 3, 4 & 8: A Hand-painted Batik artisan at work at Jadi Batek in Kuala Lumpur: A Canting (copper-tipped tool) is used for drawing wax designs on cotton or silk before being hand-painted with various colours of dye.
Image 5 and 6: Trying my hand at hand-drawn Batik on. These are images of the Batik before it was treated with sodium silicate, boiled with soda ash (to remove the wax) and allowed to dry.
Image 7: The finished Batik after it has undergone all of the above mentioned processes.
I think that one of the best ways of ensuring that traditional and age-old crafts don't get lost to time is when contemporary artists and designers begin to integrate and re-imagine them in their own practices. Artist like Fatimah Chik and Emilia Tan have done much in this respect, not only in terms of the preservation of Batik, but also in the way in which they expanded and pushed the boundaries of the medium.
Image 1: Emilia Tan, "Passing", Batik on Cotton, 2005, 50cm x 70cm.
Image 2: Fatimah Chik, Detail of "Asar", Batik, 1993, 267cm x 116cm, National Visual Arts Collection, National Art Gallery, Kuala Lumpur.
I hope you have enjoyed my ramblings about Malaysia and my photos of Kuala Lumpur. If you are ever headed towards South East Asia, it is definitely worth a visit!
All my love,
Nicola
* I read all responses and comments so if you have anything you would like to share with me, please send me an email. *
It surely is a Brave New World when I need to start ending off my newsletters/blogs with the statement that this newsletter/blog was fully written by me using my fallible human mind and fingers (hands?). I have never, and will never use AI to write it for me, as the writing of these newsletters serve as a kind of month-in-review for me, and that is invaluable. The same goes for my artwork, illustrations and photographs. All images, photographs, illustrations and artworks which you see in my newsletters/blogs were created by me, by hand in the real world, unless otherwise credited. |
Thank you for being here❤️
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