3 Young Contemporaries is VWFA’s annual signature platform created to promote the works of emerging artists from the Southeast Asian region to a wider audience. Over the years, the show has proven itself to be a prominent launch pad for the careers of many successful artists on both local and regional level.

This year’s show will reprise our tried and true formula of seeking out new artistic strategies, encouraging creative experimentation and highlighting the many ways in which young artists are shaping new and engaging responses to our contemporary experience. The 3 Young Contemporaries for 2009 are Budi Agung Kuswara (Indonesia), Rahmat Haron (Malaysia) and Maria Taniguchi (the Philippines).

In conjunction with 3 Young Contemporaries, we will also be featuring History Lessons: Works on Paper in our project room. Participating artists include Nadiah Bamadhaj, Sri Maryanto, Genevieve Chua and Dominic Mangila. The show looks at how paper as a medium is strategically used to translate, worked against as well as reinterpret the traditional genre of Western History Painting. Works on paper is a suitable vehicle for contemporary artists to challenge official historical narratives, finding new threads of ‘histories’ that are more personal and capturing history as essentially something polysemous, or open to multiple interpretations. In short, they provide a space for a more mature reflection than received understanding of our history.