Marking One Year: What’s Ahead with ArtRabbit Southeast Asia Community in Kuala Lumpur

The ArtRabbit Southeast Asia Community Month programme brings together artists, organisers, institutions, and cultural leaders through a combination of digital tools, in-person experiences, and closed-door conversations. It reflects ArtRabbit’s approach to building cultural infrastructure by connecting visibility, access, and community. [Read on]

Four key components shape this month's programme, from guided tours to the kind of new connections that only happen in person.

Self-guided Downtown KL Tours (from 1 May)

A digital layer of curated walking routes available on ArtRabbit, designed to support discovery of the city through arts, culture, and architecture.

Download the ArtRabbit app for easy navigation.

ArtRabbit App in situ, map view, 2025. Photograph by Tom Elsner. Courtesy ArtRabbit

Curated and Guided Downtown KL Walking Tour (Tuesday, 5 May)

A small group, guided experience used as a live case study for how ArtRabbit can support cultural navigation within the city.

Moving through Chinatown and the historic core, this small-group tour brings together artist-run spaces, boutique hospitality, contemporary exhibitions, and heritage landmarks. Along the way, we explore how art lives not only in galleries, but in buildings, streets, and everyday encounters.

Industry Night: How We Built It — Community in the Arts (Friday, 8 May)

A public-facing event bringing together arts professionals, grassroots organisers and practitioners to share how creative communities are built and sustained in Kuala Lumpur (Ilham Gallery, The Alliance of River Three!, KL Sketch Nation, Jalan Negara Kita).

Private Art Salon Lunch (Saturday, 9 May)

A closed-door gathering of thought leaders across arts, business, philanthropy, and media to discuss cultural infrastructure and placemaking.

Aunty Aini’s Garden Cafe in Nilai. Photograph by SooPhye

Alongside this, ArtRabbit will run a digital campaign for International Museum Day on 18 May, extending the impact of the programme beyond physical events and supporting visibility for cultural institutions across KL.

Together, these moments operate across three levels:

• Public engagement
• Community building
• Strategic relationship development

Marking one year in Southeast Asia, this programme positions ArtRabbit as both a platform and a convenor, working to support a more connected, visible, and sustainable cultural ecosystem in Kuala Lumpur.

Special Mention

A special thank you to Gan Chin Lee for allowing us to share his incredible work.

Gan Chin Lee is a Malaysian artist whose practice examines the spatial and historical conditions of postcolonial society, with particular attention to the legacy of the Chinese New Villages established during the Malayan Emergency.

Working across painting, drawing, and sculptural installation, his projects are grounded in long-term field research, archival inquiry, and site-based observation. His works reconstruct fragmented landscapes and shared social spaces—such as coffee shops and street environments—as visual systems that register displacement, containment, and the layered negotiations of communal life.

Read more about his works here.

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