Denise Lai

Denise Lai is a Malaysia-born curator and Associate Director at ROH, a gallery located in Jakarta that aims to build a consistent local program whilst fostering a broader, borderless dialogue. Prior to this, she was a curator at the Kuala Lumpur-based gallery, A+ Works of Art, where she curated Yee I-Lann’s solo exhibition ALLOM! AMATAI! ALLOM! in 2023. Her research develops from her ongoing engagement with contemporary art in and from Southeast Asia, developing exhibitions and programming that redeploy an array of cultural memories within the region to address our contemporary conditions. Denise received her BA in History of Art from the University of Oxford and an MA in History of Design from the Royal College of Art. In 2020, she was awarded the Clive Wainwright Memorial Prize and the Design History Society’s Virtual Design History Award for her research on the design history of Malaysia’s defining state-development campaign of the nineties, Wawasan 2020 (Vision 2020).

Contributions

Southeast Asia | A Global Museum

Au Sow Yee: The Fate of the Post-Heroic Perwira

Au Sow Yee’s three-part video series The Extreme Journey of Perwira and the Calm Sea: In 3 Acts (2019–22) begins with a karaoke session. An introductory xylophone sequence announces the unfamiliar Song of Departure: a mash-up of lyrics and melodies from a Taiwanese conscription tune and cinematic theme songs. In conventional karaoke fashion, synchronized textual cues (in Japanese, Chinese, and English) accompany a montage of images, and from the song’s main refrain, we learn of its premise as well as its protagonist: ぼくらのハリマオ | 我們的 Harimau—in English, “our Tiger.”