Lin Si Yee ((exclusive)) 📥

What made this collection distinctly Lin Si Yee was her refusal to romanticize decay. Where other artists might have polished the rust, she left it raw. Her accompanying manifesto for the exhibition stated: “We are not preserving what is gone; we are honoring what continues to breathe beneath the cracks.”

These controversies, however, have done little to dent her reputation. If anything, they have sparked necessary conversations about consent, memory, and the ethics of artistic salvage in post-colonial societies. As of 2026, Lin Si Yee is reportedly working on her most ambitious project yet: a multi-year documentation of the last surviving clan houses (kongsi) of the Hokkien and Teochew communities in southern Thailand and northern Malaysia. The project, tentatively titled The Silent Kongsi , involves not only visual art but a podcast series and a collaborative mapping project with anthropologists from Universiti Sains Malaysia. lin si yee

Others have questioned her use of found family photographs. In 2019, a descendant of a family whose discarded album Lin had used in a collage came forward, claiming they had not intended for the images to go public. Lin responded by removing the piece from the exhibition and establishing a strict provenance protocol for all future found objects—although she maintained that “discard is an act of release, not of ownership.” What made this collection distinctly Lin Si Yee

Speculation also surrounds a potential retrospective at the National Art Gallery of Malaysia (now known as the National Visual Arts Gallery). While no official announcement has been made, sources close to the gallery have confirmed that curators have visited her studio multiple times over the last six months. If anything, they have sparked necessary conversations about

As Kuala Lumpur’s skyline transforms with luxury condominiums and high-speed rail, the physical landmarks of Malaysia’s multicultural past—the rubber estates, the cinemas playing Shaw Brothers films, the wooden kampung houses—disappear. Lin’s art functions as a form of grief work. She offers no solutions, only documentation that feels like a eulogy.