From Production to Presence: Why I Built Art + Being

After more than three decades in global advertising and production, I could have chosen a quieter landing. Instead, I opened an art gallery.

Art + Being, based in Damansara Heights, Kuala Lumpur, is not a pivot away from my past — it is the accumulation of it.

My career began unusually early. At nineteen, I founded one of the region’s first visual effects houses, working at a time when much of what is now standard simply did not exist yet. We were inventing as we went. There were no templates — just problems to solve, fast.

That instinct — to build what is missing — has followed me for more than 35 years.

My professional life unfolded across Malaysia, Singapore, Asia and later the UK, spanning visual effects, production houses, post-production, music, film, and large-scale brand ecosystems.

I co-founded 25Frames, a VFX house, and later founded Yelocentric, a production company working with film directors, photographers, animators, artists and musicians. The work moved fluidly between commercial, cultural and experimental worlds.

Alongside this, I also curated and produced art exhibitions nearly two decades ago — successfully, but without the desire at the time to formalise them into a permanent institution.

Over the years, I worked with artists and musicians at formative moments in their careers, produced music videos and cultural projects across Southeast Asia, and was involved in complex VFX, early stereoscopic and experimental visual work long before it became fashionable.

I also led and produced larger cultural initiatives, including projects connected to the Sarawak Music Festival — at one point bringing the founders of Soca Music from Trinidad into the jungles of Borneo, simply because it felt right.

Much of this work sat outside categories, driven more by curiosity and connection than by strategy.

In Singapore, my path moved into global roles. I became an agency executive producer working across international markets, shooting Asian and US celebrities, and collaborating with Oscar-nominated directors — often burning through eighteen-hour days with no weekends.

Eventually, this led to a transition into production consulting, working directly with brands.

For the past decade, I’ve worked as a global production advisor across APAC and global markets, supporting multinational brands including Ferrero and Nestlé — a role I continue today, often working across the US, Latin America, Europe and Asia time zones.

Running parallel to this high-pressure professional life, another thread was forming — not as a trend, but as necessity.

I wasn’t looking to become spiritual. I was trying to understand my own mind well enough to stay sane — and to take responsibility for the reality I was creating.

Long before “wellness” became an industry, I began exploring ways to regulate a nervous system that had been switched on for decades.

Over twenty years ago, I landed in India, where my relationship with meditation began. I trained as a Hatha yoga instructor, explored breathwork, meditation and energy work, and travelled extensively — not out of ideology, but out of pragmatism.

I needed tools that worked. And, of course, who doesn’t find India endlessly compelling?

That quiet, functional relationship with presence became foundational.

Returning to Malaysia after twelve years abroad — split between Singapore and the UK — brought everything into focus.

The UK, for me, had become far too cold in every sense, so I rented out my house and came back home.

Kuala Lumpur, where my children were born, felt like a return not only geographically, but energetically.

Art + Being grew from a question that had been circling for years: what happens in the space between doing and being?

Advertising is built on output — deliverables, performance, speed. That world taught me discipline, precision and how to execute at scale.

It also made the gap very visible: the gap between making things and actually experiencing them.

Art + Being positions itself deliberately outside familiar categories. It is not a white-cube gallery chasing trends, and it is not a wellness space dressed up as culture.

It operates from a simple premise: art is not separate from being.

The programme brings together contemporary visual art — painting, sculpture, installation and mixed media — alongside carefully framed experiences that deepen perception: sound immersions, embodied reflection, and neuroscience-informed creative practices.

Not as “healing events,” and not as spectacle, but as ways of learning how to perceive more fully.

We don’t fix people here. We don’t promise transformation. We offer conditions — for attention, for reflection, for resonance. Art already does that, if you let it.

The gallery’s curatorial focus is rooted in Southeast Asia, with a strong emphasis on building meaningful bridges to Europe.

Many of the artists we work with are established in their own contexts but under-represented internationally.

Others are emerging voices whose practices are embodied, political, poetic or materially experimental — often all at once.

This approach reflects my own sensibility: practical, unsentimental and quietly radical. I’m not interested in spiritual bypassing, and I’m not interested in cynicism either.

Both are lazy. What interests me is presence — the kind that can hold contradiction.

That philosophy is embedded in the gallery’s name. Art + Being is not about addition, but recognition: that creation and existence are already intertwined.

I haven’t stepped away from my consulting work. If anything, the two worlds inform each other. Years in global production governance bring rigour and transparency to how the gallery operates; immersion in art and being sharpens my understanding of creativity beyond metrics and KPIs.

I didn’t leave one life for another. I integrated them.

Art + Being opened with its inaugural exhibition The Space In Between and will continue to evolve through exhibitions, residencies and intimate public programmes.

I’m not building a brand empire, and I’m not chasing scale.

This is a long game. A place that earns trust over time.

For someone who has spent a lifetime building studios, projects and creative ecosystems, Art + Being may be my most distilled work yet.

Not louder. Just truer.