Sounds of words, ways of prayer, even the texture of daily life, can all be different: Malaysia is a country where multifarious strands of human activity are woven into a single social tapestry. A land that glows with wondrous diversity, yet beneath its luminous surface, faint undercurrents occasionally ripple through the nation’s social weave.

The art collective established in this intricate multiethnic context is Five Arts Centre.¹ Since 1984 the Kuala Lumpur-based collective has produced a stream of experimental works that cut to the heart of Malaysian social realities, in a transdisciplinary practice that ranges from theater and dance, to music and the visual arts. Continually interrogating what it means to be a place for expression, Five Arts Centre has employed art and performance to cast critical perspectives on narratives shaped by the state. The collective also channels effort into workshops and education programs, part of an ongoing commitment to nurturing the next generation who will take on the mantle of art and culture in Malaysia.

Fragments of Tuah, the latest production by Five Arts Centre, had its maiden run at KLPAC (The Kuala Lumpur Performing Arts Center) over the period from late August to early September 2025, and was also on the program of the Kyoto Experiment performing arts festival held in October.²

The work is a piece of documentary theater, taking as its theme the warrior Hang Tuah, believed to have served the sultan during the Malacca Sultanate that flourished mainly in what is today the Malaysian state of Malacca, in the 15th century. Today Tuah is a ubiquitous national icon in Malaysia, featuring not only of course in books but also plays, movies, textbooks, the speeches of politicians, and even video games. Despite it being unclear whether he even actually existed, through repeated tales depicting his loyalty and bravery, Tuah has come to serve as an emblem of national unity, and model “ideal Malaysian.” The production team led by director Mark Teh undertook a careful survey of material inside and outside Malaysia, visited places connected with Tuah, and also focused on images of Tuah in today’s social media. Throughout the work, while sensitively illuminating the myths, they delve deep into the figure of Hang Tuah as it has been shaped against the historical background of Malaysia.

Telling the story is performer, musician, and also digital producer Faiq Syazwan Kuhiri.³ But Faiq is no mere narrator. Drawing the story in closer to his own reality, he cleverly weaves in his own origins, career, music videos of his controversial band, and their social repercussions. The Tuah of myth and figure of Faiq as an individual living in today’s world mingle, the story homing in sharply on a “now” accessible to the audience.

On a stage notable for its lighting, projection and live music effects, a collection of actual publications concerning Tuah sit as if frozen in time. Behind, a vast wall of archival material folds under and over like the warp and weft of a textile, expanding into space as “fragments of history.”

Never silent, these respond to movements on the stage, functioning as an extra “line of sight.” The gazes of scholars and writers who have penned history books and stories about Tuah over many years, transcend the text to appear on stage and drift across the darkness of the audience seating like voiceless whispers, this aura imbuing the whole of the work with a peculiar tension.

Among those involved in shaping the image of Tuah, moreover, are figures like the sculptor commissioned to make the likeness housed in a Kuala Lumpur museum, and a linguist who claimed that Tuah visited the Kingdom of the Ryukyus. Footage of interviews with such people are inserted in the play. Their various attempts to breathe life into a being whose very existence is questionable, and their demonstrable will to believe and relate historical depictions, also have an air of awkwardness that is hard to erase. But by inserting these documents, Teh’s intention is not to offer a single clear answer. Rather, by mixing in different viewpoints and stories, the performance as a whole begins to pulse like a kind of living collage.

And reverberating elegantly in the intervals between each beat of that pulse, are Faiq’s own original vocals. On the stage, powerful poetics arise, melody faintly quivering as the melancholy strains of song shrouded in an ephemeral gloom penetrate the recesses of the spectator’s soul. The sight of the singing Faiq in due course overlaps with the image of a Tuah made to bear the title of “hero,” the pain seeping into his inner being resonating quietly with the strife both mental and physical of being squashed into the box marked “male” experienced by men living in today’s world.

Fragments of Tuah ventures boldly into territory where historians and journalists fear to tread, delicately yet confidently moving back and forth across those boundaries. Occasionally flashing a graceful smile, with a humorous yet critical touch it uncovers and dismantles coverups and contradictions buried in the depths of historical description, as it shakes the structure of storytelling itself. What this piece of theater shows is not an unequivocal, definitive “truth” about the past, but a chain of unreliable and complex discourse appearing on the margins of the tale, from which arise a multiplicity of interpretations and interrogations. These kindle in the audience living in the present day questions around their own position, and the layers of memory, record and information entwined with it. Certainly coexisting in this performance that does not simply retrace a story involving history, but offers itself up as the endeavor of interlacing past and present, are tension and possibilities for reconstructing historical perceptions, and identity.

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［*1］“About – Five Arts Centre.”
［*2］Mark Teh / Five Arts Centre, Fragments of Tuah, Kyto Experiment 2025
［*3］ “3 Questions: Faiq Syazwan Kuhiri,” Five Arts Centre, February 27, 2023.
(All accessed October 20, 2025)

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About the series
“Intersections: Meditations on Southeast Asia” is a series by Malaysia-based arts and culture researcher Kanai Miki, in which she unpacks the art of Southeast Asia from multiple perspectives, including those of history, regional characteristics, and solidarity among peoples, contemplating the relationship between Southeast Asia today and art, including from a Japanese perspective.

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Kanai Miki
A researcher of arts and culture, Kanai documents and analyzes artistic and cultural phenomena first hand as a journalist, and links this practical knowhow to her studies. Following an MA in 20th-century art history at Goldsmiths College, University of London, she spent around two decades based in Berlin, covering the art scene closely in over 20 European countries. Two years of this period were spent as a Japanese Agency for Cultural Affairs Program of Overseas Study for Upcoming Artists grantee (art criticism). Kanai has written for a number of Japanese art magazines including Bijutsu Techo, Geijutsu Shincho and ART iT, and also for cultural magazines such as Seikatsu Kosatsu and Studio Voice. She has introduced the European art scene and European artists to Japan through the writing and editing of books, websites, and exhibition catalogues, and as an exhibition coordinator. Currently based in Malaysia, in addition to research and writing she also helps to organize exhibitions and workshops. Member of the German branch of the International Association of Art Critics (AICA).