A new non-profit art institution has opened in the Malaysian capital, taking over six restored 1930s Art Deco shophouses in Medan Pasar, the historic quarter where Kuala Lumpur first grew up around trade. Muara Arts, supported by the Creador Foundation, sits at the meeting point of the Klang and Gombak rivers, and its name comes from the Malay word for estuary, a confluence.

The opening exhibition, A-Z of Southeast Asian Art: A Critical Dictionary, brings together more than 40 artists from all 11 Southeast Asian countries, alongside members of the diaspora. Co-curated by consultant artistic director Lydia Yee, formerly of the Whitechapel Gallery, the Barbican and the Bronx Museum, with assistant curator Zhen Feng Ang, the show takes its framework from Singaporean artist Ho Tzu Nyen's ongoing Critical Dictionary of Southeast Asia, organising works alphabetically around shared terms. The selection spans generations and media, from Pacita Abad's textile painting and Tuan Andrew Nguyen's sculptures made from artillery shells to works by Marcos Kueh, Martha Atienza, Jennifer Tee and Navin Rawanchaikul.

Yee says the show was designed to introduce newcomers to the region's art while still engaging seasoned viewers, without flattening distinct national contexts into a single narrative. Instead, recurring concerns surface in different forms: identity and belonging, corruption, the environment and the legacies of conflict. Works by Wong Hoy Cheong, whose Definitive ABCs series undercuts the idea of the dictionary as an authority, sit alongside Ho's open-ended lexicon, so the exhibition itself argues for plural, shifting definitions of Southeast Asian art.

Muara Arts is the cultural arm of the Creador Foundation, established by Shanthi Kandiah and Brahmal Vasudevan, and forms part of the wider Warisan KL regeneration of the Medan Pasar precinct, involving the adaptive reuse of 55 heritage properties. A theatre is planned to open in 2029, with residency and rehearsal spaces to follow, and Chris Lee joins as chief executive in mid-December after a decade at the National Gallery Singapore.