Since the formation of the 1971 New Culture Policy, the Malaysian government has been promoting national integration through one national culture. The mixed-media installation, titled ‘Menjadi Rimau’, seeks to conceptualize Bangsa Malaysia in cultural terms and to offer a critical perspective on the nation’s cultural identity.

Composed from speculative artifacts, textiles and moving images, the installation proposes an alternative socio-political and cultural imagination where the tiger is presented as a supra-ethnic national identity. In this imagined space, the tiger ‘unified’ the people of the nation across their differences and their ‘lost origins’ caused by the history of enforced diasporas.

By re-examining a collective historical and mythological narrative, ‘Menjadi Rimau’ serves as an open dialogue on diaspora identities in Malaysia, prompting a reflection on our cultural belonging to Bangsa Malaysia. Between fiction and fact, the work hopes to dissect cultural pluralism as part of a colonial heritage, and to offer a critical and poetic exploration of post-colonial discourses, mythology and diasporas.