What are the opening hours?

Saturday 10:00 - 17:00 Sunday 10:00 - 17:00

Malaysia Design Archive

Home
Malaysia
Kuala Lumpur
Malaysia Design Archive

Design . Arts . Culture . Politics
MDA Visual Culture Archive Sdn Bhd
202101014033 (1414333-K) What is our design history? Do we have one?

Malaysia Design Archive is a project to map the development of graphic design in Malaysia from the period before independence (1957) until now. It is a space to trace and document Malaysian ‘endangered’ design legacy, to preserve our historical past, as well as to create a resource of Malaysian design work. This is also another way to protect our history, provide us with space to question its mean

ing, recurring imagery, icons used, ideas, and how it is connected to the our political landscape at the time. This project aims to highlight the importance of archiving as a way protect and preserve our own visual history. www.malaysiadesignarchive.org | www.twitter.com/designarkib | www.instagram.com/designarchive

(By appointments only)

07/04/2026

Problems a Non-“Problem-solving” Design Practice Has to Solve

by Gideon Kong

Date: 12 April 2026 (Sunday)

Time: 2pm

Venue: Malaysia Design Archive

RSVP here: https://forms.gle/ex8orEiZL7AAwAqi7 (link in bio)

Summary: Design practices that claim disinvolvement with “problem solving” as an activity or model of practice often still have to navigate or solve larger and more complex problems than those found in individual projects or commissions. Such practices are a problem in themselves when we consider factors around finding, creating, or sustaining projects that demand many things yet seldom come with immediate commercial or societal value. As gideon-jamie, we have been running such a problematic practice since 2017 and are involved in graphic design, small-scale publishing, and several related ad hoc activities. In this talk, we will share a little bit of everything across a selection of different projects and activities. However, instead of proposing any grand vision or long-term solution, we simply describe how we attempt to solve the problems we encounter daily in small, improvisational, makeshift, economical, and practical ways, and how problems are still everywhere around design even when design tries to disassociate itself from them.

Bio: gideon-jamie (gideon-jamie) is a design studio involved in graphic design, publishing, writing, and making exhibitions, with a focus on books, typography, and printing. Started in 2017 by Jamie Yeo and Gideon Kong, they also run Temporary Press (Temporary Press), a small publisher of artist books and design publications, and Temporary Unit (Temporary Unit), an ad hoc bookshop and exhibition space for graphic design.

30/01/2026

Tokyo Flyers, 2000s–2020s
Printed Matter as Cultural Infrastructure

This sharing session introduces a personal flyer collection gathered over more than 20 years, mainly from Tokyo’s underground music, art, and club scenes.

Rather than approaching flyers as nostalgic design objects, this talk considers them as a form of cultural infrastructure — a medium that once visualized how people gathered, how scenes were formed, and how urban culture circulated before the dominance of social
media platforms.

Based on an independent, non-institutional practice of collecting and organizing, the session opens a space for discussion on what has been lost, transformed, or made invisible through the digitalization of cultural memory, and asks how contemporary archives might respond to these changes.

Profile:
Taka Kumazawa is an independent organizer and archivist based in Kyoto, Japan. He runs deepbluesea, a nomadic project focused on printed matter, exhibitions, film screenings, and music events.

He has been collecting flyers for over 20 years and is currently developing “Through the Flyer,” an ongoing research and archiving project on urban cultural memory.

To register: Link in bio

22/01/2026

Affective Listening in the Archive
Date: 3pm, Saturday, January 31st
Venue: MDA,
Moderated by Cadence Cheah
*Sign-up link and readings in bio.

In this reading group, we begin with Marika Cifor’s intervention into archival discourse, in which she argues that emotions and affect have been historically overlooked in judgments of archival value. She suggests that the deeply intimate feelings that move our bodies as we encounter an archive—whether arising from its contents or from the relations binding the archive and the witness—are rarely taken as sources of value in their own right. Drawing on the work of Sara Ahmed and Ann Cvetkovich, Cifor shows how affect and emotion are central to ethical witnessing and to ongoing struggles for (emotional) justice.

We then turn to the writings of Tina Campt and Christina Sharpe. While not directly engaging with archival theory, both attend to photographs, traces, and stories passed down across generations through intimate practices of listening to affective relations. They foreground the affect and emotion that arise as legitimate grounds for scholarly inquiry, rejecting the idea that such relations are too ordinary or personal to be included in the archive. In doing so, they illuminate the low frequencies of everyday injustice that often escape visibility, a crucial step for imagining more just futures.

Alongside these texts, we will read Sim Chi Yin’s work, particularly her zine about her late grandmother, whose husband was deported from Malaya during the Malayan Emergency. Tracing grief, love, and the limits of understanding, the work shows how affect and emotions shapes the making of an archive from what remains.

Together, these works invite us—as writers, researchers, witnesses, and actors—to consider what we listen to, from where we theorize, and what becomes possible when we choose to obstinately ground our work in feeling.

Prescribed texts:

– Marika Cifor, “Affecting Relations” (pp. 7–22)

– Christina Sharpe, Ordinary Notes (Notes 1–10)

– Tina Campt, Listening to Images (pp. 18–31)

– Sim Chi Yin, She Never Rode That Trishaw Again (physical copy will be circulated on the day)

12/01/2026

Street Photography and Everyday Life in Southeast Asia – Initial Incursions

by JPaul S. Manzanilla

Date: 2pm, 24 January 2025 (Saturday)
Venue: Malaysia Design Archive

RSVP here: link in bio

Southeast Asia, our very own rapidly developing culturally diverse region, is witnessing a renewed photographic boom across all genres. Photographers (professional and amateur, local and foreign) capture places that are among the most visited in the world and are experiencing tectonic socioeconomic and political shifts. One notable genre is street photography, which attracts a broad range of practitioners and offers vast possibilities in content and form. We may well think of everyday life images as marking profound transformations over time, such as changes in the natural and built environments and civilian behavior. Yet we could also imagine the everyday as exhibiting the extraordinary in the ordinary, where—according to Henri Lefebvre, in his take on Henry James’s Ulysses—”the quotidian steals the show.”

Might the superbly crafted dreamy, grainy, and blurry images (and even the “mediocre” pieces), by not minding the social and structural, in effect index them even more, but in a different light? Can the innumerable street photos of today give us the “period eye” or express the zeitgeist (spirit of the time)? Or could we abandon the photographer’s intentionality, think less of the thresholds of technology, and yield to, as Clive Scott writes, “the capricious temporalities which flit around the skirts of the street photograph”? This talk pitches several themes and questions suffusing street photography, which initiates the speaker’s project of studying everyday life and street photography in Southeast Asia.

Bio: JPaul S. Manzanilla () teaches visual media, postcolonial studies, and cultural and intellectual history courses at the Integrative Center for Humanities Innovation, Faculty of Humanities, Chiang Mai University. He is currently conducting research on photographic modernisms in Southeast Asia.

Image: a photograph from Che’ Ahmad Ahzar’s () series “A Walk of Life”

18/11/2025

Malaysia Design Archive in collaboration with Rumah Attap Library presents:

Bearing Witness: Conversations on Caste, Gender, and Climate Justice (with visuals)
A sharing session by Bhumika Saraswati

Date: 8pm, Tuesday, 25 November 2025
Venue: Rumah Attap Library, The Zhongshan Building
Register here: https://forms.gle/GZQtqdgDJqNn2vhG7 (Linkin bio)

The institutionalized and systemic marginalization of Dalits and gender-oppressed people across India, Bangladesh, Pakistan, Sri Lanka, and Nepal makes our communities disproportionately vulnerable during global climate emergencies. As climate collapse accelerates, Indigenous peoples, Dalits, and other historically disenfranchised groups continue to bear the brunt of its impacts on the frontlines.

Drawing from her ground work in India, Bhumika will share her visuals work, images that insist on dignity while documenting communities routinely met with indignation and dehumanisation. She will speak about the politics of the image, the urgent need for ethical image-making, and the role of the photograph as an archive, particularly in the context of Dalit lives.

This is also about reclaiming authorship: creating images from within our own communities, disrupting the violent gaze, and opening conversations that many would prefer remain unspoken. These are difficult but necessary conversations - about caste and climate change, caste and health, caste and gender justice in our contemporary world.

Bio
Bhumika Saraswati is an award-winning journalist, filmmaker, and photographer from India. A storyteller from the Dalit community, she works on the intersections of caste, gender, and climate inequality.

Image credit: Bhumika Saraswati

16/11/2025

Title: Dreams and Nightmares in the Empire of AI by Karen Hao
Date: 330pm to 530pm
Venue: Rumah Attap Library, The Zhongshan Building
To register: https://forms.gle/aEFMrvarGu5Xoa837

As Artificial Intelligence claims increasing influence over our lives, it’s easy to believe AI’s creeping dominance is inevitable. But is it?

Join award-winning journalist Karen Hao in conversation with Jac sm Kee, for a discussion on Hao’s best-selling book, “Empire of AI.”

As the first reporter to gain extensive access to OpenAI when its founder, Sam Altman, promoted it as an altruistic research non-profit, Hao has followed the company’s meteoric rise. Drawing on seven years of reporting across five continents, Hao sheds light on the hidden impacts of AI — from the exploitation of data workers in the Global South to the immense environmental costs of its energy and water consumption. Discover whose priorities are being advanced, whose voices are overlooked, and how we can work together to build a more equitable future for the world with AI.

“Empire of AI” will be available for purchase at the event. The author will stay for a short book signing after the program.

Bio:
Karen Hao is the NYT bestselling author of EMPIRE OF AI and an award-winning reporter covering the impacts of artificial intelligence on society. She writes for publications including The Atlantic and leads the Pulitzer Center's AI Spotlight Series, a program training thousands of journalists around the world on how to cover AI. She was formerly a reporter for the Wall Street Journal, covering American and Chinese tech companies, and a senior editor for AI at MIT Technology Review. She has received numerous accolades for her coverage, including an American Humanist Media Award, an American National Magazine Award for Journalists Under 30, and a TIME100 AI honor. She received her Bachelor of Science in mechanical engineering from MIT.

11/11/2025

“Documenting Street Objects, Spaces, Behaviours” by Faiz bin Zohri, Street Report

Date: 23 November 2025 (Sunday)
Time: 2pm
Venue: Malaysia Design Archive

Summary:
Street Report () publishes accounts of events on the street by a “street reporter.” As per some readers’ description, our series is a joke book disguised as an urban study. Street Report is not sure why. We are serious. By reporting on street objects, spaces and behaviours, overlooked situations are spotlighted, legitimately transforming them into something that is open for critical discussion. The talk discusses the publication’s founding, motivations, strategic vision, successes and failures, reader’s feedback and criticism, as well as current and future issues down the road.

Bio:
Faiz bin Zohri (.unstable) is a landscape architect and co-founder/editor of Street Report

29/10/2025

"Filem Purba as the Malay Cinema Genre: From Conventions to Social Functions” by Norman Yusoff

Date: 15 November 2025 (Saturday)

Time: 2pm

Venue: Malaysia Design Archive

Summary: This talk explores the period costume drama known as filem purba, a prototyped genre for Malay cinema produced in Singapore and Kuala Lumpur during the studio and post-studio eras. Either adapted from folk literature/theatre and historical texts or based on original ideas by the screenwriters/directors, the narrative of filem purba is set in the pre-colonial and colonial eras and glorifies the Malay world before the arrival of the imperialists. By combining archival research with a brief textual reading of selected films, Norman Yusoff argues that this genre forms and evolves from the specific cultural practices of industries and audiences, and that it is associated with an undercurrent of nostalgia, particularly in how it offers social and temporal reflections.

Bio: Norman Yusoff is a senior lecturer at the Faculty of Film, Theatre and Animation, UiTM, where he teaches Film Theory and Appreciation, Malaysian Cinema, and Genre and Popular Culture.

Image: Still from Hang Jebat (dir. Hussain Haniff, 1961).

No RSVP is required.

23/10/2025

Secubit Arkib: Workshop
Saturday, 1st November 2025
11am to 12:30pm
Venue: MDA, 84B, 2nd Floor, at The Zhongshan Building

What makes a year? Bring one object that represents the year for you - it can be a bottle cap, one picture, a found postcard, page 16 of today’s newspaper, anything that for you, holds 2025. The workshop will go through what makes an archive, explore the visual language of our objects, and how our collection of things and our stories connected to them become the beginning of a small archive of the year.

You will have the option to publish your item as an digital artefact on MDA's website as part of this workshop's collection.

Sign up link in bio! Limited to 20 pax.

30/09/2025

Living Typography: Eighteen Years of Community Practice and a Century of Chinese Type Design

Date: 3 October 2025 (Friday)
Time: 7pm
Venue: Malaysia Design Archive

The independent collective TheType is in town. TheType is an independent project focusing on typography, design and society. Through writing, publishing, podcasting, events and other activities, it aims to deepen public understanding of the role of design and visual culture in society and promote research in the relevant fields.

Huruf and Malaysia Design Archive will be co-hosting two sharing sessions (happening on the same day). Design and type enthusiasts are all welcomed!

Part I: Eighteen Years of Community Practice

Talk by Chen Wenbo and Li Zhiqian, The Type

This talk focuses on TheType’s creative practices and their engagement with Chinese typography as a lively and continuously evolving tradition.

Part II: A Century of Chinese Type Design

Talk by Li Zhiqian

The talk will begin with the introduction and localization of Western metal movable type in China, exploring Chinese printing typefaces developed under varying technological conditions and dominant forces across different eras. From metal type and phototypesetting to laser typesetting and early digitalization up to the present day, the storage, usage, production, and printing media of Chinese fonts have undergone tremendous transformations. Meanwhile, the interplay of contradictions—such as private capital versus state apparatus, market economy versus planned economy, and independent R&D versus imported collaboration—has continuously shaped this evolution.

Speakers’ Bio:

Li Zhiqian () is a researcher, writer, translator, curator and designer on typography, visual culture and art. He is the project lead of Shanghai Type and TypeTour, founder of 3type, board member and contributor of TheType. He is a distinguished research fellow at Type Lab, Shanghai Academy of Fine Arts. He was one of the judges of the TDC Ascender Award in 2023.

Chen Wenbo () is a member at TheType. He graduated from Royal College of Art and has been to 26 countries.

About TheType (): https://www.thetype.com/about/

29/08/2025

Arkib di bawah Attap
Date: 30th and 31st August 2025
Venue: All talks will be held at Rumah Attap Library & Collective, .
Sign-up link in bio. All are welcome!

Join us this coming Merdeka weekend for a series of talks about the politics of visual culture and archival practices!

We celebrate independence by asking questions about history, power, and memory in acts of archiving and research. How do we narrate complex lives and events that seem distant in the past but live on in the items that we keep? How do we interrogate the production of knowledge in and outside institutions, constantly mediated by process, context, and actors? Our speakers, from Malaysia, Hong Kong, and Australia, ponder these questions and more in their respective topics ranging from picture post cards circulating the early 20th century empire to fabricated images and speculative visions intimate to the legacy of the Malayan Emergency.

Schedule:
30th August, 11.00 am
Spectres of San Ba Lou 山芭佬: Inheriting the Malayan Emergency
By Eddie Wong, artist, researcher, educator

30th August, 3.00 pm
Re-temporalising Empire: Encounters with a picture postcard in the colonial port city in the early 20th century
By Jennifer Yang, PhD candidate in Art History at the University of Sydney

30th August, 5.00 pm
Body as Living Archive
By Eleanor Goroh

31st August, 11.00 am
From Strange to Stranger: Working on Ha Bik Chuen's Legacy
By Michelle Wun Ting Wong, researcher, writer, and curator

31st August, 4.00 pm
The Moral Economy of the Chinese Kongsi: and its Undoing in the Larut Wars and Mandor Rebellion
By Yvonne Tan, researcher and writer

“Arkib di bawah Attap” is a collaboration between Malaysia Design and Rumah Attap Library & Collective

29/08/2025

Arkib di bawah Attap
Date: 30th and 31st August 2025
Venue: All talks will be held at Rumah Attap Library & Collective, .
Sign-up link in bio. All are welcome!

Join us this coming Merdeka weekend for a series of talks about the politics of visual culture and archival practices!

We celebrate independence by asking questions about history, power, and memory in acts of archiving and research. How do we narrate complex lives and events that seem distant in the past but live on in the items that we keep? How do we interrogate the production of knowledge in and outside institutions, constantly mediated by process, context, and actors? Our speakers, from Malaysia, Hong Kong, and Australia, ponder these questions and more in their respective topics ranging from picture post cards circulating the early 20th century empire to fabricated images and speculative visions intimate to the legacy of the Malayan Emergency.

Schedule:
30th August, 11.00 am
Spectres of San Ba Lou 山芭佬: Inheriting the Malayan Emergency
By Eddie Wong, artist, researcher, educator

30th August, 3.00 pm
Re-temporalising Empire: Encounters with a picture postcard in the colonial port city in the early 20th century
By Jennifer Yang, PhD candidate in Art History at the University of Sydney

30th August, 5.00 pm
Body as Living Archive
By Eleanor Goroh, tattoist, beader, historian

31st August, 11.00 am
From Strange to Stranger: Working on Ha Bik Chuen's Legacy
By Michelle Wun Ting Wong, researcher, writer, and curator

31st August, 4.00 pm
The Moral Economy of the Chinese Kongsi: and its Undoing in the Larut Wars and Mandor Rebellion
By Yvonne Tan, researcher and writer

“Arkib di bawah Attap” is a collaboration between Malaysia Design and Rumah Attap Library & Collective

Address

Unit 84B, The Zhongshan Building, Jalan Rotan, Off Jalan Kg Attap
Kuala Lumpur
50460

Opening Hours

Saturday	10:00 - 17:00
Sunday	10:00 - 17:00

Website

http://www.malaysiadesignarchive.org/supportus/

Alerts

Be the first to know and let us send you an email when Malaysia Design Archive posts news and promotions. Your email address will not be used for any other purpose, and you can unsubscribe at any time.

Contact The Business

Send a message to Malaysia Design Archive:

Shortcuts

Featured

TIME / Maxis Fibre Contractor / Unifi Repair
Tesco kajang

Want your business to be the top-listed Contractor in Kuala Lumpur?

07/04/2026

30/01/2026

22/01/2026

12/01/2026

18/11/2025

16/11/2025

11/11/2025

29/10/2025

23/10/2025

30/09/2025

29/08/2025

29/08/2025

Address

Opening Hours

Website

Alerts

Contact The Business

Shortcuts

Featured

Share