In Conversation with: Kenneth Wong See Huat
Mapping Penang as a “living archive” — we spoke to the curator and cultural practitioner about social cartography and how Penang’s stories continue to unfold through food, walking and memory.
Kenneth Wong See Huat is a Malaysian curator and cultural practitioner whose work looks at heritage as something lived, moved and continually remade.
Drawing on walking, food, memory and community knowledge, he has created Echoes in Between: Penang as Living Archive — an exhibition that now continues on MagnificentH as a digital micro-museum.
We spoke with Kenneth about the stories that shape Penang, and why the most meaningful cultural maps are often made outside the frame of official institutions.
Could you begin by telling us about your journey as a curator and cultural practitioner?
My journey has never followed a single, linear path. My academic background crosses urban planning, cultural landscapes and curatorial studies, so I have always been interested in how places are shaped not only through architecture and policy, but also through memory, movement and everyday cultural practices.
“I see them as interconnected ways
of asking how culture is
produced, remembered and shared.”
I founded People Ideas Culture in 2016 as a platform through which I could bring these different strands together. Rather than separating research from curating, cultural mapping or community engagement, I see them as interconnected ways of asking how culture is produced, remembered and shared.
My work often begins with walking and observation: noticing a building that may soon disappear, following a religious procession, listening to a hawker describe how they travel between neighbourhood markets, or watching how people gather around a kitchen, temple or coffee shop.
These encounters may appear ordinary, but together they form a kind of social map. They reveal the relationships, memories, labour and emotions that make a place meaningful.
How did walking become part of your curatorial methodology?
Walking allows me to encounter a place before deciding what it means.
It is partly informed by psychogeography—the idea that movement through a landscape can reveal emotional, political and social layers that conventional maps often overlook. But for me, walking is also a practice of listening. It requires slowness, attentiveness and a willingness to become temporarily lost.
During my Asian Cultural Council fellowship in New York, walking became especially important. I moved through Chinatown, the Lower East Side, Greenwich Village, Fire Island, and other parts of the city, tracing the histories of the Asian diaspora, queer presence, migration, and community formation.
New York became more than a research location. It became a living archive and a teacher. Its streets showed me how communities inscribe themselves onto urban landscapes even when their histories are absent from official monuments.
This led me to ask: how do bodies, food, grief and land become maps? That question has continued to guide my work in Malaysia.
What do you mean by “social cartography”?
Traditional maps usually describe physical space: roads, boundaries, buildings and landmarks. Social cartography maps relationships, memory and lived experience.
It may include oral histories, personal photographs, recipes, rituals, family businesses, community routes or the places where people meet every morning. It is concerned with the invisible networks that make a neighbourhood meaningful to those who inhabit it.
A map is never entirely neutral. Every map involves decisions about what is included, what is excluded and whose knowledge is recognised. Mapping is therefore both an interpretive and a political act.
In Malaysia, where rapid urbanisation often creates gaps in collective memory, social cartography can help surface histories that remain outside conventional archives. It can make working-class experience, domestic labour, informal economies and community knowledge more visible.
My earlier projects—including heritage walks in Bangsar, research in Jenjarom New Village and the intervention surrounding Penang’s Last Siamese House—helped me develop this approach. Echoes in Between brings those ideas into an exhibition context.
How did this journey lead to Echoes in Between: Penang as Living Archive?
The exhibition emerged from several overlapping experiences rather than one defining moment.
After spending considerable time outside Malaysia, including periods of study and research overseas, I returned to Penang with a renewed awareness of how quickly the city was changing. Penang is internationally recognised for its built heritage, particularly within George Town, but the life of the city extends far beyond its historic façades.
“Heritage is not only a celebrated monument.”
I became increasingly interested in what exists between formal heritage categories: domestic memories, neighbourhood rituals, temporary structures, roadside economies, community relationships and ordinary places that may never enter an institutional archive.
At the same time, I was meeting artists who were recording Penang through very different perspectives. Some were painting streets and buildings; others were working through family history, faith, migration, gender, memory or changing cultural landscapes. I began to see the possibility of bringing these works into conversation.
That became Echoes in Between. The title refers to what survives in the intervals between past and present, permanence and disappearance, private memory and collective history.
What does it mean to describe Penang as a “living archive”?
An archive is often imagined as a place where documents and objects are preserved after something has happened. A living archive behaves differently. It continues to be produced through people’s actions, relationships and memories.
Penang can be read through its architecture, but also through cooking, religious processions, market routes, spoken histories, neighbourhood routines and the ways people occupy public space. These practices may be temporary or difficult to collect, yet they carry enormous cultural meaning.
Calling Penang a living archive also changes who is recognised as a keeper of knowledge. The archive is not held exclusively by museums, universities or government institutions. It may also be held by an artist, a hawker, a ritual practitioner, a craftsperson, a resident or a family caring for an old house and its memories.
The exhibition asks audiences to look at Penang not as a completed historical picture, but as a place whose meanings are still being negotiated.
Food and community memory appear frequently in your research. How do they connect with the exhibition?
Food is more than a subject within my work. I see it as narrative infrastructure.
A dish can carry family memory, care labour, migration routes, border histories, economic survival and collective authorship. A kitchen can function as an archive, even when it contains no formal documents. Knowledge is transmitted through gestures: cleaning, cutting, tasting, remembering and teaching someone younger how something should be prepared.
My work on Penang’s Last Siamese House sharpened this understanding. After the house was demolished in February 2025 despite heritage appeals, I developed Siam Reversed with Thai artist Anuwat Apimukmongkon. It took the form of an edible memorial—a communal meal that reconstructed aspects of the house and its cultural world through taste, aroma, storytelling and shared remembrance.
For instance, Siamese laksa, bunga kantan fritters, rice cracker mosaics, and fermented rice carried memories of connections between Penang, Kedah and the wider Siamese world. Food became a form of geopolitical memory, preserving histories that contemporary borders can obscure.
That experience taught me that when a building disappears, heritage does not disappear entirely. It may remain in a recipe, a bodily gesture, a ritual or the memory of people eating together. This thinking informs the wider curatorial framework of Echoes in Between, even when food itself is not directly represented in every artwork.
How is the idea of social cartography expressed through the artworks?
The exhibition brings together artists working across watercolour, batik, photography, printmaking, sculpture, mixed media, illustration and film. Their approaches are different, but each work contributes a particular way of reading Penang.
Some artists document buildings and neighbourhoods that are vulnerable to demolition or redevelopment. Others focus on domestic histories, cultural identity, religious practice or the emotional attachments people form with ordinary places.
The films bring attention to hawker culture and the living faith of the Nine Emperor Gods, showing that heritage is enacted through bodies, labour, movement and repeated practice. Hawkers moving between neighbourhood markets, for example, create their own cultural routes. Their mobility helps transmit recipes, tastes and social relationships across the city.
The works collectively form a social cartography of Penang. They do not offer a single authoritative map. Instead, they provide multiple, sometimes incomplete perspectives.
This incompleteness is important. Every map is partial and positioned. The exhibition acknowledges that there are always other stories, memories and routes that remain beyond its frame.
The Last Siamese House plays an important role in the exhibition. Could you explain its significance?
The Last Siamese House in Pulau Tikus represented a particular intersection of architecture, community memory and cultural disappearance.
Located within Penang’s historic Siamese and Burmese enclave, it carried generations of family life and reflected the close relationship between domestic space, temples, food and community practice. Its demolition marked not only the loss of a building, but also the erosion of a cultural landscape.
Parts of the house survived, including window panels and frames. These remnants are incorporated into the exhibition design and printmaking. Rather than treating them as decorative objects, I wanted them to function as witnesses.
They create the suggestion of a house within the gallery and invite visitors to look through fragments of something no longer fully present. The exhibition cannot reconstruct the original house, but it can create a space in which its absence is acknowledged.
“A museum does not always need to
begin with a building or collection“
The journey from Siam Reversed to Echoes in Between also represents a movement from mourning towards mapping. The first project responded to loss through an edible memorial; the exhibition asks how art might record, interpret and connect vulnerable memories before more of them disappear.
How has your work with food and community mapping influenced the way you think about museums?
I have become increasingly interested in museums that are multi-sited, sensory and co-created.
A museum does not always need to begin with a building or collection. It might begin with a walk, a recipe, a temporary festival, an oral history or a shared meal. A village itself might be understood as a distributed museum, with stories held across homes, temples, coffee shops, businesses and everyday routes.
In Jenjarom New Village, for example, I have been exploring how family-run food businesses can function as micro social archives. A handmade bao shop, an egg-cake maker or a family producing you tiao may preserve several generations of embodied knowledge. Heritage is transmitted without museum labels through daily work and relationships.
This does not mean conventional museums are no longer necessary. It means we can expand the ways museums interpret knowledge and engage communities. Food, walking, pop-up exhibitions, digital mapping and community storytelling can create accessible entry points into histories that might otherwise feel distant.
Why was it important to extend the exhibition onto MagnificentH?
A physical exhibition is always shaped by time and geography. It opens, people visit it, and then it closes. For an independent exhibition in Penang, its reach may be especially limited for audiences who cannot travel to George Town during those two weeks.
The MagnificentH micro-museum allows the project to move beyond those constraints. It does not simply reproduce the gallery online. It creates another layer of interpretation in which the artworks, stories and curatorial ideas can continue to be encountered after the physical exhibition ends.
I am particularly drawn to the idea of the micro-museum because it offers a scale that feels appropriate for independent and community-led cultural work. It can begin with a focused story, a community archive, an exhibition or even a single cultural route. It does not need to imitate a large institution before it can offer meaningful knowledge.
For Echoes in Between, the digital space also reflects the idea of a living archive. The project can continue to grow, connect with audiences elsewhere and potentially create new conversations between Penang and other places.
What challenges do independent curators face when producing projects of this kind?
Independent curating often involves doing many jobs at once: research, fundraising, artist coordination, writing, design, installation, publicity and relationship-building. The visible exhibition is only one part of a much longer and often invisible process.
Funding remains a major challenge. Community-oriented and research-driven exhibitions require time, but that time is not always recognised as labour. There is also pressure to produce immediate and measurable outcomes, whereas cultural relationships and meaningful research often develop slowly.
At the same time, independence can create flexibility. It allows us to work across institutional boundaries, respond to overlooked subjects and experiment with different formats.
For me, independent practice is not about working alone. It is about building a temporary ecology of artists, researchers, communities and supporting organisations who believe that a particular story deserves to be told.
What do you hope visitors will take away from the exhibition?
I hope they leave with a more expansive understanding of heritage.
Heritage is not only a celebrated monument or something officially listed. It may be a modest wooden house, a neighbourhood coffee shop, a market that appears once a week, a religious procession, a recipe transmitted within a family, or the memory of a place that no longer exists.
I also hope visitors recognise that preservation does not always mean freezing something in time. Sometimes it means sustaining the relationships, practices and knowledge that allow culture to remain meaningful.
Most importantly, I hope the exhibition encourages people to look again at their own surroundings. Every place contains stories that are in danger of being overlooked—not necessarily because they are unimportant, but because they have become too familiar.
Where do you see this work going next?
I would like Echoes in Between to become more than a single exhibition. The physical presentation in George Town is one chapter, while the MagnificentH micro-museum opens another.
“The future of heritage will not
exist only inside
conventional institutions.”
I am interested in how this model might encourage independent curators, community museums, artists and heritage organisations elsewhere in Southeast Asia to develop their own micro-museums. These could explore community histories, intangible cultural heritage, Indigenous and ancestral knowledge, foodways, crafts, migration, faith, environmental knowledge or cultural routes.
This also connects with my wider work on CultureAtlas, which explores participatory cultural mapping and digital storytelling. Across these projects, the underlying question remains similar: how can we create credible, accessible and meaningful ways for communities to represent their own cultural knowledge?
The future of heritage will not exist only inside conventional institutions. It will also emerge through smaller, distributed and interconnected spaces—both physical and digital.
As I learned through walking, maps are never finished. They offer places to pause, look back and recognise the paths we have travelled before continuing. I see Echoes in Between in the same way: not as a conclusion, but as one point in a longer journey of listening, mapping and making cultural memory visible.
Discover Kenneth’s micro-museum and follow him on MagnificentH here.
Featured image for “In conversation with: Kenneth Wong see Huat” is depicting artwork by artist Lim Jee Yuan, Echoes of Kampung Siam: The House of Nai Boon Phrom, 2025, watercolour on paper, 38 × 53 cm. It is a record of Penang’s Last Siamese House at 3 Lorong Burmah before its demolition. The artwork is included in Echoes in Between: Penang as Living Archive and demonstrates how artistic observation can preserve the memory and atmosphere of a place beyond the survival of its physical structure.
