Areena Ang

Areena Ang is a Malaysian artist based in London. Primarily a painter, Ang’s work also spans writing, video and collaborative sculpture.

Ang looks into the extensive corpus of cartoons and autobiography as a source of fictive potential and reconstruction. Grappling with the contemporary moment, they attempt to synthesise the conditions of climate breakdown and increasing political instability into narrative works that address the felt experience of loss. At times, offering moments of humour and whimsy, and at others, offering glimpses into violence and abjection.

Ang calls this the state of ‘collective bereftness’. This investigation into the ontological state of ‘lack’ is reflected in their depictions of scenes or figures that mimic the real world, but are often carved out or reduced to its scaffolding. In their most recent body of work, ‘The Marionette Studies’, 2025, the iconic character of Pinocchio is repositioned as a trans figure. Drawing from their own identity, Ang seeks to gesture at the fracturings of desiring an impossible masculinity, whilst considering how the confined nature of the marionette itself mirrors how the bodily autonomy of women and trans people is becoming increasingly threatened.

Their formative years in Malaysia solidified their interest in culturally specific forms of maximalism and themes of the mythic. Informed by the nation’s ethnic heterogeneity, Ang freely collages influences from popular culture, the Gothic, found imagery, ‘third world aesthetics’, the camp genre, technicolour cinema, the European conceptual painting canon and Japanese animation.