Marcos Kueh (b. 1995, Sarawak) is a textile artist with a background in graphic design and advertising. Growing up in a post-colonial developing country, he has always been fascinated about his identity as Malaysian and his place in larger Western discourses. His practice revolves around using textiles to encapsulate day-to-day stories—just as Borneo’s ancestors did with dreams and legends before the arrival of Western alphabets. He explores how his country is perceived—from colonial descriptions in anthropological museums to tourism marketing—versus his lived experiences as someone from a small Borneo town navigating expectations to progress as a modern citizen.

Adapting fundamentals of traditional graphic design craftsmanship and the smart wits of advertising philosophies, Kueh describes his works as woven posters and billboards. Using keywords evoking Third-World connotations—laborious, complicated, traditional—he crafts larger-than-life posters by layering graphics and texts to depict realities where the subject is “the other.” Through his work, he wishes for the public to reconsider how we fashion our reality through the visuals and texts we consume—how they affect the way we see and speak to ourselves and how we perceive and describe others.