Pelita Hati: Sculpting the way for artists outside the box

Artist Nur Atika Husain with her 'Water, Air and Gas' claywork series at Seramik 2012 in Pelita Hati.

Nineteen years on, art gallery Pelita Hati is still game for bigger challenges.

The story of how art gallery Pelita Hati came to be starts with a young artist named Raja Shahriman Aziddin and his artwork. In an incident that happened 20 years ago, he delivered some sculptures to a gallery but the curators didn’t quite know what to do with them. The sculptures were a little strange, they said. Too daring. Too experimental. So for “safety reasons”, they were placed in temporary exile in a dark space under the stairs.