A universe woven in colour.
For artist Tulika Prakash, a reclaimed textile is the beginning of a conversation about memory, identity and belonging.
Some materials arrive in an artist’s studio with a history already attached. A piece of embroidery, an old sari, a textile handled by more than one generation: each carries a trace of another life. For India-born, Malaysia-based artist Tulika Prakash, those traces are a starting point for richly layered works about the relationship between the individual and a much larger world.
Finding a different kind of language
The August feature follows Prakash’s move towards art after more than two decades in analytics and business strategy across Malaysia, India and the United States. During the Covid years, a period shaped by expatriate life, motherhood and illness led her towards a more introspective creative practice. Painting and meditation became closely connected in that process.
Her solo exhibition I Am the Universe, shown at KL City Art Gallery in Publika earlier in the year, brought these interests together. Its works explored identity as something interconnected and changing. Rather than treating an inherited textile as a neutral surface, Prakash allowed its associations to become part of the image.
Room for a more colourful world
The work’s visual generosity is deliberate. Radiant colour, intricate ornament and layered textures resist a pared-back, grey visual world. The article places influences from Gustav Klimt and Vittorio Zecchin alongside the palettes and symbolism of Indian folk traditions. Those connections emerge through compositions that feel decorative, intimate and expansive at the same time.
Spiritual philosophy and writers including Rumi and Khalil Gibran also inform the artist’s thinking. Yet the works remain tangible: fabric, paint, pattern and the traces of making ask for close attention. A viewer can begin with the pleasure of colour, then gradually notice the relationships between the fragments. The exhibition becomes an invitation to consider belonging as something assembled from experiences, places and memories, with room for many different parts to remain visible.
A Universe Woven in Colour
Original story by Agnes Bartoszek. The Expat, August 2026, pages 62–63.
This digital preview is adapted from the original magazine feature. Text has been shortened and rewritten; photography and artwork come from the print edition.
