Indigenous arts on show at All About Arts, WAK Miri

MIRI, 22 June 2026 - Over the course of last weekend’s WAK Miri Festival 2026, the All About Arts exhibition, which ran from June 19 to 21 at Bintang Megamall, offered an exploration of identity, memory, and the materials through which Sarawak’s communities have always told their stories.

Curated by Edric Ong in collaboration with Society Atelier Sarawak, the exhibition drew on Sarawak’s extraordinary diversity of indigenous artistic traditions, from weaving and basketry to textiles and traditional crafts.

Edric is one of Sarawak’s most internationally recognised figures in the arts. He has curated exhibitions across Asia, Europe, and beyond, and serves as a UNESCO consultant and jury member for the UNESCO Award for Excellence for Handicrafts.

All About Arts framed Sarawak’s indigenous weaving practices, beadwork, and traditional crafts as expressions of a continuous and evolving identity that has absorbed change while retaining something essential about who these communities are and where they come from. Visitors encountered textiles and objects that carried within them the motifs, materials, and knowledge of specific peoples and places, each with its own logic and history.

The exhibition also arrived at a moment of cultural pressure. Skilled craftspeople across Sarawak are ageing, and the transmission of specialised knowledge, such as the specific hand-movements required to produce a Pua Kumbu weave, or the understanding of which forest materials yield which natural dyes, cannot be outsourced or digitised. Ong has spoken candidly over the years about what he sees as a race against time, not just to document these traditions but to make them economically and creatively viable enough for younger generations to take up.

All About Arts at WAK Miri was, in that sense, both an artistic statement and an act of advocacy. By placing these works inside a contemporary festival setting, freely accessible, surrounded by music and food and the noise of a city weekend, it suggested that heritage culture does not need to be cordoned off in specialist spaces to be meaningful. It belongs in the middle of things.

A companion fashion showcase, All About Arts: Fashion Show, brought the weekend to a close on Sunday evening at City Rise Hotel’s Sky Lounge, where designers Edric Ong, Melor, Baju Kuas, and Yacutha presented runway collections that wove cultural artistry into contemporary silhouettes. It was a fitting final note for an exhibition that had spent three days arguing that the two need not be in tension at all.

WAK Miri Festival 2026 ran from 19 to 21 June. The next edition of the wider WAK Festival takes place in Kuching this October. For more information, visit www.wakfestival.com.