Silas Oo’s ‘Roadkill’ Brings Urban Mortality To The Gallery Wall

By Lara Kramer  •  30 Apr 2026 in Events

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Kuala Lumpur’s The Back Room is set to stage a striking new chapter in its programme this May with Roadkill, the first solo gallery exhibition by emerging artist Silas Oo.

Opening on 9 May 2026 and running through 7 June, the show marks a pivotal moment for the Kuala Lumpur-based artist, who has steadily built a reputation through group exhibitions and accolades, including a shortlist for the National Art Gallery’s Bakat Muda Sezaman competition in 2024.

For an artist already known in local circles, Roadkill is more of an arrival than a debut. It’s Oo’s first fully realised body of work presented in a formal gallery setting, comprising 10 meticulous pen-on-paper drawings mounted in custom acrylic frames.

Executed with an almost obsessive precision, the works demonstrate his command of ultra-fine line drawing while pushing his long-standing preoccupation with mortality into more immediate, unsettling territory.

True to its title, Roadkill confronts viewers with scenes that are both mundane and deeply disturbing. These are not imagined horrors but familiar ones, drawn from the streets themselves.

Flattened animals, encountered in passing on hot asphalt, are rendered with an unflinching directness. Yet Oo complicates these images by fusing flesh with fragments of machinery. Limbs morph into car parts, organs dissolve into metallic forms, creating grotesque hybrids that blur the boundary between the organic and the industrial. The result is a series that feels both clinical and surreal, where the violence of modern life is refracted through a strange, almost mechanical poetry.

This fascination with death has been a constant throughout Oo’s practice, though its expression has evolved significantly.

During his early years at The One Academy, his drawings often reimagined characters from children’s pop culture in bleak, carcass-filled environments, echoing the dark satire of Dismaland by Banksy.

In more recent years, his work shifted towards sculpture, incorporating chrome and metallic elements that introduced a sense of distance, even detachment, from his subject matter.

Roadkill strips that distance away. Instead of symbolic skulls or stylised figures, Oo turns to the raw, immediate reality of death as it appears in everyday life, unceremonious, unpredictable, and often ignored. Beneath the surface, this fixation is deeply personal, rooted in the artist’s own experiences growing up in an environment shaped by anxiety and religious narratives surrounding death and the afterlife.

Despite its heavy themes, the exhibition also serves as a testament to Oo’s technical prowess.

There is a quiet intensity in the way each line is constructed, each form carefully controlled even as the subject matter veers into chaos. This balance between discipline and discomfort positions him as one of the more compelling drawing practitioners working in Malaysia today.

The exhibition opens to the public with a reception on Saturday, 9 May, from 3 p.m. to 7 p.m., and will be on view Wednesday through Sunday, 12 p.m. to 6 p.m., offering a visceral meditation on death in its most ordinary form, one that lingers long after the initial encounter.

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