KL has an excellent array of museums and art galleries, some of which are among the region’s best, including the National Museum, Islamic Arts Museum and National Visual Arts Gallery.
With its entrenched mall culture, it is easy to forget that KL also has an excellent array of museums and art galleries, some of which are among the region’s best.
The Islamic Arts Museum, once named by TripAdvisor as one of the top 10 museums in Asia, boasts 12 galleries displaying more than ten thousand artefacts. The museum’s exhibits, among the largest in Southeast Asia, are diverse, from jewelleries from various Islamic dynasties to the reconstruction of a 19th century Ottoman Syrian Room. There is also the Ancient Malay World gallery, where visitors may enjoy Islamic arts that have been married with the local, Nusantara sensibilities. The museum is currently hosting the Al-Tibb: Healing Traditions in Islamic Medical Manuscripts exhibition, showcasing the wealth of medicinal knowledge by physicians, scientists and philosophers in the Islamic world.
The National Visual Arts Gallery, located off Jalan Tun Razak, features a large collection of artworks created by local artists. Its current exhibition includes the Husin Hourmain Exhibition, by an established Malaysian contemporary artist who is an abstract expressionist artist at heart. Aku…Dalam Mencari Rukun, focuses on his personal life journey within his Islamic practise around the 6 Pillars of Faith in Islam.
The National Museum, opened in 1963, serves as a repository of Malaysia’s diverse cultural and historical heritage. Housed in a Minangkabau-style building, the museum consists of four galleries dedicated to different periods of the nation’s history. For a glimpse of the region’s Palaeolithic history, take a peek of the 11,000 years old ‘Perak Man’, the oldest human skeletal remains found anywhere in Southeast Asia.
