“Did they forget to finish it?”
Amelia went to the gallery the way one goes to the gym in January with good intentions and the vigorous suspicion she did not belong there. She had passed the exhibition banner all week. “Contemporary Abstraction,” it announced, which to her sounded like “Paintings That Will Make You Feel Nothing or Uneducated.” Still, she had a free Saturday and a dangerous amount of curiosity, so in she went, clutching her tote bag as if someone might quiz her on colour theory at the door.
The first painting she encountered was enormous. Blue. Very blue. The kind of blue that suggested either deep emotional turmoil or a wholesale discount on ultramarine paint. There were visible scratches, as though the artist had attacked the canvas with the back of a brush during a minor crisis. One corner seemed almost unfinished, like they had run out of energy and simply walked away. Amelia leaned in, pretending to inspect it thoughtfully. Up close, she could see scratches, layers, parts where earlier colours peeked through like secrets that refused to stay buried. She waited for understanding to descend upon her. It did not. Instead, she felt something closer to standing near the ocean at night. Not because it looked like the sea, but because it felt vast and slightly unsettling. She glanced at the wall text, then decided against it. The last thing she needed was confirmation that the painting was actually about industrialisation or the fall of Rome.
In the next room, a canvas full of warm browns and ochres caught her off guard. It looked like someone had dragged earth across fabric and then changed their mind several times. There were uneven edges, patches where pigment thinned out, areas that seemed scraped back aggressively. Amelia imagined the artist standing there thinking, “Good enough,” and heading off for lunch. Oddly, she liked it. It made her shoulders drop a little. She thought of clay, of dirt under fingernails, of ancient things imperfect but solid. She realised she was responding to it physically, not intellectually.
She thought to herself, "Alright. This is new"
Truth be told, Amelia had always approached art the way she approached instructions for assembling furniture. There must be a correct interpretation, and she was probably doing it wrong. But as she moved from painting to painting, she noticed something liberating. No alarms went off when she misunderstood and definitely no attendant rushed over to confiscate her opinions. One canvas was an explosion of pink and yellow. It made her feel mildly anxious, like being trapped at a birthday party or a baby shower where no one knows each other well enough to leave.
Another was almost entirely white, so subtle she initially assumed it was lazy and unfinished. "What a waste of canvas", she thought, mildly offended on behalf of all the colours not invited to the party. But, the longer she stood in front of it, the more she saw faint textures rising from the surface. It required patience, which she did not naturally possess, but she gave it a chance. Slowly, it began to reveal itself.
By the time she circled back to the entrance, Amelia had stopped asking what the paintings meant. To her, a better question had emerged: "What do they do to me?"
Some made her restless. Some made her calm. Some she disliked on sight and then begrudgingly admired five minutes later. None of them handed her a neat explanation and surprisingly, that felt generous. The experience was less about decoding a message and more about noticing her own reactions and giving her opportunities to experience infinite possibilities.
As she left the gallery, she felt faintly triumphant, as though she had survived a dinner party with philosophers without embarrassing herself. She had not become an expert in abstraction as she still could not explain the difference between gesture, spatial and composition. But she had learned something more useful.
That you do not need permission to feel something in front of a painting. All you need is the willingness to stand there long enough to let it happen.
Mia M. Nor ©
27 February 2026
Kuala Lumpur.
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