On June 9, Valentine Willie, influential Malaysian gallerist, collector, curator, and consultant, passed away peacefully at his home in Kuala Lumpur after a long battle with cancer. He was 71 years old. 

A beloved friend of many artists, collectors, fellow gallerists, curators, and art writers from across Southeast Asia, Valentine is remembered as a visionary and a connector who played an outsized role in the development of the region’s contemporary art scene from the mid-1990s to the 2010s. 

Valentine Francis Willie was born in 1954 in Sandakan, Sabah, Malaysian Borneo, the third of seven siblings. After reading law at University College London, he returned to Kota Kinabalu, Sabah, where he practiced for some time as a lawyer while pursuing other endeavors, such as setting up a nightclub as well as a shop selling Borneo traditional art and crafts. 

In the early 1990s, Valentine gradually moved his base to Kuala Lumpur, where an interest in spotlighting local contemporary artists led to his first forays into curating exhibitions at Sabah Art Gallery and Malaysia’s National Art Gallery. A deep engagement with material heritage and people’s stories, together with legal work that took him to Indonesia, the Philippines, Singapore, and Thailand, formed a regionalist perspective. Collecting art became a means of learning about Southeast Asia’s diverse yet intertwined cultures, histories, and sociopolitical conditions.  

Valentine gave up active law practice to establish Valentine Willie Fine Art (VWFA) in Kuala Lumpur in 1996, in partnership with Asian art specialist Mee-Seen Loong, highlighting representation of “Southeast Asian modern and contemporary art.” If not the first gallery to carry artists from around the region, it was certainly the first to do so with such conviction and ambition. His belief in encouraging the growth and visibility of Southeast Asian art as a rich field of practice, inquiry, and exchange energized a generation of art workers, institutions, and artists, and continues to inspire today.

I joined VWFA as the gallery’s curator in 1997 and later served as managing partner from 2000 to 2008. In the early 2000s, we briefly ran a gallery at the Chedi in Ubud, Bali before Valentine opened VWFA Singapore in Tanjong Pagar Distripark in 2008. That same year, he launched Jogja Contemporary (formerly Tembi Contemporary) in Yogyakarta, in partnership with Warwick Purser and Deborah Iskandar; and Manila Contemporary, in partnership with Evelyn Lim Forbes and Valeria Cavestany. In their own way, each venue changed the local art landscape while forming a regional network. 

Between 1996 and 2013, VWFA and its affiliate galleries held and organized over 300 exhibitions, showing the work of close to 450 artists from Southeast Asia and beyond. As a gallerist, Valentine offered a platform to some of the most prominent figures in the regional art scene today. Most importantly for him, he provided spaces for neighboring artists to encounter new works and each other. VWFA pioneered Southeast Asian participation at international art fairs like ARCO Madrid and Melbourne Art Fair in the 2000s, even collaborating with Borobudur on the first dedicated auctions of Contemporary Southeast Asian Art (2007–08). Understanding the importance of knowledge exchange and documentation, Valentine created an extensive library of regional art references in his Kuala Lumpur gallery, which became a significant resource for visiting researchers, curators, and artists. This April, on his initiative, the website vwfa.net was relaunched, comprising a digital archive of the galleries’ exhibitions over the past three decades.

In 2013, Valentine decided to step away from his position as a gallerist: he closed VWFA Kuala Lumpur and Singapore, handing over Jogja Contemporary to manager Rismilliana Wijayanti and Manila Contemporary to his partners. Keenly aware that there were barely any public institutional spaces for contemporary art beyond Singapore, he worked with art patrons Daim Zainuddin and Naimah Khalid as well as gallery director Rahel Joseph to set up ILHAM Gallery in Kuala Lumpur’s city center in 2015, where he carried the role of creative director until 2020. 

As a curator, Valentine was a blockbuster specialist. VWFA’s first exhibition, “Wong Hoy Cheong: Of Migrants and Rubber Trees,” was a groundbreaking drawing- and installation-based presentation held at the Creative Centre of Malaysia’s National Art Gallery in 1996. In the National Art Gallery itself, ambitious surveys included “ASEAN Masterworks” (1998) and “12 ASEAN Artists” (2000), along with his independent projects “Identities – Who We Are?” (2002) and “Malaysian Art Now” (2004). “Faith and the City” was a VWFA show featuring works by more than 40 Philippine artists, which toured Earl Lu Gallery (Singapore); ABN AMRO House (George Town); The Art Center, Chulalongkorn University (Bangkok); and the Metropolitan Museum of Manila from 2000 to 2002.

In late 2002, he was appointed exhibition director of the Jendela visual art space during the opening festival of the Esplanade, Singapore, and curated visual art elements for the George Town Festival in its early iterations. In 2004, he mounted a pan-island exhibition of monumental sculptures and paintings by Colombian artist Fernando Botero, titled “Botero in Singapore,” under VW Special Projects.

At VWFA Singapore, he curated an annual series of three “Singapore Surveys” (2009–11). Attempts were made by official bodies to restrain the survey themed “Beyond LKY” (2010), which coincided with the island state’s 45th National Day and challenged artists to contemplate a Singaporean future independent of Lee Kuan Yew’s singular political shadow. At ILHAM Gallery, Valentine’s exhibition “Era Mahathir” (2016) also courted controversy for expounding a cultural and sociohistorical narrative surrounding the similarly authoritarian figure of Mahathir Mohamad, Malaysia’s longest-serving prime minister.  

Valentine began early as a collector, amassing mats, baskets, and textiles from Borneo. His wide-ranging collection includes regional textiles, tribal sculptures, beadwork, megalithic stones from Flores, Chinese export porcelain, Indian art, and pieces by early senior modernists from Malaysia and the region. He built what is likely the largest private collection of Southeast Asian contemporary art.

An excellent chef, Valentine loved to cook and would often host friends and family at his beautiful homes in Kuala Lumpur and Ubud. He loved his 17 dogs, all adopted strays. He was a co-founder of Men’s Review magazine in 1993, and served on the board of the Malaysian AIDS Foundation. From 2018, he was managing director of KRA Group, an ASEAN-focused public affairs and political risk consultancy.  

For Valentine Willie, Southeast Asia, art, culture, history, hospitality, politics, ideology, compassion, and friendship were not separable categories of knowledge or experience. Everything was to be lived together and in full.

Beverly Yong is an editor, writer, and curator based in Kuala Lumpur. A curator and managing partner at Valentine Willie Fine Art between 1997 and 2008, she is also ArtAsiaPacific’s Kuala Lumpur desk editor.