It’s interesting how titles can tilt the way and range of interpretations. Fadilah Karim is a highly prominent young figurative artist who’s known for her highly nuanced works using the female figure, often in dark clothes, and in role play and with ambient settings. This work from Fadilah’s second exhibition, Secret Lies, at Taksu Kuala Lumpur in April 2016, shows a girl, back to viewer, staring at a wall of darkness. Should she tarry and mop or step further into the unknown? What has she got to lose? It’s a kind of Alfred J. Prufrock decision we take daily. Or it could just be a recalcitrant student being sent to stand in a corner facing the wall by the class teacher. But really, it’s her skilled handling of her concept and composition, with the play of light, shadows and fine brushstrokes, with subtle reveal-and-conceal manipulations, that’s the thing. Fadilah Karim, mentored by Amron Omar for two months in 2010, gave notice of her potential when she clinched 1st Prize in the Malacca TYT Action Portrait competition in 2007, a year before she graduated with a Diploma in Fine Art at the UiTM campus in Lendu, Alor Gajah. She went on to achieve her BFA (2010) and MFA (2013). In 2007, she also took 2nd Prize in the Tanjung Heritage competition and in 2009, the 3rd Prize. She won the Incentive Award in the Shah Alam Open in 2008, and HOM Art Trans’ Young Guns Award in 2013, a year after her first solo, Vague, at Pace Gallery, Petaling Jaya. She featured in a double header with the Philippines’ Guenivere Decena in the Mystery exhibition at HOM Art Trans in 2014. She has taken part in Art Stage Singapore in 2015 and 2016; Art Taipei in 2015; Art Gwangju in 2015; Art Bazaar Berlin in 2014; and Art Expo Malaysia from 2013 to 2015.