National Art Gallery

This guide to the National Art Gallery in Kuala Lumpur opens in 1958, a year after independence, when the country had only four donated paintings and a plan from civil servants Mubin Sheppard and Frank Sullivan to build a national collection. It follows the rise of Syed Ahmad Jamal, a young painter who represented Malaya at its first international exhibition in Manila and later returned to run the gallery himself. Look up at the spiral staircase, designed to echo the Guggenheim and to embody nusa, the Malay idea of homeland.