Valentine Francis Willie, the influential gallerist and curator, has died aged seventy-one, Malaysian newspaper The Stars announced.
Born in Sabah, Malaysia, Willie initially trained and practiced as a lawyer. Early on, he started collecting art and began curating exhibitions of Malaysian artists in Kuala Lumpur in the early 1990s.
In 1996, he left the legal world for good to co-found Valentine Willie Fine Art (VWFA) in Kuala Lumpur. The gallery expanded widely, later opening spaces in Singapore, Yogyakarta and Manila before eventually closing in 2013. With VWFA, he helped bring broader visibility to Malaysian and Southeast Asian contemporary art through offsite exhibitions including at the 1997 ASEAN Summit and through the international art fair circuit, being the only ASEAN gallery to participate in ARCO Madrid in 2002.
In 2015, moving away from the commercial artworld, Willie helped start the Kuala Lumpur-based non-profit ILHAM Gallery where he remained creative director until 2020. Speaking to 4A Papers in 2020, he said ‘I see Ilham as writing our art history as there is so little writing … another condition when I started the gallery was that every show must be accompanied by a catalogue. So at least we have a starting point and we build up some literature that can become the starting point for future art historians.’
