Art + Being is a contemporary art gallery exploring the space in between.

Founders Story | The Team

ABOUT Art + Being

Art + Being is a contemporary art gallery rooted in Kuala Lumpur and extending beyond borders. Conceived as a platform for artistic inquiry, the gallery brings together artists and collaborators whose work engages the dialogue between matter and meaning, form and formlessness, chaos and stillness.

At its core, Art + Being is dedicated to art — painting, sculpture, installation, and expanded contemporary practices. Through exhibitions and artist residencies, the gallery presents work that explores materiality, perception, and lived experience.

Alongside its exhibition programme, Art + Being invites carefully framed encounters that support how art is perceived and experienced — including sound, embodied reflection, and other practices that heighten attention and awareness.

Through these encounters, Art + Being recognises art as a powerful inner connector — supporting reflection, integration, and meaning-making across ages and experiences, including work informed by art-based and neuroscientific perspectives.

Inspired by Khôra — the philosophical “space in between” — the gallery invites encounters with art that is felt before it is understood, giving rise to inspiration, recognition, and connection.

FOUNDER’S STORY

This is my story.
I was seven.
Sitting on a bus, wide-eyed, watching people.

My mum elbowed me — “Don’t stare.”
She thought I was judging.
But I wasn’t.

I was fascinated.
Two people standing side by side —
one watching children laugh and play,
the other watching dogs fight.

Same bus. Same direction.
But completely different realities.

And I remember thinking:
How can we all be in the same place… and see the world so differently?

That moment never left me.
It became the lens through which I see everything —
Art. People. Places.
Noticing what others are looking at.
Listening for the stories inside.

And when I’m truly seeing — time stands still.
That stillness, that space between — is where Art + Being was born.

Where art meets presence — beauty, stillness, play — and the frequency in between.

A homage to Khôra — the space in between.

Art + Being TEAM

Zora Gabrovsek

Slovenian-born and raised in Germany, Zora began her adult life in Asia. She holds Swiss and Slovenian passports, with Malaysian and UK residency, and lives between Kuala Lumpur and the UK.

For over 35 years, she has produced global campaigns for brands such as Nestlé, Ferrero, Honda, Sony, Beats, and Coca-Cola — working with world-class directors and celebrities, always treating everyone as human.

Founder | Creative Director

  • Alongside her corporate career, Zora has dedicated herself to practices that ground her. She is a certified Hatha yoga teacher, trained in mindfulness, and holds Reiki I & II. She has spent over 25 years traveling through healing spaces and ashrams — from Osho India to breathwork, vipassana, dynamic meditation, week-long fasting retreats, including a ten-day water fast, and dance workshops worldwide.

    For her, meditation is her true medication — a daily, non-negotiable practice that sustains clarity and balance while navigating a high-pressure global world.

    Personally, while working and traveling the world, Zora raised her two sons single-handedly — both now grown, successful, and sane. Today she lives between Kuala Lumpur and the UK with her two beloved ‘furry’ companions, Raven and Tito.

    Known for seeing what others overlook, she recognizes the essence in people and spaces and translates it into creativity and connection. This vision drives Art & Being, rooted in Khôra — the space in between where art and presence meet, and where healing begins.

Lavinia Lurvink

Lavinia is an art producer driven by an insatiable curiosity for culture, design and the beauty that surrounds us — whether found in art, nature, people, scent or the spiritual.

Born in London to Dutch parents, her childhood was shaped by movement between cultures before she eventually found her footing in the Netherlands.

Art Producer

  • Her relationship with the creative world began early. As a teenager, Lavinia interned as a photography assistant to Shanghai-based photographer Wang Gangfeng, an experience that sparked a fascination with Asian art and artists that has stayed with her ever since.

    At 18, she moved to Florence to study photojournalism and fashion anthropology, followed by cultural anthropology at Leiden University. Her creative instincts eventually led her towards Media Concept Development at Academie Artemis in Amsterdam, before taking her to San Francisco, where she completed a Master’s in Creative Advertising and Branded Media at the Academy of Art University.

    Lavinia began her professional career in London advertising, working across international brands including Heineken, Scottish Widows and Mars.

    She later joined Amsterdam-based art magazine See All This as a producer, contributing to Pretty Brilliant Women in the Arts — an ambitious project dedicated to bringing greater visibility to female artists and their place within art history.

    Now based in Kuala Lumpur and a mother of two, Lavinia brings together the many threads of her life — art, culture, storytelling, design and an enduring curiosity about people and the world around us.

    At Art + Being, she has found a natural home for these passions, working alongside the team to produce exhibitions, collaborations and experiences that explore the space where Art meets Being.

Sabrina Hani Shaiful

A Fine Arts graduate from the United Kingdom, Sabrina is an artist with a head for structure and a heart attuned to space.

Her practice explores the quiet relationship between form, emotion, and environment — an interest that naturally led her toward the field of spatial psychology, which studies how the spaces we inhabit shape our inner worlds.

Gallery Operations | Event Coordinator

  • At Art + Being, she supports founder Zora Gabrovšek in bringing this vision to life — where art, presence, and healing converge into a living experience.

    With her sensitivity to both aesthetics and flow, Sabrina ensures that every exhibition, workshop, and encounter within the house feels coherent, grounded, and alive.

    For her, Art + Being is more than a gallery — it is a continuum between art and atmosphere, a practice of being within space itself.

Jonathan Mark Barrie

As Artistic Advisor + Visual Design, Jonathan helps ensure that every element — from exhibition layout and artist presentation to website design and visual identity — feels considered, connected and quietly alive. His approach brings refinement without stiffness, humour without noise, and a deep sensitivity to the space between art, design and being, adding touches of meaning and mischief in equal measure.

Artistic Adviser | Digital

  • Born in the UK, Jonathan grew up in what he calls “a perfectly normal British family” that shaped both his independence and his eye for the absurd — by eighteen Jonathan had had quite enough. Having taught himself to cook, he packed a bag and left home to pursue Fine Arts at Norwich Art School — beginning a lifelong journey between rebellion and refinement.

    After graduating with a BA in Fine Arts, Jonathan moved to London, where he spent the next three decades immersed in the design world — orbiting, assisting, and occasionally arguing with the greats. He collaborated on early London exhibitions with Maarten Van Severen, Muller Van Severen, and Established & Sons, contributed to design publications, and worked on projects of leading designers and architects including Stefan Diez, Michael Anastassiades and Naoto Fukasawa.

    In recent years, he escaped London’s chaos for the quiet seaside town of Hastings, where he splits his time between the UK and Asia. At Art + Being, Jonathan supports Zora Gabrovšek in shaping the visual language of the gallery — bringing together decades of design knowledge, artistic instinct, and a sharp eye for coherence, detail and storytelling.

Gary Tay

Gary Tay is an extraordinary digital thinker and technology strategist with more than 35 years of experience across advertising, communications, digital marketing, and innovation.

He began his career in account servicing at Leo Burnett before moving into digital at a time when few truly understood its future. He went on to head the digital department before founding Amphibia Digital, an advertising digital media company that became one of Malaysia’s early independent players in the digital space.

Digital Advisor | Technology Strategy

  • What sets Gary apart is that he has never treated digital as surface or trend. His work moves fluidly between brand, technology, user experience, systems, and business transformation — from online strategy and UI/UX to CRM, analytics, automation, AI, machine learning, and digital infrastructure.

    At Art + Being, Gary brings both depth and clarity to the digital architecture of the platform — helping shape the online presence of a space dedicated to art, reflection, and being.