By Musa Igrek
The censorship of a play does not always begin with a ban. “Sometimes the script changes before rehearsal”, one performing arts respondent says in Understanding the Impact of Self-Censorship among Artists and Cultural Workers in Malaysia, “not because we want to, but because we know the venue won’t approve.”
The report was commissioned by ArtsEquator, a Singapore based arts freedom monitor and Freemuse partner organisation and Five Arts Centre, a Malaysia based arts collective. It forms as part of ArtEquator’s Southeast Asian Artistic Freedom Research and Documentation Resource (RADAR) and conducted by the Merdeka Centre for Opinion Research. It attempts to document a form of restriction that is difficult to count.
Public censorship is visible. A play gets pulled from a festival lineup. Everyone hears about it. Self-censorship is quieter. It happens earlier, inside the making of the work itself. Before anyone else ever sees what the artist decided not to make. No one will know what was lost. That is what makes self-censorship so hard to confront. Susan Sontag called it “the most important and most successful form of censorship.” It works by staying invisible, already inside the work, already inside the artist. That invisibility is exactly what makes it one of the least understood threats to artistic freedom, and one of the hardest to document.
‘Self-censorship is a kind of grey zone’
The report draws on focus group discussions and interviews with thirty-seven practitioners across film, publishing, music, performing arts, visual arts, interactive media, design, heritage and cultural work. Its findings are careful. It does not claim to represent the entire arts and cultural sector. But it identifies recurring experiences: self-censorship is widespread, often normalised, emotionally costly, and shaped by fear of state action, public backlash, reputational damage, institutional pressure and loss of funding.
When we spoke with Mark Teh (Five Arts Centre), Tasha Nanthiny (Merdeka Centre) and Kathy Rowland (ArtsEquator) about the report, all three returned, in different ways, to the same problem: how do you document censorship before it becomes an event?
“Lyrics or performances with political or religious themes are quickly attacked. Sometimes the public reaction is harsher than the government.”
Mark said the question had been hovering around RADAR for several years. RADAR had long been tracking public cases of censorship and restriction, but self-censorship was harder to capture. “How do we document, how do we capture, how do we think about self-censorship?” he asked. “Self-censorship is a kind of grey zone” he added with its effects on emotional and mental health being “harder things to kind of document or to capture.”
That grey zone is where many of the report’s most revealing testimonies sit. The habits of anticipation, not the regulations themselves, are what the artists describe. A filmmaker and publisher says, “The film board and the Printing Presses Act make you think twice before writing. Sensitive topics like politics, race, and sexuality are almost impossible without cuts.” A musician notes that, “Lyrics or performances with political or religious themes are quickly attacked. Sometimes the public reaction is harsher than the government.” A visual artist adds, “Street art can disappear overnight if it’s seen as provocative. You don’t always need authorities – the community itself polices you.”
The censor, in other words, is not always a state official. It might be a venue manager, a funder, an online crowd, a local community, a professional network, or the artist’s own memory of what happened to someone else.
‘When you censor yourself, the work feels incomplete’
The report captures how self-censorship becomes embedded in the daily fabric of creative work: in budgeting, scripting, rehearsing, teaching, promoting, exhibiting and posting online. The question stops being simply “what do I want to say?” It becomes: “What can be shown? What will the venue accept? What will the public do? What will it cost me later?”
“You’re constantly weighing between being true to yourself and being able to keep working”, one respondent says.
Tasha raised a question rarely asked in public debates. It is not about whether work gets released, but how it feels when the work that gets released is not the work you actually made because of the changes required along the way.
“Sometimes you feel like, what’s the point of creating if it’s never what you really want to say?”
For the artists, the consequences were deeply personal. “When you know a piece has been softened, you feel like you’ve betrayed your own message” a visual artist says. A theatre practitioner asks, “Sometimes you feel like, what’s the point of creating if it’s never what you really want to say?” A publisher describes how this compromise affects the work itself: “When you censor yourself, the work feels incomplete. It’s like delivering half the message.”
That phrase, half the message, captures the damage of self-censorship well. From the outside, cultural life appears to continue as normal. But the artist knows what is missing.
When choice becomes pressure
The report is careful not to treat every act of adjustment as censorship. Artists make strategic, aesthetic and professional decisions all the time. Thinking about audiences, choosing tone, reaching for metaphor and humour… The difficulty is knowing when choice becomes pressure. Kathy said this was one of the methodological challenges: how do researchers distinguish between a genuine artistic choice and a decision made out of fear? She drew the line between choosing a form because it reaches an audience more effectively, and wanting to say something directly but feeling unable to because of risk to livelihood, safety, or reputation. Some of this, Kathy said, is conscious calculation. But some of it goes deeper. “The act of policing is no longer necessary” she said, “because people are already internalising it.” The report’s darker implication is that censorship may be most effective when it no longer needs to be visible.
“The scariest part isn’t the government – it’s netizens”
The pattern runs across generations. One lecturer quoted in the report says, “My students avoid topics like gender or sexuality not because they don’t care, but because they already feel the pressure. They’re only 20 and already censoring themselves.” Mark connected this to how young artists are trained. Their cautionary examples are stories of work being shut down, and advice can arrive as craft rather than warning: make it more metaphorical, more allusive, more subtle…
“Alone, I’d probably censor more. With others, you feel braver.”
Gendered threats appear briefly in the findings. What it records, however, is hard to ignore. One respondent says, “After I spoke about gender issues online, I got messages threatening to rape me. That’s when I stopped posting about it.” Another says, “The scariest part isn’t the government – it’s netizens. Once they start, it doesn’t stop. As a woman, you feel completely exposed.”
When I asked about this, Tasha said the team was cautious. The theme appeared in the discussions, but it was not dominant enough across the data to be treated as a central finding. Still, she said, it was important to include, because people needed to know it was happening. Kathy added that the composition of a focus group matters: if only women had been in the room, perhaps the conversation would have taken a different shape. This is a pilot study, and its authors are careful not to claim more than their data can support.
‘Sometimes solidarity is the only protection we have’
Artists are not only retreating, though. There is coded expression, alternative platforms, international events, peer networks, collectives. “I rely on peers to push me”, one respondent says. “Alone, I’d probably censor more. With others, you feel braver.” Another says, “Sometimes solidarity is the only protection we have. If one of us is attacked, the rest rally.”
Asked whether the findings had left them more hopeful or more worried, none of the interviewees gave a simple answer. Mark pointed to emerging conversations in Malaysia and the region around artistic freedom, self-censorship, legal literacy and practical support. Tentative, he said, but real. Tasha said she hoped future research could help bring policy closer to what artists actually live with. The gap between the two, she suggested, is still wide. Kathy spoke about the need to hand knowledge over to those who can use it, and acknowledged that knowing one’s rights is not always enough without support systems to back them up.
The report does not claim to have resolved these questions. But it has made visible something that is difficult to see.
Self-censorship tends to get treated as an individual act. This report suggests it is bigger than that: it is a system of anticipation, shaped by law, institutions, audiences, and fear, that quietly defines the boundaries of artistic freedom. That is the silence before censorship. The moment when the work, before it even reaches the public, has already begun to withdraw.
