"Tanah... sumber yang tiada ganti." Land... a resource with no substitute.

Malaysia's hills did not form overnight. The limestone karsts of Ipoh, the forested ridges of Perak — these are geological formations tens of millions of years in the making, shaped slowly by pressure, water, and time. What extraction removes in months cannot be returned in a lifetime. That is the quiet truth sitting at the heart of Bumi Luka — wounded earth.

This series was made in and around the quarry landscapes of Ipoh, Perak — a region known for its dramatic limestone geography and, increasingly, for the scale at which that geography is being altered. From a distance, a quarry can look almost abstract: terraced cuts of pale stone, machinery reduced to small moving shapes against vast exposed faces of rock, dust hanging in the air like weather. Up close, the picture shifts. What you see is not just extraction — it is transformation, irreversible and ongoing. The wound, once opened, does not close.

The quarrying industry in Malaysia plays a significant role in the supply of granite, limestone, and aggregates that feed construction across the country. Roads, buildings, infrastructure — the demand is real, and the economics are understood. But the land bears the full cost of that demand. Forest cover is cleared. Hillsides are cut open. Water tables are disrupted. The habitats of plants, insects, birds, and animals that took centuries to establish are displaced in a season.

What Bumi Luka tries to hold is the tension between those two realities — the necessity and the cost. The images do not look away from the scale of what is happening, nor do they reduce it to simple condemnation. Industry exists here. Workers exist here. Communities depend on what these quarries produce. But the land, once taken apart at this depth and at this scale, does not recover. The stone does not return to the hill. The forest does not regrow over open rock.

Every scar on these hillsides has a price attached to it — one that rarely appears on any invoice. Bumi Luka is an attempt to make that cost visible.

Photographed in Ipoh, Perak, Malaysia, by Syazni Aizat. (2024)