Not everyone can be a Van Gogh or an Elton John – and if you are, keeping the spotlight on you can be harder than getting on the stage at all. Fated to a lifetime of mediocrity, the message is that your life will be an eternal uphill battle.

Husband-and-wife team Sukhbir Cheema and Ista Kyra co-founded Eksentrika, an online arts and culture community, in the hopes of breaking this stigma.

Giving creatives a platform to share their successes and collaborate with like-minded people, the website founded in 2016 is home to over 800 budding creatives across Asia.

The website was initially founded to cope with the shock closure of the local news portal Malaysian Insider that led to the end of Ista’s journalistic career.

“I lost my job when I was six months pregnant. It was like the rug had been pulled out from under me – it was a very scary experience. Eksentrika was a way for me to deal with it,” Ista shares.

Both Ista and Sukhbir left journalism around the same time and decided to invest their abilities into a shared passion of theirs: the arts.

“We are both very much creative people who dabbled in the arts. And we both enjoy writing.

“So, we thought we might as well combine two interests of ours and see what happens. It was a great creative outlet for us to keep writing despite the uncertainty of the future.”

When asked about what strand of arts they were interested in, Ista smiles bashfully.

“I love acting, and Sukhbir enjoys playwriting – whatever he writes, I’ll star in. Sukhbir also drew comics in school.”

The power couple currently juggle running the website on top of their nine-to-five corporate jobs and raising a five-year-old girl.

Self-professed creatives, through Eksentrika the pair sought to give a voice to artists drowned out in a world that valued science and commerce-based professions.

“When we dipped our toes into the art scene, we saw that people could thrive and become successful. You just don’t really hear about them.

“So we started out writing about artists who were well-established within the community and those who weren’t, to get their stories out there. We wanted to show people that arts and culture is not a dead end.”

The website soon grew to become more than just articles about the arts as Sukhbir and Ista stumbled upon problems within the community that they felt Eksentrika could be the solution to.

“We noticed that there was no one place where creatives could go to seek one another out, to collaborate across different strands of art. The writers tended to stick with other writers, cartoonists with other cartoonists, and so on,” Sukhbir explains.

“We wanted to encourage cross-collaboration, and our solution was to establish an artist’s registry. Over the five years we’ve been active, 800 artists from a plethora of backgrounds are in our repository,” he says with a smile.

Sukhbir estimates that around 85% of them are Malaysians with the rest from Singapore, Indonesia and the Philippines.

The expansion didn’t stop there.

As well as establishing a listing page for arts and culture events that accepts submissions across the continent, the website publishes guides and advice for creatives, as well as forum which is currently in the works.

“A lot of the artists we spoke to lacked business acumen. They didn’t know how to apply for funds or grants, or register a company. We started writing guides to help artists looking to gain those skills,” Sukhbir says.

The forum currently on trial on the website is based largely on the Kakiseni arts forum established in 2004.

“There were lots of creatives getting in touch on that discussion board, swapping ideas and initiating collaborations. We really wanted to do the same, as well as create a safe space for people to ask questions or just catch up with each other.”

The couple have recently received a grant from CENDANA, the government’s Cultural Economy Development Agency to be invested into Eksentrika.

“We are immensely grateful for it. We’re hoping to use this opportunity to see if becoming a self-sustaining business is a viable option for us,” Ista says.

Sukhbir tells FMT that they plan for Eksentrika to branch into content marketing, acting as a media arm for artists out there.

“We’ve put our blood, sweat and tears into the website over the last five years. But at the end of the day, we need to make a profit for it to sustain us.”

Most of all, the duo stresses the importance of the arts and culture industries, not just for individuals but for communities as a whole.

“People rely on creative outlets as a way to express themselves. They are putting a little piece of themselves out there with every piece of work they produce, and this can be very healing. More important than its potential commercial success is the fact that the arts help people.”

You can find Eksentrika here, and join their artist’s registry here.