Stories to the Horizon

 

The horizon, that panoramic expanse that extends visually both in terms of depth and laterality, is a conceptual medium that is employed in Yee I-lann’s recent practice. It is a channel through which I-lann is able to effectively  stage a complex response to the issues that concerns her as an artist working in Malaysia.

Born in Kota Kinabalu, Sabah (East Malaysia) in 1971 to a New Zealander mother and Sino-Kadazan Malaysian father, I-lann graduated from the University of South Australia in 1992 and has since worked in a number of media including digital photography, painting, installation and sewn objects, using her practice to address contemporary issues in Malaysia that also reflects broader concerns with the politics of identity.

Raised as a pack of wolves

Happy New Year Folks!

 

 

Gen Chua remains one of my favourite photographers in the region. She has been commissioned by Singapore’s Fringe Festival 09 to create an online narrative, ‘Raised As A Pack of Wolves’. This project required her to spend months on end hanging out with a group of disenchanted tom-boyish girls, snaking through the clean grids of Singapore city into darker corners of Singapore – the subway tunnel, quiet parks, karaoke bars, local eateries, etc. 

She then brings them into the project, narrating the familial bonds amongst the girls in her photographic story that cast them as a pack of wolf spirits made to wander through an alienating urban terrain. 

More than an ethnological tour-de-force, it is also a cinematographically beautiful homage to their independent spirit. The website allows the viewer to drift from one slide to another, following the travails of these girls as they roam through the wild place of neglect, absent of people. 

‘Raised as a pack of wolves’ follows Gen’s more recent interest and forray into the history of Southeast Asian horror traditions. 

Please go to http://www.raisedasapackofwolves.com/ to view the series.

Gothic Camp: A Conversation Between Painting And Photography

 

On the far end wall of a cosy room, a photograph of Alfred Hitchcock presenting a defeathered duck taken by fashion photographer Albert Watson is projected onto a blank surface normally used for screening both classic and underground films. The painting Birdwatch by Geraldine Javier is charged with a cine-philic sense of pathos and humour – the funny side of Hitchcock presiding over an audience-less screening.

In At Maculangan’s Opera 14, the chiaroscuro effect guards pop psychologist Tony Buzan from the surrounding darkness. As if formed by loose strokes of paint, his hands gleam in the lower right corner of the frame. In this painterly tableau of gloomy contemplation, the positive motivation of an educationalist is weighed down by the negativity of his shadowy environment.

‘Green Comes Out Of Blue But Is Richer Than Blue’ stages a dialogue between paintings by Geraldine Javier and photographs by At Maculangan. They highlight a sensibility that both artists share in spite of their differences in subject and media. This sensibility is the element of ‘camp’ in the gothic.

Returning To Painting As Painting

 

Tukar Ganti pronounces a shift in recent approaches to painting in Malaysia and provides an overview of this development in the works of eight local artists. The title of the show playfully suggests, in the Malay language, the notion of change and replacement. While it broadly hints at the political ‘wave’ that has beset the country in recent times, the exhibition focuses on the development and extension of painterly forms, hitherto sidelined in the local painting scene, by a new generation of artists that have expanded their vocabulary of painting.

If Malaysian paintings, since the late Eighties, are marked by a return to figuration, artists in more recent times have increasingly looked beyond the confines of the Malaysian subject. Instead they have turned to explore the medium on a more experimental level, finding new forms that can embody and respond to the significant turns in the country’s pattern of thinking, particularly in areas of culture, aesthetics, and social history.

 

Picnic At Sungai Chilling Falls

 

Organised on 23 August 2008.

Picnic at Sg. Chilling Falls is a quotidian and relational art programme that experiments with new vectors of communications by using the adventure tour into the forest as embodiment of a particular experience of the tropical forest – a leisure activity of jungle trekking and picnic.