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.

The discovery of the horizon’s structural effect was probably a chanced encounter. In I-lann’s Malaysiana series 2003, she assembled found photographs from the Seventies (all taken from the same photo studio) and arranged them into typological grid panels, archiving a nation as it was coming of age (Malaysia was founded in 1963), piecing together an evocative portrait of its collective face. Here the lined studio portraits reveal a consistency of distance between the camera and its subject, so that its backdrop, the linoleum floor and baseboard linked one picture to another, relaying a lateral contiguity that suggest an underlying sense of connection between these disparate images.

But the horizon as a structure was only consciously articulated in the Horizon series, produced two years later, when a visit to the high desert in the South Australia inspired a new way of seeing that I-Lann was hirtherto unfamiliar with. It was the expansive vista, affording an uninterrupted view of surrounding land, that prompted I-Lann to rethink the Malaysian landscape as largely constricted by its ‘building, monument and mountains’. For I-Lann, the horizontal line that zips across the pictorial field, connecting one inter-related narrative to the other is also a signifier for the unknown. She projects onto the emptiness of the desert a chronicle of the Malaysian experience through images that convey its hope, anxiety and vision. In turn, by situating them in a foreign (if not also neutral) environment, she was able to bracket these images and its attendant beliefs, providing us with enough critical distance in order for us to assess their relevance and significance outside and beyond its immediate context.

In Sulu Stories, Yee I-Lann continues to complicate this line of inquiry by remapping a zone for narratives in order to redeem the specificity of a local history from the totalising effect of Malaysian and Filipino narratives, which center their official history around the Peninsular (West Malaysia) and the Luzon Island respectively.

The Sulu Sea is a body of water that sits between Malaysia and the Philippines. Located in an area that is considered as peripheral to the nationalist imagination of both countries – northeast of Malaysia and south of the Philippines – its distinctive history in maritime Southeast Asia is often sidelined. Yet, as a border territory between these two countries, its liminality confronts us with the precariousness of our more recent nationalist episteme, exposing this categorisation as an awkward and foreign knowledge projected onto an area whose cultural history would not follow or fit into its neat modern divide.

Though I-Lann dons the mantle of an archivist, archaeologist and researcher, employing research methodologies that are documentary in nature, she is less of an archivist than a storyteller. Faced against the immensity and blankness of the wide open sea, she draws upon local history as narratives to be projected, voiced, chanted onto the horizon, turning the sea, a signifier for an empty page or a vacuum, into a repository or a stage for the reenactment of an occluded history – ‘not quite Filipino, not quite Malaysia, but very aware of being Sulu’ – that escapes more recent demarcation of places according to nation state boundary.

Later in her Kinabalu series, I-Lann was able to plot the horizon on her homeland to explore ‘the eroded spiritual power of the Kadazandusun woman and her shifting relationship to her land’. Mount Kinabalu, the highest mountain in Southeast Asia is the only fixture in the Malaysian state of Sabah’s dramatically changing environment. In all three images, which comprise the series, the mountain looms over its subjects – a legendary female deity, a family portrait and a dystopic vision of Sabah state. The horizon anchored by the mountain offers, in this case, a parallactic view of her home state, suggesting that the horizon is not only an infinite lateral spread, but a photographically circular compass that envelops and finds the Mountain at its centre, presenting a geographically specific symbol as the centre from which its people draw strength and cultural pride from even as the series, paradoxically, conveys poignant lament for the cultural loss of the Sabah people.

Yee I-Lann’s practice represents the best of a generation of contemporary artists from Malaysia that have emerged, since the late Eighties, from the discursive and market dominance of Islamic abstraction that followed the arabic-isation of Malay culture in the Eighties. If the latter’s universalism appeals to abstraction as a design that can spiritually and artistically unite the country under the rubric of a single religious culture, then the first generation of contemporary artists contested against this conviction. Malay (and therefore by default, Muslim) artists such as Ahmad Fuad, Ahmad Zakii Anwar and Jalaini Abu Hassan return to figuration in order to articulate the significance of local context to art-making and to further politicised received understanding of Malay and Islamic identity. Non-Malay artists such as Wong Hoy Cheong, Tan Chin Kuan, Kok Yew Puah, J Anurendra, too sought to widen the restrictive definition of Malaysian art through narrating communal and multicultural experiences in Malaysia, decentering the official, often Malay-centric, expressions of culture.

They defied the modernist logic of medium specificity by working across various media, from installation to video to photography, through which many of the works successfully explore the politics of identity in a country where the discourse of race and religion were becoming increasingly narrow. Moreover, contemporary art in the Nineties have argued against the pastiche of modernist art into a new arabesque vocabulary that is not only formalist but also essentially ahistorical. They locate aesthetic within the unique cultural history of Malaysia, acknowledging the importance of its context in forging a visual language that could creatively address issues that have broader aesthetic and social significance, in order to stake out a more multivalent and sophisticated understanding of who we are and who we can be.

Simon Soon
for Southeast Blooming, PrimoMarella Gallery, Milan/Beijing, 2009

* * * 

Further Reading

Michelle Antoinette, ‘Different Visions: Contemporary
Malaysian Art & Exhibition in the 1990s and Beyond’ in
Art & Social Change: Contemporary Art in Asia and the
Pacific, Caroline Turner (ed.), Pandanus Book, Canberra,
2003.

Gina Fairly, ‘Not Drowning… waving: Intersections in
the Sulu Sea’ in Nafas, October 2006,
http://universes-in-universe.org/eng/nafas/articles/2006/yee_i_lann

Beverly Yong, ‘Yee I-Lann’ in PhotoARTAsia Magazine,
September 2008.

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.

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.

By ‘camp’ I do not mean the maimed conception of the term as a self-conscious kind of effete irony. It is an attraction towards and a fascination with the transformative power of theatricality, stylisation, and artifice. The gothic with its fascination with preternatural forces is remarkably resonant with camp sensibility. Popular association of the gothic with the macabre has impeded us from recognising two of its underlying principles: artifice and surfeit.

The key sentiment that feeds much of gothic literature and art is neither tragedy nor fear. Rather, it is a tender appeal towards the surreal. To be sure there is a clear element of horror in Dracula and Frankenstein, but there is also sincerity in their theatrical excess, an element of romance and mischief in their narrative that makes them camp.

A style driven by this sensibility is therefore also playful and prone to rule-breaking. Javier and Maculangan display a blatant disregard towards modernist notion of the autonomous medium. On the whole, Javier’s paintings are largely influenced by her interest in film and photography. For example, she painted Birdwatch based on a photograph taken by Maculangan. Maculangan, on the other hand, thinks more like a painter, often referring to his photographs as composites. As such, their ability to think outside of their medium has inflected this dialogue with a shared aesthetic predicate that is larger than life.

By coding the everyday as surreal, Maculangan seems to be suggesting that the flexibility and malleability of the digital medium is more consonant with painterly representation than analogue photography. Often, Maculangan’s photographs betray his training as a painter. Unlike techniques of photomontage, a digitally manipulated image does not usually expose discrepancies when two images are put together in a single photographic frame. Rather, incongruities are smoothed over, producing a singular phantom image that has no real world reference.

By placing his subjects in the middle of the composition, Maculangan is able to emphasise the constructed and fictive nature of digital photography, countering analogue photography’s logic of truthful representation. Moreover, he turns the theatrical spotlights on them as actors of the quotidian. In Opera 11, an image of former Philippines president Fidel Ramos picking up a golf ball is combined with a background image of a razed mansion belonging to the illustrious Lacson family in the Visayas region. Used as an operational base by Japanese army during the Second World War, the mansion was subsequently bombed by American soldiers. Ramos who was almost always photographed as a dignified official is seen here indulging in a recreational pastime, contrary to the air of formality that his public image normally exudes. The ruin looms above an unnoticing statesman, in respite from his political role.

Opera 10 is composed by superimposing an image of a drenched little girl taken at a birthday party with the interior shot of a bedroom located in the historical Lizares Museum. The girl is as if spritely dashing across a sombre diorama of the past, imprinting the dust-settled stillness of the room and the weight of time with the levity of youth. In Untitled, Maculangan dresses up his mother-in-law in an opulent brocade dress. Enthroned under a coiffed wig and bedecked with lavish jewelry, she represents an exaggeration of refinement and a kitsch imitation of the historical past. Covered in a thick layer of makeup, she becomes a figure that is both terrifying and amusing, a doyenne of camp incarnated.

Figurative paintings of our time have been inevitably mediated by iconic images in photography and cinema. Javier’s paintings are sepia-tinted explorations of the enduring and haunting power of this legacy.

Wallflower depicts a wizened Georgia O’Keefe cornered into the flower motif common to her paintings. As an alluring subject for many photographers, from Alfred Steiglitz to Andy Warhol, O’Keefe’s fame rested as much on these iconic photo portraits taken of her as her paintings. Wallflower places the photographically mediated image of O’Keefe in a painterly space to suggest an individuality that is shaped by both painting and photography.

Moonlight is based on a photograph of Sally Mann shot in her studio by a photojournalist. Javier transplanted the artist into a dark haunting landscape, alluding to Mann’s photographic series of the Deep South, published as What Remains. The painting suggests that Southern gothic as a genre is (invariably) linked to its Romantic and Victorian predecessors. By composing the pendant panel as a reference to the wallpaper of an old house, the diptych becomes a house of memories. The missing photographs, the crumbling wallpaper, and the barren landscape suggest an aesthetic of decay and loss, supplying us with a romantic vision of a vanishing world.

Arrangement in Gray and Black refers to the unwavering hold of Diana Vreeland over the world of fashion. Not a person known for her beauty, Vreeland commanded the respect of fashionistas entirely through her sense of style and visionary taste. Javier likens fashion to our outer shells, what we project to others. In Arrangement, Vreeland’s physical form is no longer present; a spectral nightgown haunts us as an inheritance, resting on a couch, above which hang metallic plates adorned with pretty patterns from nature such as seashells, beetles, and a singing blackbird.

While Javier’s paintings provoke a rethinking of our collective culture by alienating the subjects as the mysterious Other, these homages to a world of fashion, film and photography, inflected by a noir-like atmosphere of disquietude, are also deeply tender and clever. For those who appreciate the sensibility of camp that underwrites them, they are pregnant with irony, references and playfulness.

Plucked from a historical fiction by Anchee Min, the title of this exhibition, ‘Green Comes Out Of Blue But Is Richer Than Blue’, is attributed in the novel to Madam Mao. The colour green is comprised of mixing the primary colours of blue and yellow together, a fitting metaphor for the principle of enrichment that subscribes to both the gothic and an allied camp sensibility. Javier describes the exercise as ‘getting influences from various aspects of our lives, distilling and finally making it our very own, while in the process of making art and other things in life.’i

A notion of play, experimentation, and creation underlies this meaningful engagement between photography and painting. Transforming our quotidian activities and image culture into a spectacle of the uncanny, Maculangan and Javier have found both anxiety and warmth in their subjects.

In a sympathetic conclusion to a sensibility that had attracted and repulsed literary critic Susan Sontag, she movingly declaims, ‘Camp taste is a kind of love, love for human nature. It relishes, rather than judges, the little triumphs and awkward intensities of ‘character’… Camp taste identifies with what it is enjoying. People who share this sensibility are not laughing at the thing they label as “a camp,” they’re enjoying it. Camp is a tender feeling.’ii

Simon Soon
for Geraldine Javier and At Maculangan: Green Comes Out Of Blue But Is Richer Than Blue, Valentine Willie Fine Art KL, November 2008, http://www.vwfa.net/kl/exhibitionDetail.php?eid=93

________________________

i. Conversation with artist, 2008
ii. Susan Sontag, ‘Notes On “Camp”’ in Against Interpretation, 1966.

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.

Situating the shift

The context and history of this shift require further explanation. As a dominant approach to painting the last decade of the Twentieth century, as well as an important narrative in Malaysian art history, the reemergence of the figure came after its near obsolescence in the preceding three decades. ‘Modern art’ in Malaysia could be said to begin in the late Fifties with a loose group of abstract painters returning from art schools overseas. These artists have thus advocated various forms of abstraction as characteristic (both on stylistic and subjective grounds) of ‘Modernity’.1

The turn towards the figurative in the Nineties was not always an attempt at forging a coherent and idealised vision of a local identity, as propagated by the Angkatan Pelukis Semenanjung (APS) half a century ago.2 Rather, this contemporary endeavour was at times informed by a range of post-modernist impulses to engage with art as a form of social critique or commentary.

Art under the rubric of post-modernism was also post-medium. What this means is that formalist attentiveness towards medium-specificity was dismissed as ‘art for art’s sake’. In Malaysia, artists by then were looking beyond the restrictive formalism that has characterised abstraction since its institutionalisation in the late sixties. Subsequent development in local abstraction eventually led to the development of a dominant form of Malay-Islamic aesthetic in the Eighties, which viewed the figurative image as unorthodox. This has driven artists (both Malays and non-Malays) to rebel against the orthodoxy of an increasingly repressive, rigid and formulaic approach to painting.

On the contrary, artists working in the expanded field of contemporary art create practices that are often interdisciplinary in nature.3 They are often unafraid of working across a range of mediums, using them as tools and means towards a socially aware end. Painting, in this sense, even when it becomes the primary medium or the only medium in which the artist works with, is seen as expedient to a greater social project rather than a medium with its own set of knowledge models that can be hermetically explored.

Art, in this instance, is employed as a platform on which issues of identity as well as the confluence and conflicts that attend the demarcations of subjectivities along racial lines are expressed.4 In Malaysian painting, the presence of the figure becomes a cipher for a recognisable and categorisable body, upon which questions of culture and history can be fore-grounded through the artist’s ability to forge an aesthetic sensibility that could either convey its anxiety or celebrate its beauty. This ranges from the post-colonial deconstruction operating in the early Gauguin-esque paintings by Wong Hoy Cheong to Kok Yew Puah’s development of an aesthetic of multiculturalism. At times, figuration in painting also serves to evoke or reassert racial identities, often through mythical or communal narratives, such as those of Bayu Utomo or Anurendra Jegadeva.

Moreover, choosing to paint figures can be viewed as a politically motivated choice. For many Malay artists, it was a rebellion against the Islamic abstraction that came to represent a hegemonic form of modernism, propagated largely by the ITM art schools in the Eighties.5 On the other hand, non-Malay artists found in figuration, a visually powerful means to narrate their cultural alterity, drawing upon specific socio-cultural experiences to underline the complexity of living in a multicultural society.6

Nevertheless, often artists who paint social subjects fail to realise the level of aestheticisation that their politics and beliefs undergo, through which personal convictions are enhanced and ennobled through art. They use art as an expressive model for polemical ideas rather than exploring the possibility of mobilizing the political within the structural and formal properties of a given medium. This, in turn, limits painting or any other artistic medium, as relevant or useful only if it is contingent upon a social subject.

New Malaysian Paintings

It seems that after almost a decade and a half that figuration became the dominant form of painting – serving a particular critical discourse on Malaysian subjectivity – a particular shift in recent times have seen Malaysian artists approach painting from more complex trajectories.

Characterising this shift is a greater concern, amongst the eight artists featured here, with the formal properties of painting. The re-inscription and development of the vast repertoire of modernist and traditional painterly devices and genres (such as mural painting, vanitas painting, the grid, colour field, readymade, pop material, collage, etc.) furthermore evince conscious attempts at deploying the historical structures and languages of painting to open up new ways of describing local experiences and histories.

This return does not signify a regression towards institutionalised formalism. Instead, it can be read as a method of rethinking formalism as a complex body of theoretical models that allows us to expand upon what we understand of painting as well as employ these models to create more sophisticated modes of expressing or responding to our experiences.

Collectively they present a plural approach to painting, with each artist choosing painting as a way of retrieving a personal reflecting space. Viewed in this light, the paintings in this exhibition can be broadly interpreted by dividing them into three different categories.

Extending the Figurative

Closest in form to the figurative paintings of the previous decade are the works of Hamir Soib, Yau Bee Ling and Khairul Azmir Shoib (also known as Meme). Although the figure remains a prominent feature in their art, figuration extends beyond the confines of articulating the discourses of local identities.

In Hamir’s monumental painting entitled ‘Pura-Pura’ (‘Pretending’), which is a play on the Malay word kura-kura (tortoise), depicts a frontal portrait of a tortoise rearing its head out from its shell.

The work, redolent with Hamir’s subtle yet biting trademark satire, alludes to the political retardation and pretensions of the country’s leadership. More importantly, Hamir utilises his experiences and skills as a set designer for theatre productions in his painting by working with such scale, allowing viewers to examine the surface effect and the plastic, or form giving, potential of bitumen as a medium.

Similarly, the portraits of Yau Bee Ling are studies of generic forms made from swaths of paint orchestrated to tease out a bare minimum feature. At once authoritatively imposing yet threatening to dissolve into pure painterly strokes, her works exist in a paradox that articulates an unresolved formal anxiety as well as a subject that is either surfacing or submerging into the materiality of her paint.

In a different approach, Meme’s references to Tim Burton-esque characters draw on the comically macabre. He laces his pictorial field with lyrics from alternative rock artistes, turning familiar locale into an fantastical setting of a surreal narrative, such as in ‘Ramadhan – a.k.a. Green Miles’. This phantasmagorical universe, where local tradition seemingly colludes with a world of alternative culture, ruptures stability and performs an acerbic critique of the hard-lined beliefs in pure cultural forms and subjects.

Everyday Spaces and Objects

The absence of the figure in the paintings of Phuan Thai Meng and Gan Siong King invite us to reconsider the spatial matrix, which it inhabits. These are often quotidian spaces or everyday objects that we seldom acknowledge.

Gan often projects the everyday in his still life. In ‘Cold.Gold.Sold a.k.a. Plastic Representation of Something Achieved’, he reconsiders these plastic trophies as objects of sentimental worth, symbolising the aspirational values of the middle class Malaysian. ‘Vanitas’ plays with the genre of still life from objects that collectively suggest a children’s birthday party. However, this sense of youthful optimism is undercut by a moral predicate through the framing of the pictorial arrangement within the traditional genre of vanitas paintings, which serve to admonish its viewers of their mortality.

On the contrary, Thai Meng’s paintings take after the scale and composition of a mural. In this fashion, their narratives possess distinct qualities of mural paintings, which are ethical, instructive and exhortative.

In ‘Fragment of Development – Behind the Light of Glory’, a group of children, painted disproportionately larger, direct our attention to the occluded history of the site of a former school, excavated from beneath one of Malaysia’s glitziest mall, Pavilion, which forms the backdrop of the painting.

A pendant work, ‘Fragment of Development – Mr. E. Bulldozer and Ms. Bbgs’, charts the plan of the demolished school, which is threaded on the surface of a painted excavation tractor. Articulating the collision of interests as the cost of development, Thai Meng also underscores the fragility of its historical space (through the use of thread) and memory, as well as the values they represent, against the onslaught of a faceless mechanical force.

New Malaysian Non-Objectives

Perhaps, some of the most challenging works in this exhibition come from the new non-objective painters. Their paintings neither evince an allegiance to the Hard Edge styles of painting, which has a local antecedent in the 1969 New Scene exhibition, nor do they subscribe to the expressionistic ideals of the pioneering group of modern Malaysia painters in the Sixties.

Instead the works exist between these two competing approach towards non-representation. Unlike minimalism or the Hard Edge styles, artists in this show do not completely erase the authorial hand or demonstrate an analytical determinism completely devoid of lyricism. Furthermore, unlike abstract expressionism, they do not subscribe to the language of an autographic gesture as an unmediated register of the artist’s psychic/emotional state.

Saiful Razman’s paint-rolled stripes, alternating in bands of red and white, are developed from his previous series, Pelan-pelan. This body of work came from observing the stain and grime left on the gallery wall after exhibitions were closed, when the walls needed repainting to return the space to a former state of working order.

In Razman’s paintings, this effect of staining illustrates the operation of entropy at hand. This collapse of a system or order is not merely suggested in his works, but also imprinted and performed on the canvas. In ‘Lintang’, just as its bands of red and white signify Malaysia by way of its allusion to the national flag, Razman also declares that the nation is a stained and strained construct that is on the verge of disintegration.

Signs of disintegration as well as dissolution are also apparent in Choy Chun Wei’s ‘Collapsing I’ and ‘Collapsing II’. His paintings could be read as a collage or construction in which disparate elements of paint, shreds of advertisements are cohered into a singular visual whole. But the pictorial logic is a paradox – inchoate, yet maintaining a semblance to order, fragile yet solidly frontal, achieving an all over effect although it is also raw and fluid. As such, the works project optical noise as an invasive field that erases all distinctions into a leveling field that is both borderless and infective.

Liew Kwai Fei’s three paneled vertical painting, ‘A Day (With White)’ towers above the viewer with its soft rainbow hues. While its lyricism often brings to mind the colour field paintings of Mark Rothko as well as Agnes Martin’s colour bands from mid-seventies, its flatness insist that its surface luminosity is the qualitative result of mixing the original paint colour with white, resisting convenient references to the sublime.

More interestingly, in both of his ‘Pandora Box’-es, seven colours of paint – again representing the hues of the rainbow – are literally deposited into different hand-painted colour-coded compartments in readymade pharmaceutical cases. Kwai Fei then defies the logic of the colour system, which he has devised on the readymade by placing the paints into colour compartments that are different in value. He notes, ‘Only the green paint matches the green compartment, signifying hope.’ This deliberate disorganisation is however an economical illustration of the subversion of colour theories as well as the readymade, through which materiality of paint reclaims its own space and value by defying the colour-coded logic already inscribed on a product.

Painting as Painting

This survey of new Malaysian paintings evinces a broader trend in current artistic approach towards the exploration of painting’s formal and visual structures. Moreover, the artists in this show display an appreciation of the visual and textual complexity of image making.

In many sense, the show hopes to suggest, in its small way, that artists in Malaysia have returned to painting as painting. Such explorations are less yoked to social discourses that bind and restrict the formal range and potentials in painting, permitting artists to revisit or invent new painterly strategies that could complicate, develop and enhance our visual languages and codes as well as to create reflexive and reflective spaces that consider polysemy, fissure and ambiguity.

This reconsideration of the medium can then strengthen the way the visual language is used and explored; to propose new ways of coming to terms with (and thinking about) aesthetic and culture.

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.

The proposed project requires a chartered bus, which will carry a group of forty people to Kuala Kubu Baru. Participants who prefer to drive are welcomed to do so. The group begins a one-hour trek heading for the Sg. Chilling Waterfalls. Upon reaching our destination, a picnic is held and participants are free to explore surrounding area, swim, chat or do whatever they want. At the end of the day, participants will pack up and leave for the city.

A talk on the history and overview of relational art followed by a discussion panel will be held at a later date. Artists who have employed relational aesthetics and communicative models in their works are invited to talk about their experiences and art as well as debate on the relevance and importance of this sort of artistic model.

Project Objectives

As a leisure event, its aesthetic value is mined from the middle class quotidian activity of picnicking by the falls on a weekend, of rest and recreation, of opportunities for unplanned, callous and drifting dialogues conversations to take place. Hence, its refusal towards ‘significance’, through its leisure aspect of this non-event, hopes to create a temporary social platform that is free of any discursive constraints or objectives generated by the urban environment and its consequential effects on the artistic networking and communicative channels. 

The project hopes to explore an aesthetic and a possible space, through the grid of picnicking and leisure, that might encourage tangential dialogues and open up new communicative channels. As such, its curatorial strategy hopes to highlight and complement the communication/relational structure found in the works of artists/performers featured in this ‘picnic’. 

This project hopes to attract the participation of arts practitioners across a range of medium – film, fine arts, design, theatre, graffiti, musicians, literature, dance – as well as the general public who are interested.