Lalang for Five Arts

I’ve been meaning to blog this forever. I spent the first 3 months of the year feeling stuck, and without a project to lose myself in, purposeless. So Zedeck and I started Activity Book, where I gave him things to write and he gave me things to draw, everyday.

When Five Arts asked me to decorate their 30th Anniversary party at the end of March, I jumped at a chance to fill my purpose vacuum. It was like a pebble preceding an avalanche. Now, I’m back to having too many things on my to do list. Sometimes I wish I could learn to sit in the vacuum a little longer. The self-intiated Activity Book (stalled for now) was turning out to be so cool. It made me feel like a mini sun, generating art through pure alchemy of the self.

Eventually, when the to do list has worn me out, I’ll go back to that place.

Five Arts is one of the longest running art groups in Malaysia. They’re rock steady. I admire their continuity and appreciate their work, but I know deep down there’s quite the ideological divide between us. They value history, and perhaps as a result of that, seniority; they’re a naturally hierarchical organization.

My first (and only) mentor, Chee Sek Thim, is a member of Five Arts.  Not only did he give me my first solo show at his gallery in 2005, but also his time, experience and honesty. His tough-mindedness wasn’t always easy to accept, but I loved him fiercely and will always be grateful to him.

My mindset tends towards the anarchic and autonomous. I used to think that I couldn’t work with anyone because I was too much of an individualist and egoist. This made me feel guilty and ashamed. If I wasn’t a team player, then I must be a megalomaniacal control freak, right? It took me years to figure out that in fact, I love working with people, but only in non-hierarchical situations.

I have thought alot about hierarchy. Sometimes I look at my work and see it as one long-ass question about the relationship of the individual to the collective. I hate being a boss as much as I hate being an employee. Having interns and mentors stresses me out. Projects that have given me the most satisfaction tend to be with partners, not subordinates or superiors.

This explains a little my love for the Internet. But that’s another story.

So for Five Arts’ 30th Anniversary, I decided to play on this tension. I chose lalang – weedy grass – as the motif. It’s a symbol of my utopian views for art and Malaysia – something wild and unpredictable, not entirely desirable, destined to be chopped and yet grow back again and again. Burdened with no other responsibility than to be and grow. Nothing to prove, nothing to gain. No dominion over anything.

Perhaps what I value most about Five Arts is how they invite and synthesize different views. I don’t think lalang reflects the Five Arts approach. Yet, the fact that it was allowed to grow all over the launch of their 30th Anniversary, I think, does.

Happy birthday, Five Arts! May you live long and prosper.

Concept sketches and results

The entrance was stenciled with yellow lalang. I couldn’t find chalk that was bright enough, so I made my own. We also filled one of the giant urns from Marion D’ Cruz’s famous Urn Piece with water and flowers for mandi bunga. I remember drunkenly splashing people and slurring ‘no mooarr sueyyyyy’ at the end of the night.

draw_03_entrance_mandibunga
chalk
chalk3
5arts_kakiseninsta

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We used the same flowers and leaves for centerpieces on the tables.

draw_01_tents

5arts_FB_tables

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Inside, I wanted to set up an interactive station where people could stencil lalang over a BN banner I’d taken down after Elections 2013. It was decided (wisely) that this wasn’t the occasion for it. Instead, I painted lalang on sheer boxes from Fahmi Fadzil’s Wayang project. Syam used them to stunning effect in his lighting for the Rhythm In Bronze performance.

draw_04_mainspace
draw_07_shadowbox
5arts_FB_RIB01

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I’d planned to stencil lalang along the stairs, but ended up with the simpler solution of drawing lalang on glass bottles and putting candles in them instead.

draw_stairs
candles

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Upstairs, I used posters of Five Arts’ past performances to make a paparazzi wall. The shelves were turned into a mini-museum showcasing past props.

draw_10_minimuseum

5arts_FB_minimuseum

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In the airwell, I made my first ever mural, based on a drawing of five interconnected bunches of grass and assembled from sheets of recycled A4 paper. It rained like crazy that night, but the mural survived to see the next day. A wasp stung me in the face during set up, but it was WORTH IT.

draw_09_airwell_mural
mural_drawing
lalangmural2
mural_night

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Thanks Marion D’Cruz, Grey Yeoh, Hoe Hui Ting, Syamsul Azhar, the interns and everyone at Five Arts.

Five Arts is hosting a ton of programs in 2014 and 2015 as part of ten Ten TEN: Five Arts Centre Celebrating 30 Years. Keep up with them on Facebook or Twitter

Photos in this post by Hunied Tyeb, Kakiseni, Grey Yeoh and Hoe Hui Ting. 

The Door in the Mountains

In June, the Japan Foundation Kuala Lumpur sent me and June Tan to Kinosaki for a symposium about reviving the Conference for Asian Women and Theatre, which was founded in Japan in 1992 but hasn’t seen any action since 2005.

They asked us to write a report about our trip for Teman Baru, JFKL’s monthly newsletter. I drew this picture instead:kinosaki_web

Luckily, June wrote a proper report (and took pretty pictures):TB2014-Aug-Sep-10web

It’s been easier for images to come out of me than words, this year. They’re like a bubbling stream, and on good days they’re even a strong river. All I have to do is sit down at the page and let it pour out of my hands.

Writing, meanwhile, feels like fishing for stones at the bottom of that river. I mean, they come. But god, so reluctantly.

I wonder about this a little. Before this year, I’ve never spent so much time drawing in my life, except maybe as a kid. It feels like my brain is being rewired – new pathways built, but more importantly, old connections reestablished. I like to imagine little brain worms wearing hard hats doing all this. Some are arguing over the plans and others are jackhammering my cerebral cortex.

I hope they dig me a channel where the River of Drawing joins up with the River of Writing and we all go white water rafting – you, me, and the brain worms.

And we will go through the door in the mountains.

Meanwhile, I swim madly in the image world and will drag up as many written stones as I can.

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Speaking of which, on route to Japan I worked on this commission for Poskod.my, commemorating 100 days of MH370 being lost. I wouldn’t recommend chasing your deadlines on a plane, but in this case it gave me a perspective from the inside:SharonChinSilentSeas
I called it ‘Silent Seas’. Words were not possible. Even the image was hard, but it found me in the end.

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Here’s a photoblog to help decode the drawing:
kinosaki_kimono
Kinosaki is a hot spring town in northen Hyogo prefecture, along the coast of the Sea of Japan. We stayed at a guesthouse with lovely artists Shirotama Hitsujiya (left) and Sato Shimizu (right).  Everyday, you pick a fresh cotton kimono, which you’re supposed to wear to the public hot spring baths. Naturally, I gravitated to bunnies.

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kinosaki_buoys

Upcycled plastic buoy cat heads.

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kinosaki_talk

June and I presenting our work at the symposium to discuss the future of the Conference for Asian Women and Theatre. We were invited by Shirotama and Mikuni Yanaihara (far right), both productive geniuses in the performing arts in Japan. The discussion got pretty heated, especially around WHY there needed to a conference specially for WOMEN. I said I saw ‘Asian’, ‘Women’ and ‘Theatre’ as doors that lead somewhere, instead of walls that keep people out. If you don’t include any of those doors, you don’t get see where they go in the mountains.

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kinosaki_guns

We watched a play about a stripper staged at an old cabaret joint. Next door was a strange shop, with old pachinko machines and this shooting gallery of tiny ceramic figures. It was manned by a charismatic old lady who insisted June try her hand at shooting. She kept dragging June’s gun until it was inches away from the figures. She really wanted June to win something.

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kinosaki_sea2
Shirotama organized a workshop at the marine research center at Takeno beach. I seem to be dressed as a communist, which is a look I enjoy.

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kinosaki_seaweed
We identifed and tasted different types of edible seaweed…

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kinosaki_cooking
…and cooked octopus rice over a wood fire. You can’t see it, but a huge brown eagle was circling close overhead, waiting for us to be done so it could swoop down on our meal.

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kinosaki_trash
Stuff we picked up from our fieldtrip. The amount of trash didn’t faze me; since living in Port Dickson I no longer have illusions about how packed with garbage our oceans are. No, it was something else that mindfucked me: as we walked along the beach, I looked down and saw the sand embedded with tiny, multi-coloured fragments of plastic, as uncountable as confetti. You could sit all day trying to pick the broken plastic out of a square meter of sand and still not take it all out. It stretched on as far as you could walk. The plastic was PART of the beach. I had never seen such a thing. It made my heart sick, and then, I felt something harden inside, a kind of determination to accept this reality, to face it with whatever tools I had at my disposal: my art, and the time I have left on this earth.

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kinosaki_cave
Best for last. We visited this sea cave. A hole in the rock where the ocean came rushing in and out with a roar, over and over. The hole in the rock. The door in the mountain!

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P.S. Shirotama Hitsujiya is the founder of performing arts group YUBIWA HOTEL, a creative genius, and also the artist who invited us to Kinosaki. She’s in Malaysia this weekend and will be giving a talk called “Why we work with the community” alongside other Japanese artists. Come if you can! Sat, 9 Aug 2014, 4pm – 5pm at Five Arts Centre in TTDI.