Writing by Me

Am I Chinese? – Notes on Chong Kim Chiew’s Isolation House (2005 – 2017) at A+ Works of Art

Disclosure: the proprietors of A+ Works of Art have previously purchased my work

Chong Kim Chiew, Isolation House (2005) at Rumah Air Panas

I’m late. Sentul, like Cheras or Kepong or Shah Alam, makes me anxious – a result of mere unfamiliarity, which I suppose you could say defines the Malaysian condition. Waze sends me to Bangsar on the NPE and onto Sentul Link. I see familiar buildings, but the elevated highway messes with my sense of direction, already useless in the best of times, and renders everything distant.

It’s tempting to fall into the lull of this speed, the lack of friction. From my home to the destination, via algorithmic app, in an Uber or a Grab, personal playlist streaming on Spotify. I float in my car, the road clean and smooth. It’s a soporific effect. I struggle against a sense of inevitability.

I experienced Kim Chiew’s installation as it was originally conceived, twelve years ago, at the artist-run space Rumah Air Panas, which was on a road called Lorong Air Leleh, surrounded by roads with names like Jalan Air Madu, Jalan Air Bersih, Jalan Air Dalam, and Jalan Air Pusing, in place called Air Panas, in Setapak. Today, a highway runs through where Rumah Air Panas used to be.

I remember the earth under my feet, and the hole it’d been dug out from. The hole, outside the house, was wide and deep enough to bury a human body, and filled with light brown rain water. We entered the locked house by a door near the roof, down a shaky staircase. Inside, down low, the spread earth pressed against the white walls of the house in a dark ring. Here and there were cages, objects inside: a wooden crutch, a flute, a gourd. Eight enclosures and eight tools to stand for the Eight Immortals who crossed the sea in story.

In this new version, in a newly opened gallery housed in a commercial complex built by YTL as part of their multi-billion ringgit Sentul Raya redevelopment plan, there is no soil. The floor is concrete. The cages – just two of them – are empty.

Many years ago, I lived in a rented house. We had a god that we’d brought with us from my childhood home, on the ground, in a red hut. But we didn’t take care of him – it’d been a hard year. I could barely take care of myself, and two dogs. We didn’t light his oil lamp, forgot to lay out his cheroot and curry and soft pink cakes, and the rain rotted his red wooden plaque inscribed with glittering gold Chinese words I couldn’t read. When it came time to move again, a man well-versed in these matters came, looked at the hut, and told us: there was no more god, he had left.

I thought about this as I looked at the empty cages.

Chong Kim Chiew, Isolation House (2005 – 2017) at A+ Works of Art, d6 Trade Center, Sentul East

Another thought rippled up, unbidden – am I Chinese?

The rusty metal plates bearing the names of roughly 40 new villages remain in the new Isolation House. Slowly they oxidize, breathing oxygen, alive: Semenyih, Rasa, Batang Berjuntai, Jinjang, Salak Selatan.

During the Emergency period (1948 – 1960), in an effort to halt the spread of communism amongst the rural population, the British colonial administration resettled 530,000 ‘squatters’ and workers into more than 400 new villages across Malaya. These ‘new villages’ were guarded camps, with strict curfews enforced by police. The large majority (but not all!) were ethnic Chinese.

This history of the new villages – is it mine?

I remember, as a teenager, quite literally, growing up in shopping malls: specifically, 1 Utama, Bangsar Shopping Center, Jaya Shopping Center, Subang Parade, Sunway Pyramid and Midvalley Megamall, where my parents had opened a chain of deli-style restaurants.

But I go further back, to childhood. An old lady, Ah Chun Yi, took care of me, while both parents worked. In the day, after school, I went to her wooden house. Was it in a village? I can’t… remember. I dig for it, but I hit concrete. Her long hair, her soft voice. Her polyester floral shirts. Naps in the hot afternoon, the standing fan and fluttering of green lace curtains. No, that was in my grandmother’s house, where the god came from, the one who left.

Who else besides me remembers the feel of soil on the parquet floor of Rumah Air Panas? The pixelated video documentation of the original Isolation House tells us almost nothing except that this work existed in another form in another time. It’s my memory that gives the new Isolation House its full meaning – without it, the defining feature of this work, which is loss, is lost. Or say rather: locked. Hard to reach, and thus, hard to read. Harder now than it was 12 years ago. And soon it will be harder still.

In his refusal to stage a straight reproduction of an acclaimed past work, his commitment to the reality of this new site, and his fidelity to the truth of where we have come in the last decade, Kim Chiew teaches us that we must – we can – learn to read and face our history even in the smooth, clean and silent concrete.

This installation is part of the exhibition Kadang Kadang Dekat Dekat Akan Datang: Chong Kim Chiew & FX Harsono, 15 Sept – 7 Oct 2017 at A+ Works of Art

‘Playing with History’ by Beverly Yong, a joint review of Chong Kim Chiew’s Isolation House and my first solo exhibition Boats and Bridges, first published in 2005 on kakiseni.com (now defunct).

Notes on Liew Kwai Fei’s “Siapa Dia Tong Sam Pah? 我的名字哈苏丹。You Look F**king Funny Lah!”

I’ve known and loved Kwai Fei’s works for almost a decade. Painting Suite (2008), a triptych* of his earliest minimalist geometric paintings hangs in my bedroom.

[* A triptych is a set of three separate works that are meant to be seen together as one complete work. A diptych would be a set of two separate works. Quadriptych a set of four and so on.]

My favorite in this triptych I’ve hung across from the bed, so I wake up to the light slanting on those tiny off-white triangles floating on four rectangles of black acrylic paint. Below it, on a chest of drawers, sits a small, framed photo someone sent me long ago, of sailboats on the pacific ocean, seen at great distance from the top of a cliff – sharp, three-cornered shards of white cut against a limitless blue sea.

Both painting and photo remind me of the order, and disorder, of my own imagination. It’s a purely visual effect, like music, but for your eyeballs. I get the same feeling looking at the work of fashion designer Isabel Toledo, who has described what she does as ‘romantic mathematics’.

Installation views of “Color, Shape, Quantity and Scale” at 15 Jalan Mesui (2010)

Kwai Fei’s subsequent exhibitions “Paintings for All Ages/Paintings with Extended Space” (2009) and “Color, Shape, Quantity and Scale” (2010) filled entire rooms with units of colorful, minimalist geometric paintings in oddly shaped frames. They leaned on walls, fit around corners, and climbed up the sides of doorways. These memorable works were probably influenced by the wonderful Thai artist Mit Jai Inn. In turn, I see their influence on fellow Malaysian artist Chi Too’s bubble wrap paintings in last year’s “Like Someone In Love”.

It seems like a huge, disjointed leap from there to this current show, at Richard Koh Fine Art, on the top floor of Bangsar Village II shopping mall.

I find the new works strikingly ugly. I thought about starting that sentence with ‘sorry’, but I’m not someone for whom ugliness is a bad thing. In fact, seen against the backdrop of BVII’s glitzy shops, Kwai Fei’s art is like chewing on a bitter herb after eating too many sugary doughnuts.

I’d argue that there is an unbroken thread that connects those minimalist haikus from years ago with the current pun paintings in “Siapa Dia Tong Sam Pah?”. To make sense of this show you have to see it in the context of that continuous arc.

At the heart of his geometric works was the idea of modularity – that is, a system of discrete units that can be rearranged to form larger structures. IKEA kitchen and office furniture – that’s a modular system. It’s as if Kwai Fei broke a painting down to units of colour and shape, so he could put them back together in new combinations, like a drummer improvising rhythms.

Above and Middle: Installation views of “Painted Words & Written Paintings, for the Refined and for the Masses” at Valentine Wilie Fine Art (2012). Bottom: Installation view of “Kami Bukan Hantu, Ah Pull & Ah Door” at Run Amok (2013).

Next came a series of word-play paintings in “Painted Words & Written Paintings, for the Refined and for the Masses” (2012) and “Kami Bukan Hantu, Ah Pull & Ah Door” (2013). Those works looked as if a Chinese dictionary, manga art, and old school hand-painted signs had been put into a blender and spit out – they couldn’t be further from the simple shapes in saturated colors that had come before.

In fact, however, they come from the very same place – Kwai Fei was taking the approach of breaking down and reconstituting units, and applying it to language.

“Siapa Dia Tong Sam Pah?” is also about language. There is a crucial difference in style. Put those 2012-2013 paintings beside these current ones, and you’ll see it. There’s a… voluptuousness in the images completely missing from the new works, which are lurid and brash.

Above: Installation view of “Siapa Dia Tong Sam Pah? 我的名字哈苏丹。You Look F**king Funny Lah!” (Image from Richard Koh Fine Art). Bottom: Interacting with God Breast You, 2015.

It’s crucial, because Kwai Fei comes from a Chinese working class background. He was on home ground tearing apart the seams between and around Chinese language, image and identity, and he was fluent in putting it all back together.

With this new show, he tries to do the same to two foreign languages: Malay and English. As he writes in his artist statement (which holds the key to the exhibition title and exhibition as a whole; I’d argue that you can’t fully understand this show unless you read it), he has experienced these languages as instruments of ridicule and exclusion.

This is why “Siapa Dia Tong Sampah?” is unsettling for the viewer: the paintings look like jokes about race and class, the kind that Malaysians love to make to and about each other, but in this case we’re not sure if we’re on the inside or the outside.

They reveal the total effects of prejudice on an individual in our society – not just as a receiver of racism and classism, but a nurturer and perpetuator of it. No neoliberal niceties here. No easy, hollow, ‘we are all Malaysians first’ hypocrisy. Even the title excludes: you may or may not understand the Chinese component. It’s pronounced ‘wo de ming zi ha su tan’. Translated: My name is Ha Su Tan. Hasutan is Malay for ‘sedition’.

Above: Jangan Ketawa, 2015. Middle: Lady’s F, 2015. Bottom: Takkan Seni Halus Hilang Di Dunia, 2015.

The works themselves literally invite you to uncover what’s underneath: lift up a ladies finger and you see a cunt, lift a keris to reveal the words ‘Seni Harus Untuk Melayu Shj’. The latter… ohhh boy. Ok, I’ll try to explain. It’s a reference to UiTM – one of the few public universities in Malaysia to offer a Fine Arts degree – and its Bumiputera-only admissions policy. It’s also a play on how Chinese speakers often pronounce ‘l’ as ‘r’. HaLUS means ‘fine’ in Malay – seni halus: fine art. HaRUS means ‘should be’ – Seni Harus Untuk Melayu Shj: Art Should Be For Malays Only. Puns upon puns upon inside jokes that don’t include you, because they are lost in translation. Miss the joke and all you see is a bad painting with a racist statement on it. Happens all the time in Malaysia.

The paintings are ugly because the subject uncovered is far from pretty. But the uncovering itself is done as skillfully and self-critically as such a difficult, I’d even say, impossible, task will allow.

These works sit uncomfortably in Richard Koh Fine Art. They don’t look like desirable commodities. But they sure do grab attention. I saw a security guard – Nepalese? Burmese? – walk past and linger, his eyes glued to the painting about migrant worker deaths suspended from the ceiling. For him, simply stepping inside the gallery would mean a greater transgression of racial, social and class boundaries than we can imagine. I thought about that for a long time after leaving the show.

Above: Lu Siapa? Mana Kampung? Mana Mau Pergi?, 2015. Bottom: Shopping Class, 2015 and Xiao Portrait, 2015.

For an artist with Kwai Fei’s background, to be represented by RKFA means both artistic validation, and a level of social mobility. Yet, somewhat ironically, there may be too many hard truths in this particular series to be friendly to the market. ‘All that is gold does not glitter’, but the classes that buy art from RKFA generally prefer a thicker coating of sugar on their bitter pills. Eventually, this is how commercial galleries come to calibrate what kind of art gets made.

If I had the funds, I would buy one of these paintings to hang beside the sublime quiet of Painting Suite – to remind me of the work between them, of time and distance travelled by experience. These days, we’re hard pressed to give anything more than two seconds of our attention, let alone follow an arc that spans a decade. Also, to remind me that beauty and ugliness can inhabit the same room, like joy and sorrow, pain and pleasure. It’s a good room that can invite both.

Lately, I’ve been wondering why I continue to look at and write and think and care about art. This is one reason why: it may seem as though we are unraveling, but artists are weaving threads that hold our story together – both the beautiful and the ugly. We need to pick them up and follow, so we can weave them together, strand by strand, to find our way home.

“Siapa Dia Tong Sam Pah? 我的名字哈苏丹。You Look F**king Funny Lah“, 16 – 31 March 2016, Richard Koh Fine Art

Review by Art KL-itique

Feature in The Star

Notes on Shika/Shieko Reto’s “Buang Bayi”

Shika, besides being an artist who has shown at the Singapore Biennale, a Nippon Foundation API (Asian Public Intellectual) scholar, a transgender activist, and a prolific blogger, designer, illustrator, and graffiti writer, is also lead singer for the Ting Tong Ketz.

I watched them play a couple of weeks ago. ‘Pulang, marilah pulang, ke pangkal jalan…’ chanted Shika, in a song she dedicated to JAKIM. She pointed to the crowd, and on cue, we screamed the refrain: ‘TAK NAK!!!’

The joy of that refusal: I felt it crack out from under my ribs and bounce across the room – unapologetic, free.

‘Pulang ke pangkal jalan’ is what we say to people who’ve strayed off the path. It’s a call to come back, back to the crossroads, before you went wrong. They’re iron words in a velvet glove, often used by those with power – the state, religious authorities, parents, society – to persuade you that not only is their path better and safer, it’s the only one that’s true.

One of my favorite Shika designs is the logo for Pangkal Jalan Pub. I have it sewn above the left pocket of my number one jacket, which I wore to the opening of “Buang Bayi”, where Pangkal Jalan Pub transformed from an idea into something real. Shh… Diam! (the sharpest and funniest band in Malaysia right now, btw) set up a bar on folding tables, DJ CT spun from her collection of vintage Malay pop, and visitors toasted to the only paths worth taking – our own.

The society we live in makes some paths much more perilous than others. Being a transgender person in Malaysia means traveling a road strewn, literally, with dead bodies, but also, discrimination, abuse, exploitation, rejection and violence.

To call “Buang Bayi” an exhibition about transgender issues would be like putting a label next to an arrow pointing to somewhere in an exploding nebula, and saying: here, this is what this is, and this is how you should look at it.

Instead, Shika’s show makes me feel like I’m inside a spaceship. From there, I see that a world in which gender was radically redefined would be a world expanded beyond recognition.

In the sheer density of creation and universe building, Shika reminds me of Eko Nugroho, or Yoshitomo Nara, only about a hundred times more fun. The space – Kerbauworks is artist Yee I-Lann and punk rocker Joe Kidd’s multipurpose studio – is stuffed, wall-to-wall, with zines, posters, paintings, patches, sculptures, toys, t-shirts, tote bags, buttons, postcards, drawings, prints and more. In one corner sits her guitar, in another are sashes meant for the beauty queen, MISS GENDERED.

The amount of material created in all manner of techniques and mediums is almost dizzying. There’s the campaigns she created for I AM YOU: BE A TRANS* ALLY, and Justice For Sisters, infographics on SOGIE, fictional characters, autobiographical cartoons, and on and on. But there’s an order to this universe – formed by Shika’s virtuoso sense of design, as well as a syntax of recurring symbols: mirror, bicycle, raft, unicorn, butterfly, roadside table, and humans escaping from their own skins, amongst others.

It’s an alternate galaxy tethered to earthy reality. Take the exhibition title “Buang Bayi”, which refers to the disturbing recurrence of baby dumping in Malaysia, or the aforementioned Pangkal Jalan Pub: Shika twists familiar images into a multi-angled mirror, simultaneously reflecting back to the world an image of itself as it is, and as it could be.

Shika’s universe was made to be distributed. If you took a piece of it home, whether a painting or a patch, it feels like another baby would quickly spawn and be dumped in its place. Most days, the artist was on site, singing songs, drawing alternate gender portraits of visitors, making paintings, and updating to Instagram. It’s the model of an art exhibition as a living, breathing, social thing, and not, as I’ve said before, dead objects on display for two weeks.

What Malaysian society and media tells us about transgender people and gender identity is a feedback loop of ignorant garbage. We can’t even get the pronouns right. Don’t worry, I’m learning too. Read this handy guide to transgender terminology. It’ll take you 5mins.

Shika built a spaceship for an expanded universe that doesn’t exist yet. She filled it to overflowing with beauty, joy, solidarity, punk rock and a future in which anything’s possible. I want to go where it’s going, into the deep unknown.

“Buang Bayi: An Exhibition by Visual Artist Shika/Shieko Reto“, 12 – 27 March 2016, KerbauWorks, 11 Lorong Kurau, Bangsar.

Review of “Buang Bayi” by Art KL-itique

Shika’s blog, Tumblr, Instagram.

Notes on Chong Kim Chiew’s “Be Careful Or You May Become The Centre”

Thoughts about the exhibition ‘Be Careful Or You May Become The Centre‘ by Chong Kim Chiew, O, Kim and TOPY at Wei Ling Contemporary, 25 September – 30 November 2015.

Update 23 Oct 2015: Check out Art KL-itique’s take on the show here.

(Shopping) Centre

I went to Wei Ling Contemporary for the first time to see Kim Chiew’s solo show. I had to go twice because they’re closed on Monday, and I didn’t check the opening hours. So I got to walk through the older Mid Valley Shopping Centre, through The Gardens Mall, which is the newer, premium building, and up to the 6th Floor where the gallery is – twice.

Ten years ago, I wrote an article for kakiseni.com championing art in shopping malls. I think I declared them (unironically!) Malaysia’s ‘truly democratic spaces’. Today, the website doesn’t exist anymore, and that article is gone from the internet, but shopping malls have fully embraced art, and vice versa. See: the Kakiseni festivals in Pavillion, the Iskandar Malaysia Contemporary Art Show in Danga Bay City Mall, MAP @ Publika, and the gold standard for galleries in malls, Galeri Petronas in KLCC.

Chong Kim Chiew, Unreadable Wall, 2013, Newspaper, Dimensions variable. In the foreground, part of Across Your Space, Across His (Her) Space, Across My Space by O, 2015, Photo sticker

Here’s a little story about what changed my views on art and shopping malls. A few years ago, I had a show in the concourse of Bangsar Village II. A couple was looking at the work very intently. This made me happy. As they walked away, I overheard one of them say: ‘wow, those lightbulbs are so nice’. He was referring to the state-of-the-art Megaman™ bulbs lighting my art.

Thus, a humbling, but rather important lightbulb moment of my own: the realization that art is a social product of a social species; it’s not an autonomous thing. Put another way: in a shopping mall, there’s no reason for people to view art any differently from a sexy pair of jeans, designer cupcakes, or lightbulbs.

What’s interesting about Wei Ling Contemporary is that it’s set quite apart from the shopping mall, in an annexe of its own, as I said, on the 6th Floor. Casual shoppers wouldn’t go there. There would be no… opportunity? possibility? for art to be overshadowed by its own lighting appliances.

So art is in the (shopping) centre, but, (and this is by design!) not really. When I think about this, the title of Kim Chiew’s exhibition starts to take on many meanings.

TOPY, Exhibition Logo Design No.1, 2015, Painted mural

Avatars

There are four artists in this show: Chong Kim Chiew, Kim, O and TOPY. They’re all Kim Chiew’s creations.

It’s strange, Kim Chiew is one of the least theatrical artists I know. He means everything he makes. Look at his work from ten years ago, and these new ones under the name Chong Kim Chiew, and you’ll understand what I mean. The integrity and sincerity of the work is clear.

What to make of this gimmick? It’s not new – the artist who created an entire biennale of made up works from made up artists comes to mind. I’m also reminded of Hokusai, the famous Japanese printmaker who, every time he felt himself reaching a certain level in his art, took on a new name so that he wouldn’t get attached to his own mastery.

O, Skin Time, 2015, Video, 480mins. Bottom image is a screenshot of my phone after I set a photo of Skin Time as my wallpaper. Only one minute difference between the clock in the artwork and the clock on my phone! The artwork is synchronized with the gallery’s opening hours (11am – 7pm).

Two thoughts:

1. The internet used to be THE place where you could construct someone other than who you were in real life. You could test out different personas and see how they interacted with the virtual world. My first online avatar was Zhen. I tried him out in an IRC chat room when I was 16 years old. Zhen was flirty and confident and neither male nor female, or was both at different times. She had short silver hair, and was around 25 years old.

Today, Facebook insists that we use our ‘real identities’, when nothing could be further from the truth. Facebook Sharon Chin is real in the way Levi’s jeans or Doc Marten boots are authentic – a constructed persona, a personal brand optimized for Likes and Shares. As online space becomes the ultimate marketplace, it’s in real life and the real world where we can enact or imagine new selves and new ways of being. In this sense, I see Kim Chiew’s real life avatars as a retrieval of an important kind of freedom that we have lost on the internet.

2. I keep thinking about that street trick, where someone shuffles the cups and you have to guess which one the pearl is under. It’s called a shell game. The art world is itself a game, and like all marketplaces, has become increasingly sophisticated and boundary-less as a result of being fuelled by digital networked technology. Media theorist Douglas Rushkoff calls it ‘capitalism on steroids’.

Kim Chiew’s avatars are like a hall of mirrors, where the self can duck and hide, and evade the surveillance eye of the market or institution, all while participating in the game, in plain sight. I could put it another way: the show is a shell, but it hides the pearl in the shell.

O, Your Place and My Place 1, 2, 3 (detail), 2015, Inkjet print, 18 x 24cm. As an interesting comparison, check out Gan Siong King’s hyper-realistic socket paintings.

O and Kim, Space and Time

I’m charmed most by O and Kim, #sorrynotsorry @chongkimchiew and @TOPY.

O’s stickers that run up the walls and across the floor of the gallery are so subtle, so effective. Kim’s Skin Time is probably my favourite piece in the show. It’s On Kawara for the digital age, a clock for humans stuck in a perpetual now.

These joke-like works have deep enquiry at their core: an investigation into space, and time. They don’t treat these subjects as existential punch lines, but as wonderful mysteries. The wall stickers make you look at the concrete floor more closely, and they make you look at the walls. They make you aware of the space you’re in: in this gallery, in this building put together and maintained by human labour.

Skin Time makes you feel time in your body, makes you think about how unnaturally the human inhabits digital time in which one second seems the same as the other. But the human knows that each minute is different. The human lives in real time.

O, Across Your Space, Across His (Her) Space, Across My Space, 2015, Photo sticker

Prices

There is a trend of leaving price tags off artwork labels, and this show is no different. (I remember Gan Siong King did a hyper-realistic painting of an artwork label a few years ago, with price.) Price labels and red stickers that showed a work was sold were almost fetish items in local galleries – are they passé today? I don’t know anymore, I’m not really… in the loop. Did this change happen as auction houses started to operate in the local market?

Anyway, I make it a habit to ask for the price list at every gallery show I go to. Why hide it? I’m really curious about this!

Erasure and Unreadability

Obliteration exists in one way or another in all of Chong Kim Chiew’s works in this show.

There is a wall of bricks made from eight years worth of pulped newspapers.

There is a painting made of little squares of cut up paintings.

Chong Kim Chiew, White Over White, Black Over Black – Map, 2011, Acrylic and marker on canvas with cutting, 200 x 300cm

And finally, there’s the centrepiece of the exhibition, Boundary Fluidity – an ongoing series of unreadable maps painted on industrial tarp, and a video showing these paintings in various locations – crumpled in a heap in an empty parking lot, hanging from a branch sticking out of the ocean, laid out under a pattern of shadows dancing in afternoon light.

It’s important to look at these works from the back. Seeing them as blue rectangles hanging in space, something clicks into place. Kim Chiew is a brilliant site-specific artist – he has an intuitive grasp of the poetics and politics of space. It’s a sensibility, a sort of artistic tic that can’t be learned or manufactured. It’s what separates good installation art from that of artists who just take up a lot of space with a lot of stuff. See: most biennale artworks.

He’s a less intuitive painter. The best of these paintings are the ones that you wouldn’t bat an eyelid at if you saw it shading a nasi lemak stall from the sun. Their layers are weathered and buffed into a homely abstract beauty – equally suited to hanging above your couch, or covering a pile of bricks by the roadside. The least successful are the ones that look most like paintings.

I think Chong Kim Chiew has to exist in order for O, Kim and TOPY to be. It’s Chong Kim Chiew who will feed and clothe the others. His works are the most marketable today, the ones that will make most sense to the art world. Is that why they are full of erasure? Is that why, seen from the front, they are unreadable?

Category: Writing by Me