friends

Dear Grey Diamond – Grace, 31, beauty writer

All of the last eight months I have been thinking of you, since the day you announced yourself in my dreams by way of this jewellery shop I saw on the Instagram Explore Tab.

This image features stock images of a group of stars in the Centaurus constellation, from Universe and Humanity (1910), and of a lump of coal.

Letters To What We Want is a series of letters composed by friends, responding to the question ‘What do you want? In 2021 and beyond?’. The format was left open, as was the choice to sign off anonymously or with a pseudonym.

In exchange, I sent them an artwork, which can be viewed at the end of the post.

Dec 12, 2020

Dear Grey Diamond
(Hexagonal, 0.44 carat, set in a Gold Ring with Two Smaller Diamonds)

Katie Carder Juniper Ring with Grey Hexagon Diamond, meekajewelry.com

All of the last eight months I have been thinking of you, since the day you announced yourself in my dreams by way of this jewellery shop I saw on the Instagram Explore Tab.

While employed, I calculated how much I would have to set aside each month. Unemployed, I have pulled up your image to try and work myself up to open LinkedIn again. Impending hunger was not enough motivation.

Your brilliance, fire and heft, forged by both earth’s magic and jeweler’s flame, is everything I didn’t know I wanted before. But I need to tell you that it’s been too much, and I don’t think I can do this anymore.

I’ve always thought gemstones were among the best things to wear. Precious, so universally beautiful and so, like, exposing of human absurdity. Like, all we needed was to survive. But somewhere along the way, and early, we realized what we really wanted was to be adorned. And when stones entered the picture. Oh man, the lengths we went just to be P R E T T Y. We went to murder lengths!

The thing is, I know that exchanging money for you is beyond useless– it’s nothing but wasteful. Scarcity has been created and is as real as you and I, despite the best efforts of abundance mindset horseshit from the wells of Self Help Youtube.

It just feels awkward, in a time when labs can replicate your chemistry, colour and iridescence in any size, to continue to pine for something just because it was squeezed into being in some cave for a billion years, then yanked out to maybe fund a repressive regime. I’m sorry, I’m being rude. It’s not your fault. You are perfect.

I was watching all of the fourth season of The Crown recently, and was freshly struck by how much jewellery these guys have. It’s their actual birthright, heaps of stones set in hulking wearable sculptures for elevating their squishy selves above everyone else. THE CROWN. D’UH. Is that what I want from you– to be better? To be worthy of the sparkle? To maybe camouflage my lowly social class at events? It’s either this or something else, right? No such thing as beauty for its own sake.

Is it because I need yet another arbitrary item to peg meaning to? Something to remind myself that… I am breakable? Ya, of course, sure. Every desire is a Death Thing. I’m not alone in feeling death around every corner right now. Incidentally, the old aunty next door died yesterday, the one who used to yell at the stray animals. She also used to wear pretty pastel floral tailored shirt suits, which she hung to dry on our shared fence.

Anyway, I think right, I don’t even need a Death Thing. I won’t have children to pass you to. At best, some young person I care about in the future will have an accessory they never got to choose, but can’t sell off because they’ll feel bad. At worst, you’re just going to be a reminder of how awful I’ve always been with money. Imagine, “Wah, she really only left her laptop and phone with their dying batteries. And this ring.”

All this is to say I will love you forever, but maybe not in real life. Please don’t get too upset by the plastic seed beads I wear. I love them too, cause I strung them together myself. Still, you know that I know they are not the same.

Yours Faithfully,

Grace

Image of Country Musik: Movements #18, given in exchange for this letter.
An edition of this work is available in the shop.

Spectacles – Cermin Mata: A Conversation

On 20 Feb 2016, I sat down to have a conversation in public with Sze, my friend and cohort. I’d been wanting to do a talk about taking part in APT8 (8th Asia Pacific Triennial of Contemporary Art), but was tired with the usual slideshow-followed-by-Q&A format. Sze suggested doing the talk as an interview, which she’d experienced and been inspired by while studying in the UK. I loved it immediately.

We’d actually been conversing for months – since the middle of last year, when she interviewed me for her Masters thesis about politics, art and public space in Malaysia. Talking with Sze – in bars and cafes, on gchat or email or SMS – has been like getting into a trolley cart with my thoughts and ideas. Everything moves forward, inch by steady inch.

This time though, we were gonna talk in front of an audience.

It was experiment for the both of us. My relationship to speaking is not the same as the one I have with writing. My spoken voice feels to me the weakest muscle in my possession – I can hardly put any weight on it; I just don’t know what it will and won’t do. But as Durga Chew-Bose, one of my favorite writers today, says: ‘I do believe there is a power in conversation and dialogue. I think the transcribed voice for women is really important to women because the essay voice is edited and we’re self-editing from the day we’re little girls’.

AUDIO

Below is a full, unedited recording of the talk. We’ve ‘mapped’ the conversation with quotes and comments to help navigate the 1 hour 40mins of audio. It’s in two formats:

1) Sze visualized the talk using Timeline JS, a free, open source tool originally developed for journalists. Click through the timeline to see quotes, links, photos and comments that follow the flow of the conversation. To scroll through: point your cursor to the bottom of the timeline, click and drag left or right. The audio is embedded as a Soundcloud track in the second slide, click to play. Access the timeline separately here.

2) Click to play the Soundcloud track. Topics, quotes, comments and links are arranged according to timestamps in the Google spreadsheet below. Access the spreadsheet separately here.

ZINE

I made a zine for people to use as a notebook to scribble or doodle in during the talk. Here it is in PDF format, available for download.

LINKS

Artist Shika/Shieko Reto blogged about the talk HERE.

Liyana Dizzy and Syar S. Alia recorded an amazing conversation of their own about Spectacles HERE (or click on the image below). It’s full of insights and totally worth your time.

CREDITS

Many thanks to Ronnie Khoo for producing the audio recording.

Image of the talk from audience member Hing Lim’s Facebook post.

“Spectacles – Cermin Mata: (Goh) Sze (Ying) interviews Sharon (Chin) about taking part in APT8 (8th Asia Pacific Triennial of Contemporary Art)“ was a conversation on 20 Feb 2016 at Awe Gallery.

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.

Antid Oto #11: Dear Janet

The Janet in this letter is Janet Lilo. She lives in New Zealand, and we have not seen each other for six long years. She is a very great artist. You can find her here.

And here are the Sierra Leone Refugee All Stars:

Antid Oto – italian for antidote – was one of Leon Trotsky‘s earliest pen names. I also love the Malay word for it: penawar. A few months ago, I started taking regular walks and making drawings afterwards as a way to deal with worry, procrastination, hopelessness, writer’s block, internet rage, and digital distraction. I’ll post a series of them here, one every other day, for as long as I keep making them.

Fertilizer Friday: Daniel Salehuddin

Fertilizer Fridays are interviews with artist friends. Honest, casual conversations that share ideas and bust myths about being an artist/making art.

I needed to get a box made to house my WEEDS rubberstamps set. That’s when I met Daniel Salehuddin, self-taught woodworker. The craft and care he puts into everything he makes blew me away. Read on for great insights on Malaysian woods, wood sourcing and making things with love.

Just like everyone else, craftsmen have good days and bad days. Could you describe what your working day is like, a good one and a bad one?

a) GOOD

A good day is when you get the chance to make or do something new. It’s always a good feeling when you finish your first dovetail joint or your first full-sized stool.

b) BAD

A bad day would be making a wrong cut even after you’ve measured ten times!

Offcut Cushion Bench. Various hard and soft woods including Resak, Meranti, Nyatoh and pine. The frame is made from Meranti.

When we met you were just finishing your internship at LAIN Furniture. Now you work there full time. So give us the story! How did you get into woodworking?

Growing up I was always a maker, and wood was always in abundance. So, I became quite handy with a saw and hammer at a very young age.

When I was 17, one of the assessments for my Engineering Technology subject was to build a full-sized cabinet. I tricked my dad by telling him that, if he bought me a jigsaw, I would build a gate for our garden. Instead I used the jigsaw to build an actual shoe cabinet with drop-down compartments (like those IKEA ones), a drawer and even a place to put your umbrellas.

I was really proud of it. Because of that project and the feeling I got from it, I fell in love with woodworking! I ended up building a gate and a door for our garden later that year.

Pallet Low lounge/table. Made from reclaimed wooden pallets, with tiger claw sofa legs.

Could you run us through some basics about types of wood available in Malaysia? Do you have any favorites?

Meranti, Balau, Nyatoh, Merbau, Jati, Resak, Getah, Chengal, and Belian are some of our local woods that I’m familiar with. The cheapest out of that group would be Meranti, since it’s the wood used in construction. You can get it easily from the normal hardware store. If you’re just starting wood working, get some Meranti to practice.

The furniture industry is familiar with Getah, Nyatoh, Jati, and even Merbau.

Chengal, Belian, and Balau are really hard woods and often used as decking or for structures like pergola and sheds.

My favourite wood right now would be Nyatoh since it’s easy to work with and the wood has some pink and purple colour in it!

Wall-mounted ukulele holder

How about sourcing? What are some good places to get wood? Usually I only see poor quality plywood at hardware stores and I’ve always been curious how to get my hands on the good stuff.

Don’t go to a normal hardware store to find good wood! If you want some good quality hardwood, try your local lumber yard or sawmill. Some shops even offer wood plane-ing service so you can get your wood all flat and squared up. Another thing to keep in mind is to try and get dried lumber!

About plywood, the ones at normal hardware stores are usually construction grade. Try to find a furniture hardware shop in your area to get furniture grade plywood, but be ready to spend about triple the price! If you are in the Klang Valley, try going to Kampung Baru Sungai Buloh, there you can find lots of wood related stuff!

Handcut and sanded from a Meranti offcut block. Ngiauuuu~

For someone thinking about trying their hand at woodworking, what are some basic tools you’d recommend? Does it take much to get started?

The most basic would be a handsaw, a hammer and some wood glue, but since we live in the modern age where power tools are cheap and abundant, I would recommend a jigsaw and a drill. When I started, I only had those two power tools.

Custom Nyatoh box with mitre joints and sliding lid for my WEEDS Rubberstamps set. More photos here and here.

When I came to you I remember whining that ‘it’s easy to get someone to make a box, but a REALLY good box is another matter’. It seems harder and harder to find good craftspeople in Malaysia, from general contractors to welders or glass workers. There’s a lack of care or pride in the work. What are your thoughts on this?

I can’t really comment about other people, but for me, it’s always about doing something you love. That’s the backbone of doing anything, whether it’s welding, drawing, driving or dancing. You know you will do a good job when you are doing it with love!

End-grain Nyatoh wood cutting board – in progress and finished. A cut out on the underneath edge makes it easier to lift.

We spend so much time on computers or mobile devices. I still find that I think best with my hands. There is also a sort of joy; I even experience time differently. Why do you think making things with our hands gives us so much satisfaction?

It all boils down to the feeling of success and pride! Different people have different ways to achieve that feeling. Some get it after making a good sale, others after doing a performance. For us, we get it after we have a finished product in front of us with paint and dirt all over our hands!

What’s next for you?

I’m currently setting up my home workshop. Nothing fancy, just a small shed at the back of my house. I can take my time setting up the little shed since I’m currently working at LAIN Furniture, which is a proper woodworking studio. When the shed is done, it will be my space to do all the ‘not work’ projects!

Working at night with the help of a construction site night lamp.

Thanks, Daniel!

Everyone, please say hi to Daniel on Facebook. Also check out LAIN Furniture, the workshop where he’s currently based. They run woodworking classes for beginners.

Fertilizer Fridays: Kok Siew Wai

I know it’s been quiet on the blog. Been working furiously backstage to get my online world in order. Big change is afoot, but it’s taking awhile to come together. In the meantime… ONWARDS with Fertilizer Friday.

Fertilizer Fridays are interviews with artist friends. Honest, casual conversations that share ideas and bust myths about being an artist/making art.

Say hello to Kok Siew Wai, sound and video artist, plus organizer of all things experimental in KL and beyond. She’s one of those unsung art heroes who steadily makes things happen, one DIY event, festival, and performance at a time. Here she’s got some great insights on failure, improvisation and alternative culture.

Just like everyone else, artists have good days and bad days. Could you describe what your working day is like, a good one and a bad one?

a) GOOD

It feels good when my effort and passion in the arts is understood and appreciated. And, when I do something more risky, and it turns out great. Once we showed some challenging works in a screening, and we were a bit worried about the audience’s reactions. The audience turned out to be quite open minded. At the end, our sponsor came up to us and said, “You know, it’s important that you show these works to the Malaysian audience.” This comment made my day.

b) BAD

So, it’s the opposite, when we’re being misunderstood, which happens quite often. Haha! Also, I don’t like tedious bureaucracies, but I do have to do those things often because of my job.

You make art using video and sound, and also lecture in the Faculty of Creative Multimedia at Multimedia University. Is unfamiliarity a problem when it comes to experimental art forms? How can we create better understanding without taking on the position of ‘expert’ who’s trying to teach their audience all the time?

I don’t regard myself as an ‘expert’ with a superior sense. As an artist, I try to express myself honestly. As an educator, I’m a facilitator, a moderator. In teaching, I like to create an interactive environment where students will talk and involve in a discussion. I usually let the audience/students watch the work first, before presenting my own thoughts.

In my own artmaking, I’m sharing personal experience, feelings and thoughts. And if the audience feel related, that’s good. Then you and the audience are communicating on an artistic and somewhat spiritual level. If not, then so be it. Some people can understand you, some just don’t. It’s really not a problem at all.

The spirit of experimentation is in everything you’ve done, like the Experimental Musicians & Artists’ Cooperative (EMACM), Open Lab platform, and recently, KL Experimental Film and Video Fest (KLEX). Experimentation is linked to creativity, but so is that dirty word: failure. Can you tell us about experiencing failure, epic or otherwise?

‘Experimental’, and also DIY. Some of my works are experimental, while others are just alternative. By ‘alternative’ I mean it’s not mainstream or the ‘usual’, but nonetheless exists, and this is a fact. The minority is as important as the majority, as they both make up the whole picture.

A Chinese proverb says, “Failure is the mother of success”. And it’s very true. Failure makes you stronger, better, and you learn and improve. But it’s not a fixed entity, you see. From one angle it’s a failure, but from another angle it might not be so. It depends on how you see and work with this so-called ‘failure’. In improvised music, there’s hardly a “wrong note” as improvisation is an on-going process – it’s always changing, forming, transforming. You can bring a ‘wrong note’ to a whole different new dimension with new possibilities.

I’ve talked to you before about improvisation as something that’s important in both art and life. Could you give us instructions for a simple improv we can do right here, right now?

Play a ‘wrong note’, and see where it leads you!

I consume most of my media (news, entertainment, ideas, culture, art) on the Internet. The web is an explosion of sound, images and words. Lately I’ve been experiencing symptoms – inability to concentrate, lack of focus, constant hunger for information. Yet as an artist, I love that we have all these ways to connect and spread our ideas. What are you thoughts on this?

My thoughts on social media and the online culture, you mean? I think it’s a great way to connect and get informed. But one’s life shouldn’t exist only in the virtual world and be satisfied by looking at the computer screen and inside one’s mind, I think. As a human being living in a human society, I appreciate the physical connection with other human beings. I still think that you can only truly know a person with physical connections, by meeting face-to-face. That’s why I enjoy organizing events, and live performance.

Are you a feminist?

I’m a woman biologically; my womanly qualities are natural and part of me. I accept and I act with my natural self. I’d like to be regarded and respected as a “human”. That’s all. Labeling is not so important.

How have you found organizing events (Open Lab, Sama-Sama Guesthouse Mini Festival, KLEX) in relation to making your own art?

Definitely connected. An artist makes art about life in a human society. Artists and society are closely related. They affect each other. Personally, my artwork from my time in the States (1998-2005) are so different from my recent works after I moved back to Malaysia in 2005.

As an artist with an alternative, avant-garde interest in the arts, I find such work hardly gains understanding, exposure and support in Malaysia. It’s a smaller voice, but it does exist. It’s out of this internal sense of ‘mission’ to change the situation, to provide an alternative outlet for like-minded artists and audiences to see something different, that me and my peers started the initiatives. It’s very encouraging that through these initiatives, we got connected with many artists and musicians in the field internationally, and realize that we’re not alone. Everybody is struggling in his/her region, some already for many years, to remain the alternative, to not conform to the dominating majority. So we keep it up, too!

Something has been bugging me for a long time about the art profession in Malaysia: the fact that galleries and collectors often take months (sometimes years!) to pay artists for works that have been sold and delivered. Has this happened to you, or if you had to pick a specific problem you’ve encountered professionally, what would it be? What can be done to improve the situation?

To be honest, 80% of what I do is for free and I don’t get paid. If a project can break even, I’m very happy! I do art out of passion. To survive, I have a full time job. This actually makes the experience more ‘down-to-earth’.

Art funding is not easy because the importance of art is still not widely recognized. People here in general still regard art as something ‘extra’, like a hobby, an interest, but not a necessity. There are societies that realize art is an important entity to enrich culture and the quality of humanity. The state plays an important role in this case. I think in Georgetown, the situation is improving. It tries to inject art into peoples’ everyday life. This will create a general awareness of art as part of life, a necessity. Then, respect and support towards art will grow.

What’s next for you?

Well, basically continue doing what I’m doing now, juggling between teaching, making art and organizing art events. It’s already a way of my life! My current project is KLEX, in which this year will mark the 4th year. This project needs a year to prepare and it involves various pre-festival events throughout the year.

Thanks Siew Wai!

Everyone, please check out KLEX’s Facebook and website.

New brog! Important VS Urgent: Shahril Nizam, friend and artist

As I write this I don’t feel like writing at all. I don’t feel like putting another fucking word out into the world, which is full of words, photos, links, opinions and news, news, NEWS.

Supplication, 2013, oil on canvas.

The roads outside my house are crammed with political flags and propaganda. It’s hard to keep balanced. I don’t mean keeping balanced as a virtue in and of itself, I mean keeping balanced enough to feel like work is worth doing, that normal life is worth living. By normal I mean MY normal (in random order): friends, art, making, creating, thinking, talking, eating, shitting, FEELING.

Shahril Nizam is an old friend and an artist. You may or may not have heard of him. You may or may not have seen his work.

He painted my portrait:

Yellow, 2012, oil on canvas

He gave this painting to me a few weeks ago. It’s in my house in Port Dickson, waiting patiently until I finish my work on the elections here in KL.

I’ve been struggling alot with the difference between what’s important and what’s urgent. For example – campaign work is urgent, because it may lead to changing the government. But what’s important? It’s home, with its garden where the weeds are growing tall, and the snails are eating the mint. It’s my adopted little town, where I’m worried about my gardener who’s just gone for an eye operation, and the kopitiam auntie is waiting for me to do a portrait of her parents.

Wanna talk about important vs urgent? Nizam’s first solo exhibition is happening on nomination day. April 20th. That’s when candidates for the elections are announced.

The King of Dance, 2007, Ink on paper.

Zedeck wrote the truest description about Shahril’s art: ‘The works are gentle; they are kind, like a hand on a crying shoulder.’

Our house is filled with little drawings and paintings by him. It’s the kind of art you can live with; it grows with you over the years. His many sculptures, drawings and strange objects (he’s one of the most prolific artists I know) create a completely distinctive visual world filled with thought and emotion.

But it’s the portraits that ground his work – they’re subtle and revealing celebrations of his subjects. To me, the sombre joy you can detect in these portraits are key to understanding Nizam’s unique vision.

The Wait, 2013, 20cm x 20cm, acrylic and oil on canvas.

I think I understand the difference.

Urgent is what needs to be done NOW. The favorite working method is compromise. The favorite slogan is ‘by any means necessary’.

Important is what keeps us going. It’s what’s patiently waiting – at home, in your heart or in your imagination. It’s the source of your best and most passionate work.

I’m late. I’m expected at an urgent meeting. But fuck it. I had to write this, even though I’m exhausted and lazy and really didn’t feel like it.

You see, I couldn’t let it go.

It wouldn’t let me go.

See you all on the 20th!

Soil, 2012, mixed media

P.S. – Check out this interview between Nizam and OUR Art Projects’ Simon Soon, and listen to this podcast featuring Nizam on BFM’s The Bigger Picture.