Antid Oto #3: Penjahit/Penjahat

antidote003_web

I love the romance of rebellion; I could drink the beauty and glamour of courage for days. But lately, it hasn’t been enough. I don’t think it ever was, for me. I’ve started to think about resistance as slow, banal, steady work – stitch by stitch rebuilding, reworking, remaking.

Jahit in Malay means ‘sew’, jahat means ‘bad’. Pen- is the suffix that turns them into nouns: penjahit is a person who sews, penjahat is a person who does bad things.

~

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. 

Antid Oto #2: #KitaLalang

antidote002_web

The hashtag #KitaLawan appeared in February, after Anwar Ibrahim was convicted of sodomy and sent to jail for the second time. In the beginning, I saw both #KitaLawan and #KamiLawan being used, which was interesting.

‘Kita’ and ‘kami’ are collective pronouns meaning ‘we’, but the latter is closer to ‘us’ – an other, i.e. a ‘them’, is explicit when using ‘kami’. Thus, ‘negara kita’ means ‘the country belonging to all of us’, while ‘negara kami’ means ‘the country belonging to us, not including you/them/other people’.

The image of bright yellow lalang growing over a Barisan Nasional banner has hovered in my mind since 2013. It sometimes comes into sharp focus, but I’ve yet to pin it down. This was an experiment cutting lalang out of scrap pieces of yellow fabric – a patchwork of resistance, a loose web against an unchanging background.

~

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. 

We are the weeds with fire

seditionhand_eng
I’ve wondered what it was like to be grown-up during Operasi Lalang. I was 7 that year – truly a child of Mahatir, who came into power in 1981, and ordered the government crackdown on political dissidents and activists in 1987. Over a hundred people were arrested under the Internal Security Act, and many of them got sent to jail.

People who lived through that time are calling this recent spate of arrests and convictions under the Sedition Act ‘Ops Lalang 2‘. Lim Kit Siang blogged about a “…climate of fear in the country, as if we are in the midst of a ‘white terror’…” Ambiga Sreenevasan declared to rousing applause at a forum: “…We are no ‘lalang’ (weed). We’re going to stand up today.”

Perhaps the confusion and fear in 1987 was the same as ours is now. Maybe parents chided in lowered voices about being careful what you write or say, at least until ‘this blows over. You never know.’

The same but not the same.

In 1987, we didn’t have the Internet. We didn’t have these amazing magic machines, which let you write, take photos, make music, shoot video and then connect it instantly to the whole wide world. The same machines with which you could start a fire, or a spark of hope, and watch it spread, or flickering, die, only to revive again, like those magic birthday candles that refuse to go out.

My favorite journalist in the West, Quinn Norton, has called the net the ‘Promethean substance of this age. It can consume, it can destroy, and it can empower. Like fire, we have to learn to use it and live with it.’

If you’re an artist, or a writer, if you keep a blog, or have an FB profile or Twitter account, whether you scribble the workings of your heart, or work all night drawing scary hands (because dammit it is fun), you wield a tiny part of this power. Now is the time to use it.

In contradiction to Ambiga’s words, though not, I believe, their spirit, I say: We ARE the weeds. We are the weeds with fire. We’re sending smoke signals across the net to find each other, and our hands are moving faster than theirs can catch.

seditionhand_bm

 

Click images to enlarge and download. You’re free to share or print these images as many times as you like, for non-commercial purposes.

Read this: Seven things to know about the Sedition Act

Join this: Gerakan Hapus Akta Hastan

Follow this hastag: #MansuhAktaHasutan

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

~

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

draw_01_tents

5arts_FB_tables

~

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

~

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

~

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

~

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

~

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. 

Lalang dress

Reimagining my Bunga Bersih dress (now completely deflowered) as a possible prototype for a Lalang Dress. Those are cutoffs from the cardboard grass stencils I made last week.

In art, one thing usually leads to another. Which means: 1) don’t throw anything away 2) make things, even though (especially if) the first idea isn’t perfect.