Makenarten

New brog! Art, Life, Books, Love

Sorry for the lack of postings this week, dear readers. I’m back in Port Dickson after 10 days in KL. My trips to the city always turn me upside down, inside out. The first thing that greeted me when I got home on a rainy Saturday night was the sound of a cricket in the garden.

I don’t hear the crickets in the city. But I’m sure they are there.

Also in the city are weeds and stray cats. And fruiting trees. I noticed one in Taman Tun and made Zedeck jump up to grab a low hanging fruit.

It started bleeding sticky white sap immediately. I wonder what tree it is? Every neighbourhood should have an avenue of edible fruit trees – mango, mangosteen, rambutan, papaya, banana. Maybe not durian because they can be lethal.

This is going to be a totally random, grab-bag of a blog.

I went to Readings and listened to Zedeck tell stories from his book-in-making.

We argue all the time about the advantages and disadvantages of our respective art forms. What I envy about writers and their books is the total portability of their work. The ease of physical access. You can keep it on your bag or pocket. When people ask you what you’ve done, you can take it out and say: here it is. The whole thing, the labour and the craft and the dream.

On the other hand, writing it is a supremely lonely task. You can’t just have someone read a page in progress, not like you can show someone a sketch or painting study.

How do you make art portable? How do you fit the world in your pocket? I’ve thought about this for a long time. I think it’s why I’m making a video game for my Epic Project.

After Readings, we saw a huge mushroom growing by the roadside. It looked like a naan bread. Possibly deadly? It would be wonderful to have a companion guide to all the weeds and fungus growing in the city. I mean, not just for utilitarian purposes (e.g. to eat), but to actually know the city in a different way. Like seeing a friend (or enemy) in another light.

Me and Zedeck went to the bookshop and bought alot of books. Mine are for Epic Project research – anarchism and color theory. I love this part of art making – the learning. It’s like doing a university course in what obsesses you at the moment, only there are no exams, credits, rules or deadlines. The books become your lecture hall. The work is the laboratory.

I’ve dreamed about doing this all my life. I had a very hard time in school. I always did well enough get to through, but I never excelled. Just didn’t know what I liked or didn’t like. Mostly I was driven by fear of failure. But I wasn’t very good at failure either! Stuck somewhere in the middle. Dry.

I used to think about suicide all the time. Maybe everyone does. People like to call it teenage angst. Dismiss it. Maybe that’s why we keep such thoughts to ourselves. Lots of shame and guilt attached to those thoughts. Sometimes I would run my mind in circles, telling myself I was acting out a drama, that these feelings were all about getting attention, so I should snap of it. You know, be normal.

More and more, I think what we share is this element of knowing pain. No matter how privileged or destitute we are. First World or Third World.

It took me a very long time to find out what I wanted to do. I had help, luck, education, privilege, family. And it boggles the mind how much I still stumbled around, lost and dry.

All the way, the things that helped were books, art and being in love with nature. It was like a well that never went dry. It kept on feeding me, and still does. Being able to add to that well with my own work has been my strength and joy.

When I’m done making things and saying things, I’d like to build a library with a garden that people can use for free. Not a grand place with millions of books, but a modest little open house, with windows and open doors, where weeds can grow. It won’t be out of the way, it’ll be close to people, full of people.

Lately, me and Zedeck have been talking about whether we’ll stay here in Port Dickson. The short answer is: we don’t know.

There are many things still to do, for us. In the city and everywhere. Going to KL every couple of weeks fucks up the rhythm of my life, but I never wanted to be a hermit. No, me and hermitry don’t go. Art itself is basically a great way to be with people…

Hah! I like that. Forget about Art for The People, long live Art to Be With People.

This is a good house. It takes care of us and helps us do our work.

When I was in KL, we celebrated my best friend Poop’s birthday.

Here’s another one of us:

Poop is an engineer. You might say we’re diametrically opposed in all things. It’s a strange and beautiful fucking friendship. We were talking about my recent discovery of anarchism and how she felt she was growing more conservative as she got older. I said I’d rather hang out with a thinking conservative than a fanatic anarchist any day.

I didn’t tell her that a thinking conservative (or a thinking anything, really) IS an anarchist.

Sneaky me.

I also collected some prints of the photographs that were on the 7 year old roll of film I blogged about last week. Zedeck helped me come up with the title: Pickled Stones. Direct translation into Malay would be ‘Batu Jeruk’, which seems to mean live corals in Indonesian. Perfect.

Two of these are going to be in a fund-raising exhibition at House of Matahati next week. The proceeds are going towards MARS (Malaysian Art Archive and Research) – a non-profit research center for Malaysian art. I got a peak at the newly built wall-to-wall book shelves at the Center:

Isn’t it a thing to behold? The only way this room can get any cooler is when the shelves are all filled up.

That was my life for the past week, dear people. Fucking full to the brim. And I didn’t even include the family trouble.

How is yours going? Tell meeeee…

Love, Sharon

New brog! The Strange Power of Time

First, a plug! Zedeck is reading some stories from his epic book-in-making this Saturday, 27 Oct at Seksan’s. Come witness this pre-birth. More info here.

(Btw, if you don’t know, Zedeck is my non-husband and fellow inhabitant of leaky magical house in Port Dickson. Oh, he is a writer. Rather a good one, I think.)

Now, a story for you. I’ll keep the words short, and let the photos tell it.

In 2005, I had my first solo exhibition, Boats & Bridges. Back then, Reka Art Space was a great little gallery in Kelana Jaya. It was run by Sek Thim, who was very supportive but tough-minded. He was the kind of mentor I needed at the time. I had just come back from overseas and was a bundle of nervous energy. People who spend a long time away have this thing called ‘returner-angst’. I had alot of that.

Department of embarrassing and devastating memories: the night before my exhibition opened, I found out the person I had been hopelessly in love with in Australia had found someone else. I was a wreck. Halfway through discussing some exhibition detail, I started blubbing. It wasn’t pretty crying either, where perfect tears creep slowly down your face. It was horrible, snot-everywhere sobbing. Sek Thim packed me off home and reassured me everything would be ok.

Opening night was a success. Many people came. All the works sold out. I got happy-sad drunk and cried to sleep when I reached home.

I always associate my pride and joy in that first exhibition with the memory of gut-wrenching desperate sorrow. They kind of balance each other on a scale in my mind.

The high of the high is measured by the depth of the low. This is how it is.

So much for keeping the words short. Sorry.

For the exhibition, I’d made these weird shapes by pouring plaster-of-paris into plastic bags, and then peeling the bag off once the plaster had hardened. They were so cute! They were like little animals, little grey THINGS made from gravity and weight.

After the exhibition, I had an overwhelming feeling of not wanting to hold on to the THINGS. I thought it would be nice to distribute the THINGS all over the city. My friend Nazim (an excellent photographer and filmmaker) agreed to come along on this art littering/adventure and take pictures.

So that’s what we did at some ungodly hour of the morning. We dropped the THINGS at roadsides, at my old secondary school, a shopping mall, a carpark, the National Art Gallery (gotta get in there somehow). We put some in Dataran Merdeka, where homeless people were sleeping under the Malaysian flag. The last stop was Reka. It was dawn. I left a big grey THING there for Sek Thim as a tribute to what he had helped me start.

Nazim brought two cameras. He shot mostly on the digital, but also handed me a roll of 35mm film at the end, which I forgot all about.

Last week, I found it lying at the bottom of a box. These photos were on the roll.

Seeing them is like drinking a fine, aged wine. Memories, colours, even certain smells, come washing over me in a strangely potent combination. I love how age has caused these ‘stretch marks’ over the images, like on a woman’s hips (well, MY hips, anyway).

My iphone does so many things. But it can’t do this.

Wouldn’t it be cool if we shot a roll of film every year and promised only to develop them at a certain point in the future? I imagine rows and rows of them sitting in a cupboard somewhere, waiting.

But in the meantime, we would have to make sure there was someone around to process them. There could be an instruction scroll, handed down from generation to generation. It would be like… that boy dude in Terminator. THE ROLLS. OF FILM. HELD HER DESTINITY.

*dun dun DUNNN*

I wonder if anyone found the THINGS and took them home?

P.S. – Looking to develop film in Malaysia? Someone has compiled a good list here. I processed mine at Fotosun, SS2 (they will scan the negatives and put them on a CD for RM12). I’m printing some of these out for an exhibition next month. Hands down the best place for professional, archival quality photographic prints is Photomedia in SS2.

Art proposals: Why they’re Difficult, and Important

I’ve spent the last few days trying to finish a proposal for my epic art/multimedia/videogame/genre-busting/enterprise project.

As usual, it’s eating up more time and sweat than I thought it would. First steps always do. They’re the litmus test. If you can’t get past this stage, how are you going to hold up to the rest of the journey?

Halfway through, in a one of those fits of despair-clarity (desclarity? clarpairity?) I tweeted: Proposal writing is like pushing a dream through the sieve of reality.

No matter what project you’re trying to birth, this is one of the most difficult things to do. It’s also one of the most important.

I’ve written probably more than a dozen proposals – for myself and others. Hanim used to call me ulat proposal or the proposal worm. I like that. A worm is the right thing emulate. You’re in the darkness, turning the soil, working hard, trying to prepare the ground where (hopefully) your 250ft Tualang tree is going to grow.

Be a worm, my comrades!

I’ve realized that the ones closest to your heart are the hardest to write. This year is the first time in a long, long while that I’ve written proposals for myself, not as an application for a grant, residency or external opportunity of some kind. There’s no deadline, except the passing of the days, the realization that… FUCK, is it October already?… the end of the year is coming.

I’ve talked a lot about this epic project to friends – how it’s going to be a total shift, what it’s going to take, the outfit I plan to wear at the launch. But writing it down sets it in stone. No turning back. It becomes real, to you.

So real that, as I was scheduling the work plan and budget, my heart started pounding uncontrollably. ‘Chill the fuck out’, I ordered my brain. ‘It’s art, not saving lives.’

The enormity of the task felt overwhelming, and also slightly ridiculous. Was it right to dedicate so much effort to realizing a personal vision? Did it not smell a little of hubris? Selfishness? I saw a wave coming towards me, completely swallowing up my life for months, perhaps even years. Shouldn’t I use this life towards a greater good? Art… pffft.

These are the kind of powerfully stupid thoughts that kill worthy dreams before they even start. Where do they come from? I cringe as I write them down. Do you get them?

I can’t really answer whether art is more important than say, education or saving the environment or bringing down a corrupt government. But I do know this: many best efforts go awry, and many good intentions do harm. So how? I don’t know. I’ve chosen the Taoist/anarchist route: do what only you can do. What no one else can do. Keep to that, and maybe I’ll do less wrong. Who knows, perhaps I’ll even do some good in the bargain.

Incidentally, that last paragraph is basically what the Epic Project (that what I’ll call it from now on, until I’m prepared to reveal the proper title) is all about.

Fucking hell. I figured it out. I was dead stuck at the ‘Project Context and Significance’ part of the proposal. That’s it. Taoism. Anarchism. Doing only what you can do.

God, I love blogging. Thank you, imaginary readers. You help me in unimaginable ways.

Now back to proposal writing.

Why is it difficult? Because it’s a start.

Why is it important? So that you can see what you need to finish.

I started to calm down as I plowed through the business plan and working schedule. I broke it down into parts, and then into smaller parts. I cut out anything that wasn’t absolutely essential, then thought hard about what I could realistically accomplish, and gave myself more time. I took a deep breath and I thought…

I can do this. I think.

Pics: I was in Sabah recently and went on a canopy walk amongst Tualang trees that were as hard as rock, and hundreds of years old. I felt like a little seed invited to a party by living ancients. It was cool.

A very long P.S. –

From a professional artist point of view, writing clear and effective proposals is a skill well worth developing. It takes practice, but it can be done. The question is, do you want to do it, and do you need to?

Many artists have difficulty describing their work in words. It feels unnatural, something of a ‘mistranslation’ when you want your art to speak for itself. If you want to pursue the path of getting gallery exhibitions, grants, funding or residencies, you need to write good proposals. This is because the intersections of art, commerce and social-economic development are getting more complicated and sophisticated. It’s a bureaucratic jungle. If artists want to grow there, they have to justify their work in terms of objectives, goals and wider social significance.

There are choices, other paths to take. That’s not the only way to be an artist. You can focus on engaging your audience the way YOU want to, by talking about your art the way YOU want to, and so gain more autonomy through self-representation. That’s what I’m trying to do with this blog.

However! Whether it’s for a selection committee or for personal use, writing a proposal is a helpful tool (whatever the ‘project’, e.g. running a marathon, writing a cookbook, starting a recycling campaign, planning an urban garden, etc). It kicks the logical, analytical, left-brain part of yourself into gear. It sends a clear signal to your central system: no kidding around. I. AM. Doing. This. Because this is how I’m going to do it.

So, try it out. There are some good tips out there on the interweb.

I’m thinking of doing a practical guide on How To Write a Project Proposal. I mean, a proper one, with templates and real instructions. Drop me an email or a comment if you think that’s a good idea.

The Gates and Grilles of Malaysia

Over the weekend, I played around on Pinterest.

I uploaded all the photos of house gates I’ve been taking over the past few months.

I still don’t know exactly why I’ve been collecting gates. They’ve been sitting in my phone, accumulating digital dust.

My favorite one. What a beauty. Petaling Jaya.

Assembling them on Pinterest has been surprisingly useful. I can see a visual idea developing. Will it turn out to be sweet song or thundering fart?

So much of art is waiting, stirring the pot.

Stir, stir, stir.

I think gates would make good graffiti, especially over existing graffiti.

A mural of gates. A tribute to all the places we can’t go, all the things we keep locked up and protected, all the people we keep out.

Kuala Lumpur

I like using Pinterest as a tool to document, observe and understand. I’m not so hot on the marketing and social part.

Warning! If you’re just grazing around the interweb, looking for random grass to chew, Pinterest has the time-suck potential of a small blackhole. In other words, if you have work or life needs doing, APPROACH WITH CAUTION.

There’s a lot of talk about Pinterest monetizing and leveraging off the collective creative soup out there on the internet… turning it into a finte resource like privatized water, or bottled oxygen.

Some very good links here and here, about Pinterest’s ethical grey areas, and the importance of creating a culture of proper attribution on the internet.

Room to let. They want a Chinese Female only.

New brog! One Person, Bersih3.0, and Using Art

Hello dear readers, I spent the weekend trying to write this blog so it could go up yesterday.

You see, I had A PLAN.

Mondays I would post updates from the frontlines of Making Art Happen – all the stuff that goes on in my head and heart. I would call it Makenarten Mondays.

Wednesdays I would post geeky How Tos – practical, technical, mildly tutorial type things, which would also veer into strange territory like the last post.

Fridays I have a surprise brewing, which is not ready yet. I promise it is cool, and importantly, contains things other than ME.

But, as you cannot fail to notice, it is already Tuesday. I am late. Fuck. Beautiful plan is no longer pretty and perfect. So maybe instead of doing what I always do, which is makenplannen, I’m going to try to makenhappen this first and see where it goes.

Ok? Ok.

Warning: this is going to be long and messy.

I’ve realized that blogging works best the closer it is to now. Fresh dung is golden, stored up things get stale and heavy. But I want to blog about #bungaBERSIH and Bersih3.0.

It’s been months since the momentous day of the street rally. I finally feel like I can talk about it. There were a lot of voices and opinions in the lead up to 28 April – how people felt, how they didn’t feel, analyses, reflection, criticism, resistance. It just went on and on, like a bursting river of pent-up emotion. It was fucking elemental.

I’ll be honest, part of me wanted to hide and drop out. Not because I was above it all, but because I couldn’t fucking hear myself think or feel. I can’t have been the only one. (Introverts of Malaysia, you feelin’ me?)

This is where art saves me. It gives me something to do. It can be (I emphasize CAN be) an expression of the self that doesn’t try to win over or control others.

There were calls for creative people to ‘use our art for a good cause.’

I didn’t know how to deal with that. Here’s the thing. I’m not neutral politically. I’m comfortable with politics – it’s part of living as a citizen in the world. I’ve also been on the far end of this ‘using art’ spectrum, having spent a brief stint making actual political propaganda. It was a good experience. I got paid for it. I might do it again, if the spirit moves me.

But something about the idea of ‘using’ art fills me with dread. I think it’s because if you believe there’s ‘useful’ art, then you also believe there’s ‘useless’ art. I can’t buy into that. I don’t accept that art of higher moral standing is more valuable, and I’m wary of anyone who says it is.

Back in 2011, I designed some posters supporting Bersih2.0. I felt like I was serving a greater cause. But deep down I knew I had done it for myself (as with, ultimately, all my art making) – maybe for attention, to feel righteous, to be somehow visible during this historical moment. That doesn’t mean I’m not proud and glad that these posters exist in the world.

There is a line. And it’s NOT about not crossing it, because to understand anything, you need to go everywhere. It’s about keeping track, making sure it’s there. What is this line? I don’t know. But I think – and this is a theory – it lies in this question and how honestly you can answer: why are you doing this?

For Bersih3.0, I knew I wanted to make a costume of some kind.

When I was in Spain last year, I saw someone dressed up as a Mystic from The Dark Crystal in the Puerta del Sol. I dropped a coin into his/her tin and the Mystic did a little dance for me. I kissed it on the nose and went on my way. It was a beautiful moment that made me indescribably happy. My mom took a video. If I find it, I’ll post it up.

I decided to make a yellow dress covered in bunga (flowers) to give away.

On the eve of the rally, a few of us stayed over at Shahril Nizam’s place in the heart of KL. (Shahril is one of my favorite people, and an amazing artist) We spent the day sewing and pinning hundreds of ribbon flowers to the dress.

Shahril’s kitchen table on 27 April. The hot glue flowed and so did the bubble tea:

28 April came. I watched the dawn from Shahril’s window:

Bersih3.0 was one the best days of my life – for a few hours, all the invisible walls between art, audience, and power dissolved. People loved the dress, it seemed to make them happy and that made me happy. So much love, no explanations needed. I remember thinking: how do I make art be like this, always?

I kept putting off the moment of giving out the flowers because I wanted to ride the high… and then, suddenly, the tear gas hit. It was chaos. When rumours of violence started trickling in via twitter, we left the scene. The flowers stayed on the dress. I took it home and hung it on my studio wall to remind me of that incredible day.

Now, enter part two. (Sorry, I told you this was going to be long. Stay with me, ok?)

A few months later, the editor at Esquire Malaysia emailed asking if I’d be part of their Media Art Project: interview, photo shoot, exhibitions in three different venues, and feature in their Artsy Fartsy August issue.

I turned them down. I even drew a little chart weighing the pros and cons (I am a total dork. I really am) and concluded that I needed to be getting on with the epic art project I have planned for 2013.

But in a fit of perversity, I said I’d do it if they featured the yellow Bersih dress. To my surprise, it was a yes. They’re a game old bunch, over at Esquire. See, they even let me hold a bag of salt (salt neutralizes tear gas) in the photo shoot:

I made A LOT more flowers for the dress, and numbered each one by hand. All 345 of them. I decided to be absent for the exhibitions. Partly because I didn’t want to leave Port Dickson, partly as an experiment in making art happen remotely, from a distance. I prepared an information board that told people to ‘liberate’ a flower, and to email/tweet me which number they got, using the tag #bungaBERSIH.

I was looking forward to the same rush of interacting with strangers that I got at Bersih3.0, only this time, virtually.

A few good friends (bless their souls) emailed and tweeted me their flowers. The wonderful Esquire intern (@ShawalRas) sent me sweet messages about how everyone loved the dress. No one outside my familiar circle got back to me.

By the night of the second exhibition, the silence from my inbox was deafening. I think what made it worse was that I wasn’t there in person to see how people were engaging with the dress. On my end, it felt like a total failure. I was crushed.

The next day, I got an email from someone I didn’t know. It was a single line:

‘Hey, nice show. I got flower #_____.’

One person.

That one email made me cry. I realized that when people take your art, it’s actually a gift. And if they ever let you know how it made them feel, that stuff is priceless beyond anything. That lone email was as important as to me as the reactions of the huge crowd at Bersih.

One person. That’s all we’ll ever be.

It’s everything!

P.S. If you’d like to liberate a flower, write to me at sharon@mail.sharonchin.com. Tell me your address and I’ll send you one (yes, through the post office, in the real world), wherever you are.

P.P.S. Check out the #bungaBERSIH Liberators List here.