Animals! Animals! Animals! Prints! Prints! Prints! (in progress)

Here is a taste of what I’ve been working on for the past few weeks, in a little attic studio at the top of Hotel Penaga, where I’ve been artist/parasite-in-residence since mid-May.

These linocut illustrations for Zedeck’s ‘Local Fauna’ story collection have been in progress for two years. I checked the date of the very first sketch I made, and it was 2 Dec 2014:

rainmakerfrog_sketch

In 2015, we pasted the first 10 linocut designs that I finished on bus stops around Jalan Pudu, and later some of them were collected in Little Basket, the new anthology of Malaysian writing published by Fixi Novo.

Now, I’m at 20 linocut designs, and we printed editions of all of them! There is no part of these prints that my (and Zedeck’s) hands haven’t touched. We pulled them by hand, with pitch-black oil-based ink on handmade Thai mulberry paper, and a ton of elbow grease. Both ink and paper are beautiful. I caught myself wondering if making linocuts was just a way to show off the raw beauty of those age-old materials… you get weird thoughts during the long hours of printmaking.

So we are doing an exhibition! It’s at Run Amok Gallery in Georgetown, which is an art space and collective run by friends we love. It opens tomorrow. There are 20 linocuts, and we’re selling some editions to raise funds for a book. Yes, we are making a book, tentatively called ‘Local Flora, Local Fauna’. It will have 50 animal stories and 25 plant stories by Zedeck, and each of them will have an illustration by me… so 20 linocuts down, 55 to go…

Here are some of the prints in the exhibition. Interested in buying a print? Email info AT runamok DOT my for the full catalog. We’re taking international orders too. 

Update 25 July 2016: The full catalogue of prints is now online. Please visit: http://runamok.my/localfauna/

01localfauna_mustachedmacaque 02localfauna_firecrackercrow

03blocalfauna_terrapin
04localfauna_mudskipper 05localfauna_obligationworm

 

Maybe after all the prints are gone we will finally be able to get some sleep? Until the next round of printing…

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How To Be Free: Wu Ma and the Tools of Prolonged Daily Use

WuMa
I met Wu Ma at the thieves’ market in Georgetown.

He’s 87. For the past 30 years, he’s been drawing pictures everyday.

He rents a small shack where he lives alone. His neighbours watch out for him. When he dies, they will buy the coffin – ‘棺材! You know or not?’ – and burn his body. ‘No need to burn nonsense like incense and money. All that ghost stuff, I don’t believe.’

The drawings are in piles, in clear plastic bags. Horses with laughing faces and strange proportions gallop across white space. Mysterious figures hide in caves or behind foliage. There are shadowy ghosts and ghouls, as well as plain, austere landscapes. Those are my favorite.

At one point, after chattering on about the materials he uses, most of which I couldn’t understand, he suddenly unscrewed his water bottle and flung its contents over the drawings I’d taken out of their bags to look at. ‘Aghhhh! Nooo!’ I squealed, horrified. My arms stretched out to prevent more splashing. He shook the moisture off a drawing and laughed. ‘No problem! You see? This is a good painting. Water can’t do anything.’WuMa01
He was born in China. He came to Malaya with his parents when he was a little boy. ‘My papers are red. I’m half a person of here, half a person of there.’ I asked if he had gone back since then. He shook his head and frowned. ‘No, no. Bad memories. People are lucky now. So lucky! It was horrible then. Parents would sell their children. I was the only one my parents didn’t sell. And for what? Some jars of sesame oil and bags of rice!’

His bicycle was parked behind him. I tried to charm him: ‘Is that your horse, uncle?’ ‘Huh? Oh! Hahaha! Yes. I ride it everyday! Draw and ride bicycle, that’s all I do. Now doctor says I have to eat less meat, because of my – ‘, pointing to his liver. ‘The doctor at the hospital is good. They take care of people like me who have nothing.’

I wanted to talk to him until the world ended, but I had to go. We were meeting Fan Chon from Run Amok gallery for dinner. I picked three paintings and asked how much.

WuMa02

‘Three paintings. For you, discount. XX ringgit. So, you want me to sign them?’

He opened a rectangular tin and showed it to me. ‘You see? These are the things I use to make rice!’ His box of tools – the outside and everything in it – was stained black. It was the patina of time, and love. Your tools have to earn that kind of patina. The only way to get it is prolonged daily use.

He dipped a well-worn Chinese brush into a small round tin filled with black goop, and wrote his name and the year on each picture. Then he put them into a plastic bag, handed it to me and smiled. When I tried to slip in an extra XX ringgit, he shut me down immediately. ‘I said XX, and I meant XX! I don’t change my mind. Take it!’

I noticed that the people around him were smiling. When I left, the surly looking uncle who was selling stuff opposite waved to me and said: ‘Come again next time, har?’WuMa03
~

Some notes:

– The thieves’ market is at the corner of Lebuh Armenian and Carnavon. It’s a gritty, slightly dodgy looking place, a patch of the city claimed by locals and migrant workers to sell or trade just about anything you can imagine. Phone chargers, remote controls, half a telephone, broken toys, used clothes and shoes… all salvaged from the detritus of modern life. Part of the reason Wu Ma made such an impression on me is because the atmosphere of the market was palpably different to the rest of Georgetown, which feels to me like a picturesque heritage themepark, where everything is consciously on display.

– Wu Ma and I chatted in Mandarin. Some of that language has stuck to my bones after 6 years in Chinese primary school. I can grasp context and syntax very well, but my vocabulary is poor. I probably understood him to about 70 percent accuracy.

– The ‘Ma’ in Wu Ma’s name = horse.

– Over dinner, I was astonished and delighted when Fan Chon told me Run Amok’s first show was an exhibition featuring Wu Ma! Nothing says more about the vision and kick-ass indie spirit of this awesome art space. I’m hatching plans to do something there next year. Seriously, check out Run Amok!

– Fan Chon told me that Wu Ma prices his works according to how much he needs at the moment. I am aligned with this approach, having used it myself, so I won’t reveal what I paid, except to say that it was very affordable. If you buy Wu Ma’s art, I think you should pay whatever he asks, not more, not less.

wuma_portrait
First three paintings by Wu Ma. Above: Portrait of Wu Ma by me.

Roadtrip brog! Crying at sunsets, crying at Sigur Ros

Hello, you. Hello from a quiet little hotel in Kuantan. Hello from the East Coast – monsoon country this time of year, and just unfamiliar country to me generally.

My car tells us we’ve travelled about 2000 kilometers so far. I wish that number made more sense to me. I’m sure it will in time. Everything seems to be travelling at different speeds – the blog and my life, my body and my head. One of them arrives first (usually my faithful, serviceable body) and has to shout at the rest: will you hurry the fuck up?

Ok, now. Right now. It’s raining, of course. Zedeck’s beside me, working on story no. 81. Sometimes I suspect we went on this roadtrip just so he could write and I could blog from different rooms with different views.

There’s so much I have to tell you. How to measure the journey?

Well, there’s been alot of junkfood. The road has been paved with nuts, Cheezels, cigarettes, chips, prawn crackers (my weakness and poison), bubble tea, all manner of fried and crispy food; sudden blasts of SUGARY SWEET! and then…SALTY! It’s all starting to make me feel run down and… squishy. I’m lugging around more belly than I’m used to. This is ok.

There’s been GOOD food too. Malaysians? We fucking ROCK at food.  It’s like we’ve reserved all our passion, creativity, sensitivity, attention to detail, sexiness, joy and unabashed embracing of the new and strange, and squeezed it into soups and little luscious morsels and deep complex curries and sauces and weird-ass things like rojak and and and…

At a kopitiam in Ipoh: this perfectly silky, french-chef-worthy, creme caramel pudding. I may never forget it. Blessed (or cursed) never to visit Ipoh again without thinking about it.

Just like whenever I go to Penang, I need to go to this beach in Balik Pulau. I know there are a thousand prettier places in the world, but this one’s mine. When I’m on this patch of earth, I’m complete. I mean, ‘complete’ like on a fucking cellular level. It’s like being with an old, old, old friend.

This time, we got there in evening. The sun was going down and the light was on the water. I stared out at the open sea and suddenly I started crying. When Zedeck wandered over and asked what was up, all I could say in a half-embarrassed sniffle-whisper was: ‘It’s just so beautiful’.

I felt like Double-Rainbow Guy, the sad Asian knock-off version.

Zedeck gets this, he gets me. I love him for it.

Also on the list of Things That Made Sharon Cry for Happy-Unexplainable-But-Really-Good reasons: seeing Sigur Ros play at Urbanscapes. I’m not even that huge a fan, but the music got to me.

Doesn’ t matter if you don’t let it in.

It’ll steal inside you like a thief, that thing, the beautiful thing.

It’s 3AM. Good night, now, dearest people.

Love,
Sharon