portrait

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

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.’
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.

‘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?’
~

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.

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

A Portrait of Vivian Lee

In July last year, I drew a portrait of Alvivi.

Alvivi are Vivian Lee and Alvin Tan. I follow them online. It’s like following a meteor as it trolls brightly through the Internet, trailing controversy and naked pictures in its wake.

This time though, the stakes were different. It was Ramadan, the holy month. Alvivi uploaded a photo of themselves eating pork soup, wishing Muslims ‘happy breaking fast’, and included a HALAL logo in the corner.

The public outcry was intense. They were arrested, denied bail, sent to prison for 8 nights and charged with the Film Censorship Act, the Sedition Act and Section 298A of the Penal Code.

As is usual with controversies, especially ones online, and especially in Malaysia, you’re either for or against. I drew Alvivi’s portrait as an escape route, an attempt to look at them (and our reactions to them), differently. I wasn’t very successful. There is a limit to the insight you can gain when you only know your subjects through the Internet.

People interacting with “Vivian Lee, Social Portrait” at the exhibition opening.

That portrait eventually led to me meeting Vivian in person. She saw it and friended me on Facebook. Months later, I sent her a message asking: ‘Can we hang out? I want to make art about you.’

I’m not sure if she found it flattering, or creepy. Possibly both. Anyway, she said yes.

Meeting Vivian for the first time was surreal. My brain kept recalibrating the online image I had in my head with the reality of the human being, both simpler and more complex, in front of me. I’ll be honest – I was inclined to be sympathetic from the outset, and had trouble keeping my projections in check.

My affinity for Vivian comes not just from being a woman, but one whose life, work and self-image are closely tied to the Internet. I met my first boyfriend in an IRC chatroom (back in the earlier days of the Internet) when I was 16. Almost 2 decades later, the Internet is allowing me to build an independent art career by connecting me directly to my audience. At the same time, my Facebook feed shows me ads for weight loss and vaginal tightening creams because its algorithms predict that’s what I’m mostly likely to buy.

Vivian is 10 years younger than I am. She was about 11 or 12 when she first encountered the Internet. She started chatting over MSN Messenger, and moved on to the proto social network site Friendster. When she joined Facebook, she was extremely self-conscious and cautious about posting there because her family and friends shared the same network. Her mother, a conservative single parent, would nag her based on her status updates.

Photo by Nadia J Mahfix

Tumblr was different. The blogging and social media platform has relatively low usage amongst Malaysians. It was there that she and Alvin started their (now defunct) sex blog Sumptuous Erotica in 2012, which was followed by international fans and a handful of close friends. She spoke with sadness about no longer having the blog. She had lost a place on the Internet where she felt free to be, as she put it, ‘my true self’.

Vivian maintains she never wanted controversy or fame. She regrets that Alvin shared the link to their sex blog on forums like hardwarezone.sg, which led to it being picked up by Singaporean media. Whether he did so to connect with more like-minded people, or to boost the Alvivi signal online, is open to question. This sheds light on Alvin and Vivian’s relationship and the Alvivi ‘brand’ – while they may have differing approaches to fame and the Internet, they bear the outcomes of each other’s actions together.

Many accuse Alvivi of being low-rent attention seekers. But who’s really mining and exploiting our human attention spans? In today’s economy, ‘eyeball hours’ are the new raw minerals. Stock prices depend on views, likes and shares, while Youtube sensations leverage their millions of subscribers for lucrative partnerships with big brands. An indication of what Vivian does for web traffic: a photo posted to my Facebook page usually gets 200 – 600 views. A photo tagged with Vivian got 2,000. When The Star broke the story of Alvivi in Malaysia, it garnered record page views, and continued to feature them in print and online every day, for a week.

Photo by Masjaliza Hamzah

In the press and their social media channels, Alvin’s voice dominates. Negative comments on their Youtube videos reveal a marked difference in the way people perceive him compared to Vivian. He’s ‘wasting his future’, while she’s ‘stupid for being used by an asshole’. She said that most of the ‘shameful’ and ‘slut’ comments were directed at her. Even though Alvin was derided for embarrassing his family, she was seen as ‘incurring the most loss’ because no one would want her as a wife. It seems that women can’t even be harlots on their own terms; they’re bad not because they’re bad, but because they’re unmarriageable.

When I asked Vivian what she had learned about race and religion in Malaysia since the Ramadan pork soup controversy, she could not answer. I’m not sure if it was because she didn’t understand my question, or because there was nothing she had learnt. I rephrased: ‘what do you think about race and religion in general?’ She expressed frankly that she likes the fact that she’s Chinese, and that there must be reasons why people don’t like different races, for example: because Chinese are greedy, Malays are lazy and Indians are violent.

She felt that people should be less sensitive about race and religion, and wondered ‘why make such a big deal out of it?’ On the one hand, she seemed to buy into racial stereotypes. On the other, she felt that race and religion were forms of social control, and saw no difference between being offended by racial or religious self-expression and being offended by sexual self-expression.

Hello can you hear me? Photo by Maryann Tan

This is where my values differ from Vivian’s. Freedom of expression is a poor defense for holding and expressing racist views. Maintaining the right to individual self-expression, while expressing a group racial identity (e.g. Chinese eating pork soup) to address another group racial identity (e.g. Muslims fasting during the holy month), is hypocritical.

Vivian said if she had known that the consequences of posting the Ramadan picture were jail and criminal charges, she would not have done it. Not because it was hurtful or offensive, but because it was ‘not practical’. This is important. It tells us that criminalizing offense does nothing to impart understanding. It only enforces obedience based on fear. As long as we turn to repressive laws to manage our cultural differences, we will continue to live in fear.

Vivian’s racism does not diminish my affinity for her in other respects. Looking at her honestly enough to make a portrait that has a kernel of truth and meaning trains me to look at Malaysia the same way. The picture that emerges is complex: brave, ugly and challenging all at once. She is neither good nor bad, she is simply herself. Looking deeply into the individual, we may find a way to understand the whole.

We are all Vivian. Photo by Maryann Tan

Many thanks to Zedeck Siew, Danny Lim, Maryann Tan and Sunitha Janamohanan for editorial help on this essay.

The Good Malaysian Woman: Ethnicity. Religion. Politics is showing at Black Box, MAP Publika, from 18 – 25 May 2014.

Portrait of En. Raman

Mr. Raman is our gardener.

He comes round every month, sometimes more often, sometimes less. He cuts the grass, sweeps the leaves and clears the drains.

He’s built like a tree, solid and barrel chested. Our garden is a two-day job for him. He’s getting older now. He’s had several eye operations and wears big sunglasses when he works.

Once he tried to introduce me to another lady in the neighborhood who also employs him to keep her garden tidy. I think he thought I was lonely, since he only ever sees me sitting at my table hunched up over a drawing or my computer. Finally, I ran out of excuses and went to visit her. We had tea. She was very nice to me, but I got the strong impression we were both there to oblige our gardener.

The portrait shows him cutting down a bougainvillea tree that used to choke our front fence. It was a massive tangle of thorny branches that grew so high, it blocked out the street light. I remember him standing in the shadow of the bougainvillea, hacking away at its trunk with a small hand axe: Thwuck! Thwck! Twhuck! For some reason, that image is like chewing gum on the bottom shoe of my mind.

He invited us to his 68th birthday party yesterday! I rushed like crazy to finish the portrait in time. I gave him the drawing, but I’m not sure if his eyes can see it clearly. We met his family. Most of his children are in Port Dickson now, so he’s got company. He’s been a widower for many years.

I ate too many poppadoms at the party, which I am wont to do. And I tried not to be envious of his super cute garden, full of pretty plants. I want green thumbs, I get green eyes. WHY.

Happy birthday, Mr. Raman!

#Alvivi

Getting ready to ink #Alvivi’s portrait.

New brog! Ah Gow the Treecutter

Last week something important happened to me. Well two things. One of them I can’t actually talk about, except to say it involves illness and someone I love.

I mention it because my mind seems to associate the two memories closely, even though they’re completely unrelated. I was wondering why I couldn’t blog about this really cool thing. No matter how hard I tried, my brain just kept turning to mush. I suspect it’s because it happened at the same time as the traumatic event. To retrieve that memory, I can’t avoid going to the place of pain, as if they share the same room.

And I wonder… does it work the other way? Could the awesome memory make the sorrowful one more bearable? And going even further, thinking about how pain and joy accommodate each other, and how avoiding one means cutting off access to the other…

Anyway, I sit here, my heart full of both, and I’m glad I can finally get words out.

I’m glad I can finally tell you about Ah Gow the treecutter.

The garden was getting out of control. It was the decades-old durian tree that worried me most – an entire side was dying and hanging its huge, brittle branches over our roof. A storm had already blown down half the nangka tree in the front yard. It was a warning that we had better fucking deal with things, no matter how broke we were at the moment.

We got Ah Gow’s number from our neighbours, who hire him when their super tall coconut trees need harvesting. Ah Gow doesn’t have a monkey. He is the monkey. He climbs the tree and chops the coconuts down. Apparently he’s famous in Port Dickson for being THE MAN to call about anything tree related.

I was anxious. Even with Zedeck’s parents footing half the bill, we were spending money we didn’t really have. The last thing I wanted was a half-ass cowboy hacking away and leaving us a garden full of mutilated plants. I’ve seen city council workers pollarding trees along the road. It’s like shock treatment. The trees always look bald and terrible afterwards.

But sometimes you can tell straight away when someone is going to do a good job. It’s a certain quality. I tried to put my finger on what it was when Ah Gow came to look at the garden. He checked out everything – the trees, the house, the ground – nodding silently to himself now and then. He shook his head at the 3-storey tall Durian, and the monster bougainvilla rising up like a mythical bramble hedge, and the termite infested rambutan trees at the back. He confined his comments to (in Chinese) ‘haven’t looked after garden for awhile, issit?’. And seeing my worried face, threw in a gruff ‘Don’t worry. I can do. No problem.’ before he left.

First day. I expected him to roll up with a tractor, a cherry picker, a lorry … or SOMETHING. It was going to be a huge job. He showed up in his car carrying nothing but the following: two chainsaws (one big one small), a bunch of well-worn rope, machetes, a small hand axe and 3 helpers, one of them his son. He then proceeded to climb to the top of the first tree (a big Citrifolia, or pokok noni) and began to lope the branches off expertly with a chainsaw. In about 5 minutes, the whole thing was down to a stump.

And then I watched as he straddled and tied rope to a huge branch in the durian tree. Let me remind you this is 3 stories off the ground and over our precious roof. He began cutting into it. At the precise moment, he shouted to his son below (who was holding the other end of the rope) to ‘PULL! PULL!!’. The thing landed to earth with a shuddering thud, missing the roof (and the son) by inches.

I have never seen anything like it. It was fast, methodical and precise execution of dangerous and difficult work. The man knew exactly what he was doing and how to do it. It kind of took my breath away. Or maybe I just have a thing for elderly, mustachioed uncles who wear sneakers and have muscular forearms.

It was the skill that was dazzling. The rudimentary equipment made it clear as day what was getting the work done: timing, experience and knowledge – perfected and internalized to the point of instinct. By the second day, they had completely brought down 4 trees, and the Nangka and Durian (both huge) had been trimmed with a delicacy reserved for bonsais. They weren’t butchered or amputated. They looked… prettier.

Ah Gow told me he’d been doing his job for 40 years. ‘Climbing trees since I was ten years old’. He’s 58 now.

Maybe it’s nothing extraordinary, cutting a tree down, but something about the WAY he did it made you want to watch and pay attention. Why?

I think… it’s about TEXTURE.

QUALITY.

His work had both.

What produces that? And why is it important, when all you need is to get a job done?

I’m pretty sure about the answer to the first question. It’s time. Time and practice are what produce texture – because you find your own way of doing things. And quality? That comes from care and respect for your work, whether its fixing shoes, writing stories, building buildings, caring for sick people, raising kids, growing food, or painting pictures.

But I don’t know why it’s important. Maybe it’s far too romantic an approach to work in this capitalist industrial economy. All we care about is making sure people have a job, ANY job, even if it turns them into robots churning out STUFF that we don’t need. Somehow things like GDP and FDI matter so much more than the happiness and dignity of individual people. And that’s the thing isn’t it? Expanded markets don’t have texture. Key Performance Indexes don’t have texture. Produk Rakyat 1Malaysia (I saw this plastered on a bus today, I kid you not) doesn’t even know the meaning of texture.

Even getting ‘success’ in your chosen ‘industry’ doesn’t have texture or quality. They’re abstractions. But I think… initiative and ambition can lead you there, to the place where you make something real. That is, if you’re brave enough to act on it, and not get distracted by the siren songs of money or fame.

I don’t know why texture and quality and artfulness and beauty are important. I only know that I recognized it in Ah Gow and knew it was something I wanted for myself. I realize I’ve always been thirsty and searching for it, that quality. Finding it in the most unexpected places is reassuring, like a quiet message from the universe saying: This is the path. Keep going.

You know, his work didn’t come cheap. I mean, it wasn’t exorbitant, but it wasn’t cheap. He knew his own value. I think that’s rare, and getting rarer everyday.

On a whim, I drew Ah Gow’s portrait. Then I got REALLY shy and almost chickened out of giving it to him. Better just to put it on the internet. Get some likes. Safe. No risk. But Zedeck said ‘you have to! you have to!’, so I did.

He looked at it, puzzled and suspicious. ‘What’s this? Ha?’

My heart sank.

Then all of a sudden, in a tone of complete surprise, he grinned and said, ‘That’s me!’