Big Funny Energy at the ILHAM Art Show 2022

In ILHAM’s first show featuring living, contemporary artists in years, the most frequent remark I’ve heard about it is that it’s “cramped”. There’s not enough space to view or photograph the works properly and the recent surge in crowds and visitors lured in by TikTok have only made the show even more tight and crowded, even more of a spectacle.

I love it though. I just love cramped and chaotic shows, I love spectacular shows, I love when people end up bumping into the artworks, it makes the experience so hot and bothered and absurd.

I like it because I like curated mess, I like lived-in spaces, I like details. I like works and presentations that seem chaotic but are actually very neat up close. I just moved into a new house, while a friend of mine just moved out of his, his old house being one of my favourite living spaces. In his house, paintings were hung on the walls all the way up to the ceilings and little detritus made space on the bookshelves along with dust bunnies; meaningless trinkets abounded everywhere but in an organised manner. His home is how I always imagined a home should look like — like its owner actually enjoys living in it and filling it up with all his possessions. I like the ILHAM Art Show because I hate IKEA. I like it because it feels lived in, it feels like people were really trying to tell you something about themselves.

The show opens, rather intimately, with Kim’s skin clock, titled Skin Time 1119, a work among my personal favourites in the show. It shows the present time, from 11am to 6pm (the gallery’s opening hours), stamped onto the artist’s skin. Each image, a close-up of the numbers in serif font embossed lightly on various parts of the artist’s body, stays for a minute before they tick on. It reminded me of the works of the Japanese-American artist On Kawara, whose works I find beautiful for their uncomplicated relationship to the passage of time. In contrast to the On Kawara-esque structured simplicity of Kim’s skin clock, there were the works by Minstrel Kuik and Dhavinder Singh, which were vintage and worn like a loved blanket, poetic mess. Minstrel’s work was, quite possibly, the best work in the show. Her work, A House in Motion: Repair, Restore, Reimagine, Rebuild continued her existing explorations with used textiles and the boundaries of the frame. She is probably one of the only artists in Malaysia currently active at the moment who uses her art to think through current socio-political events without being corny or heavy-handed with her messaging. Light touches of humour and colloquialism give the work its poetry, such as Bersih-yellow ribbon bows that evoke a schoolgirl’s ponytail, or a little bear resting in an accidental hammock in the back of one of the frames, or checked fabric reflected in the warped surface of a tin cup, or the use of an archival image of a poacher/colonial administrator (?) standing over an elephant he had just shot, with the caption, “The elephant that caused the trouble” in that serif font (Caslon?) that all colonial documents have. Minstrel’s meditations on space and the idea of a home, and loose ends, and stray threads, and tender buttons, and ways of making quiet presences felt: viewing her artworks and scrolling her instagram feed always remind me that I am alive and that the world exists. Meanwhile, with his work Jaga Life, Dhavinder Singh continues his excavations into family history, specifically of his childhood growing up in the industrial surroundings of Jalan Chan Sow Lin. This time with artefacts from his grandparents’ lives as security guards, or jaga, for a factory. I have always found him to be a good curator of nostalgic found objects but his work is still ripe, with many of the objects presented as they are, i.e. without much artistic intervention that I’m aware of.

But whereas the chaos and clutter of IKEA feels very banal — a boring maze of default template items — walking through the ILHAM Art Show revealed moments of poetry and, more often than that, moments of camp and farce. What else to make of the choice to put Tan Zi Hao’s The Mercurial Inscription, a stone for people to rub on, next to Hoo Fan Chon’s video about a retired drag performer? In Fan Chon’s work (I Enjoy Being a Girl), there’s a very long section of him plucking out fake moustache hair from a rubber face. Rubbery texture that I imagine feels something like the plasticky smoothness of Zi Hao’s aluminium stone. Every time you rub the stone, a digital stone on the screen in front of you makes a splash into an anonymous ocean, ethereal graphics evoking computer games on CD ROMs from the 2000s. And what else to make of the crazy zooms in Azzaha Ibrahim’s video, or Azizan Paiman’s cabinet of saliva??? I don’t think I’m hallucinating when I say that there are elements of farce and camp pervading the exhibition which are not overtly acknowledged, which the critics who say the space is cramped have not managed to pick up on. This is why Izat’s work, possibly the kitschiest one in the show, is the perfect work to greet visitors upon entering the gallery proper. Titled Balada Darah Eksotika (BDE) – (Exotic Blood Ballad), the work consists of a group of black spray-painted toy roosters, a plaster Roman column, and two television screens showing a music video for a karaoke version of M. Nasir’s Mentera Semerah Padi. Positioned in the direction of the qibla, it is also suggesting a direction for how to interpret the Art Show and contemporary art in Malaysia more generally. Which is that you enjoy the whole experience so much more when you don’t take it so seriously. Once you allow a sense of humour into your view of things, artworks that initially struck you as silly and juvenile start to seem bizarre, surreal, and ludicrous in an AMAZING way.

I read an NYT editorial about ruangrupa the other day that described an exhibition the Indonesian collective did where they just threw a massive party in the gallery and called that a work of art. Maggots started infesting the space: art. Decadence has a sleazy glamour to it, but it feels like a cop out to call a debauched party an artwork and develop a whole aesthetic philosophy around it. Ruangrupa’s celebration of rubbish and debauchery as “art” still has this boring jargonistic solemnity about it that prevents it from achieving the fun of real kitsch and camp quite like how the ILHAM Art Show does. I reckon that you can never make a show fun so long as you’re deliberately trying to make it fun. The Art Show proves that when people try really hard, they end up producing camp, and this brand of camp — camp that emerges unintentionally — is some of the best in the genre. A person/work is camp when they unironically take themselves way too seriously. Trying really hard produces these bombastic works of art, if bombast is camp.

However, at an artist talk on July 2nd, when I asked Zi Hao about whether his work intentionally included any elements of kitsch in the presentation (which was very dramatic, very self-serious), he flatly denied that the idea of kitsch was on his mind, which left me feeling a bit blindsided and embarrassed that I had implied his work was funny. But it’s my intuitive feeling, as the viewer, that the two extreme corners of the exhibition are so dark and serious that there is no rational response to them if it does not allow at least a chuckle. Zi Hao’s work is located at the leftmost corner of the gallery, while on the opposite end of the gallery, there is Tan Kian Ming’s The Ancestor, a life-size graveyard crafted out of aluminium foil. One of ILHAM’s gallery workers told me that they’ve been getting reports from visitors claiming that they feel “presences” around Kian Ming’s work. I mean… what! Not even ruangrupa’s party could evoke this sort of untethered emotional response to a work — where visitors come in and report feeling paranormal tingling!

Other instances of comedy: CC Kua’s work, perhaps the only other work in the show aside from Izat’s that deliberately tries to be funny, is impossible to photograph unless you step around the paho’ lanchang installation by the Kumpulan Ukir Kite ‘Kelab Kebudayaan Mah Meri’ (“Mah Meri Cultural Club”) and get a shot of a wooden chicken in the frame. Everything just takes up too much fucking space and it’s hilarious. Chong Yan’s video game, Atl-Aequus and the Five Phases, is impossible to play if you possess no video game experience and I think it’s so funny, this idea of a guy spending so much time and energy in creating this elaborate virtual world, but it’s so elaborate that people don’t even know how to interact with it. And still I derived the most joy out of his work in particular because it allowed me to break the taboo of making really loud sounds in a gallery. No fucking clue what’s going on, just smashing buttons making loud gun sounds. And getting away with it because it’s an unintended side effect of the work, whereas if the work’s stated premise was to make really loud sounds to intentionally disrupt the institution of the gallery, like ruangrupa’s intentionally subversive party and maggots, it might not have been as satisfying. Because you’d still be playing into the artist’s vision, permitting them to direct your feelings towards their work. (For this same reason, though Dhavinder Singh’s work also features a loud, disruptive audio feature — an alarm that goes off at 11:15am and 6:45pm every day as a reference to the factory bells that mark the open and close of a work day — I did not find it to be as satisfying as smashing Chong Yan’s buttons.) There is a cacophony of sounds in the gallery, produced by echoes shuttled between so many audio-video works, and this is a really fun thing to experience because it breaks the solemn silence of the gallery. At the aforementioned artist talk, Blankmalaysia was giving this really serious, scholastic account of his intentions behind his work, but suddenly a loud trumpet sound burst through from a segment in Dipali Gupta’s video, which was located right opposite his work… and nobody acknowledged it at all; just kept steadily focusing on Blankmalaysia while this minor carnival was going on in the same corridor. Also during the talk, Dhavinder Singh’s alarm went off at 11:15am, startling everyone.

The sounds worked so effectively to disarm the show, because the show had such a heavy aura of dignity and weight. It was as if Malaysia’s artists had collectively adjusted their postures and stood up straight, because it’s ILHAM, because this is the closest you’ll get to making it in this country. They started doing things they wouldn’t normally do. They “dressed up” their practices because getting selected for a show at ILHAM is like being invited to the Met Gala. They donned appearances that were out of the norm (and perhaps out of the range) for them. A lot of artists produced installation works, some of whom had either never done so before or hadn’t recently exhibited such. The tenor of the works was also more stately and serious, making overtures to current political and social issues. Many of the works tried to reflect the state of contemporary Malaysian society and shed light on topics that are (so their artists perceive) underrepresented in Malaysian politics, topics like the urban regeneration of Kampung Baru; the livelihood of Kelantanese children; the untold stories of the LGBTQ and drag community; the untold stories of ex-Communist guerillas; the traditions of the indigenous people of Peninsular and Borneo; the pandemic-era White Flag movement; the domestic lives of women, et cetera.

In so doing, many of the works have this formulaic quality that also suggests the instructional DIY model of IKEA. Some sections of the show have a bland, flat finishing that makes you think an artwork was assembled according to instructions of what the artist thought a complete artwork should look like. Works like Leon Leong’s intricate Persian miniatures, Chang Yoong Chia’s batik installation, Azizan Paiman’s cabinet of spit and Samsudin Wahab’s coconut husk sculpture of his mother’s head appeared a little too polished while their artistic statements had an unpoetic stiffness, as if they were fulfilling an art assignment for school. “I was exploring this material and I chose to depict this subject because it related to the material, and it also comments on this issue currently present in Malaysia.” Anyone, then, could make such a work if they followed this formula? They were a little too rigid in their depictions of their subject, too literal- and single-minded, lacking style and finesse. In contrast, an artist who normally works in such a narrative framework but attempted a departure from it for this show was Hasanul Isyraf Idris. He forewent his usual practice of creating narratively dense illustrations to make Quarry, a monument of grief consisting of a gigantic crumpled sheet of paper coloured from edge to edge using god knows how many graphite sticks. The thing looms in the middle of the gallery, an obelisk commemorating three family members whom he lost over the past two years. A trio of heads at the foot of that mountain, casted in resin in the likeness of the artist himself and representing each of those family members, seems, however, more like an afterthought to fulfil the assignment.

As if anticipating the statement-making tendencies of their male counterparts and also their tendency to segregate the external world into labels and identities, many of the female artists in the show presented works that were a bit more ambiguous and… hopeful? Or, like, softer, and in being softer thereby also being more optimistic. The works did not approach anything as solid as a statement, rather they existed in a more diffuse way.

I’ve already spoken about Minstrel’s work above. CC Kua, in her usual way, did something funny about nothing in particular, but, diverging from her usual way, did so in a more conceptual register. Her work of underutilised colour pencils, titled Everybody Has a Chance, was frivolous and lighthearted; like Sharon Chin’s Rich Country, a collection of prints scattered around the exhibition, it breached the fourth wall between gallery and viewer to draw attention to the exhibition as a curated (by definition exclusive) space. Cheng Yen Pheng’s When the Land Tortoise Meets the Sea Turtle Test Fly: I Believe I Can Fly, a mixed media sculpture of wau kites and wire, was a colourful ode to failures. Tetriana Ahmed Fauzi’s Evil Begone, Keep and Tend to Yours Truly of small, expressive abstract paintings created by herself and her students as exercises in art therapy during the lockdown was also an ode to… not failures per se, but to survival and the therapeutic quality of the creative act in a period of dissolution. Sharon’s Rich Country was nominally about the microbes and microorganisms that sustain a soil’s ecosystem, but allegorically about the interconnectedness of everything and the importance of forging circular social networks to replace vertical hierarchy. Mimi Aslinda’s quilted patchwork, Aiyier Di Aiyier Tarjun Lambah Anai Taruih Mangalier (Air Di Air Terjun Lembah Anai Terus Mengalir), was a personal family portrait that was way more effective and affecting than Ivan Lam’s rather odd and diminishing homage to his grandmother. Incidentally, the female artists also happened to be the ones who mostly “stuck to the brief” and created works within their established practices, choosing to be more experimental in the choice of display and layout rather than in the execution of the work. They did not try to surprise anyone, and many were fine with being hung conventionally on the wall, in a showcase where most of the male artists seemed hungry for horizontal space and preferred projection over hanging. (Some speculative spitballing: hanging = dead, defaulted; projection = phallic.)

Speaking of phallic, is there any artist working in Malaysia right now quite like Izat Arif?! He’s so funny, cool, and bold, while still keeping his aesthetics sharp and considered. If Sharon’s work was a way of manifesting networked relationships to the artists around her, then Izat’s work (and practice in general) is a way of manifesting combat with the artists around him. From his recent solo exhibition, Gentle Reminders at Richard Koh Fine Art in 2020, where he created text-based stencil paintings that made fun of observed trends in art, to his BDE now on show at ILHAM, the guy is breaking the gallery’s fourth wall to make people aware of how whack much of the artworks within its walls are. Who’s up to fight him? That motherfucker will take on anyone.

In closing this blog post, I return to the beginning of the exhibition, to Izat. Above, I wrote that his pointed work offers directions on how to interpret the show, i.e. in the direction of humour, but they also not-so-discreetly point out some of the selected artists’ fallacies in dwelling too hard and much on their own work. In the creation of symbols and signification, style and aesthetics should not be sacrificed for IKEA-like functionality. There needs to be more room to make way for the viewer, the external interpreter — not just in the physical layout of the show, but in the conceptualisation and execution of the works. Imagine the sorts of poetry and interactions that could emerge if artists granted themselves a sense of humour and relinquished some control over their work.

On the other side of things, the ILHAM Art Show proves – you don’t need to imagine here – the brilliance that could emerge if other galleries and organisers took art open calls, and art generally, more seriously. Given how much ILHAM contributes to the advancement of Malaysian art, the “cramped”ness of the gallery is nothing more than a minor inconvenience; gallery visitors should just have more respect for the art they’re viewing. I mean, god, you think this is your home is it?