E for Effort: 2 exhibitions from April

E for Effort is my ongoing review series where I write about recent art, film, and music. This instalment features two exhibitions.

Titik, Garis, Bentuk: Drawing as Practice – ILHAM Gallery
March 24 – July 28, 2024

ILHAM is a pleasant gallery to visit, because it is only here that you can get to see a meaningful array of Malaysian contemporary artists on display and get a somewhat faithful snapshot of the nation at the current moment. Titik, Garis, Bentuk is no exception. I’m not sure how the exhibition appears to foreign visitors but I rather enjoyed it because of how little there was in the way of obtrusive, demanding installations or politically-heavy works, and the absence of any videos taking longer than 2 minutes. It’s great, actually, to go into a museum show and know that there isn’t some monstrous 30-minute-long video awaiting you! 

The exhibition treats the concept of drawings liberally. Of the many "drawings" shown here, only a handful are pictorial works rendered in charcoal, graphite, or colour pencil, while the rest mostly comprise artist studies, works that utilise these mediums to evoke a childlike aesthetic, or as minimalist materials to express cerebral concepts. This is fine, and does indeed portray a diversity of practices, but also leaves you at times wishing for something meatier. 

Of the pictorial drawings, Chang Fee Ming’s sketches on envelopes seems to have been selected more for the novelty of its surface rather than the technical skill or subject matter. The drawings, rendered on a cramped scale, just aren’t as impactful as his wonderful watercolour paintings. Wong Hoy Cheong’s study along with Chong Siew Ying’s long panel of a misty mountain landscape are pleasurable as usual, showing virtuosity with the medium; Siew Ying evidently choosing charcoal for its hazy, dirty qualities that make it perfect for depicting mist. On the other side, Ahmad Zakii and Jalaini Abu Hassan receive their dues for being among the most renowned and influential 21st-century Malaysian artists to utilise drawing as a medium. Ahmad Zakii’s larger-than-life pantheon of modern Malaysian women is endearing and executed with deft strokes of charcoal, his signature medium. Jalaini’s self-portrait of himself as a bomoh has greater impact and mystique than Zakii’s portraits of the average woman on the street, and I really cannot knock an artist daring and convinced enough of his own powers to present himself as a mystical shaman, channelling energies from a mysterious and subterranean outer-dimension for his art-making. On the facing wall, Foo May Lyn’s drawings present an alternative image of the artist as shaman: she channels Aphrodite bringing Helen to Paris, in this case helping the Sultan Mahmud Shah present 10,000 Mosquito Hearts in fulfilment of the demands from the withholding princess in the legend of Puteri Gunung Ledang. The premise is interesting but the final effects perhaps not as striking as Jai’s self-portrait as shaman. The woman here is preoccupied with the mundane repetitive labour that goes into making things grow and ensuring the livelihood of future generations – the picking, the gathering, the day-in day-out stooped posture – while the dark-eyed male artist-shaman takes the reins, chanelling nature’s chaotic bounty and bending it to his will. 

Complementing Ahmad Zakii’s black-and-white portraits are two other black-and-white tableaux: Engku Iman’s “Pertandingan Lilit Tudung” on the left of the gallery and Chang Yoong Chia’s “Tapestry of the Dead” suspended on the gallery’s right. Iman’s depicts a trio of young and somewhat shy or uncertain-looking Malay women wrapping the hijab around their heads, perhaps for the first time as pubescent teenagers, or perhaps against their own will, for the sake of some obligatory family function or to have their passport photo taken. Or maybe the artist is being mocking — executed directly on the wall like graffiti, with a painted banner stating “Tudung-styling Competition” nailed above them, perhaps the artist is mocking the importance that the tudung has in young Malay women’s lives, the way such a simple piece of fabric causes such rifts and uncertainty in their feminine identity. They stare down the aisle at two young, Malay women in Ahmad Zakii's pantheon: one a free-haired youth in denim with eyes covered by sunglasses, and another slightly older, also free-haired, haughty and smoking, who saucily refuses to hide her bulging figure within loose-fitting clothing. All five figures (Iman’s trio, and two from Zakii’s) capture what I imagine must be the strange and disconcerting experience of young, Malay-Muslim women, on whom a burden of virtue is placed and the drama of sexual scandal is implicitly – sometimes explicitly – invoked from an extremely young age. In the right wing, Chang Yoong Chia’s tapestry of the dead is rendered with embroidery in a similar outline-only style as Iman's, but with less personality in them, since the photos are mostly drawn from obituaries. Perhaps I just wasn’t feeling the self-serious tone of the work on the day I visited. 

Indeed the arrangement of works in the gallery seems to transition from birth to death, as you travel from the left wing (from Haris Abadi’s video teaching Kelate ABC to kids) to the right (terminating in Hasanul Isyraf Idris’s deathly monument, “Quarry”). In the selected works's moments of childishness and minimalist simplicity, they do reflect how drawing is perceived in our present day, where it is regarded less as a foundational skill for an artist to possess and more as a statement of elegant simplicity. Amid the endless array of incomprehensible contemporary art artefacts, the choice of drawing is wielded to signal one’s allegiance with the simple and unpretentious. At the extreme left end of the gallery, Haris Abadi’s video and Roslisham Ismail a.k.a. Ise’s compilation of recipe drawings convey some of the fun and lightness of the Kelantanese culture, with their sing-songy voices, love of taking things at their own pace, love of the land, and extremely delicious and fragrant cooking. Next to them, we have the “angsty urbanites”: chi too’s “95”, his Sol LeWitt-style instructional line drawings; Agnes Lau’s “Soul that Repeats”, meditations of shaded lines on paper; and Paul Nickson Atia’s modular, labyrinthine line drawings. The coastal artists want fun, gatherings, midnight markets, and for Raya to last a whole year, while the urbanites — evidently overwhelmed by the barrage of sensations and stresses that the city constantly throws up — turn artist-ascetics and find peacefulness in plain lines. 

I think a lot of the figurative works I listed above were done somewhere between the 00s and 10s, perhaps peaking somewhere ten years ago, on the cusp of total social media saturation. Of the more recent works (made in the 20s), nothing seemed to capture moods, expressions, or atmosphere anymore. Instead, many of the works retreated into the quiet domain of minimalism or into the chattering stream-of-consciousness style of quirky maximalism, as seen in the works of CC Kua and Binti in the right wing of the gallery. What happened? What reticence do artists have towards depicting their present era? Or could it be perhaps that Covid, with its total shutdown of everyday life, made all attempts at doing so seem futile? 

The work that I spent the most time with when I visited was Hasanul’s “Spiritual Zoo” series. Depicting the surreal sensation of the early-20s Covid era, it does not valorise (as many paintings of doctors that appeared at the time were wont to do) nor does it criticise. Using animals as stand-ins for humans, it depicts the utterly bestial and chaotic state that society was thrown in, with uniformed cat-guards stalking through piles of plastic packaging waste as they lazily and somewhat indifferently guard rows of precious eggs on supermarket aisles made to look like laboratories (perhaps metaphors for the precious and limited vaccines). There is some affection in depicting the authorities - much maligned at the time - as adorable and faultless household cats, lost and desperate as citizens were but forced to do an unenviable job. The soldier-cats yawn, wear their masks wrong, and chain-smoke in a time of heightened concern over respiratory functioning. All around the border of the image, a conveyor belt of sushi and cat treats frames them like a fever dream of a world of convenience and oral pleasures now lost. Of the trash on the floor, there’s an unfinished bubble tea, representing the small and half-hearted everyday indulgences ordered on GrabFood, boxes of kiwi (sources of immunity-boosting Vitamin C), a full litterbox that no one bothers to clear. Seen in the present day, it’s a poignant portrait of a time when everybody had absolutely given up on life and were resigned to living in their own filth, because they had no other recourse to life. This series might have been the one work in the show that most strongly invoked drawing’s prehistoric origins on cave walls, as mentioned in the exhibition text, by which I mean drawing as a way of grasping one’s surroundings, of inventorising one’s resources, of making sense of the utter chaos and unknowing that surrounds one, huddled desperately in the caves around a dwindling source of fire, recording the nightmares. 

It starts with a dot, then a line, and eventually shapes start to take form, and meaning is constructed. Drawing is one of the most fundamental skills taught to art students and one of the most natural forms of human self-expression. It’s nice, amid the barrage of post-modernist new media and immersive art that gluts the contemporary art circuit, to actually return to a simple and intuitive medium where things make sense. The last time I felt such a sense of belonging and Malaysianness in an ILHAM show was with Kok Yew Puah’s solo exhibition in 2021. Apparently, this show was something of a last-minute scramble amid the drama of the ILHAM building owner’s ongoing asset-declaraction case. Something good came out of that, at least! 

Creative Coupling – Temu House
March 30 – April 21, 2024
Amat/Binti as Mati, Esmond Sit/Joanne Loo, Silas Oo/Kimberley Boudville

Coupling: an aura of intrigue and salaciousness often surrounds the couple in society. Perhaps this stems from the implicit awareness that two people have been physically intimate with each other, and the tantalising promise that they present a different face behind closed doors than they do to the rest of the world. If ever someone is an enigma to you, often the best person to consult is their partner, if they have one. Creative Coupling at Temu House cashes in on the petty intrigue inspired by the romantic lives of others, under the curatorial cover that this time it’s different because all parties are also creative. Nevertheless, the final results are unconvincing and honestly not even salacious. 

The couples, all within the same age bracket of late-20s to early-30s and all having shown at Temu before, are perhaps too young as artists to have developed a strong personal style or statement yet and probably too young even as couples to have impacted each other’s art in any major way. It’s difficult not to see the exhibition as a vanity project, since it remains unclear how any of the selected artists’ practices is altered by their relationship and by working together as opposed to working on their own. Little in the way of curatorial elaboration is offered beyond a print-out of each couple answering a set of the same generic survey questions that do not touch on aspects of their practice, but rather on coupledom in general, such as “do you share a studio space and if so, does this cause problems”, with the answers being prosaic things like “yes, sometimes fragments of hair and soil from my work wind up in his paintings.” 

Works by Silas and Kim, and Esmond and Joanne, don’t do much to help dispel vanity accusations, since their sections are heavily themed on each couple expressing their personal love to each other and hitting the right buttons to make audiences go awww. Esmond and Joanne have constructed three “eodhs” to each other (it’s never explained what an eodh is; it sounds Welsh; I suppose it’s something that only makes sense to the both of them): little squarish monuments built out of black, jenga-like blocks and topped off with the papier-mâché constructions that are Joanne’s signature. Spread across the little recess in Temu House, they are interspersed with some floor cushions for people to sit on while contemplating the eodhs, like a little zen sculpture garden. Unfortunately, the works lack the peace and symmetry of such a garden, with Joanne’s sculptures looking like jarring organic appendages atop Esmond’s decidedly inorganic building blocks. Their styles are possibly just too different to cohere into a beautiful singularity, and the provision of an unfortunate amount of supplementary material — like a pair of love letters to each other and a framed sketch of the work with annotations by both — seem like compensation and a method of cohering the installation back into the too-literal curatorial framework. 

Silas and Kim presented a mix hang of small works made over the span of their relationship, interspersed with little annotations whimsically written directly on the gallery’s walls in pencil in which, like Esmond and Joanne’s supplementary material, mostly consist of the couple expressing their affections towards each other. Silas showed some of his early-career illustration-style drawings of comic-book-like monsters and macabre figures, reflecting the dark and brooding state of mind that he was in when he made them. These are complemented by some of Kim’s own drawings and paintings from the same period, when she was going through personal crises of her own. The works don’t display much in terms of technical virtuosity or conceptual interest. Of course Silas can draw extremely well, but his subjects often have that juvenile tone of a disgruntled teenager. The sculptural and assemblage aspects of the works continue each artist’s own brand of whimsicality that is expressed in their drawings and paintings. Nails hammered into a resin-cast anatomical heart signals Silas’s boyish fascination with the macabre, and a pair of entwined hands cast in plaster and displayed under a bell jar signals Kim’s girlish preoccupation with the tamer, Disneyish conventions of fairytale. The whole thing brings to mind Beauty and the Beast, but more gothic and drag-like? I think this is the reason for some of the drawings being displayed in novelty faux-fur frames. But that edgy teen, campish aesthetic of fairytale and gothic tropes mixed with faux-fur diva glam and stone roses is one that is just really not my thing.

Mati, a compound of Amat and Binti, presented several drawings on photographs and an installation made with silkscreen and found fabrics on the mezzanine floor. I think Binti has the makings of a distinct individual style, if only it can be pushed into something beyond “quirky” rhyming. The two large, John-and-Yoko-esque couple portraits are filled with neatly-written but nonsensical slogans and have the rather unnecessary addendum of chenille wire trimmings outlining the couple’s hair. The best work is probably a comic strip-style set of 9 drawings, with each panel done in a film storyboard style and annotated, retelling a fable in which Amat and Binti wake up one day with radiant light shining out of their chests and go through various metamorphoses that transform them into inanimate objects or concepts. A bit too Tumblr twee but it has a je ne sais quois that is promising for a pair of young artists. On the mezzanine floor, they’ve hung up a bunch of secondhand clothing on a laundry line in a visualisation of the idiom “airing one’s dirty laundry”, with each piece of clothing silkscreened with fragments from the couple’s chat logs. Mostly mundane couple talk, but there’s one pretty good find of a raglan t-shirt that says “PSYCHO BITCH” at the front and “I’ll love you when you’re more like me” on the back. All of these couples are somewhere in that area between being too young to have had significant personal experiences that make for interesting expression in art, but too old for their attempts at naïveté and whimsicality to be accepted…