E for Effort: 4 exhibitions from March
E for Effort is my ongoing review series where I write about recent art, film, and music. This instalment features four exhibitions.
Penang impressions
Prior to this month, I'd only visited Penang for leisure or for smaller, more middling art shows, like those at Hin Bus Depot back when their gallery still existed in an indeterminate space as a for-rent event hall and a commercial gallery. The past week, I got exposure to a more commercial and extravagant side of Penang, Penang as an emergent art capital within Malaysia, under the auspices of Blank Canvas gallery (established in 2022) and their fair-slash-festival-type collaboration thing with Palai project, an exhibition project started by a pair of Parisian gallerists which first debuted in an Italian palazzo in 2021. This year, the location for the Penang edition of the Palai project was Homestead, a heritage mansion from 1919 that is rather unfortunately attached to the front of Wawasan Open University, a solid block of blue glass that looks like a heavy, anachronistic appendage to the century-old mansion. Photos of the first Palai project in the Palazzo Tamborino Cezzi in Lecce, a city in southern Italy, showed works displayed in a crumbling, glamorously abject 16th-century palazzo with peeling wallpaper and terracotta-painted walls, warmed by the Italian sun and accentuated by sumptuous maroon sofas. Not so Homestead which, aside from the unavoidable eyesore of the university attached to its back, seems to have significantly less character than the Italian palazzo, instead being more of an indeterminate mix of architectural styles. Roman columns at the front prop up a portico flanked by two towers. A mess of ornaments upon the facade and a great number of windows lend it the appearance of looking somewhat squished. It brings to mind the more administrative, fortress-like manor style of the American White House rather than the sleazy, simple glamour of an Italian country house; which is apt, I guess, since it has now transformed into the administrative building for the University.
I discovered that the type of wealth in Penang is still the rare breed of old money type, accumulated through ancestors who were pioneers and industrial tycoons, not like the KL rich, which mostly consists of enterprising people with start-ups or corporate jobs and such. You don't meet bankers or lawyers or doctors in Penang, you meet scions of sugar or tin-mining families and ancestral landowners. This perhaps explains the very “Singaporean” feel of the people, who are highly educated but also appear slightly anxious for everything to be in order, and who don’t seem to have much in the way of personality aside from a polite geniality born of good breeding. People in urban centres are always more brash, more socially awkward; they tend to laugh louder and make more faux pas, i.e. they have more and diverse occasions in which to test and build their individual characters. Don’t quote me on my armchair socio-psychology though. They’re all a very lovely bunch of people. In all my life, I don't think I've ever met a single rude Penangite, regardless of class.
Inasmuch as the Palai event was an attempt to establish Penang as an art destination, it was difficult not to notice that the island's art scene is still the same as ever. In both of their concurrent showcases—the Palai event and the show at the gallery—Blank Canvas pretty much exhausted the list of all of Penang’s few “serious” artists (i.e. artists whose practices have some substance beyond mere craft and have shown internationally).
⏊IWE
Blank Canvas Penang
So the spelling of the exhibition’s title is actually the word "TIME" with all the letters upside-down, as spotted on the design of a random T-shirt the curator encountered in a random bundle shop in Penang during her three-week residency. This is funny, and gives the exhibition a unique identity, but it didn’t contribute much to my understanding of the works on show. I suppose the artist who most fit the bill of the curation was Kah Bee Chow, whose works were a poignant ode to time passing in its various ways: ageing parents, land reclamation on the Penang coast. Her works and those of Nurul Ain’s shared a similar sensibility: art as a way to protect, preserve, or ensconce fragile and ephemeral things, but their works were unconvincing in their physical smallness and the mostly pedestrian things that they depict. When I attended the artist talk and heard that Ain's ash drawings were inspired by stories passed around within the artist’s family, including ghost stories and the like, it kind of put me off and made the paintings less interesting to me than they already were. I’m just not convinced that “spooky tales” of the sort that every Malaysian kid has read in True Singaporean Ghost Stories constitute enough of a basis for waxing poetic on “oral stories” and their preservation. The paintings don’t help in convincing; they’re made of ash because it’s an ephemeral medium that will disintegrate over time—a medium through which one can watch time passing, but so is everything. In the current state of our global art market, I suppose it’s a bold statement to own the perishability of one’s material, but without that USP the paintings are not really all that interesting.
The impressionist gouache paintings by Hasanul were quite beautiful and possibly more interesting than the more structured butterfly formations that he previously showed at Rissim. Because of the vibrancy of his chosen medium, some of them do have that “street photography” look — rain streaming down a windshield and refracting the headlights on cars is a pretty worn-out trope. More interesting are his strokes of ambiguity, where you’re not sure what, exactly, is the scene that he's trying to depict, or when you notice a watery, hidden figure in the rain. His vague and impressionistic titling of the paintings also helps in ameliorating the triteness of their subject matter…
The "RE: Looking" video work by Wong Hoy Cheong was probably the most erroneous addition to the show but, outside of the curatorial context, also the strongest individual work of the batch. It’s quite simply funny and there’s a nice attention to details like when an Austrian “fan” of Siti Nurhaliza talks about how she likes that Siti Nurhaliza is so modest. But mostly the work works because it plays on an essentialising binary of “Southeast Asia = colonised” and “all white people = coloniser”, taking Austrians are merely representative of “white people” and colonialism in general, instead of engaging with their unique national history like how, for starters, Austria-Hungary wasn’t a colonial power in the video’s sense of the term… It was funny, in the way that any effective role-reversal comedy can be funny.
Young, Wild, Free #2
Galeri Puteh
As expected. The pastel drawings by Adam Badruddin Syah were nice.
Hsu Che-Yu: Three Episodes of Mourning Exercises
ILHAM Gallery, Level 3
Videos have a long artistic history with expressions of time and mourning. Videos, more than art, captivate audiences and force them to pay homage in the form of time: a video or film has a greater ability to fix you in place as you watch its contents unfold, while a painting or sculpture leaves it up to you to decide how long you spend before it. Ever since film became accessible as a medium, it has been used by artists to explore the subtleties of time passing, and as a film ages alongside time, it also becomes a document of the time that has passed, because it fixes events and people as they are at the time of filming. What happens then when you combine this with 3D scanning, a medium that should short-cut the time and effort needed to actually bring a scene or a location together? I’m not familiar enough with the mechanisms of 3D scanning to actually be sure of whether Hsu saves any time and effort in 3D scanning and modelling his scenes in the works in this show, as opposed to filming live action. But in an image- and footage-saturated world, 3D-scanning his actors and locations and then leaving them uncoloured and unfinished in a grey, ghostlike pallor affords the videos a greater sense of loss and melancholia than filming the subjects in full HD colour might have. The subjects in “Blank Photograph” and “Zoo Hypothesis” look like they’ve had their brains eaten out and landscapes look like they’ve been crystallised in time. It’s a similar feeling to the ash- and sand-covered landscapes of films like Woman in the Dunes or Hiroshima Mon Amour, landscapes that have been neutralised of all their distinct characteristics and immortalised forever under mountains of whiteness. 3D scanning does have something unnerving about it, in the sense that it seems to fail at accurately capturing the subject in their full depth and aliveness, with the result that 3D-scanned subjects in Hsu’s films look like wax or plasticine versions of themselves (including an amusing or maybe unnerving part in “The Unusual Death of a Mallard” where the artist scans his son, turning his laughing face into a smooth orb), which makes you wonder why anyone would 3D scan anyway if such things as cameras already exist. Sometimes technological innovation really is redundant. But in a perverse cyclical way that characterises human reason, if nobody did it, then we wouldn’t know.
The two shorter, smaller videos at the beginning of the exhibition feature a puppeteer working with a taxidermied rabbit in one and embalmed hands in another, which mirrors the effects of 3D scanning, in that the puppeteer’s performances can only approximate the true nature of the live thing, to uncanny effect. Which also makes one wonder: can you feel the aura of whether a thing is alive or not through a screen?
Of the two longer works in the exhibition, “Blank Photograph”, an interview with a (failed, but convicted) terrorist bomber, was more interesting as a document of time passed and things lost than “Zoo Hypothesis”, which was significantly more boring and apparently unsure of its own direction. “Zoo Hypothesis” takes a more circuitous route in talking about its subject, by recording a scripted dialogue between the film's dramaturg (?) and puppeteer discussing which movements the latter should use when animating the taxidermied animals; a strategy that I guess was supposed to be poetic (a conversation about how to reanimate things and how to approximate life, held by two alive people) but in practice was mostly just boring. The final video, “The Unusual Death of a Mallard” is more of a variety show, but I noticed a Lost Highway poster (or maybe a vinyl of the soundtrack) at the top of a shelf in the artist’s home in that video, which provides a hint as to his artistic influences. Good taste!
Kadang Kadang Dekat Dekat Akan Datang Nº 6: Izat Arif
A+ Works of Art
Izat is the premier Malaysian contemporary artist of irony. There are a few others I can think of who utilise irony in their works (chi too, Liew Kwai Fei, Hoo Fan Chon) but perhaps none who are as known or as influential as Izat is. His works have become blueprint, template, holy grail for many young art students and emerging artists aspiring to his same punk flippancy that appears to not give a fuck about the opinions of curators, galleries, collectors, or the general viewer. Of course, this kind of flippancy has its vanities too: people who have managed to wrangle themselves into befriending the artist or collectors who have bought his work can flatter themselves as being on his good side or in the know. The works aren’t all that inflammatory. Their slogans – poised as sarcastic asides rather than pointed critique – are vague enough to be taken on the chin by anyone except the most delicate of viewers (which many of our local elite are).
Izat’s current practice seems to have emerged as a reaction to the aesthetic fetishism of elements from Malay life and culture in the art of previous generations of Malay artists, from the earlier wave of post-independence artists to have been educated abroad, like Sulaiman Esa and Ismail Zain, and in their successors like Ahmad Zakii Anwar and Jalaini Abu Hassan. This aesthetic approach, drawing from the Malay world, finds its continuation among younger millennial artists like Haffendi Anuar's textile installations inspired by the kain sarong that Malay men often wear around the house, and which is associated with their calm and dignified pose even during repose, even with a simple cloth slung around their hips. As if in reaction to the proliferation of Malay-coded elements within the works of his seniors, Izat instead works with cheap and unglamorous materials like the linoleum coverings that line the tables, floors, and walls of classrooms, offices, and Malay warongs, and the banquet chairs that are practically synonymous with government functions. All of these cheap and kitsch items still constitute "Malay(sian) aesthetics" in their proliferation within the every day, and their selection by untrained eyes who find their decorative patterns and bombastic colours appealing. Only, they don’t have the association with national or religious identity that is attached to objects like the sarong, keris, or kampung house (which, in their sentimental esteem among Malay leaders, eventually wind up becoming kitsch). Izat’s art of linoleum and karaoke and McMansions and Caramel Macchiatos are attacks on several fronts: against our tasteless political and business elite who nevertheless spend unaccountable sums of money on erecting national monuments that are devoid of aesthetic value, meaning, or relation to the present moment; against the stultifying environment of local Malay-priority art schools that repeat the same cultural references; against those who might bloviate about Malay-world aesthetics and traditional crafts while indulging in the products of global consumerism in the comfort of their IKEA showroom houses; against even the local Datin-culture celebrities and influencers who genuinely think their extravagance is the pinnacle of taste. As such, he signifies a break away from an older tradition, one that may still have a hold among Fine Art students at UiTM, and a rejection of all art that stinks of the reactionary attitude of upholding Malay aesthetics in order to establish a unique artistic identity within a globalised art world.
His art is fighting a battle on several fronts, which is admirable. Aside from attacking the customs and practices that he’s observed within the Malaysian art scene, and which I imagine must have been on his mind quite a lot while an art student, his recent works have turned to direct their attacks against a phony and superficial global art circuit which has dispensed with making aesthetic judgments and instead celebrates those who offer up the most interesting, unique, and exotic "narratives". His recent installation at ArtJog 2023, Citarasa Internasional & Selera Lokal, somewhat reprises the style of text-based works from his 2020 solo exhibition Gentle Reminders, both of which turn their attacks against the superficialities of the art cognoscenti. His works are highly relatable to everyone within the art scene, whether seasoned art worker or casual outsider, because they break down an exclusive and insular society into pithy statements that are still vague enough for everyone to laugh at without necessarily thinking themselves the butt of the joke. Or perhaps some of them do realise, but laugh it off anyway because the slogans are simple and accompanied by rather funny and deliberately tacky designs.
In our current art climate, any artist who rebels is immediately swallowed up and neutralised within the ecosystem, because a system that requires novelty and spectacle to be delivered as frequently as possible often needs its “bad boys” as well in order to offer a sense of variety within the array of art on show. What would a gallery roster or biennale or art fair be without at least one distinguished artist who takes the piss out of all of it? That’s not entirely to say that Izat’s work is made in bad faith; on the contrary, I do believe he’s entirely sincere and that everyone who admires his work is also sincere in doing so. The art world is exhausting and stupid, with its endless list of international clients and contacts, their endless cocktails and dinners as if everything must be an occasion, their endless roster of international artists whose arrival in a foreign country demands some sort of celebration or soireé even if their practice amounts to nothing that history will remember them for. Izat’s work is right to point out these ludicrous practices, and the many aspiring artists whom his work inspires are right to be inspired, because the environment they emerge into is one of serious decadence and retardation.
It’s difficult to evaluate Izat’s work, because the scale of their influence on younger artists and their appeal within the art world almost nullifies any judgment of the works’ individual merit. In terms of aesthetics, I have always found Izat's works funny in a “ha” way though not necessarily pleasing or worth extended contemplation. I can appreciate antics and a part of me goes "hell yeah" whenever one of his works bursts the bubble of some moron, like the incident with a minister and his "Terima Kasih Banyak-Banyak YB" chairs at the Hotel Art Fair in 2022. But beyond that, his slogans have the same sarcastic, flippant tone that isn’t really my thing, so blunt and common, so on the nose about the art world that you sometimes feel the claustrophobia of such a world closing in around you instead of the opposite feeling of liberation that you’d expect to feel upon encountering an artwork that expresses your own long-suppressed thoughts or emotions; instead, they’re a reminder of the art world’s dreariness and you cringe at the ones who would find works like this so cool and edgy, because these people are just giving the works the response they were meant to elicit and thus they become part of the same dreariness. Because they have no recourse to higher levels of critical thinking.
But that’s the thing. In Malaysia there is such a dearth of critical thinking surrounding art and the decadence of the contemporary art world that Izat's works constitute a sort of rallying point for feelings of disgust towards the art world. They are rebellious and at times political without being dry, they turn the pent-up frustration towards the art world into a legitimate crusade and they are a pressure valve for all the disgruntled curators, gallerists, and artists caught up within the art world’s mechanisms (...seduced by the promise of a career within a better, higher world outside of the pedestrian smallness of a corporate job, but who find themselves sinking into a suffocating environment of cloying phoniness and vanity). But perhaps most importantly, Izat’s works symbolise a more youthful and rebellious position apart from the smug satisfaction of an older generation of Malaysian contemporary artists, those who still dominate and populate the boards of the art schools and national institutions. Caught between two worlds – the stultifying, ‘sumbangan ikhlas’, ‘don’t forget asal kau jadi!’ culture of the old and the equally vain and content-driven culture of the young – it’s no wonder that his art is celebrated by so many. The way things are now, such concerns often take up all of the artist’s mind, more so than those to do with art-making.