E for Effort: a bunch of stuff from June and July

GAN SIONG KING, My Video Making Practice at Five Arts Centre

The video is what it says on the box. It functions as an artist portfolio presentation for Gan's video-making practice (as distinct from his painting practice), only executed in video form so that the artist himself doesn’t need to be present while a recording of his voice narrates the presentation. In addition, he can also soundtrack the presentation with choice music samples and sound effects.

Gan, who is 49 this year, has found a tightly-controlled format for promoting and showcasing his video-making practice that befits his misanthropic nature as an artist, disinclined towards public presentations and self-promotion.

The video presentation runs for 80 minutes. It’s okay. It displays proficient video editing and filming skills, though Gan seems to have a distracting predisposition for flashy effects like filming in almost microscopic close-up and using a GoPro. 

His videos are attempts at bridging a gap between himself and other people, but they never really succeed. The camera and the filming event are a bridge, and a barricade. There is maybe a lack of understanding or direction which lends most of the videos a sense of aimless meandering. The series of short films on various artists and makers are all nice introductions to their respective subjects, but they don't show the presence or function of Gan as an artist as opposed to merely skilled filmmaker. Put another way, these videos could have been made by any other video-maker, even one without artistic pretensions, which might have even improved the video, because at least a professional, commercial video-maker would have hired a director to lead the videos somewhere by the end...

Gan as video-maker has yet to develop the skills and techniques of a DIRECTOR, someone with a clear vision of what he wants to express and capture. It could be the same pitfall with his paintings as well, which get too bogged down in questions about the nature of what is being done, too much metaphysical questioning without the formalisation of a cohesive vision or, at the very least, a cohesive line of questioning. Every step forward(?) only opens up another distracting doubt. As if anxious that what he's doing is not worth doing, the artist counters this by becoming ever more self-conscious, throwing new subjects of inquiry at the spectator and burrowing deeper into his internal monologue. It’s claustrophobic enough for me to navigate, I can't imagine what it's like for him.

ALVIN LAU, I WANT TO GO HOME at 293

I’m biased, because I’ve always been a fan of Alvin’s work. I think he has the most overlooked pair of eyes in the Malaysian art scene. This show is his first solo, long overdue it seems because the show makes it clear that he has long graduated from the practice of making standalone images. Printing his photographs on vinyl stickers that he papers around two walls of the small space, he weaves his photographs into a poem of the city, making me wonder whether he composed and captured the images with the wider collage-composition in mind or if he composed the installation after studying his existing pile of photographs. Alvin's current practice can only be shown in a collage-style installation format like this. By placing images side by side, or on top of or underneath each other, he brings out rhythms in urban structures that I would have never thought about. For example, in a rather unlikely triptych, he placed a long-distance shot of a grey apartment complex alongside a slightly closer shot of an overhead highway and its retaining wall with a couple of construction workers climbing it on a ladder and, above that, a very close-up shot of a stack of concrete bricks in some context-less location. In this triptych, the themes are clear: grey, stacks, blocks, building, upward movement. In another surprising pairing, he placed a photo of a building's loading bay with a lorry in the background alongside a photo of a severely rusted metal sheet (possibly taken in the same neighbourhood), and, surprisingly, it works. The composition is different, the subject matter is different, the distance from which the photos were shot is different, but the two photos look oddly the same, and the bent metal sheet does uncannily seem to resemble the shape of the lorry. When I asked Alvin during the opening how his mind makes such connections, he likened his practice to his passion for wall-climbing – seeing patterns, finding where things fit into each other.

TAN ZI HAO, The Tongue Has No Bones at A+ Works of Art

Bent over punk metalhead being FUCKED by academic Zi Hao? Couldn’t get that central image out of my mind... (it was used as the main artwork in all the show's promotional material)... The way it’s bent over is very suggestive. The metalhead is bent over a Kamus Dewan - as if in some position of submission towards the DICtionary - possibly while being raw-dogged in the ass by invisible nerd DICtator, in this case the artist. Apologies to my readers for propagating crass imagery, but the work gives off such a strong and unmistakable impression that it has to be mentioned.

The exhibition is a concise and comprehensive first showing of all the themes that Zi Hao’s rather cerebral practice is interested in, which is to say that it’s interesting if you’re interested in all that. The exhibition's artworks are visualisations of language games and the quirks of multiculturalism, very pedagogic which is on-brand for Zi Hao. It's a linguistic playground with fun, eye-catching visuals and a friendly guide, the artist himself, to walk you through it and give you a few lessons along the way. Unfortunately for me, this exhibition conjures up images of all my most-hated tropes from secondary school: the bulky, stodgy, GRANDPA-looking Kamus Dewan which all students had to keep on hand and which helped me little since the definitions were also in Malay, a language I was weak at and quite frankly didn't see the point in gaining proficiency in beyond the enforced pressure of getting good grades; the horrible and enervating school textbooks with horrible, enervating graphics. The overall impression is of a school field trip to somewhere educational that tries to be 'fun' but ultimately leads to a tired lecture given in a faux-upbeat kids programme voice.

The problem with this exhibition for me is that the accompanying explanations for each artwork only leave me less impressed, not more. Language is a battlefield in Malaysia. Language divides. But since I never cared about language and have always maintained an English supremacy my entire life, the works just don't touch me. Child me, teenaged me, and adult me still don't see the point in developing proficiency in Malay, since it's quite obvious that English has been the dominant global lingua franca for a long time now and a proficiency in English has opened up many avenues of complex thought and philosophy to me. Zi Hao's works don't help in convincing me what the real problems with language are or what real differences there are in languages aside from the superficial, sectarian ones that Malaysians make up for themselves. The works only replicate superficial ways that language differences are represented in Malaysia, most notably on shop signboards, but they don't possess the texture of reality... you could easily imagine these as a souvenir concept in a gift shop, come and have your name written in the style of an old-school Malaysian signboard...

Without ‘defaulting’ to the traditional modes of painting or sculpture, Zi Hao has nevertheless succeeded in creating an exhibition that feels contemporary while at the same time artisanal and rooted in heritage. On my side, I just don’t find the images compelling in and of themselves (i.e. without their accompanying texts guiding you on how to interpret them; in general I like to be left alone in exhibitions without someone talking to me and telling me how something should be understood, watching my reactions). The only one that had any strange impact on me was Anthropophagic Strategies I, the aforementioned bent-over punk, and that only because of its suggestive position of intellectual sodomy.  

ZHANG XU ZHAN, Jungle Jungle at ILHAM Gallery 

Atmospheric and immersive, but restrained. This is a great show coming out of ILHAM Gallery and its small but scrappy team. The papier-mâché animals are impressive, but could have easily veered into the crafty if not for the central artwork, "Compound Eyes of Tropical". Setting aside the amount of time and labour spent on this thing – which I admit as impressive feats, but not inherently meritorious or valuable – the video features excellent camerawork and editing skills. It's almost like watching top-tier anime. This guy is unlike most other artists who "work with film" because he actually is a filmmaker, or at least knows enough about filmmaking to hire quality film people on his production team. It's refreshing to visit an art exhibition with media/film elements and see something that actually engages properly, knowledgeably, with film techniques instead of merely engaging film for the sake of jumping on the "new media" bandwagon.