Narratives in Malaysian Art Vol. II, , Kuala Lumpur: Rogue Art, 2013., Sep 2013
A historicisation of recent art practices in Malaysia since the 1990s. The “kontemporari” turn of... more A historicisation of recent art practices in Malaysia since the 1990s. The “kontemporari” turn of the 1990s set the stage for the transformation and availability of various outlets for the presentation of contemporary art leading up to the present day. Like all maturing cultural forces, the Malaysian contemporary art scene has undergone and emerged from its grow- ing pains. Since the early 2000s, the gradual expansion of a collecting market, the proliferation of independent artist-led projects, a growing art audience, access to budget air travel, the prevalent use of social media, social-political transformation, among other variables, have over the years influenced the myriad ideas and positions that stake a claim in our discursive practice.
With all the above considerations at the back of our mind, we can now begin our overview of current practice, sketching its broad, but by no means exhaustive, parameters across four trajectories. I term these as “currencies” to suggest that they possess traction and value primarily as media of exchange on a level of discourse. They capture broad patterns of circulation within the local and global contexts, allowing us to map out idiosyncratic individual practices onto an ecological terrain.
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shaped the history of postcolonial higher education and attempts at producing countermovements to its subsequent institutionalization. I consider this in relation to
pedagogical practices that reference creative forms in avant-garde art and theater.
A genealogy of rethinking education through creative means can be traced back to
the establishment of Nanyang University and the teaching of contemporary Asian
literature by Han Suyin, with later artists such as Wong Hoy Cheong engaging with
Paulo Freire’s ideas on learning in Wong’s course on Third World aesthetics,
Universiti Bangsar Utama’s reimagination of the role that education could play in Kuala Lumpur during the 1998 Reformasi, and most recently Buku Jalan’s decentering of education. Finally, I consider the pedagogical stakes at hand by exploring the life story of a bookseller in Kelantan and his embodiment of a local cosmopolitanism.
by Thanavi Chotpradit, J Pilapil Jacobo, Eileen Legaspi-Ramirez,
Roger Nelson, Nguyen Nhu Huy, Chairat Polmuk, San Lin Tun, Phoebe Scott,
Simon Soon and Jim Supangkat
How has the curatorial functioned as a form of colonial discourse in its expansion into art and activism? By what means can we identify the contradictions between its claim to agency and the complex texture of social and political disruption? This essay attempts to critique the colonizing tendencies of curatorial knowledge as it seeks to transform art and activism into an archive of knowledge directed at institutional critique, and prospect other means in which genuine engagement can take place.
Patrick’s adoption of batik as a painterly medium late in his career enables us to re-read some of his earlier iconic paintings, chiefly Spirit of Earth, Air and Water, 1958 and Batek Malaya, 1957, both of which received local honours. This method allows us to unsettle dominant institutional discourse on ‘Malayan’ batik with queer speculations. I suggest its speculative dimension allows for the recovery of an aesthetic history of non-normative intimacy in Southeast Asia.
<p>
"In 1993, an exhibition titled 'What About Converging Extremes?' attempted to lay the groundwork for a 'new art, and new voice.' The exhibition was, in many ways, a consolidation of ideas that have begun to take shape chiefly through the writings of artist, pedagogue and curator Wong Hoy Cheong as well as exhibitions undertaken by recent graduates of Malaysian Art Institute, and the Institut Teknologi MARA since the late 1980s.
This paper takes the concept of 'Converging Extremes' to examine a number of exhibitions that took place in Malaysia in the 1990s as an attempt to work through a double bind. On the one hand, it captures the historicising tendencies that sought to engender a new ground for Malaysian art, which balances angst with social agency, and to engender a new public as it recovers a sensibility rooted in revolt and revolution that has not been factored into the narrative of Malaysia's modern art history.
At the same time, it seeks to figure the contemporary as rooted in multidisciplinary collaboration and invent a history of radical art that was absent from the mainstream history of Malaysian art. In the process, it seeks to contextualise these practices within the post-cold war political horizons of Malaysia and Southeast Asia by examining the exhibitionary impulse that sought to foreground the tensions and contradictions of modern life."
I demonstrate that the historical narrative that the artists, who came together to stage What About Converging Extremes?, sought to produce was aimed at prospecting a radical art history in its perceived absence in Malaysia."
Books
But who does the Boria belong to? What are its origins? This chapter complicates heritage as a ready-made historical narrative by exploring the Boria, whose beginnings can be traced to Muharram celebrations introduced to the port city of Penang in the early nineteenth century. Though first viewed as disruptive of the colonial moral order, Boria then gained credibility as a theatre form connected to the Malay nationalist movement. Today, it is recognised as one of Penang’s unique heritage theatres. Attending to textual, archival, photographic and urban spatial analysis, this chapter questions heritage discourse and practice by examining the Boria as a burlesque of the colonial state and its epistemic ordering of social relations along the faultlines of race and religion. It ends by calling for a new terminology for heritage that can critically account for the cosmopolitics of past cultural practices.
I suggest the preference for figurative portraiture in academic realism by the mid-fifties in Kuala Lumpur, as opposed to the more eclectic experimentation with modernism that emerged in the early fifties in Singapore, suggests that as the decade progressed, the radical truth value of figuration normally associated with social realism was transformed into an ‘academic’ school. The resulting genre of ‘academic realism’ became a means of transferring into visual form the political 'suara' that sought to monopolise the definition of kebudayaan Melayu Moden in post-war Malaya.
Specially commissioned essays will look at under-researched areas such as art historical and critical methodologies, gender, art and technology, and engagement with communities. There will also be surveys and interviews with local art world figures as well as specialist essays addressing more familiar central topics such as post-colonialism and ethnicity and identity.
As the closing volume of a four volume series, Vol. 4 Perspectives will also reflect on the production of the Narratives in Malaysian Art series in order to identify gaps and avenues for future research. In this way, the book hopes to stimulate further discussion, which may in turn expand into a more sustained sense of discourse in Malaysian art.
"These exhibits were not sculptures per se, at least not in our commonplace understanding of sculpture as a three-dimensional object endowed with aesthetic value, skilfully rendered by an artistic hand. Instead, they were a selection of objects from our environment, collected samples of our everyday, displaced from the outside world into a gallery space. They operated within the discourse of the objet trouvé (found object), drawing on the innovation of early 20th century avant-garde artist Marcel Duchamp....""
With all the above considerations at the back of our mind, we can now begin our overview of current practice, sketching its broad, but by no means exhaustive, parameters across four trajectories. I term these as “currencies” to suggest that they possess traction and value primarily as media of exchange on a level of discourse. They capture broad patterns of circulation within the local and global contexts, allowing us to map out idiosyncratic individual practices onto an ecological terrain.
shaped the history of postcolonial higher education and attempts at producing countermovements to its subsequent institutionalization. I consider this in relation to
pedagogical practices that reference creative forms in avant-garde art and theater.
A genealogy of rethinking education through creative means can be traced back to
the establishment of Nanyang University and the teaching of contemporary Asian
literature by Han Suyin, with later artists such as Wong Hoy Cheong engaging with
Paulo Freire’s ideas on learning in Wong’s course on Third World aesthetics,
Universiti Bangsar Utama’s reimagination of the role that education could play in Kuala Lumpur during the 1998 Reformasi, and most recently Buku Jalan’s decentering of education. Finally, I consider the pedagogical stakes at hand by exploring the life story of a bookseller in Kelantan and his embodiment of a local cosmopolitanism.
by Thanavi Chotpradit, J Pilapil Jacobo, Eileen Legaspi-Ramirez,
Roger Nelson, Nguyen Nhu Huy, Chairat Polmuk, San Lin Tun, Phoebe Scott,
Simon Soon and Jim Supangkat
How has the curatorial functioned as a form of colonial discourse in its expansion into art and activism? By what means can we identify the contradictions between its claim to agency and the complex texture of social and political disruption? This essay attempts to critique the colonizing tendencies of curatorial knowledge as it seeks to transform art and activism into an archive of knowledge directed at institutional critique, and prospect other means in which genuine engagement can take place.
Patrick’s adoption of batik as a painterly medium late in his career enables us to re-read some of his earlier iconic paintings, chiefly Spirit of Earth, Air and Water, 1958 and Batek Malaya, 1957, both of which received local honours. This method allows us to unsettle dominant institutional discourse on ‘Malayan’ batik with queer speculations. I suggest its speculative dimension allows for the recovery of an aesthetic history of non-normative intimacy in Southeast Asia.
<p>
"In 1993, an exhibition titled 'What About Converging Extremes?' attempted to lay the groundwork for a 'new art, and new voice.' The exhibition was, in many ways, a consolidation of ideas that have begun to take shape chiefly through the writings of artist, pedagogue and curator Wong Hoy Cheong as well as exhibitions undertaken by recent graduates of Malaysian Art Institute, and the Institut Teknologi MARA since the late 1980s.
This paper takes the concept of 'Converging Extremes' to examine a number of exhibitions that took place in Malaysia in the 1990s as an attempt to work through a double bind. On the one hand, it captures the historicising tendencies that sought to engender a new ground for Malaysian art, which balances angst with social agency, and to engender a new public as it recovers a sensibility rooted in revolt and revolution that has not been factored into the narrative of Malaysia's modern art history.
At the same time, it seeks to figure the contemporary as rooted in multidisciplinary collaboration and invent a history of radical art that was absent from the mainstream history of Malaysian art. In the process, it seeks to contextualise these practices within the post-cold war political horizons of Malaysia and Southeast Asia by examining the exhibitionary impulse that sought to foreground the tensions and contradictions of modern life."
I demonstrate that the historical narrative that the artists, who came together to stage What About Converging Extremes?, sought to produce was aimed at prospecting a radical art history in its perceived absence in Malaysia."
But who does the Boria belong to? What are its origins? This chapter complicates heritage as a ready-made historical narrative by exploring the Boria, whose beginnings can be traced to Muharram celebrations introduced to the port city of Penang in the early nineteenth century. Though first viewed as disruptive of the colonial moral order, Boria then gained credibility as a theatre form connected to the Malay nationalist movement. Today, it is recognised as one of Penang’s unique heritage theatres. Attending to textual, archival, photographic and urban spatial analysis, this chapter questions heritage discourse and practice by examining the Boria as a burlesque of the colonial state and its epistemic ordering of social relations along the faultlines of race and religion. It ends by calling for a new terminology for heritage that can critically account for the cosmopolitics of past cultural practices.
I suggest the preference for figurative portraiture in academic realism by the mid-fifties in Kuala Lumpur, as opposed to the more eclectic experimentation with modernism that emerged in the early fifties in Singapore, suggests that as the decade progressed, the radical truth value of figuration normally associated with social realism was transformed into an ‘academic’ school. The resulting genre of ‘academic realism’ became a means of transferring into visual form the political 'suara' that sought to monopolise the definition of kebudayaan Melayu Moden in post-war Malaya.
Specially commissioned essays will look at under-researched areas such as art historical and critical methodologies, gender, art and technology, and engagement with communities. There will also be surveys and interviews with local art world figures as well as specialist essays addressing more familiar central topics such as post-colonialism and ethnicity and identity.
As the closing volume of a four volume series, Vol. 4 Perspectives will also reflect on the production of the Narratives in Malaysian Art series in order to identify gaps and avenues for future research. In this way, the book hopes to stimulate further discussion, which may in turn expand into a more sustained sense of discourse in Malaysian art.
"These exhibits were not sculptures per se, at least not in our commonplace understanding of sculpture as a three-dimensional object endowed with aesthetic value, skilfully rendered by an artistic hand. Instead, they were a selection of objects from our environment, collected samples of our everyday, displaced from the outside world into a gallery space. They operated within the discourse of the objet trouvé (found object), drawing on the innovation of early 20th century avant-garde artist Marcel Duchamp....""
With all the above considerations at the back of our mind, we can now begin our overview of current practice, sketching its broad, but by no means exhaustive, parameters across four trajectories. I term these as “currencies” to suggest that they possess traction and value primarily as media of exchange on a level of discourse. They capture broad patterns of circulation within the local and global contexts, allowing us to map out idiosyncratic individual practices onto an ecological terrain.