The recipients of the Central Market Annexe’s inaugural Grants For Grab programme cycle have been announced:
1. Simon Soon, awarded RM1,500. For his proposal Picnic At Sungai Chilling Falls, a one-day excursion for artists to Kuala Kubu Baru to foster a free form social discourse between the participants in a natural environment.
2. Rumah Air Panas, awarded RM9,000. For their proposal Contemporary Art In School, a project that uses the SM Stella Maris school compound as a space for artists to engage with students through their works.
3. Mark Teh, awarded RM8,000. For his proposal EMERGENCY: Sebuah Darurat Dua Minggu, a two-week multi-arts event to investigate and reflect upon the incidents of the Malayan Emergency sixty years on.
4. Elaine Pedley, awarded RM3,500. For her proposal Dance And Drama Facilitation In Selayang Community, a four-month series of workshops in dance and performance with children from the the Selayang area.
5. 1948 Artspace, awarded RM10,000. For their proposal Entry Points, a long term multidisciplinary community arts project that will be based in the Seri Kembangan area.
6. Sabina Arokiam, awarded RM10,000. For her proposal Stories From The Heart, By Kids For Kids, an arts workshop working with children of Burmese refugee communities to get them to share their experiences with the larger community.
7. Chang Yoong Chia, awarded RM8,000. For his proposal Stories From Vanishing Towns, a series of community art workshops working with residents of Sg Lembing (Pahang) and Papan (Perak) to collect stories about the towns’ tin mining histories.
you will recognise as a simulacrum of Malcolm Browne’s iconic 1963 (World Press Photo of the Year-winning) image of Buddhist monk Thich Quang Duc, as he burned to death in protest of religious persecution by the South Vietnam government. Mike’s toy tableau is a rather accurate approximation, down to the gasoline can and open bonnet of the Quang Duc’s Westminster sedan; it’s haunting because his (almost callously) whimsical medium so succinctly captures the essence of that scene — the little Lego man has such a nice smile. Journalist David Halberstam, who witnessed the actual event, said that as the monk burned “he never moved a muscle, never uttered a sound, his outward composure in sharp contrast to the wailing people around him.”
Spotted via Roo Reynold’s whirlwind Interesting 2008 slide-show of his obsession with those Danish bricks. (Note how Roo starts on a interesting point about toys and constraints and their influences on childhood development, with Douglas Coupland books in the background — then comically skirts the seriousness to talk about Star Wars Lego sets.)
Technology, I tell you. A famous aphorism attributed to Steve Wozniak, one half of the two Steves that founded Apple, is: “Never trust a computer you can’t throw out a window,” — and while that statement was made when people with home computers were still whizgeek rebels, I daresay it still applies. My iBook, now three years old (and therefore a warranty-less, evil brat) has been spontaneously expiring on me: data loss, shocked miens and bloodcurdling frustration. I’m behind on deadlines as it is, so this is a liability I don’t need — yet, with so much of my life still in there, I can’t bring myself to junk the treacherous thing.
(I know, I know: backup. Well, I can’t really afford a replacement rig, either, so it’s shitty either way.)
A friend has been kind enough to loan me her computer for the past few days — but before that working was a tiptoe through sentences, frequent punctuated by visits to the diskette icon and the “Save and Continue Editing” button. That enforced caution reminded me of Burmese performance artist Moe Satt (who was last seen in KL as part of “Buka Jalan”, and performing at the opening of Soe Naing’s exhibition) and his story about working with computers back home: because of frequent black-outs, the labels on his “Control” and “S” keys have worn off. The difference, of course, was that I have no malevolently inept government to finger. The closest equivalent would be Steve Jobs.
Anyway, no reason I can’t be (sort of) timely: fairly current is “The Weekend Sessions”, yet another newfangled limb of Popfolio’s burgeoning Blob, which has just posted their first session: a sit-on-the-floor-and-talk and two songs (nice, lightly edited footage of recording in Hardesh Singh’s house) with bard Azmyl Yunor.
Ah, the rhymes of Panda Head Curry?: more elegantly phrased social satire you will not find. Take, for example, their latest single, the genetic-experiment-gone-wrong- turned-apocalypse “Projek Khinzir Raksaksa”, which His Lordship Lord Panda (the shared nom de guitare of Rafil Elyas and Ben Liew) has brought to us as a forerunner to a full album (there’s also “Chipmunks On Crack”, but that’s a little more generic). Anyway, put it on and sing along:
Em G A
Projek khinzir raksaksa
Akan makan semua
Tidak boleh kau lari
Dari pada babi
Em G
Aku tak makan bak kut teh A G
Aku tak makan char siew pau
Aku pemakan haiwan soleh
Ayam, kambing yang disembelih
Hello Khalid Ibrahim
Nihaoma Chairman Lim Guan Eng
Kepala tuala Nik Aziz
Menentang khinzir yang najis!
Aku tak makan bak kut teh
Aku tak makan char siew pau
Aku pemakan haiwan soleh
Ayam, kambing yang disembelih
Khairy, Super Jason Lo
Najib, Tempe man Khir Toyo
Gu-na-kan kuasamu yang sakti
Letupkan semu-a babi!
The National Art Gallery, after 50 years, has come to acquire a somewhat checkered reputation in the cosmos of Malaysian visual art. For something that is supposed to be (and used to be) a mirror to the national state of the art-form, it struggles at showcasing the groundbreaking (commercial galleries do that, here), cataloguing the important (Singaporean museums are more avid at making Malaysian acquisitions, apparently) — or, well, just being a good space to exhibit art (leaky roofs, zinc awnings, shiny floors). Irrelevance — not having its finger on the pulse — is the most common criticism leveled at it, today.
It’s a toxic thing. When people want first introductions to a certain aspect of their culture they inevitably turn to big, government institutions, where they find no introduction at all. No wonder art here is so niche. The general public is largely unexcited because — at least when they look at the Balai — there’s isn’t much, really, to be excited about.
What’s gone wrong? The Balai has had a number of passionate Director Generals through the course of its existence, including artists Syed Ahmad Jamal and Wairah Marzuki; it’s current one, Mohammed Najib Ahmad Dawa, appears to have good intentions even if he’s a little blur (soundbite: “These days even supermarkets have catalogues so we have to redesign ours.”). Yet the prevailing working culture in the National Art Gallery is bureaucracy — unavoidable, considering how close its functioning is tied to the Ministry of Unity, Culture, Art and Heritage, a place proverbial for red tape, hearing impairment, and bending over to the squalls of politicians’ whims. (Just look at how many times, and how unthinkingly, its portfolio changes!)
The National Art Gallery Act of 1959, which established the institution, details practical concerns (constitution for the Board of Trustees, funding, etc.) but says nothing about the Balai’s aims or purposes. This is, perhaps, emblematic.
The indomitable musician and composer Hardesh Singh was recently described to me as a sort-of new-media mogul. There is some reason for this: one of the projects he’s been working on is Popfolio, an online entertainment (music, for the moment) community / conglomerate with no small amounts of potential. It’s in private beta, as yet — but you can buy music (Jerome Kugan’s “Songs For A Shadow”); add its money-making music-player, Poptopus, to your blog; and watch “The Fairly Current Show” on PopTeeVee.
Those tireless boys, Fahmi Fadzil and Mark Teh, are behind that last one. (Fahmi’s brother Fikri is also part of “The Wknd Sessions”, a music show whose first episode has been edited but not, as yet, posted online.) “The Fairly Current Show” is a weekly interview programme “focusing on current and quirky affairs in Malaysia … Upcoming guests include Adrian Yap, Shanon Shah, Jacqueline Ann Surin, Pete Teo and Yasmin Ahmad.” Their debut episode, which features landscape architect and gallery owner Ng Sek San talking about the cutting down of Lucky Garden’s 40-year-old angsana trees (interesting because DBKL is, surprisingly, not the bad guy here), seems to work better as a podcast-conversation-running-in-a-background-window more than something you’d watch. I relate to the title, which is an aspiration that I strive (and nearly always fail) to achieve.
Free-associating here, I’m reminded that Mark, back in the early early 2000s, produced WOW FM’s “The Very Moody Show”, a three-hour-long slot hosted by Huzir Sulaiman playing a fictional disc jockey. One of those three hours was an interview segment; it had a guests list that included “NGO types, taxi drivers, and Hishamuddin Rais.”
The Central Market Annexe’s latest exhibition, “Out Of Line”, is (as the name suggests) an anthology of 15 sketch-and-line (in Pang Khee Teik’s case, blackboard-and-chalk; or, with graffiti designer They, spraypaint-on-plywood) artists displaying quirk. Some of the works come from dark places, as with Chang Yoong Chia’s self-potraits or Avroco’s huddled masses, but in general they are fun, fashionable pieces; many are cutesy-ly mellow vignettes or minutely detailed surrealities — reflecting the kind of knowing lightness that is such a part of our era’s fatigue with dour issues dealt in dour ways. You could ponder about meanings and subtexts (are Mun Kao’s skyscraper-toothed Godzillas about the inherent monstrosity of human habitation?) here, as in any other show — but looking at it as a collection of cool drawings is pretty satisfying in itself. (An added bonus, on display since the weekend, are finalists of the exhibition’s attendant ballpoint pen art competition. The winner: a One Academy lecturer’s weird-cool rendition of a dog.)
The political and women’s rights activist Zaitun Mohamed Kasim withdrew from Malaysia’s 12th General Elections on account of what was believed to be, variously: typhoid, glandular fever, or intestinal ulcers. She had been fighting a protracted battle against pain and a host of symptoms that flared up, one after the other – though, for a while, she seemed to get better. There was a resurgence the week preceding campaign time; she was in a hospital as the country (specifically Petaling Jaya South, which would have been her constituency as Women’s Candidacy Initiative candidate) made history. When we received the election results, Toni had been told that she had liver cancer.
Further tests soon revealed that metastasis had occurred, and that the cancer was also in her pancreas. The prognosis gave her till the end of the year. As it turned out, this wasn’t the case.
Most people are familiar with Toni’s portfolio: her near-win in Kepong during the 1999 Elections; her work for Sisters In Islam and an army of other NGOs and advocacy groups; her writing, including articles about theatre, film and Ramadhan for Kakiseni; her lectures with clerics and artists and transsexuals about gender and sexuality concerns. This list, suffice to say, is far from adequate.
Pudu Prison was previously our most famous penitentiary, instigator of international incidents; it is a former museum, current police station and future low-security jail. It isn’t going anywhere soon, unlike most architectural history in Kuala Lumpur, since being a fetter for mass hauntings it is shielded from wrecking ball-crazy developers. A natural, if somewhat relaxed, subject for documentation.
K Azril Ismail’s black-and-white photography series “Live Animals Inside!” (now at Wei-Ling Gallery) has taken full advantage of this fact. It is one of the most powerful glimpses of a space I’ve seen; shot between 2002 and 2003 — part of a documentation study of Pudu Prison’s inmate graffiti that the artist carried out for his Master of Arts at UiTM — it’s a meditative body of work, one that has only grown better — as Azril himself admits in his exhibition statement — with age and distance.
It’s all too easy for abandoned-building photography to be grim and wistful, devoid of relief from the burdens of History, populated by dark, keening spirits. When the building is a prison, this is inevitable — so Azril has pictures of empty cells, gates, barbed wire, and gallows. These are proficient enough — “The Gate” features a the silhouette of a huge, closed corrugated iron portal, sunlight glimpsed through its rotting hinges; a photograph of Pudu’s visitor’s room has the prisoner side stark and certainly lit, in contrast to the shadowed world of their transient guests — but they are, perhaps, a little conventional.
Its fair to say that I’m a pretty big fan of writer / director Nam Ron’s work. The first review I wrote for Kakiseni was of Teater Ekamatra’s Singapore-Malaysia collaboration “Project Suitcase”, a quartet of original Malay-language texts staged in late 2003; I remember Nam Ron’s “matderihkolaperih”, a Perlis gangster epic, as one of the best things I have seen, since then. It had “memorable idioms (a man, during a fight, is said to be breathing “like a bull about to be slaughtered for Hari Raya Haji”)”, it was a “deceptively simple, well-told story”, and the narrative itself was as “timeless as a Greek tragedy.”
“Vertigo”: theatre noir
It’s not really fair to compare that work to the man’s latest — except for contrast: “Vertigo” was written and directed by Nam Ron in his capacity as a lecturer in Akademi Seni Budaya dan Warisan Kebangsaan; it featured a cast about two dozen people, second-year students being rated for their ability to do Experimental Theatre Production. It could have been a memorable story — how couldn’t it, since it was already halfway there, being an Oedipus-inflected (and slightly sadomasochistic) tragedy:
Seorang budak lelaki yang kematian ibu dan bapanya sewaktu kecil dibesarkan oleh neneknya. Melalui cerita-cerita neneknya, dia mula melakar gambaran wajah ibunya di dalam fikirannya. Suatu hari dia bertemu dengan seorang wanita yang mirip seperti gambaran dalam fikirannya itu. Wanita itu menderita sakit gangguan vestibular (vestibular disorder), dia tidak dapat mengimbangi tubuhnya dan sentiasa melihat keadaan sekelilingnya berputar. Wanita ini juga adalah isteri kepada ketua samseng yang menguasai bandar tempat mereka tinggal. Budak itu mendekati wanita itu untuk menumpang kasih dan wanita itu menerimanya. Sejak itu budak tersebut berkerja dengannya. Tugasnya membantu wanita tersebut menguruskan kegiatan harian. Hubungan itu lama kelamaan menjadi intim dan mula wujud perasaan sayang setelah budak tersebut meningkat dewasa.
