Ahmad Zakii Anwar, Breath, 2003, oil on canvas, 68 x 200 cm.
This year’s exhibition involves the concept of playing games. In different contexts, play can have positive and negative meanings and outcomes. Playing builds friendships, tests physical and mental skills and develops the ability to concentrate. The danger arises when people play at policy or relationships without considering how it affects others. Policy makers play with the environment, threatening the ecosystem; and in relationships, people play with their lovers or people around them to gratify their ego. In any case the games people play affect all of us.
Playing games is an activity that occupies our lives from childhood and beyond. In youth, playing builds friendships, tests physical and mental skills and develops concentration.
Yet, as adults, games take on a more complex nature. In every language, play as a word has both positive and negative meanings. When a person tries to cover up a hurtful comment they might say main main sahaja or jyou shr kai wan siau, both meaning I’m just joking. Romance also uses the language of games with main mata or the angry accusation that someone is just playing with you and not taking the relationship seriously.
Games on their own are neutral. They require an agreed upon set of rules, clear objectives and a willingness to suspend disbelief. We have to step out of our lives for a game to be fully played. Sometimes the game becomes confused with life or becomes so attractive that we find ways to make it a crucial part of our lives.
The danger arises when others play at policy or relationships without considering how it affects the fabric of life. Policy makers may play with the environment, imposing grandiose structure that will destroy endangered species or threaten fragile ecosystems. Rather than considering the impact of their actions, the fleeting goals of pride and greed are fed in the game of power accumulation.
In relationships, people play at love to gratify their ego or provide distraction from pressing issues at home. Romance serves as an escape from reality, the reality of ageing, emotional complexity or financial concerns.
Play can also be a very positive activity. As a means to build up the skills to make changes in life, playing with something or as someone else may help to give one the confidence to make necessary changes. Additionally, play is a crucial ingredient for creativity. Artists, designers and architects use the freeing power of play to learn what happy accidents can reveal. Without play, creativity is impossible.
— Laura Fan, curator
Anne Morrison, From ‘Hybrid series’ 1. Hive 2. Pod 3. Spore 4. Scale, Size: 71.5 x 71.5cm (each work), Medium: oil on canvas
Ilse Noor
Istana Mestika
2003
20 x 30 cm
Line drawing etching, AP (artist’s proof)
on Hahnemuhle paper, 250 gm.
Troy Ruffels: Artist in Residence Rimbun Dahan
Sampled Reality (detail)
Size: 58 x 58cm (each panel)
Medium: oil on canvas
Yusof Majid
Enough of your games
2003
oil on canvas
153 x 168 cm
Troy Ruffels was the Australian resident artist of the year-long Malaysia-Australia Visual Arts Residency at Rimbun Dahan in 2003.
Biography
Troy Ruffels was born in Devonport, Tasmania in 1972. Upon completion of the 12 month Rimbun Dahan Art’s Residency in Malaysia he will return to Tasmania where he works and resides – overlooking the Forth Valley and farmlands of the Tasmania’s North West Coastline. Ruffels graduated from the Tasmanian School of Art @ Hobart, University of Tasmania (UTAS) with a Bachelor of Fine Art in 1994, where he was also awarded the degree BFA (1st Class Honours) in 1996. He obtained a Postgraduate Diploma ( with Distinction) from the Glasgow School of Art, 2001, and was in 2002 admitted to the degree Doctor of Philosophy ( Fine Art), University of Tasmania.
Ruffels’ work has been featured in numerous Australian and international curated exhibitions, with work exhibited in New York, London, Madrid, Barcelona, Alicante, Lisbon, Lubjjana, the Canary islands, Glasgow, Berlin, Sydney, Melbourne, Canberra, Brisbane, Perth and Hobart. His work is held in numerous collections including the Tasmanian Museum and Art Gallery, The Devonport Regional Gallery, and Artbank.
Above: ‘Bonnet’ 58cm x 58cm Digital Print 2003
Above: Sampled Reality: Pool 1.9m x 1.9m oil on canvas 2003
Above: Sampled Reality: Cloud Gazing 1.9m x 1.9m oil on canvas 2003
Exhibition Catalogue Essay
Filtered Sky
Rimbun Dahan exhibition catalogue cover.
I have a memory of Troy Ruffels as the only outdoor coffee drinker in the hair-raising cold of a Tasmanian winter morning. I would pass him most days on my way to university. All other patrons were on the inside of the cafe window, protected behind a curtain of condensed air, their heads in newspapers. But the folded arms and casual sitting style of the outdoor patron belied the chill as Ruffels embraced the opportunity to observe and respond to the outdoor world, ‘gathering and collecting small details of the passing environment.’ [1]
This memory is five years old, and comes to me in irony as I consider the work that has evolved during 12 months in tropical Malaysia. In the heat saturated studio at Rimbun Dahan, Ruffels continues to be fuelled by the natural elements that exist in the urban environment. The images conceived there reveal that the artist’s interest in an emotional sense of place travels with him, and is not limited to, nor lost without, his home in Tasmania. Alert to the smells, sounds and sights intrinsic to the places he visits, the artist is a filter for these experiences and memories to distil, and ultimately take root in paintings and photographs.
The works in Sampled Reality simultaneously ground and throw the viewer. They form a push me – pull me map from diaristic imagery that has been snatched by the artist from its otherwise temporary moment of beauty and being. We are grounded in the panoramic and all encompassing scale of the works, and settled by the poignant aesthetic of each reflection. Ruffels’ work draws you in, offering a journey through the artist’s experience of the world around him.
Rain. Trees. Clouds. These soft aspects of nature settle almost too comfortably in the seemingly impenetrable surfaces of new cars, puddles, glass, and hard, wet ground. Reflections in such urbane, ever-present fabrics are not something we usually register consciously. We look at the object itself, rather than the image nesting within it. Reflections do not break surfaces like scratches, dents, ripples and graffiti. Instead, they briefly accommodate the shape of the object and are almost camouflaged to eyes unaccustomed to looking beyond the expected. Ruffels has trained himself to see, snaring these apparitions as they pass across the object’s skin, and revealing the world’s infinite network of reflected, subterranean passages.
The viewer experiences subtle confusion in the artist’s use of reflection, for we normally register reflection through the live, mirrored image of ourselves or our immediate environment. The artist has further evaded other mirrored references by ensuring no part of himself is captured in the photograph. Trees, sky and stone are gently altered by the blurred movement, muted colour, shifting focus, and colliding imagery characteristic of these urban reflections. These subtle transformations trigger a sense of unease as one recognises that the painted or photographed image is not taken directly from its subject. Ruffels crops the imagery so that the edge of the reflective surface is gone. The image is floating. ‘Sky, tree and stone hang suspended’ as the frameless, softly mirrored world turns the tactile world on its head. [2]
In Malaysia, after years of working with photo media, Ruffels has again taken up painting. He writes that putting paint on canvas allows for ‘prolonged sensorial engagement’ with the subject, sensing that real value of the work is in the ‘process of engagement with the world, and the processes through which [the subject] is interpreted, and brought to life in the studio’. [3]The moving brush across canvas is not unlike the reflection moving across its surface, however the brush passes back and forwards, often repeatedly over the one area, as the image materialises. As each work-in-progress develops as an archive of the reflection, the painter exists in a world divined by instinct, a ‘continuous cycle of experience, response, and expression.’ [4]
It is hard to fight romantic writing when considering Ruffels’ imagery. Descriptions of the work are easily loaded with words like ‘poignant, whimsical, ephemeral, ethereal’. This is because the work is all of these things. Ruffels makes no bones about the fact that his art is rooted in poetry and imagination, emotions, memories and histories. Each piece is a layering process of experiences and responses to the natural environment. The artist ‘takes’ natural forms to construct the images, and creates only beautiful works that trigger the human desire to experience something breathtaking. In doing so, Ruffels drives the viewer into a flip-book of emotional responses, inciting us to reflect upon the extraordinary possibilities of the world sub-surface.
Ruffels has always responded directly to his immediate environment. In Tasmania, photographic works about reflections were printed in steel grey, cold blue, and later, a metallic pink. The rain, in its refected form, felt as if it would sting one’s skin, the waves were blackly Antarctic, and the path of the birds was ominous, as if a southern storm was brewing. Five years later, he wrote to me from Malaysia:
I have continued to work with reflections of nature in the environment. It is a meaningful motif, which I embrace. It signifies the possibility that another world exists other than the one we are able to subject to rational analysis. It gives rise to the possibility that there are other pathways we may travel in life – another level of appreciation, of understanding, of communicating with the world we inhabit – other than the one that is sold to us as being real … and subsequently finite. [5]
In the uncanny beauty that emanates from the images reflecting from duco or murky pools of water, there is a moment where one is uprooted by a feeling of wonder in the world, an awe-inspiring second of realising how small we really are, a flash where one is lifted through the clouds, or dipped beneath the molten surface of the water. The gentle manipulation of natural elements, captured reflections, the transformation of passé surfaces, and the devout attention paid to an urbane instant catch the viewer in a sensory eclipse. Brief moments of recognition are surpassed by super-real interpretations of the physicalworld. These sensations linger as the viewer moves from the work, only to come across fragments of Ruffels’ imagery all around, and ordinary experiences intensify as reality is sampled by both artist and the viewer.
Jane Stewart, 2004
Director, Devonport Regional Gallery, Tasmania
[1] RUFFELS, Troy, Artist Notes to the Author, December 2003
Immersed in the richness and complexity of nature at Rimbun Dahan, Jasmine was searching for a dialectic experience with the plants and objects around her. Obsessed with the regular pattern of the lines and textures on plants, different sizes of leaves were collected as models and cast with plaster of Paris. Slabs of soft clay were pressed against the plaster moulds to question the ephemeral nature of the objects and things around us, and render the impermanent permanent.
‘Ceramic by its nature cannot escape medium-hood’. For an artist like Jasmine ‘working in a medium so identified with craft-based procedures, her clay sculpture is immediately subject to sustained discussion on its material language’, challenging the perception of the custody of material use and the art forms in contemporary art practice today in Malaysia.
Installation, as the British writer Michael Archer described it, is ‘a kind of art making which rejects concentration on one object in favor of a consideration of the relationships between a number of elements or of the interaction between things and their contexts’. In Jasmine’s case, her works were a suggestion of scene and environment, which derived from her memories as well as from reality. The imprinted clay leaves were glazed with color and scattered on fabric, referring to the changing seasons. For instance, the imprinted lotus leaves of various sizes mimic the green summer water pond. All these pieces of work bring the connection of the scene from outside to inside, from exterior to interior. The relationship of human to nature was revealed through Jasmine’s intellectual interest, her participating in nature and sharing that experience with others.
Stone carving, like clay forming, is a slow and time consuming process. The physicality of force and the gradual changes of surface and shape were important to Jasmine and can be seen in her stone sculptures. Inspired by the curved and pointed elegance of the Jade Vine flower, Jasmine used marble to reinterpret her chosen subject through the physical process of carving. The smoothness and reflective nature of the marble was tarnished, the solid surface was opened and revealed by force. The original shape of the Jade Vine was copied, altered and magnified. The meaning of the work lies not in the work itself but in our attitude towards the art work.
Jasmine Kok’s work ‘does not reproduce what we see, it makes us see’. Her intention is not simply about recording the natural world but in transforming an object, a space and environment into something profound and intellectual. The work offers a fresh vision to her and to the viewer. The perceptual knowledge about the place around her, about things and objects she encounters and feels, are shown through her sculpture and installation works in a stage of ‘metaphysics concerned with the nature of existence’.
During her studies in London, Jasmine participated in an organization called ‘Art Express’, where she taught wood and stone carving within the community for several years. She was also involved in art therapy projects with problem children and the homeless, and the feedback was positive. She had some special experiences working with other artists from different countries while in London, and shared different culture experiences when working in the quarries and sculpture parks.
In the past, Jasmine Kok’s sculpture was primarily figurative, but since her residency in Rimbun Dahan, her art practice has embarked on a whole new journey by exploring nature and different materials. The artist in residence programme allowed her to explore new perceptions within her art, while assisting her to develop and understand the arts of her homeland.
‘Blue Symphony,’ 110 x 110 x 3 cm, ceramic clay, glaze, glue, perspex and velvet, 2004.
‘Green Summer Dream 1,’ 46x 46 x 4 cm, ceramic clay, glaze, glue and velvet, 2004.
‘Green Summer Dream 5,’ 150 x 80 x 4 cm, ceramic clay, glaze, glue and velvet, 2004.
‘Peace,’ carved from a single block of Langkawi limestone.
‘Transformation (detail),’ 145 x 52 x 63 cm, marble, 2004.
‘Transformation,’ 145 x 52 x 63 cm, marble, 2004.
‘Transformation’ being lowered into the Rimbun Dahan underground gallery.
Biography
Jasmine Kok Lee Fong
Date of birth: 28th October 1970
Nationality: Malaysian
Address: C109, Kampung Kundang, 48020 Rawang, Selangor, Malaysia.
Anne standing in the underground gallery at Rimbun Dahan, surrounded by her work.
Rimbun Dahan Exhibition Catalogue Essay
HAVEN
Anne Morrison beckons you to hover over crevices, lie beneath canopies, bury beneath undergrowth. Slip behind membranes. Peel back foliage. Slide against cell walls.
The painted environments in Haven are both macro and microscopic, bodily and earthly, scientific and sensory. The artist asks that you peer deeper into the shadowy spaces that haunt the leaves, spores, and parasites inhabiting the canvas. The surface of each work is similar to a forest floor, where decaying leaves, peat, feathers, skeletons, and twigs collide so that elements of each are only partially exposed. It is this fragmented imagery that reflects her unique approach to representing the land: ‘the layering experiences of place, relating to memories and to the movement through the landscape.’1
During the 12 months at Rimbun Dahan, Morrison has dug into and reinterpreted the organic fabric making up the vast garden that surrounds the studio. At the beginning of the residency, Malaysia’s tropical forms were unknown, and responses were acute and overwhelming. But time has allowed the artist to study the foreign land through its flora, her perceptions and understanding building with accelerating intensity. She has been able to track the seasonal transformation of the plants so that smells and textures have become vividly and evocatively familiar. The initial razor-sharp responses to the strangeness of a new environment have matured into a complex series of observations that compound with each painting, nourishing and anchoring both the artist and her work in this place.
Morrison’s practice is a continuous process of inspecting and translating the interface of tree, plant and grass forms. Cataloguing the extraordinary colour, texture, and shape of tropical growth, she is a world away from the Tasmanian seeds and grasses that triggered the preceding body of work. These were fine, weightless structures, ‘simple forms, light and ephemeral, carrying a multitude of possibilities upon a breath of air… seeds flying, dancing in the wind, settling, perhaps seeding.’2 In contrast, the moisture-congested air in Malaysia leans on equivalent biology, preventing flight and suppressing movement.
In Haven, colours are saturated, almost garish: turquoise, orange, yellow and white, unlike the muted reds, blues and greys intrinsic to Tasmania. Tropical patterns are webbed, not podded. Forms are plastic, as if slackened by the heat, not taut like those plucked from a colder climate. Paint is thinner and more viscous. Imagery is created through spilling, dripping and pouring paint on canvas, and at other times by employing methodical, repetitive brush marks. The artist’s visual language is constructed from these diverse methods of paint application, and from the ever-changing forms that surround her. Within this painted lexicon, evolving and existing dialects are employed to reflect both newly-discovered and reinterpreted forms.
Morrison’s more recent investigation of plants and landscape stems directly from an earlier emphasis on the body. During the 1990s, she fused imagery related to medical scans, diagrams, and x-rays, with maps of the land. These works were also about the unfamiliar, but probed the darker regions of the human body rather than the surface patterns of plants. They referred to the vulnerability of the body, and our inability to understand the path of foreign bodies and invasive cells. Red, pink, orange, and white paint was spilled onto the canvas, staining and penetrating its surface rather than resting with the modulated control of brush strokes. Veins, sinew, plasma, and cells were manipulated to create trails that alluded to mapping and the exploration of the unknown. Gradually, these paintings have lead to the artist’s subtle inversion of imagery: from inner body shapes that are suggestive of land, to land forms that allude to body. Though perspectives shift from looking in, to looking out, each work continues to be a highly personal landscape capturing the osmotic relationship between body and land.
Weave, Scatter, Envelop, Lattice, Storm. These are titles of earlier paintings that evoke strong imagery as words alone. They encourage bodily engagement with the work: pulling, hugging, whispering. Like these previous works, the images in Haven call the viewer towards Morrison’s unfolding interpretations of dense tropical landscape. Plants resemble the hairs, bones, veins of the body, and the heated colours mimic the effect of humidity. ‘The air is palpable … moisture is thick … beads of sweat gather on the skin … one is continuously aware of one’s body….’3 As a personal catalogue of responses to a foreign environment, each work is familiar yet strange. Lines are both sharp and blurred. Foreground and background are combined. Fleeting forms are nearly recognisable, but impossible to pinpoint. We are netted in pattern and movement, grasping and sliding, aware only of our emotions and response to the landscape before us. A haven.
Jane Stewart 2004.
Director, Devonport Regional Art Gallery, Tasmania.
1MORRISON, Anne, Notes to the author, December 2003.
2MORRISON, Anne, as above.
3MORRISON, Anne, as above.
Cluster (hybrid series Malaysia), 2003, oil on canvas 153x122cm.
Spore II, 2003, oil on canvas 190x150cm.
“Murmur”, 2004, oil on canvas, 170 x 140 cm.
From ‘Hybrid series’1. Hive 2. Pod 3. Spore 4. Scale Size: 71.5 x 71.5cm (each work) Medium: oil on canvas.
Biography
Born Glasgow, Scotland in 1966.
Morrison graduated with a Bachelor of Fine Arts Degree with Honours at Glasgow School of Art in 1988 before relocating to London to undertake a Master of Fine Arts at The Royal College of Art, graduating in 1990. In 1995 she was awarded a Commonwealth Scholarship to undertake research in Australia and in 1999 she was among the first to successfully complete a practice-based Doctorate in Fine Art at The University of Tasmania.
Morrison has had 11 solo exhibitions in the UK and Australia since 1989. Recent exhibitions include Cluster at Despard Gallery Hobart Tasmania and Body and Land at Devonport Regional Art Gallery Tasmania 2003, Weave of Nature at Essoign Club Melbourne 2002, The Sentient Body at Plimsoll Gallery Hobart 1999 and Intermediate Groundat The Bond Store, Tasmanian Museum and Art Gallery Hobart 1997.
Curated group exhibitions in 2003 include Love letter to China: Drawings by 35 Australian Artists at Ivan Doherty Gallery Sydney (Touring China 2004), Painting Tasmanian Landscape at Plimsoll Gallery Hobart, Future Perfect at Bett Gallery Hobart. Synergy at (Artist/Scientist collaboration), CSIRO Hobart and My Father is the Wise Man of the Village at Fruitmarket Gallery Edinburgh, Scotland 2002, Zero Horizon at CAST Gallery, Hobart 1999.
Arts awards and arts residencies include The Fusion Arts Commission Edinburgh, 2001, The Scottish Arts Council Small Assistance Award 1999, The Scottish Arts Councils One Year Australian Arts Residency 1994-95, The Ensign Prize, Painting, Royal College of Art, London 1990, The British Institution Fund (1st prize Painting), Royal Academy, London and The John Minton Travel Award RCA 1989, The Elizabeth Greenshields Award, Canada and The Jock Macfie Award, Glasgow School of Art, 1988.
Work in art collections include The Derwent Art Collection, Tasmania, The Scottish Arts Council, The Royal College of Art London, The University of Tasmania, Ensign Trust London, Devonport Regional Art Gallery, Aberdeen Hospital and Northfield Academy, Aberdeen, Scotland and Hijjas Kasturi Associates/ Rimbun Dahan, Kuala Lumpur.
Morrison is a Permanent Australian Resident who works and resides in Forth, Tasmania.
Permaculture is a name coined and patented by the Australian visionary Bill Mollison. Mollison alerted Australians to the importance of protecting biodiversity and agricultural land. As well as promoting an organic, interlinked and labour saving agricultural approach, he also encourages gardeners to plant indigenous rather than exotic in order to provide sustenance for birds and wild life. He has been outstandingly successful as an arbiter of what is appropriate in Australia, and has, I think, contributed greatly to the sense Australians have of occupying their particular place.
Thanks to him, people recognize not just a genera of Banksias or Grevilleas, but specific species, and gardeners vie with each other to collect and nurture many varieties. To sustain the interest, he started indigenous nurseries to produce the plants that people wanted in their gardens and thus initiated a whole new trend in gardening. Gardens, by the way, sustain a multi-billion dollar industry around the world.
I was surprised to learn that a permaculture garden has been started in a suburb of KL and was delighted to be reacquainted with the methodology. The objective of the garden in KL is to show terrace house residents that they can grow enough to sustain, or at least significantly supplement, a family with home grown vegetables, fruits and herbs. It is organic in the sense that no pesticides are used and the application of natural fertilizers is minimized, but there are no complicated sequences of crops or treatments to protect the tender plants. The whole system works on common sense and labour saving planning, so I will try to paraphrase the principles without sacrificing too much of the content.
Most important is the soil, which should never be left exposed, but covered instead with a constantly maintained layer of mulch (and this can be anything from grass cuttings to leaves) that will protect it from weed growth, excessive heat and drying out. It will also sustain healthy earthworm and micro-organism populations. The concern that everything should be composted first before applying to the ground should be a bit flexible: better to place what you have on bare soil unprocessed than to tip it out. Obviously some mulches are better than others, sawdust is not as good as fallen leaves, for example, but if sawdust is all you have, then put it on but try mixing different sources of nutrients.
One warning about fungal attacks bears repeating: keep the mulch about 2″ from the stems of plants to protect them from fungal attack, especially in the wet season.
Place your vegetables where they will get the morning sun but not the hot afternoon sun. Apparently plants grow most in the mornings and ‘shut down’ when the heat threatens to overwhelm and dry out of the plant. Protection from the afternoon sun is important, either by a wall or other plants that provide shade.
Plant slow maturing vegetables at the back, faster ones at the front. Enhance this by making path loops into the garden bed so that access can be had to all plants but tramping over beds is minimized, because this can damage the soil structure.
Mix your planting, place individual leafy vegetables in amongst the herbs or tomatoes, don’t group them together where a pest can readily destroy the lot. If you lack planting material to create this mix, scatter pre-soaked kacang hijau about. They will readily sprout and will provide the nitrogen fixing that will be advantageous to the neighbouring plants. Mix the legumes with fruit, leaf and root crops all together.
Compost and liquid manure are supplements that are needed in the tropics because of the heavy rainfall that leaches away nutrients so quickly. Where there is space, and you don’t need much, chickens can also be introduced into the equation. Especially in an orchard, they will control weeds and limit pests, as well as provide fertilzer for the garden. In exchange, you can enjoy an occasional rendang ayam and fresh eggs!
The garden in KL has tried to develop a water retention system involving a pond and a water route for run off to be reused before discharging into the drain. A pond increases the biodiversity of the garden and encourages frogs and toads that are beneficial for a pest free environment. In the pond, this particular garden had tillapia, which did not sit too well with the ethics of Permaculture, as Mollison always stresses the importance of using indigenous animals and plants. As table fish they may be easy to grow but once escaped into our rivers they out compete indigenous fish and ultimately reduce the aquatic biodiversity. I would suggest sepat (gouramys) as they are very hardy, can feed of anything available, including mosquito larvae, they don’t eat the aquatic plants and they can be harvested from time to time.
The garden we visited actually had a ‘grey water’ area, where kitchen water is discharged into a depression in the ground. Kangkong, bananas and ubi could thrive here and make use of the waste water and the nutrients in it. Obviously used cooking oil cannot be disposed of this way, nor can it be added to a compost heap, but a sand filled hole in the garden permits micro-organisms to break it down further.
Creating a sustainable system to produce safe food that utilizes nutrients that would otherwise be lost or wasted has always been my preoccupation, and it is intriguing that you can do it on even the smallest plot. It may require a bit of ingenuity to salvage runoff or to save rain water, but I think this is the ultimate challenge for a gardener: creating something that is worth more from your effort and ingenuity than it was before, and to see the benefits to other creatures, plant and animal. Keeping in touch with these natural processes and learning how to manipulate them for our advantage without harming other things is a great achievement, and it is so rewarding to eat your own kangkong or cucumber that you have nurtured through the hazards of pests and floods.
The word permaculture is a combination of ‘permanent’ and ‘agriculture’. The objective is to create a mixed garden of fast and slow maturing plants that will gradually develop into a forest garden. Taller trees will bear fruit and provide nesting sites for birds that will help maintain the balance, and protect the more tender plants below. The immaculately laid out KL garden is designed to minimize labour input, and once established it will be a joy, but gardens will always need a degree of personal care and observation. By checking on plants regularly, you get to understand what they are likely to need, and the challenge is to transform these needs and our own into a compatible garden that supports us and wildlife on a sustainable basis.
Malaysian painter Wong Perng Fey was one of the Malaysian artists of the year-long Malaysia-Australia Visual Arts Residency at Rimbun Dahan in 2002.
Bio
Born in Kuala Lumpur in 1974, Wong Perng Fey is an artist who has built his reputation as an experimental and versatile painter since his graduation from the Malaysian Institute of Art under the school’s scholarship in 1998. His works are in many prominent public collections such as the National Visual Arts Gallery, Kuala Lumpur, Bank Negara Malaysia Museum Art Gallery, Kuala Lumpur and Galeri Petronas, Kuala Lumpur. He lives and works in Beijing.
Exhibition Opening Speech
by Angela Hijjas
Solo Exhibition 2 – 19 October 2002 Valentine Willie Fine Art, Bangsar, Kuala Lumpur
Thank you all for coming this evening to see these new landscapes by Wong Perng Fey.
I would like to thank Beverly and Valentine Willie Fine Art not just for inviting me to open this show today but for having being such strong supporters of our artists’ residency programme. This gallery has suggested to us a stream of fine young artists to support, one of whom is Perng Fey, and it has provided Hijjas and I with our greatest pleasure in seeing their works develop up to this exciting exhibition stage.
Like most of us, I am neither art critic nor scholar, but I come to the new work of any artist with formed ideas about what the world is like, and inevitable expectations about how it might be portrayed. I also have a particular affinity with landscape as it illustrates to me the way we relate to the environment around us, but as in most areas where we have a little knowledge and think we know what is going on, in fact we may not.
Perng Fey’s depiction of landscapes definitely overturns any preconceived ideas of what we are likely to see. These are not pretty kampongs or rivers winding through romantic hills and forests: these landscapes portray what happens to nature and land when they are modified by man. Landscapes are not static, they change, which in itself confronts our expectations of variations caused by mere weather and light. Today, unfortunately, landscapes have been destroyed and desecrated, but it is something we rarely confront, not wanting to question the very real benefits that development has brought us.
Landscapes have shaped every culture, including Malaysia’s for generations, and yet we ignore their plight in our flurry of progress. At the same time, many of us are influenced by the cultural values of more temperate climates where open spaces are commended as ‘vistas’ and exotic gardens are the epitome of beauty. We occupy this place, but we do not know it as well as we should.
From my personal perspective Perng Fey is painting the landscapes that people would rather ignore: the ravaged and the marginal. These are the landscapes that are the closest to us but are the most neglected. Perng Fey’s are the landscapes from our peripheral vision that we really do not recognize as our own, but which are in fact our prevailing visual experience.
Despite this dark side of the work, his skills of composition and handling of his medium seduce one into looking and seeing beauty, but they are simultaneously disturbing.
Another area of Perng Fey’s interest lies in the remains of settlements, most of them tacked together as temporary shelters that have served out their usefulness and have since been abandoned. Like his landscapes, they are devoid of people, as if he is charting our passage across the land, tracing the trail of our transience. They are however, quite beautiful, forcing us to review something that has always been seen as a blight on the
landscape, once again transforming our usual perspective.
These paintings bring the conflicts of occupying a place to the surface: they are compelling canvases portraying something that I did not initially recognise for what they are, they are puzzling and yet beautiful, and I can assure you that a longer acquaintance with these works will not disappoint.
I have been watching Perng Fey’s works develop over the last 9 months and am intrigued by these landscapes that he is understandably reluctant to verbalise. At first viewing each piece seems simple enough, but as the series has developed so has his subject. Just the other day, we were discussing how, by seeing all his work hung together like this, we can experience the development of his ideas as body of work. Even those of us who are fortunate enough to acquire one of them might want to return to this brief opportunity to see the whole collection, because it works so well as a changing viewpoint of landscape and our human habitation.
I congratulate Perng Fey for this remarkable show, and thank you all for coming this evening. Enjoy the exhibition.
Visual artist Jean Weiner was the Australian resident artist in the year-long Malaysia-Australia Visual Arts Residency at Rimbun Dahan in 2002.
The scientist does not study nature because it is useful. He studies it because he delights in it, and he delights in it because it is beautiful.
Jules-Henri Poincaré
Jean Weiner’s bold, organic, painted surfaces play on the ambiguity between abstraction and realism, and between art and science. The works are abstract, yet are also re-presentations of physical reality. They are a fusion of art and entomology: an in-depth look at colours and patterns of butterflies, moths and beetles, enlarged so that they impact upon the senses.
The artist’s aim is to encourage the audience to become aware of their physical, intuitive and emotional responses to colour and pattern. To encourage this embodied meditation between a composition and its audience, the artist employs a wet-on-wet technique of blending oil colours through the use of a variety of fine brushes in order to produce his signature-style blurred borders and smooth finishes. This technique arrests focused vision, invoking a momentary feeling of chaos, but ultimately invites a new sense of ‘alive calm’.
Jean Weiner is particularly versed in his subject, bringing together in an interdisciplinary approach: a Master of Art in painting; a Bachelor of Arts in philosophy, for which he received first class honours; and his work as the honorary curator of foreign lepidoptera (butterflies) at the Australian Museum. Like the new theories in science and philosophy, the artist’s practice demonstrates the interconnectedness of both natural and cultural life. His works especially resonate with Chaos Theory’s ‘Butterfly Effect’. This environmental notion of the beating of an insect’s wing in one hemisphere having, through a web of events, possible catastrophic outcomes in another, becomes in the artist’s work a statement of hope, a way of exploring new ways of being. Just as the natural world is interrelated, so are cultures: as an Australian of Czech and French origin who has lived and practised in Sydney, Asia and Europe and exhibited internationally, he lives and celebrates this (bio)diversity.
Ultimately, Jean’s art is about wonder; it reminds us that the world, even in its smallest detail, is extraordinary.
Jean’s work has received growing recognition and acclaim through university conferences, judged and curated exhibitions, government and philanthropic grants, artist residencies and public collections. His paintings have been exhibited in museums and galleries in Sydney, Los Angeles, New York, Aix-en-Provence, Paris and Kuala Lumpur. Recently he was selected by the National Art Gallery of Malaysia to participate in the Alami II Science/ Art conference at Mt. Kinabalu as part of UNESCO’s international year of the mountain. The artist’s upcoming exhibition will show the work – based specifically on Malaysian butterfly, moth and beetle species – that he has produced during his year-long artist residency at Rimbun Dahan.
Paint not the thing, but the effect it produces… Mallarmé
Work by Ahmad Shukri at the Singapore Contemporary Arts Fair, 2002.
Ahmad Shukri’s work for the Rimbun Dahan residency is as profuse and multi-layered as a tropical garden. The artist will exhibit paintings, installations and a large drawing on canvas, all in his highly decorative and richly referential style.
Out of the explosion of work in his studio he identifies four major series. Two installations of ‘incubators’, structures filled with hundreds of white and black plaster eggs, draw on the yin-yang concept to suggest the inevitably heterogeneous nature of the world. As Shukri puts it, within a hundred white eggs there will be a black egg, and vice versa.
The ‘people’s forum’ (sidang rakyat) installation consists of multiple pairs of boxing gloves cast in plaster and set atop a low table covered in a patchwork of textiles. For Shukri, the boxing gloves represent the sparring of politicians, while the textiles are the backdrop of unresolved and perhaps unresolvable situations against which their competitions take place.
A series of diskettes embedded in perspex sheets and overlaid with resin and silk-screen printing point to the irresistible spread of technology, which he sees as again neither wholly good nor bad but always composite. In the voyager series of paintings nature and culture morph into each other: the blades of a ceiling fan echo the petals of a flower and a chicken appears both as a living animal and as a child’s plastic toy. Whereas the installations illustrate socio-political conditions as Shukri sees them, he describes the paintings—featuring paper boats and planes, dragonflies, butterflies, cartoon characters, scrawled scraps of text—as diaries, eclectic personal records of memory and experience.
Many of the motifs—the eggs, the chickens, the fabrics representative of Malaysia’s main ethnic groups, the diskettes—are familiar from Shukri’s previous work, but for the artist the significance of these images is inexhaustible and ever elusive. A thread running through Shukri’s work in this exhibition is precisely this multivalent eloquence of objects: a loosely sketched rabbit in one painting alludes to the rabbit-breeding business started by a friend of the artist, whereas the origami rabbit appearing in the same work is suggestive of Japan’s influence on Malaysia.
An interest in texture and textiles and the play of surfaces also underlies Shukri’s work. His canvases are layered with squares of fabric or cut-out numbers, reflecting, he says, the multi-layered nature of the world. Several of the paintings feature scraps of fabric machine-embroidered with bands of thread in subtle gradations of colour. The use of techniques such as these, from outside the strictly traditional artist’s repertoire, as well as the incorporation of images of found objects like coconut husks and flowers, spring from Shukri’s belief that art is embedded in everyday life. The everyday world revealed in Shukri’s work is one of vibrant, chaotic and constantly changing multiplicity.
Recently the Selangor Branch showed the new three hour BBC series by David Attenborough called ‘State of the Planet’, and I have been mulling over it ever since. The main issue he explores is the impact of humans on the global landscape of plants and animals and he demonstrates quite conclusively that the process of impoverishment of species is unrelenting once mankind arrives on the scene.
Islands provide the most easily read examples of what happens after the arrival of man. Hawaii was first settled some centuries ago and the impact on biodiversity has reduced the number of species by a half and counting, to the extent that there is little remaining of the original habitat, hence the application of the term ‘impoverishment’.
Easter Island experienced the same process in a more dramatic form. The people who occupied the islands made boats from forest wood that enabled them to fish, but eventually with the growing success of the human population there were fewer and fewer trees for boat building until all were gone. Diets changed without these boats, demonstrated by archaeological middens. Fish were no longer a source of protein, nor did the people have any way to leave the islands. Eventually they all died and left their plaintive monuments of huge stone faces staring out over the ocean, perhaps as a prayer for rescue from their devastated island.
The famous biologist Edward Wilson was interviewed extensively in the series, and summarised man’s impact as not intentionally destructive, but that we ‘succeeded too well’. Hand in hand with a technological revolution that enables us to extract the vast majority of the world’s resources for our own consumption means devastation for forests and oceans. As our numbers increase with greater security of food supplies so our impact explodes.
To continue like this can only mean the destruction of our habitat, just as on the Easter Islands.
We may think of our own immediate habitat as being relatively intact, but with globalization our foot print is actually widespread; Japan provides an interesting example. For decades the Japanese have not cut their own forests, believing that they enshrine an irreplaceable essence of Japanese culture. But rather than using other materials instead of wood, they buy their timber from lower cost countries where the environmental or cultural impact is not added to the cost of extraction. But in the long term, if we degrade the habitat of other countries, we degrade our own.
But how long is the long term? How long will it be before we feel the impact of our over extraction of resources? I think within this decade we will see significant changes in the Malaysian lifestyle. Already we eat less seafood, not because we lack the boats, but because we have over ‘harvested’ most of our tropical fishing grounds and the international market takes the best of what remains. We will no longer be able to afford wood for construction, so our housing and interiors will be unrelenting concrete. Our sources of water will be severely polluted by the destruction of forest cover, clean water will be a rarity, and tap water will be undrinkable (in fact many already refuse to drink it). Most power will not come from renewable sources in the foreseeable future, and until it does we continue to live off our capital. In fact, our whole present lifestyle is ‘off our capital’, and until we reverse that the future does not look bright.
Sustainable development is something that banks and governments do not consider enough in their cost-benefit analyses, but by ignoring the people who have to make a living from the small things and concentrating only on those who make on the big things, the balance will invariably be upset.
As the biologists know, it is the small things that make the big things work.
The global threat of the disenfranchised poor, eking out marginal lives in desert lands like Afghanistan, is not going to go away as more and more areas become biologically impoverished and can no longer support the life they did before.
On a positive side, there are some relatively painless things we can do to moderate the problem. First and foremost, we must introduce population control of our own species. The days of successive horizons of economic growth are gone. Even Malaysia which is blessed with a small population (by Asian standards) needs to take immediate steps to control population growth to a level where economic growth is not a prerequisite to provide jobs for everyone. We need to determine what population our land can support on a sustainable basis and make that our target.
The belief that God will provide for however many children there are is patently untrue, as God did not provide for the Afghanis. If the war doesn’t kill them, the drought will. However, God did provide a garden, which should have been enough for all but now the garden itself is in danger of being destroyed. We submit to the will of God in the inevitable, but we are obliged to look after ourselves when it is not inevitable and not to depend on miracles. Providing jobs for all our children out of nothing would indeed be a miracle.
Second we must revitalize our rural areas where once productive land has been abused and neglected. Restore its usefulness and reinvigorate the rural traditions that nurture land rather than neglect it.
Third, we must protect as inviolate our natural assets, the forests and seas.
The tragedy of September 11th may well mark a new age in world politics, but it has certainly brought into focus the power that humankind has acquired. The wealth of the developed world expressed as the military strength massing in the Gulf compared with a devastated Afghanistan is an obscene example of what is wrong with humankind’s success. Somehow we miss the whole picture, as we strive for self fulfillment we fail to understand that our habitat is now global. There are no more hiding places for us than there are for Osama bin Laden, the fate of humanity rests with the management of our global habitat, and this requires an enormous will to realign priorities.
Possibly democracy and human rights are no longer the principal goals for humanity. As America will have to cope with restrictions on its freedoms in order to curb terrorism, so we all may find that we have to do without a great deal of what we take for granted if humanity (and the biodiversity that supports us) is to continue.
The best we can hope for is that the wealthy of the world realise they have a moral obligation to ensure the development of the poor, to clean up environmental damage and to restore our habitat to what can support humanity and the rest of global biodiversity.
Otherwise Attenborough’s view of impoverishment will develop to its logical conclusion: we will destroy our habitat and ourselves, and the final scenes will be uglier than anything you have seen on CNN.
Lau Siew Mei migrated from Singapore to Australia in 1994. She undertook an Asialink residency at Rimbun Dahan in 2001. Her first novel Playing Madame Mao was published in 2000 after the manuscript was shortlisted in the inaugural Queensland Premiers Literary Awards for the Best Emerging Queensland Author. Her short stories have been broadcast on the BBC World Service and published in literary journals in Australia, USA, Canada and the UK. During her residency in Malaysia, she researched Peranakan culture for her new novel. She also appeared at the Singapore Writers Festival, and gave a reading at Badan Warisan.
This year’s exhibition involves the concept of playing games. In different contexts, play can have positive and negative meanings and outcomes. Playing builds friendships, tests physical and mental skills and develops the ability to concentrate. The danger arises when people play at policy or relationships without considering how it affects others. Policy makers play with the environment, threatening the ecosystem; and in relationships, people play with their lovers or people around them to gratify their ego. In any case the games people play affect all of us.
