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Taman Sari

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Taman Sari

by Angela Hijjas

for The Malaysian Naturalist, vol. 51 no. 2, December 1997.

The name ‘Taman Sari’ evokes the fragrance and grace of a lush Javanese garden, with bees probing for nectar in masses of flowers. The first Sultan of Jogjakarta, Mangkubumi, the ‘guardian of the earth,’ chose the name for the walled pleasure garden adjoining his kraton in the mid-eighteenth century. He spared no expense on walls, tunnels and waterworks, while the Dutch complained that he placed more priority on this self-indulgence than on their fortifications. If only all kings were so wise!

The intricate irrigation channels of the original Taman Sari flowed through a series of pools and courtyards, complete with a fountain of youth, the Umbul Binangan. Spice, vegetable and fruit gardens, terraces, staircases and pavilions made up what must have been a wonder of its time. But the beauty of any garden is transitory; earthquakes and neglect reduced this garden to ruin by the end of the century and today all that remains are walls and a labyrinth of sunken passages.

Two centuries later, inspired by the romance of Javanese palaces, I adopted the name Taman Sari for my herb garden. Like the Sultan, I wanted the garden to be an integral part of our home, while developing a strong sense of its place within Malaysia. The most promising site for it lay behind the house, an area of about half an acre.

The so-called ‘hard landscaping’ elements, the paths, furniture and sculpture, are an essential part of any garden, particularly a herb garden, and their added detail helps to compensate for the predominant lack of colour in Southeast Asian species. As the herb garden is a meld of East and West, the landscape design laid out the paths and beds in the European style, with crossed paths dividing the area into four quarters. Bali supplied the stone sculptures of winged lions for the entrance and a garuda to animate the garden, providing an aesthetic and spiritual link to the animist past. The pathways themselves are pure KL, the indispensable interlocking concrete pavers: cheap, durable and practical.

My criteria for selecting plants were that they either be Southeast Asian in origin, or of some culinary or medicinal significance in the region. Flowers with characteristic Asian fragrances are another feature. Half the garden was to be for useful plants, and the other for more sensual pleasure. Inevitably, this separation has become very blurred, especially since we started companion planting in the vegetable garden, using the pungency of the herbs to protect vulnerable vegetables from insect attack.

I resisted the urge to fill the space with trees as most vegetables need full sun, but some shade is provided by the garden’s main ‘structural’ trees and this creates a variety of habitats. A single tamarind tree is as the centre of the vegetable garden, while the main path is protected by rows of nutmeg and meninjau trees. The entrance is shaded by pinang palms whose narrow canopies do not block too much sun. Another row cinkeh, cloves, has been more difficult to establish and only one tree has done well, but it is backed by a hedge of kemuning, with its periodic flushes of fragrant blossoms. A row of Borassus flabiliffer, the lontar palm, will ultimately provide a source for the toddy of my old age, assuming there is someone around who can still tap by the year 2020. A row of cinnamon trees separates the garden from the old durian orchard and completes the structural framework, leaving plenty of space for the herbs, vegetables, fragrant flowers and medicinal plants that I am still collecting.

While the major plants anchor the structural design of the garden, the smaller ones provide detail and interest which can be manipulated in many way. With the larger trees providing shade, different layers can be planted through and underneath. Vanilla orchids, pepper and sireh climb the trunks, shrubby ground cover is provided by shade-tolerant pandanusi, gingers or costus, while kadok and pegaga are strong covers for shade and sun respectively.

As our land has been a coffee plantation for many years before we acquired it, and because I am interested in the continuity of landscapes, I planted some coffee as a hedge outside Taman Sari before I discovered that coffee flowers have perhaps the most beautiful of all fragrances. The blooming lasts for just a few days ever few months, but the perfume is unforgettable. Other perfumes come from the kenanga, jasmines and gingers, and the many varieties of leaves that have to be crushed to release their fragrant oils. To add to the confusion, occasionally different plants have similar smells: my plot of pandanus (whose smell is only released in cooking) is overhung by kerak nasi, whose perfume is just like pandanus. Many visitors, smelling kerak nasi mistake it for the better-known culinary ingredient.

Some foreign plants, like aloe vera, have become essential medicinal ingredients; they can tolerate full sun and a dry position. But I have given up trying to grow European herbs like rosemary and thyme, as the rain devastates them; they would probably do better in pots. Lemon balm is a useful exception. Other foreign plants that are widely used for herbal preparations, like elderberry (Sambucus nigra) have local equivalents: the entire plant of Sambucus javanica can be used for similar medicinal preparations as the European variety.

Apart from a few simple cold remedies, I haven’t made use of my plants and have collected them purely for the pleasure of seeing them all growing together, appreciating their histories (the tales about nutmeg alone fill volumes), and enjoying the delight of sharing them with others. An evening wander around the paths, interrupted by tastes and smells, is fun and enlightening, particularly for city children, and there is nothing like perfume or flavour to transport you to another part of the world. ‘My Mum uses this’ and ‘my grandfather grew that’ are frequent comments, and even I, from Australia, instantly recall the hot summer nights at my grandparents’ home every time I break a stalk of serai wangi, the citronella that was widely used as an insect repellent in the Fifties and is now in demand again with the organic revival.

We have plenty of kitchen herbs: chilli, serai (lemon grass), limau purut, kasturi and nipis, kunyit (turmeric), curry leaf, lengkuas (galingal), ketumbar (coriander) and mint all do well. Little can substitute for the pleasure of a pungent tom yam made with home-grown ingredients. If the kitchen is the heart of the home, the Taman Sari is the heart of my garden. What better occupation could God have intended for Sultan or commoner?

Jan Owen

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Jan Owen

janJan Owen, Resident Poet at Rimbun Dahan in 1997, is a South Australian who now lives in the country outside Adelaide. Since 1985 she has worked as a writer, a creative writing teacher and an editor. She has published four previous books of poetry, including Boy with a Telescope, Fingerprints on Light and Blackberry Season, and her prizes include the Anne Elder and Mary Gilmore Awards for her first book, and the Gwen Harwood Poetry Prize in 2000.

In 2002, Jan Owen launched her collection of poetry Timedancing at the South Australia Writer’s Centre in Adelaide. Tom Shapcott, Chair in Creative Writing at the University of Adelaide, who launched the ceremony, called it “a luminous book.”

'Air and Edge,' Jan's poem dedicated to Hijjas Kasturi's architecture.
‘Air and Edge,’ Jan’s poem dedicated to Hijjas Kasturi’s architecture.

Timedancing contains poems inspired by Jan’s residency at Rimbun Dahan, as well as by her travels to Thailand, Italy and Spain, and is marked by her eye for sensuous detail and by her appreciation for the value and beauty of everyday objects.

To buy a copy of Timedancing, contact Five Islands Press, PO Box U34, Wollongong University, 2500 Australia.
Fax (612) 4272 7392.
Email: kpretty@uow.edu.au

Previous versions of some of the poems in Timedancing appeared in Illuminated Leaves, an online exhibition of poetry and art at Rimbundahan.org, also featuring the works of Margot Wiburd and Noël Norcross.

The cover illustration for Timedancing is a detail of a watercolour by Thornton Walker, Resident Artist at Rimbun Dahan in 1997.

Anne Neil

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Anne Neil is a Perth based artist who works in the fields of sculpture, design and public art. Together with her partner Steve Tepper, Neil travelled to Malaysia to undertake a residency based at Rimbun Dahan in 1997. During this time Neil produced several series of ephemeral works that she exhibited there and as a collaborative team, Neil and Tepper made significant contacts with Malaysian architects resulting in a commission to produce lights and signage for a new golf course and residential development. In 1999 Neil participated in the critically acclaimed exhibition and residency project, Sekali Lagi: Australian artists revisit Malaysia, with seven other past residents.

Transitional Landscapes

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Transitional Landscapes

by Angela Hijjas

for The Malaysian Naturalist vol. 50 no. 3 April 1997

As an enthusiast of indigenous gardening, I am always interested in what everyone else plants. Tropical gardens range from the pseudo-jungle of the ‘Balinese’ style (masses of spectacular sub-tropical species) to the ‘Bandaraya’ style of intricate baroque detail, with elaborate parterres of clipped and coloured bushes tortured into anthropomorphic decorations of draped bunting and logos.

Malaysians are generally attracted to lavish detail, in enormous contrast to the natural wood and fibres wrought into the fine traditional crafts of old. From the home-made wedding decorations that used all the plants of the kampung garden to the plastic colours and glitter of today there has been a major aesthetic shift. Natural artistic judgement has been disjointed by rapid changes over recent decades and we are unsure how to see the new industrial materials.

What was carved wood yesterday is suddenly plastic today. The first reaction is to maximise this opportunity: the more colour and decoration the better. Embellishing ikat and songket fabrics used to be laborious, and yesterday’s subtle variation of natural dyes pales against today’s aniline magic. Colour and gilt can be had for almost nothing, and it will take time for the novelty to wear off, for people to conclude that, in an environment filled with so many material objects, less is more where decoration is concerned.

What is obvious in wedding paraphernalia is equally evident in garden design. The colourful and intricate landscaping along Jalan Parlimen is symptomatic of the transient state, and I await the day when Dewan Bandaraya concludes that the maintenance is too labour-intensive and opts instead for tall shady trees and a more generous habitat than miniature clipped hedges. The main objective of these baroque wedding cakes is presumably to impress the masses driving past in their air conditioned cars. The landscape was certainly not intended for pedestrians-despite the pretty pathways, there is little protection and no one likes to go out in the sun!

Garden styles are also influenced by the experiences of our parents. If they struggled to control the natural environment to survive then you can’t expect them to have much fondness for it. My father had a ‘bush block’ in Australia after the Second World War, and thought nothing of grubbing up acres to create pasture for sheep. Now Australia endeavours to repair damage to fragile marginal land that was inflicted by thousands of resettled veterans, and it took my father another twenty years to appreciate the beauty of the Australian indigenous species that now, in the PC nineties, constitute ‘forest’ rather than ‘bush’.

Similarly, Malaysian children are taught to sweep the compound every day for fear of snakes, centipedes and scorpions; the jungle must be kept at bay because neglect means rapid entombment. Hence the preference for small plants, preferably in pots, especially if they respond well to a good hard pruning to diminish and miniaturise them. A small plant is no threat, unlike the amorphous jungle that once waited at the fence. Now that the forest is long gone, I wonder how long it will take before we choose tall strong trees instead of the stunted specimens that serve to demonstrate our power over nature.

On a recent trip to West Sumatra I found a vivid example of this cultural dislocation. I visit nurseries to see what people are planting and perhaps find new varieties of local gingers. Somewhere between Bukit Tinggi and Padang, one nursery featured an intricate concrete tree stump planted with heliconia. To my eyes it was incongruous: the tree was reduced to an industrial celebration of human dominion and was planted with the latest novelty from overseas that, by definition, must be better than anything local. A garden of concrete tree stumps planted with heliconia is now my worst nightmare.

There is no beauty in the natural world unless we are trained to see it, but development is changing the face of our country so fast that the necessary cultural adjustment may take too long. By the time we appreciate our heritage it may be history.

Kuala Lumpur has some magnificent stands of older trees, and some attempts are made to preserve them. The bank of Eugenia grandis in Jalan Tun Razak was not cut down, but nothing was done either to protect the roots from construction damage so they could survive the enormous disturbance. Are we so insensitive as to believe that merely not cutting ensures survival.* The power of the jungle, I think, is overrated against the tools at our disposal.

The concept of sharing our environment with other life forms has not yet taken hold. As city dwellers we prefer our gardens to be sanitised, affirming our control and keeping the natural world at bay. A certain amount of sweeping and fogging, I agree, has to be done, but we can compensate by offering the spaces we do not need to other species. Rather than the stunted miniaturisations that we whizz past on the highways, why not trees, real trees with tall trunks, flowers and fruit for the insects, birds and tupai.

Corridors of natural planting can enrich our urban experience and help compensate for the enormous moral debt we owe to the natural world. The huge areas dedicated to traffic interchanges on our ever-growing highway system can be put to good use: plant the waste land beside the tarmac, as densely a possible, with a wide variety of indigenous species. Insect and bird life will flourish, the urban climate will be cooled a little, air quality improved and there would be an opportunity to gaze at trees instead of Toyota ads while stuck in a traffic jam.

With so much to gain, a cultural transition cannot come too soon. Malaysians need to feel comfortable with their natural heritage rather than using every opportunity to dominate it. When we substitute the word ‘forest’ for ‘jungle’, we may be on the road to recovery.

by Angela Hijjas
Malaysian Naturalist, Vol. 50 no. 3, April 1997

* Since this article was published the trees have been destroyed and a highway put in their place.

Glossary:

Bandaraya: Kuala Lumpur City Hall
Kampong: village
Ikat: an elaborate tie-dying process that is performed before weaving
Songket: a hand woven gilded brocade traditionally worn at weddings
Tupai: Malaysian squirrels

The Gardening Lifeline

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The Gardening Lifeline

by Angela Hijjas

from The Malaysian Naturalist vol. 50 no. 1, December 1996

Some of us share a compulsion to garden and find great tranquility as we perform the apparently mindless tasks of watering and weeding. Gardening fulfills a desire to beautify our surroundings by rearranging things but there is more to it than that. Our connection to a particular place is shown by the marks we make on it: what we plant or build, or choose to weed out and destroy. Gardens reflect the world we want to see.

My personal view of the world is not particularly optimistic, and my need to focus on the positive is met by gardening. I would rather not see the natural environment diminish around me and so concentrate instead on the smaller delights of my own land: deciding were to plant a tree, finding the pigeon orchids, or catching sight of a rarely seen bird: all occupy my selective view.. Living in Kuala Lumpur, I have come to accept change as the norm, but since I started gardening in earnest I have begun to focus instead on the plants people choose and to wonder about the landscapes of their imaginations.

I know that gardening is my survival mode and I kid myself that I am developing the answer to sustainability, despite the facts that no one else I know has fourteen acres to plant and that after five years I am barely self-sufficient in anything but nutmegs! Perhaps my garden will provide sanctuary for a few plants and birds, as well.

The indigenous garden framed by coconut palms; Achasma megalocheilos has taken over the damp ground in the valley; the palm at the back is Oncosperma tigillarium, ribong, with its beautiful curtain-like pendulous leaflets. The palm on the right is Iguanura wallichiana.
The indigenous garden framed by coconut palms; Achasma megalocheilos has taken over the damp ground in the valley; the palm at the back is Oncosperma tigillarium, ribong, with its beautiful curtain-like pendulous leaflets. The palm on the right is Iguanura wallichiana.

In these articles I would also like to share this understanding of ‘occupying’ a place by gardening. What do you want your garden to say about yourself? Do you want to work in it or should it be low maintenance? Do you want fragrance or colour, or both? Are you content with just greenery? Are there any cultural icons you want to include: a shrine or a piece of sculpture? A garden gnome, perhaps? The results can be surprisingly revealing.

My own thoughts on gardening are strongly influenced by having come from Australia. In Australia, planting indigenous species has become common as people have acquired a sense of belonging to the country and their knowledge of its plants and animals has grown. I have chosen to plant and learn more about dipterocarps and dillenias, instead of the eucalypts and grevilleas of my birthplace. What I learned elsewhere, I want to apply here with local materials to create my version of a Malaysian garden.

The idea of planting indigenous species in Australia had wider implications that an emerging sense of belonging in a formerly foreign country: they are better suited to the environment, so maintenance and inorganic intervention are minimised. More important, local plants only need as much rain as they get naturally. Thus, in Australia, thirsty emerald lawns were replaced by bark chips and pebbles, simultaneously creating a sympathetic ‘canvas’ for the bluish greys of Australian bush species. Presto! A ‘new Australian’ aesthetic for landscape design!

By planting local species and pursuing organic techniques, I plan to enrich my local biomass and shape it into a Malaysian landscape of tall canopies under-planted with palms and ferns. I have compromised at times when choosing plants, particularly in the earlier years, and I constantly find myself justifying the entrance avenue of Madagascan travelers palms. The lush extravagance of the ‘pan tropic’ style was just too tempting and I was overwhelmed by such exotic choices, but as I find more suitable local species those early anomalies will be replaced.

This series of gardening articles was supposed to be packed with hands- on, practical advice and information. Sadly, I lack the qualifications to satisfy the techies who want hard data. For them, in fact for anyone interested in gardening, I would recommend the wonderful ‘Tropical Planting and Gardening’, first published in 1910 and still in print thanks to our own Malaysian Nature Society. All of its 767 pages are packed with information about plants and techniques guaranteed to be environmentally friendly, predating the age of chemicals as it does. It offers a wealth of facts and figures, a wonderful insight into a world long gone and all the how-to advice you are ever likely to need.

Unlike most MNS members, I have little desire to see the places we are trying to protect; just knowing they are intact would be enough. I have no recreational need to see them because I garden and what naturalist’s adventure could be as challenging as creating a Malaysian garden? It is an artificial construction but it is also my most important contact with the natural world. I am delighted to share the experience, but be prepared for opinionated tracts on the importance of the indigenous, the organic and the appropriate, because that is my quest.

By Angela Hijjas
Malayan Naturalist, vol. 50 no. 1, December 1996

Thornton Walker

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Thornton Walker

Australian painter Thornton Walker was the Australian artist of the year-long Malaysia-Australia Visual Arts Residency at Rimbun Dahan in 1996, and undertook a one-month residency in Hotel Penaga in 2012.

Bio

thorntonThornton Walker was born in Auckland, New Zealand in 1953, and emigrated to Australia, settling in Melbourne in 1965.  He graduated with a Diploma of Art (Printmaking) from the Prahan College of Advanced Education in 1976, and began a Post Graduate Diploma (Printmaking) at the Victorian College of the Arts, Melbourne in 1977. He later deferred these studies to travel and work in Europe and the United States.

The artist’s first solo exhibition was held in Melbourne in 1980. Walker’s work is represented in collections throughout Australia including the National Gallery of Australia, Art Gallery of New South Wales, Art Gallery of Western Australia, QUT Art Museum, Brisbane, Artbank, University of New South Wales, Philip Morris Arts Grant Collection: Parliament House, Canberra, Macquarie Bank, and AXA Australia.

Exhibition Catalogue Essay

A traveller in the landscapes of our world and the landscapes of his mind, Thornton Walker evokes in his works both the presence of the environment in which they were created and the inner contemplation of their creator.

In subject, Walker’s works include three established genres of traditional art – the landscape, the portrait and the still life. Yet he blurs the distinction between these genres, and creates works which embody all three of these forms while embracing abstraction and the serendipity of chance.

Overlaying or, perhaps, underpinning Walker’s choices for the content of his work, is his own personal interest in philosophy and the spiritual, and with Eastern/Asian philosophy in particular. One particular Buddhist text has long been of importance in his considerations of the great questions of human existence: “What is the enduring body of reality?” It is a question that perhaps best conveys the concerns that Walker addresses in his work and, by implication, in his life, and it is a question to which I will return.

The work which Walker had created during his residency at Rimbun Dahan follows naturally from his accumulated body of previous work. His depiction of the orchard outside his Rimbun Dahan studio and various studies of fruits and ceramic bowls reflect his continuing use of the external world as a means of considering, even meditating on, the internal world of the mind.

For many years, Walker has depicted a simple Chinese bowl, whether alone or with one or two others, as the sole physical object set in an abstract and seemingly random background whose presence is, nevertheless, just as concrete as the delicately painted but solid bowl. Examples of this aspect of Walker’s work can be seen in “Two Chinese Bowls (Tea Ceremony l)” 1997 and “Two Chinese Bowls (Tea Ceremony ll)” 1997. These are paintings that were made using wood found in the Rimbun Dahan grounds. The ‘background’ of each painting happens to be naturally occurring marks and stains on the wood arising from its previous use in some form of construction. However, the works’ appearance is not unlike paintings which Walker has previously created on canvas, where the space surrounding the bowls has been built up with layers, drips and washes of paint and, sometimes, fragments of handwritten text.

In both paintings, the bowls are distinct and unique individuals, their substance confirmed by the shadows which they cast on their uncertain surroundings. However, they have a presence beyond that of mere inanimate objects. They are metaphors for order, creation and life, surrounded by the apparent chaos of vast forces we cannot measure and do not fully understand.

In the suite of watercolours, Walker once again focuses on ceramic bowls, some plain and unadorned, others with decorative patterns or embellishments. Sometimes they are alone, at other times in pairs or in groups or hovering over a paler reflection or ghostly image of themselves. These bowls, which themselves take on a life, are often seen together with fruit in or around them. Guavas, limes, papaya and cempedak provide forms through which Walker can apply, with such delicacy, his fluid washes of colour onto a paper that is stained and splattered, like some parchment that has been recovered from a flood.

These images of bowls and fruit acquire their own personalities, engage in dialogue, remain silent, occupying space in a minimalist landscape of washes which run and drip. Once again these objects are lit by an unseen source of light and although their shadows confirm their existence, they seem removed from space and time and become, for us, almost devotional objects upon which we may meditate.

A group of somewhat dark and brooding landscapes, based on the view of the orchard outside his Rimbun Dahan studio, provides an insight into another aspect of Walker’s oeuvre. These images are essentially tonal, capturing both shadow and light, and transforming the simple, close view of tree trunks and branches into a mysterious place where the footfall of people is anticipated but not witnessed.

'Two Malaccan bowls', watercolour, 1997, 76 x 56 cm.
‘Two Malaccan bowls’, watercolour, 1997, 76 x 56 cm.

In some of the watercolours appear fragments of text, sometimes Chinese, sometimes European, adding another dimension to an already multi-layered image. The graphic linear quality of the Chinese characters which appear to have been stamped on (but which are in fact rendered painstakingly by hand) give the work a sense of documentation, something vaguely official. In two works in particular, small red freshly rendered lychees maintain their distance from the well-ordered text, text that may describe or perhaps proscribe them.

And there, in the overlapping washes of “Two Malaccan Bowls” 1997, we can make out the words “the enduring body of reality”. For Walker, it comes down to this: What are we? What is real? What is unreal? What is permanent? What is transient? What is the mind? What is the body? Walker’s works address these questions with a quiet persistence and we have the privilege of experiencing, with him, this quest for the essential nature of the universe.

Guy Abrahams
August 1997
Director, Christine Abrahams Gallery

 

Artist Statement for Hotel Penaga Residency

I wanted to be completely open to new influences and subject matter during my time at Penaga as the artist in residence; to absorb the rich culture in Penang and respond to it as best I could, in the studio.

After exploring the town for a week, what stayed with me were the old faded photographs of faces I saw on temple and clan house walls. They resonated for me as a window into the past, a nostalgic glimpse of a rich culture.

I decided to do my best to recreate this feeling in paint. I took snap-shots of these photographs, often out of focus and partly obscured with reflections on their glass frames, and then set about interpreting them in watercolor, ink, acrylic and oil paint.

Sustainable Architecture

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Sustainable Architecture

by Angela Hijjas

Recently I was asked by a local architecture magazine to write about my house as an example of sustainable architecture. No investigation on the merits of this proposal was suggested, so I duly considered the salient points, knowing full well the outcome. If my home is considered a good example of where the building industry should be going, I hate to think what the general standing of sustainable development is in Malaysia.

Using the word ‘sustainable’ is always a bit suspect, as people apply it to justify something without really computing the environmental equation properly. The problem is extremely complex, and hinges on the materials chosen, the environmental cost in producing them and their life span. To do this properly, one needs to place a value on the natural environment, so that damage or loss is costed. If one were completely logical in computing a building’s total impact on the environment at large, then the only sustainable construction possible in Malaysia might be the Orang Asli solution of using biodegradable and short term materials. No hardwoods, no concrete, no steel, just build a new one every so often when the old begins to fail. In Australia, conscientious environmentalists build from rammed earth and hand made finishes from salvaged materials rather than new industrial ones.

I personally doubt that today’s contemporary architecture is sustainable, but acknowledge that some is more ‘environmentally friendly’ than others. In terms of domestic architecture, I look at my own home and see its many short comings in the eco-argument. It’s too big, it occupies a huge piece of land in a country where land and services are in short supply and it uses materials that devastated the environment from which they were extracted. The copper roof could well have come from the Freeport mines in Irian Jaya that are poisoning everything downstream. The concrete involves a cost in terms of lost limestone hills and caves with their fragile habitats, and the steel was made at huge energy costs that no one cares to compute in the environmental formula.

We did avoid using timber, but form-work had to be made, and the most ‘economical’ method was from plywood, made from our irreplaceable forest hardwoods. Teak parquet in some bedrooms was intended to relieve the use of ‘hard’ materials, and although no one would deny that timber is a beautiful material, it’s extraction from the forests of Burma is hardly sustainable. The inclusion of ‘standard’ features for the upper income group, like a swimming pool, tips the balance again. Chemicals such as chlorine are damaging, and are hard to justify for that occasional dip.

I love my home, but I have been trying to compensate ever since for the excessive use of resources that building it required. We moved here 11 years ago and ever since I have been filling it with artists and planting the rest of my 14 acres with as wide a range of indigenous forest species as I can find. I want to reaffirm a sense of place and cultural development in Malaysia, in the face of the devastation that commercial development brings.

In Malaysia, as in my native Australia, there may well be just one thing that we all share: this country’s land, its climate, its creatures, plants and landscape, its natural environment. This is the only thing that does not divide us from each other, and yet we embrace the foreign and diminish the local at every opportunity. My landscape design is creating a sense of place that no garden planted with heliconias and royal palms can match, even if I am the only one who recognises it.

But I diverge from the topic at hand. Now that the house is complete, it might be termed ‘environmentally friendly’ as it does not use a great deal of energy. We have little air conditioning and depend on through ventilation and ceiling fans. We have the usual overhangs for shade and pitched roofs for run off, and we are experimenting with ground tanks for water retention. We use pond water to flush some of the toilets and to water the vegetable plot during the increasingly common droughts, and therefore save on treated water from Jabatan Air. As well, from the huge storms that flood downstream, we retain water on site rather than draining it away as quickly as possible. Solar panels for heating water have been installed, but I am yet to be convinced that these are positive contributions as they have been replaced once already and the use of new materials and the disposal of the old ones are problems that skew the equation substantially.

I hardly think we make the cut, and know in my heart of hearts that the ‘life style’ that I enjoy and most aspire to is not sustainable. The machinery of the ‘market’, though, has reared us to believe that we are all entitled to aim for this, and that each new generation can expect to enjoy more than their parents did. Delusions, I fear.

The equations change, too, over time, and one should anticipate future trends in assessing whether something is really sustainable. For my home, if you discount the initial cost, at least most of the materials are long lasting and will endure, we are unlikely to change anything anytime soon. There is little that is fragile in the house, it copes with hard wear and I believe it will last at least as long as our kampong house from Parit. Rumah Uda Manap was restored because it is culturally important, but that’s another anthropomorphic equation that has little to do with environmental sustainability.

Made of hard wood and belian shingles, that house is another version of Malaysian architecture that would have been considered sustainable at the time it was built in 1901, if anyone had cared to compute. However, times change, our population has grown and natural resources are diminished, so what is regarded as sustainable now may not be so to future generations. Timber housed everyone in 1901, but it would be impossible now for all 22 million Malaysians to live in a timber house. In this case the escalation of timber prices shows that the hallowed market does indeed respond to resource shortages, but it still never computes the cost of lost trees and the damage inflicted on the forest, it merely tallies commercial shortages.

Surely sustainable development should be about building for now but without penalizing future generations, and not just generations of our own, but of all species.

Renee Kraal

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Renee Kraal

reneeRenee Kraal was the Malaysian artist of the year-long Malaysia-Australia Visual Arts Residency at Rimbun Dahan in 1996.

She studied at the St Martin’s School of Art in London, as well as studying pottery at Stanhope Institude and Campden Arts Centre. Her work includes drawing, painting and batik, and has been exhibited in Germany and Australia as well as in Malaysia. In 2005, she was featured as one of three women artists in an exhibition at NN Gallery in Kuala Lumpur.

Maps of Transitions 

notes on Renee Kraal’s exhibition at Rimbun Dahan.

Appearance and disappearance.  Form and de-form.  Structure and ‘dis-structure’.  Sight and insight.  The paintings of Renee Kraal seem to inhabit these realms of tensions.  The realm between Being and Nothingness.  Meanings obtain only in the dialectical relationships between states of consciousness.  An art that thrives on the awareness of the necessity of forms while simultaneously intent on the possibilities of formlessness.  Conscious formlessness and formless consciousness.

This mode of artistic creation, of course, has always been important in modernist painting traditions, given the preoccupation with intuition, the subconscious, the spiritual, dreams and what not, of early European modernists, and also in the covert ‘action’ and ‘freedom’ of American Abstract Expressionists.  In Symbolism, Expressionism, Surrealism. or even Impressionism with its interest in the effects of transitory light on the perception of forms, at various times either extreme dominates artistic production, giving free rein either to conscious disorder or unconscious order.  At other times, ambivalence takes over, or as could be appreciated in Kraal’s works, a sense of emergence and submergence of both seems to rule the life in flux of the subject matter.

It would not do, however, to identify her works with just one of the modernist labels, because interestingly, the works are at once symbolic, expressionistic, surrealistic, and impressionistic, and more.  The works do not convey the artist’s message as much as the ‘message’ conveys the artist.  It is not difficult to imagine that the artist is quite essentially immersed in the works, journeying freely within the terrains of the subconscious.  The paintings then become intriguing maps of these journeys, topographies of Freudian signs and Jungian de-signs.

Whatever title is affixed to a painting, whether it be Joy, Energy, Vibrations, Mental/Emotional Physical Bodies, Levitation,Mask, Nature or even Secret Music of Plants, they are all Primal Screams of sorts.  The forms and colours do not merely describe the essential external world, but express profoundly an inner pathos alluding to an aesthetic of pathology that is neither pathetic nor pathological.  On the contrary, the allusion reminds us of the inscrutable aspects of human life and the universe.  When Kraal says that ‘it’s troublesome to be human’, it is not just a whimsical platitude.  From looking at her works it is the ever-shifting boundaries between visible reality and invisible sensibility, the fluid tension of, and in life, to which she refers.

Kraal’s maps of transitions aptly appropriate the Greenbergian modernist idiom with a twist.  The flatness that predominates Greenberg’s theory of modernist painting while offering aesthetic meaning to Kraal’s work does not overpower the artist’s insights about life.  Kraal is not limited by total subservience to formalistic concerns as is demanded from the Greenbergian reduction of painting to painting.  She does not shy away from revealing allusions to pictorial recession.  Nor does she intentionally restrict her painterly explorations to considerations of properties of painting as art, as propounded by Greenberg. In fact, just as they inhabit the realms of tension and transition, Kraal’s paintings derive from and defy the Greenbergian canon.  They operate as painting as art, and as windows to the outer and inner worlds.  The medium does not just define her paintings as art, it is also the vehicle in her journeys to somewhere and nowhere, between the conscious and the unconscious.

quantumIn the context of Malaysian art, Kraal’s paintings show affinity with many Malaysian artists, in as much as many Malaysian artists’ mode of creation exhibit a tendency to explore the aesthetic possibilities of the indefiniteness of forms and contents.  Sometimes the pictorial context is reminiscent of unlocatable landscapes, as in Latiff Mohidin’s Pago-Pago paintings or Syed Ahmad Jamals’ Gunung Ledang.  Kraal’s enigmatic figures and forms are often depicted against and within a landscape context, projecting the inner psychological and spiritual worlds into the more physical outer world, or vice versa, a mode of artistic expression also seen in the abstract or abstracted landscapes populated by barely perceptible bare torsos painted by Yeoh Jin Leng, Joseph Tan and Ibrahim Hussein.  But more clearly, Kraal’s painting show closer affinity with the worlds of Ali Mabuha and the much younger Anna Chin, especially in the projection of psychological states into the physical landscapes. Perhaps because of this, the artists’ worlds cannot just be described as inaccessible by their being highly personal or that the artists are not concerned about the external and the real social world.  Perhaps, our appreciation of this kind of work would be all the more meaningful if we regard the indeterminable landscapes as metaphors of commentary about society and the environment.  With the works of Kraal, our contextual appreciation of them in this regard could take an existential view point. The individual could be seen as having to exist and struggle within the dialectical relationship between personal hopes and environmental determination.  He or she has to realise the reality of this existence that does not always offer a clear demarcation between concrete graspable reality and the no less concrete but ephemeral unconscious.  Kraal’s works map out this realm of transition.  In this she shows quite an exceptional level of artistic sincerity and conviction.  Surely in these times of unbridled commodification of artistic productions, such a quality ranks high as a criterion for critical regard.

Zainal Abidin Ahmad Shariff
Lecturer in Art History and Criticism
Pusat Seni Universiti Sains Malaysia

Enid Ratnam Keese

admin Resident Artist, Yearlong Visual Arts Residency , , ,
Enid Ratnam Keese
'Quantum Leap,' 150 x 100cm, oil on canvas, 1995
‘Quantum Leap,’ 150 x 100cm, oil on canvas, 1995

‘Out of the nine month midnight’

‘There is but one truly serious philosophical problem, and that is suicide. Judging whether life is or is not worth living amounts to answering the fundamental question of philosophy’
Albert Camus

‘old Death
Shall dream he has slain me, and I’ll creep behind him,
Thrust off the bloody tyrant from his throne
and beat him into dust, or I will burst
Damnation’s iron egg, my tomb, and come
half damned, ere they make lightening of my soul,
And creep into thy carcase as thou sleepest
Between two crimson fevers, I’ll dethrone
the empty skeleton, and be thy death’.
Thomas Beddoes

 

Enid Ratnam Keese is well known in Australia for her printmaking and her drawing. Her prints in particular are greatly admired and figure in our public museum collections. In the light of these new paintings it is worth considering this background. Printmaking has long been a neglected practice in international contemporary art. But it is often precisely in those areas of apparent neglect, removed from the fashion of the moment, that a great deal of the more interesting thought takes place.

In this exhibition of paintings, constructed in three sections: Connections, Requiem and Out of the nine month midnight ( a line from Walt Whitman), Enid has brought a great deal of the sequential and fragmented nature of the imagery of her printmaking to bear on the subject matter of the paintings. The process of layering images in sequence and allowing for their ambiguous juxtapositions to act on the viewer independently of the general narrative text of the image is much more common in adventurous print works than in painting. In this way Enid has brought a fresh approach to the construction of these images that belie the conservative choice of painting as their media. She has also deployed her images so as to reference numerous icons from the history of western painting: the Birth of Venus, the fish and the cross are part of Western Christian repertoire. Even the manner of isolating the garment of the Kebaya recalls modernist iconography, in the bathrobes of Kim Dine for example.

However these images escape easy associations, for as a Malaysian woman resident in Australia she represents the most interesting contemporary visual phenomena of cross cultural pluralism exemplified by the Asia Pacific Triennial, whose second incarnation will take place in Brisbane later this year. In these paintings she speaks of the difficulties of acceptance in your culture of origin and of the displacement of your culture of acceptance. She is placed in a zone of production where her work could be perceived to be not really Malaysian and not really Australian.

This state of hybridity is characteristic of art itself today, in which significant work arises within the region of this collision of cultures. Previously Enid dealt with these issues through an analysis of the way we gained our perceptions of the Gulf War through the images of satellite television. Her fascination with periods of the human horrors of war are intriguing and ever prescient. At the end of the century art is witness to the excesses of our deterioration as a species. Perhaps it is only in this kind of cross cultural art practice that we see the possibilities for hope and even survival.

Enid’s work has always dealt with signs of the body, particularly the female body. In these paintings she uses the distortion of the body to symbolise the status of sensation within. For her in these paintings the body is absent, but present through its exoskeletal sign of the traditional Malaysian women’s costume of the kebaya. The distortion is both representative of the subjugation of the gendered body from without (the impositions of society on women) and indicative of the distortions of the sensations and aspirations of the person as individuated subject. The body here disappears in this space, crushed as it is between the emotive aspirations of placement from within and the socially driven control imposed from without.

In these paintings the shredded form of the traditional dress wavering under the tension of the space becomes a powerful and resonant image at odds with its historical context. The Kebaya is here depicted as a sinuous set of veins pulsing and contorting both the presence and absence of the human figure. This presence, defined by the metonomic use of the kebaya as icon of traditional culture acts as guardian against reductive gestural expressionism. It has been observed that metonomy, unlike metaphor, is based on a sequential link between the object and its replacement, ‘the record of a move or displacement from cause to effect, container to contained, thing seen to where it was seen, goal to auxiliary tool’. In these paintings metonomy takes the form of the absent or repressed images of memory and displacement.

In the large triptych paintings of the series titled “Out of the nine month midnight”, the nine months represent on the one hand the duration of Enid’s residency and the gestation time for both the paintings exhibited here, and on the other the period of solitude experienced by every human child. One triptych titled “Lament for a Solo Performer” has the image of a rock precariously suspended above an egg held outwards by its nurturing hand/cradle. This image recalls Samuel Beckett’s description of life as being the “womb suspended above the tomb”. In this large and impressive painting the landscape is at once solid in its colour and turbulent like a lake of molten rock in which faces loom up from beneath the surface only to disappear like images in the memory. Seated to the left of the painting clutching a hand full of flowers is a figure cut by a mouth that literally slashes the distorted face leaving in its wake a razor like trace.

The ambiguous images that surface from this at times almost violent brushwork evoke a melancholic search for the lost, the loss of identity and of definition of one’s ability to write oneself into culture. Through metonomy Enid forces the viewer back to a re-reading of these sign as though for the first time. The desolate disillusion of the space between is the metier of these paintings. They speak to that hallucination of the will of the other. We want to imagine that we can summon the object of our desire at will, but desires are never determined, they are received.

Donald Fitzpatrick
1995-96 Visiting Scholar in Fine Arts
Queensland College of Art
Griffith University

enid2

Zheng Yuande

admin Resident Artist, Yearlong Visual Arts Residency ,
Zheng Yuande
'Private rites' oil on canvas, 1994, 92 x 92 cm
‘Private rites’
oil on canvas, 1994, 92 x 92 cm

Painter Zheng Yuande was the first Malaysian artist of the year-long Malaysia-Australia Visual Arts Residency at Rimbun Dahan, in 1994.

Bio

yuandeYuande is a distinguished artist who has had a notable career since the 1980s. He is perhaps most known to collectors for his Chinese Opera series of paintings from the 1980s and 1990s. In the years since then, Yuande has ventured to concentrate more on 3D molded metal art works, which are unique in their focus on the fluidity and movement of the human body, rather than concentrating on static beauty and aesthetics.

Exhibition Catalogue Essay

by Chu Li

The Echo of Light and Shadow

The echo between light and shadow is not an unfamiliar language in art.  Through the years, Zheng Yuande has developed this language in his paintings and sculpture by manipulating inter-personal space, feeling, mood and the body language of his subjects.  His topic remains the same: the backstage drama of the Chinese opera, the rarely seen moments of tension and release of the actors and actresses backstage, though Yuande is no longer interested in capturing the ‘real face’ of the Chinese opera.

More than ten years ago, he was painting the shifting faces of this unique art form.  His passion for the opera has taken him through three artistic phases.  He started by capturing the sound , the colours of the stage and the story line, the stylized masks and make-up, the symbolic gestures.  This phase did not last long, and he moved o to paint the hidden colours in the life of the performers backstage.  The third stage is a deeper study of is subject matter in attempting to express on canvas the silent thought so the actors just before or after a performance.  ‘He Who Was the Hero Just Now!’ won for the artist the National Art Gallery’s Young Contemporary award in 1985.

In 1994, Yuande was awarded a Petronas Art Salon Young Contemporaries Prize for his painting, but Yuande knows that an artist does not paint merely for awards as the involvement in his art is total.  In the early days, he was more concerned with the psychology behind the movement of every character by understanding subtle hints of colour and plays of light and he has now moved onto more subtle challenges in his art evolution.

The language of Silence is the language of Light and Shadow.  Every artist knows that Light, the giver of presence, casts a shadow belonging to Light, and in between this Light and Shadow is the realm of Silence: in the heart of Silence is the Echo.  This is the art of Yuande in his current Chines opera series.  One cannot help feeling that the young artist is using the opera more and more as a metaphor, for he is no longer interested in painting the real facial expressions, emotions or psychology of movement; these languages have given way to the language of Echoes between Light and Shadow.

Echoes mirror their resonates loudly in Silence.  Yuande’s is a spatial language of inter-relationships between forms. and he uses it to convey his feelings, building up dark sombre tones of shade, concealing markings between layers of shade and maneuvering light within the space of shadows.

His opera figures have taken on a universal quality of old world romanticism, its mystique rested in a more mature and challenging manner.  The mastery of his medium, oil on canvas, is more complete and he cites as inspiration Rembrandt and Turner with Pre-Raphaelite colours, but he has also returned to draw upon the dynamics and ideas of Chinese calligraphy to build his paintings.

In sculpture as in painting, Yuande’s approach is minimalist in essence and calligraphic in style.  His challenge in this current series of works is to express in minimal strokes the vastness and fullness of space, rich layers of feeling and the intense resonance of echoes between Light and Shadow, paring back unnecessary strokes and colous by going back to the basics of solid and void instead of colour and tone.

His intention is to wield understatement and restraint, drawing the viewer closer to his works, so that they may discover themselves within them.  He is more aware now of forging a closer bond with his audience by withdrawing his dominance as artist, and allowing his work to declare its own presence.

Powerful silence, whose echoes speak of tone, colour, nuance and innuendo, is sure to score an impact in art as it does in life.  For the artist, this language is a challenging search for basic breathing and release, and to hold the mirror of art to the echo of Light and Shadow.  Zhang Yuande’s journal of Chinese opera is this Echo.

 

Chu Li is a Malaysian writer and photographer.