Malaysian illustrator Yunroo has joined us for a 1-month residency from April to May. Born into a family that has its roots in the clay industry, she’s currently exploring the artistic side of ceramics; to practice and experiment with different making techniques, understand the characteristics of different types of clay, and experiment with colour pigments and glazes.
With her background in illustration, she wishes to combine her practice with ceramics, and create pottery pieces that not only look and feel contemporary, but also reflect the character of her works, which is strikingly colourful and always with a dash of humour.
About the Artist
Yunroo is an illustrator from Batu Pahat, Malaysia. Drawing inspiration from her Chinese Malaysian identity and the local culture, she infuses her creations with vibrant charm and playful humour. She enjoys exploring different mediums and materials and finds joy in seeing her illustrations come to life in various forms.
Yunroo views art as a powerful medium to connect with people, and is dedicated to sharing her passion with others. She has organised and curated art festivals and events, and has taught at a local art college to help others experience the joy of making and appreciating art.
Yee Heng Yeh is a writer, and Mandarin-to-English translator. His poetry has been featured in The KITA! Podcast, adda, Malaysian Millennial Voices, Strange Horizons, NutMag, A Wasteland of Malaysian Poetry in English, Apparition Lit, Antithesis Journal, and was shortlisted in the Malaysian Poetry Writing Competition 2021. His translations of poetry have appeared in Mantis and Nashville Review. He also writes plays and occasionally short fiction. You can find him on Twitter @HengYeh42. https://twitter.com/HengYeh42 https://www.facebook.com/yee.hengyeh
About the Residency
During his residency, Heng Yeh has been working on a series of ekphrastic poems—poems written in response to artworks. Though ekphrastic poetry typically focuses on describing a work in detail, Heng Yeh is also interested in the process of art making itself and the role of the artist, exploring the common threads that drive creation. These poems therefore engage in dialogue with the forms and practices of the works in Rimbun Dahan’s gallery, as well as of the other resident artists.
Heng Yeh is also writing poems in response to the wildlife he has encountered during his residency. These poems uncover links between human and non-human perspectives to question the urban notion of Nature as an “Other”. So far, his subjects include mosquitoes, macaques, snails, and the resident cats and dogs.
Fajrina Razak, from Singapore, was in residence at Rimbun Dahan for 6 weeks from mid February to early April 2023.
About the Artist
Fajrina Razak (b.1989) is a Singaporean visual artist, cultural worker, curator and educator.
As a visual artist, her work takes on an analysis-approach practice, using traditional materials and contemporary mediums as conduits for the archival of knowledge and by extension, forming inquiries on historical references related to Nusantara and Southeast Asia. These are entwined with an ongoing interest in issues centred around the dichotomies of ‘secularity and spirituality’ and ‘individuality and collectivity’. Working primarily with batik, her works are also translated across mediums such as image-making, installation and text-based art.
Her projects include hosting a residency programme 405 Art Residency (2020-23) and a curatorial project Between the Living and the Archive (2021). Her works are in the permanent collection of the Singapore Art Museum and private collections. She was the President of Angkatan Pelukis Aneka Daya (APAD, Association of Artists of Various Resources) in the term 2020-22.
During the residency, Fajrina divided her time between pursuing her research interest and art-making.
Fajrina’s research interests focus on (visual) culture as a motivation for understanding multitude forms of knowledge production; these formal and informal knowledge(s) are derived from archives and collections, official and unofficial histories. These interests allowed her to form inquiries on her own art-making practice with traditional mediums and review heritage textiles and cultural objects found in public and private collections.
For her art-making, Fajrina worked on a work-in-progress body creating new abstract motifs depicting flowscapes and bodily movements of spiritual practices and particularly circumambulation, an act of walking around a sacred object that involves human participation. This work is an extension of her installation work ‘after life, reverse rituals’ created in 2020. At the same time, Fajrina recreated the pucuk rebung/tumpal, a motif that has been a recurring image in her past works. The pucuk rebung and tumpal motifs, are commonly found in traditional textiles and interpreted as symbols of divinity, power and knowledge.
Below: exploring the heritage textile collection at Rimbun Dahan with Angela Hijjas. Bottom: visit to the National Textile Museum.
Thanks to Dr Kribanandan G. N. for 2 photos featured on this page.
Burmese photographer and mixed media artist Shwe Wutt Hmon joins us in February 2023 for the first of several 1-month residencies.
About the Artist
Shwe Wutt Hmon (b. 1986) is a Burmese photographer and mixed media artist, living and working in Chiang Mai, Thailand. Shwe’s works focus on collective histories, familial ties, knots and threads of human relationship and exploring the inner psyche through intimate storytelling about people and places dear to her heart. She tells personal stories from which she connects and examines broader social aspects; vice versa, she works on social documentaries reflecting and drawing from her own position within the issue. Shwe uses photography as her main medium and incorporates archives, videos, texts, poems, paintings and drawings of her own or collaborating with others.
Shwe is the recipient of respected art and photography awards including the Objectifs Documentary Award 2020 (Open Category) and the inaugural Julius Baer Next Generation Art Prize in 2021. Her works have been exhibited internationally in art festivals and spaces such as Kochi-Muziris Biennale, Aichi Triennale, Singapore International Photography Festival, Photo Australia International Festival of Photography, ArtScience Museum Singapore, Bangkok Art & Culture Centre and Photoforum Pasquart.
Over these two years, Shwe has been examining her inner feelings of agony and rage towards what is happening around her on the backdrop of contemporary Myanmar politics, and facets of personal stories on how psyche, body, environment and materials are intertwined.
During the first part of her artist residency in Rimbun Dahan, Shwe is expanding her self-portrait series “I Do Miss Hospital Visit” that asks questions and creates metaphor of how one’s body and health would fade away and how one might find outlets out of a confined situation. The images in the series were created from digitally scanning the scars on her body, along with CT scans from previous medical procedures, and juxtaposing these with dried and decaying flowers, as well as old family photographs, that serve as signifiers of mortality, and the inexorable passing of time.
Since Shwe moved to Chiang Mai in November 2022, she has become interested to experiment with printing these scanner-generated self-portrait images on Saa Paper, traditional handmade paper that is very common in Northern Thailand, which is also very similar to Shan Sakku (Shan Paper) in Myanmar. The surface of the Saa Paper with a skin-like feel plus dried flowers and leaves embedded functions as a contemplative material to exhibit a body in a tender way, alongside the popularity of the paper in Thailand and Myanmar as a layer of storytelling for Shwe’s movement through and connection with both countries.
“Eventually this experimental process led me to cut, put tape, sew and stitch as my body is treated in the operation room. At this point, I am mending myself.”
Visual artist Eunice Sanchez from the Philippines undertook a 1-month residency at Rimbun Dahan in February 2023.
About the Artist
Eunice Sanchez engages with themes related to preservation and perception through photography and alternative photographic processes. She recontextualizes the materiality of her medium to demonstrate the demand for history to be re-examined. She has participated in several exhibitions in the Philippines, Cambodia, Singapore, and UAE. She was named the Silver Recipient in the book (self-published/documentary) category at the International Photography Awards Philippines (2017) and was a resident at Visualizing Histories, a collaborative project between The Museum Collective, Load Na Dito, and Sa Sa Art Projects, supported by Asian Cultural Council (2021). She was also selected for the ASEAN Artists Residency Programme, a residency project held by ASEAN Secretariat, Maybank Foundation, and Sharjah Art Foundation (2022).
Sanchez holds a Bachelor’s degree in Photography from De La Salle-College of Saint Benilde (2018) and a Bachelor’s degree in Psychology from De La Salle University (2014).
Born in 1993 in La Union, Philippines, Sanchez currently lives and works in Manila.
“In 2021, I created a catalogue consisting of foliage I wish I could grow. Perhaps the catalogue was also formed to resemble and preserve a different reality I wish I could be in; a reality where I have the ability to nurture anything.
“In my residency, I kept finding myself expanding that catalogue and made a project I call sa hardin, may bukas. Rimbun Dahan has allowed me to depict my own garden that champions life – a way of reclaiming. Through cyanotype printing and by mending images of nature and city textures, I went further by finding likeness to humanity’s persistence to exist even in spaces that constantly hinder growth and inflict destruction. I’m referencing from my own narrative and from friends’ common sentiment on surviving Metro Manila. More and more are lost. Like foliage struggling to grow in corners of a city, we learn to look at different forms of death and reflect on what remains. Fear grows because everything seems to be repeating itself and we assume where it is heading.
“But in the garden, deficiencies and weaknesses are forgiven. In the garden, one is capable of nurturing; a permission to create and grant oneself the kind of healing that time can never give. To tend a garden is a consolation giving us everything we’ve ever imagined despite the days being inevitably followed by anything darker and more difficult.
“I’ve learned long enough that I can’t hold things together. But to tend a garden is a conviction: promise of a better tomorrow.”
In December 2022 to January 2023, visual artist Nice Buenaventura from the Philippines undertook a one-month residency at Rimbun Dahan, under the Southeast Asian Arts Residency programme.
About the Artist
Nice Buenaventura is a visual artist and lecturer from Manila. Her methods revolve around the offloading of tensions, often between ethics and aesthetics, through drawing, painting, new media and (lay-)ethnography. This extends to her project called Tropikalye, an online mutual co-learning resource on contemporary visual culture in tropical and postcolonial Philippines.
Nice holds postgraduate degrees in media and arts technology from Queen Mary, University of London and Ateneo de Manila University. She has presented work and participated in art-adjacent projects in Bacolod, Bangkok, London, Manila, Melbourne, Singapore and Zurich. In 2021, she received the Cultural Center of the Philippines – Thirteen Artists Award and the Ateneo Art Awards – Fernando Zóbel Prize for Visual Art.
About the Residency
Aside from making work about the work allowed by simultaneous childcare, as well as immersing oneself in the expansive garden (forest, really) that is Rimbun Dahan, a detailed plan for my residency was not in place. Looking back, this may have been a purposeful action (or non-action) in that I let the needs of my infant daughter shape my productivity — a conscious attempt at welcoming slowness into my process. As it would always turn out for me, the exercise became an embodied reflection on labour, particularly the invisible labour of care that is too often assumed by women. This reflection would also provide me with a loop of a concept about the time in which we live: in profit being contingent on productivity, capitalism and care cannot be farther apart*.
In the kitchen (not the studio), the tension would be momentarily resolved. There, the work took care of itself while I took care of Laia. I found myself trying my hand at making natural inks, leaving pot after pot of plant material foraged from the grounds to cook for hours at a time, only stirring occasionally. Out of the ten different plants I cooked, seven gave me sufficient and effective yield**. I learned surprising things about natural pigments: how green is hard to come by, and how colour changes not only across time but also physical states (one magenta ink from a small, red, fleshy, pitless fruit dries blue-green). Despite being dazzled by the aliveness of the inks, I caught myself describing them as unstable in my notes, and then realised how the language of commodification, wherein consistency is king, was a kind of default. There might be more unlearning to do than learning.
Meanwhile, in the studio, my partner mounted sheets of manila paper on a wall, for Laia to draw on and entertain herself with while I worked. Before long, I noticed that there were accidental closed shapes in her doodles. As I filled them in using her crayons, it occurred to me that closed shapes are formed by two ends meeting or touching, and, more crucially, how touching is very mammalian. I have been thinking a lot about touch lately, ever since coming across the counterintuitive and anti-touch regimens of sleep training infants. Going through the motions of my internal conflict, I decided to catalogue Laia’s closed shapes. No sooner had the inks finished curing than I figured, with some creativity, that I could write “mammal” with her shapes, and test the inks at the same time by doing so. In the end, what I had to show for my time at Rimbun Dahan were works (or non-works (or fun-works)) that represent a range of productivity without having to compromise one’s ability to parent***. Although very outwardly different from the controlled and monochromatic image- and object-making I am used to, the mammal series, from the ink drawings to the existential colour chart, may just be the most meaningful project I have started so far. My paradigm is shifting and collapsing unto itself: the personal is professional, and they should not be far apart.
Natural inks from RD plants.
Plant material and assistant.
Amber ink from tree beside Rumah Balai.
Magenta ink from fallen fruit.
Baby-ready studio.
Mammal ink drawing.
Mammal ink drawings.
Existential pigments.
*I first heard about capitalism being the antithesis of care from Georgina Johnson, editor of The Slow Grind, via Atmos Magazine — incidentally, on the day of my open studio. ⤴️
**This is to flag another example of how the language of commodification slips into my vocabulary. ⤴️
***Acknowledgment and gratitude are due the institutions and individuals that create spaces wherein artistic practice is not sacrificed at the altar of maternal joy: for this time, Rimbun Dahan and Costantino Zicarelli. ⤴️
Indonesian interdisciplinary artist Riyadhus Shalihin recently completed a short residency at Rimbun Dahan in December 2022.
During his stay, he developed a short video work entitled HOME/NEST and a number of sketches.
About the Artist
As an artist, Riyadhus lives and works in Bandung, Indonesia. His works often use archives, spaces, objects, and memories, processed into video/ film, drawing, performance, and installation work. His work has been presented in “Affect and Colonialism” in Berlin, Germany, “State of Fashion 2022: Ways Of Caring” in Arnhem, Netherlands, “Junction21” at PACT Zollverein, Germany, and at the National Theater Craiova, Romania, and Asian Performing Arts Forum in Tokyo, Japan.
“It begins with the question of what is home and territory and who the native is. During this one-month residency in December at Rimbun Dahan, I tried to grasp a sense of inter living-space between the house (Rumah) and nest (Sarang), an intimate dialogue among inhabitants (humans, plants, and animals) in the canopy of rain and forest darkness that I tried to reflect into a series of drawings and one video-art work.”
You can view Riyadhus’ video on his YouTube account:
Sarawak-based visual artist Catriona Maddocks is in residence at Rimbun Dahan for one month, from October to November 2022.
About the Artist
Catriona Maddocks is a curator, artist and researcher from the United Kingdom, based in Sarawak, Malaysia since 2009. Her cross-disciplinary work focuses on collaborative platform-building, and developing spaces in which to explore identity, community and cultural heritage within a contemporary context.
Through her art she often juxtaposes folklore with personal narratives, finding points of reference and crossovers between cultures and national identities. She is currently working on an illustrated series called Pua exploring Gaelic and Bornean myths and legends.
She is the curator for arts platform Borneo Bengkel and co-founder of social enterprise Catama, and was a recipient of the 2020 Krishen Jit Fund.
During her residency at Rimbun Dahan Catriona has chosen to focus on process and play, taking time to explore her creative voice rather than the outcome-based practice of her curatorial work. She has utilised various mediums, including screen printing, paint and ink on tracing paper and fabric to produce exploratory works as part of her ongoing “Pua” series.
The work takes aesthetic inspiration from the Iban spiritual woven cloth, the pua kumbu, and juxtaposes The Lambton Worm, a folktale about a dragon that terrorised Northern England, with a reimaged Nabau—a shape-shifting water serpent—and is visually presented using the geometric lines and abstract visual aesthetic of the pua kumbu.
Interspersed through the work are historical characters, battles and mythology from both Sarawak and the United Kingdom, and well as flora and fauna found here at Rimbun Dahan.
Thai visual artist Pasutt Kanrattanasutra is in residence at Rimbun Dahan for one month in November 2022.
About the Artist
Pasutt Kanrattanasutra lives and works in Bangkok/Chiang Mai. He received his Doctor of Fine Arts at Chiang Mai University and master’s degree at Goldsmiths College, University of London. He is known for many of his sculptures, installations and videos that had been exhibited in America, Europe and Asia. He is a multidisciplinary artist who explores various forms of sustainability and sustainable living – of environment, economy and culture – and examines how art can create conversations about lifestyles, decision making and the community. His work addresses environmental issues and climate change.
Pasutt continues to work with a wide variety of collaborators, from communities, youth, designers and specialists, and especially socially disadvantaged children to audiences. Engaging with alternative models for social opportunity creation, reducing the squareness and environmental ecology, works have taken the form of artistic activities, sculptures, copies, infrastructure, paintings, models, videos, and public spaces. Working in and outside the physical location of the exhibition space, he has been engaged in public space projects. The goal of his work as an environmental artist is to establish deep connections to the natural world, raise awareness around the problems facing our environment and get more people talking about the garbage problem, which is critical to inspiring action.
Pasutt was a curator and artist in Re-ทิ#ง Re-Think (Art Exhibition for Reduce “Waste” Renew “Think”) at BACC in 2013. Currently, his work is inspired by the traces of termites who are both destroyers and creators of the ecosystem, a balancing act for nature. He questions all kinds of people and animals, no matter what size, as equal creativity making an impact give inspiration, build language and code and transfer creativity to the world. He compares termites to artists whose traces of etched wood or organic material are like beautiful works of art hidden with some meaningful linguistic meaning that may reflect our environmental and ecological problems.
Every civilization has its own patterns and fundamentals that lead to the birth of civilization. The rise and fall of the world’s major civilizations in each era. The process of accumulating prosperity that comes from creativity, learning from experience, the complexity of the social system interactions between different civilizations both materially and mentally. The relationship of elements in that social system resulting in the causes and factors of the birth and collapse of influence of that civilization on other civilizations.
“Somewhere else in the world”, the latest work by Pasutt Kanarattanasutra, created while in residence at Rimbun Dahan, is a series of mixed media, prints and paintings on paper, which show simulated aerial photographs of a land that does not exist. Pasutt raises questions about society, human beings, ecosystems, environments, and the progress that is passed from one civilization to another up to the present contemporary society. Using traces of termites like travelers from the ancient past, representing a path or river from one place to another, from the emptiness to the community to explore open-ended society in a new future civilization.
Sittiphon Lochaisong, alias ‘Bomb, was born in Mahasarakham, Thailand. He graduated from the University of Silpakorn, Bangkok, Thailand, with Bachelor and Master of Arts Degrees in visual arts.
His paintings are a subtle combination of traditional Thai spiritual influence combined with his own unique vision. Ambiguous dots are joined and assembled, creating free-floating stellar scapes where figures and symbols meet with imagination and sensation. The spontaneous combines with delicacy, reflecting and embracing the complex and extreme nature of existence — a place of birth, life, death and the eternal.
Lochaisong’s hope is to create paintings that have the potential to motivate the viewer to examine their own interconnected existence: where one can consciously perceive the unstoppable propulsion and expanse of nature and their place within it. His abstracted ‘universes’ are a place where the viewer is compelled to concentrate, and rewarded with a glimpse of a deeper understanding of a greater truth.
In the residency program, living among beautiful nature at Rimbun Dahan has given me inspiration to create paintings related to the environment here. I aim to create paintings that depict the beauty and wonder of trees, flowers, insects, wind, sunlight, rain, etc, through the process of working in a semi-abstract style. It is the presentation of nature as it appears, but combined with imagination, bringing reality towards a more fantastic world to show how magical nature really is.
