In 2010 on an Asialink artist residency at Rimbun Dahan, Malaysia, Australian artist Anthony Pelchen witnessed life in the balance and produced the foundation of a body of work titled Kuang Road Prayer.
Through reflection and continued artistic engagement with Malaysia, Pelchen has expanded this evocative body of work. Issues of change, vulnerability and resilience, at the core of Kuang Road Prayer, are explored in this exhibition through drawing, photography, video and sculpture.
The exhibition entitled Kuang Road Prayer was opened by Angela Hijjas at the Horsham Regional Arts Gallery in Horsham, Victoria, Australia, on 18 August 2013.
Opening Speech by Angela Hijjas
Thank you for this invitation to speak today at the opening of Anthony Pelchen’s show at the Horsham Gallery. This event marks the convergence of many coincidences that have brought Hijjas and me to Horsham. We have been coming here regularly for the last 16 years, working on the Southbank project, but never staying long enough to develop personal links until recently, when an amazing array of pieces fell into place.
Since 1994 we have been running a residency for Australian and Malaysian artists at our home, Rimbun Dahan, outside Kuala Lumpur. It was a way for us to “pay back” for the many advantages our family had enjoyed from both Australia and Malaysia: Hijjas had been given a Colombo Plan scholarship in the 1950s to study architecture in Australia, and it turned his life around, from a poverty of opportunity to a richness he could never have imagined; and Malaysia enabled him to develop an extremely successful professional practice.
We had moved out of Kuala Lumpur in 1991 to Rimbun Dahan, and as this exhibition makes clear, we live in an urban fringe area that is mainly populated by a low income Malay Muslim community, known in Malay as “kampong”, or village.
Rimbun Dahan is fortunate in having 14 acres of garden surrounding it, but as Anthony’s experience shows, the hard lives of those around us is not so easily obscured, and it marks a significant cultural difference even from Kuala Lumpur, just 27 kilometers distant, let alone from Australia or Horsham.
Part of life in Malaysia is seeing the most awful road accidents. I see one about every 6 months in which someone must have died, and certainly the statistics bear this out, but no one is unduly concerned about this, possibly because of an inherent fatalism amongst the Malays, that whatever happens is the will of god, and that it has to be accepted without question.
This is one of the biggest culture shocks for foreigners arriving in Malaysia: why don’t we do something about this is never really a serious question, it’s just the way things are. In Jonathan Nichols’ essay description of our junction and the school, he appropriately neglects to mention the police station right next to the school… as only once in 23 years have I ever seen a police officer emerge from his enclave not in a car.
So life on the Kuang Road is far from the galleries and studios that most people assume artists haunt, but a residency is an opportunity to explore and experience something new that is outside normal life, to expose you to a new way of looking at things, and to give you new things to look at.
We didn’t really think about that when we started the residency programme, in fact I was a bit concerned that there was nothing in Kuang to interest anyone, let alone artists, but nothing could be further from the truth.
We have just come from Adelaide, where on Wednesday night we attended an opening of a show celebrating the Rimbun Dahan programme. Two of the artists exhibiting, who had stayed with us for a year and 3 months respectively, literally drew their material from the rubbish they found around them, either discarded fish boxes for Tony Twigg, or the residual rubbish on the ground that you never see in Australia, for Cathy Brooks. Others sometimes come with ideas already formed that they want to work on, but inevitably these preconceived plans are subverted by the environment in which they find themselves, and the experiences they have with people from a different culture, and in their space.
I remember Anthony showing me the series of photographic portraits that he had taken of people he had met in Kuang who had lost relatives and friends in road accidents. Anthony was concerned about exhibiting photographs of people without following the proper protocol of seeking their approval, and I was struck by how different this concern was from the Malaysian norm where no one’s private space is really private, and all is considered legitimate fodder for public discussion.
Anthony did take his concerns to his subjects, and that meant they too participated in this wondrous thing where someone was asking their permission before using their image… no Malaysian would have ever thought that to be a legitimate issue; even I thought does this really matter? But I have been immersed in Malaysian culture for so long, I didn’t see the issue clearly either. So the exposure of artists in Kuang goes both ways, all of the locals who meet our artists share an experience that broadens their view too, and that’s what it’s all about, trying to break down the barriers between cultures that more often than not are based on preconceived givens, allowing us to explore common human experiences like loss and grief.
The main thing we provide our artists at the residency is time and space: separate from the kampong, behind the fence and surrounded by trees, they have time and space to work and think about new possibilities for their practice. They emerge each day seeking food and relief, and there come into contact with the real world.
Currently in residence we have five artists: a Sydney couple, Sean Cordiero and Claire Healy, Asialink textile artist Julie Ryder from Canberra, Malaysian artist Sabri Idrus, and Carlo Gernale from the Philippines. Every year we probably host 8 to 10 artists for anything from 3 months to a year, and many more dancers and choreographers who come for shorter periods. All benefit from interactions with other artists from different backgrounds as well as the chance to make new friendships and professional links in the region, and of course from the experience of living in this corner of Malaysia that is far from the city’s malls and hotels.
For us personally, the artists have enriched our lives enormously: not just in terms of friendships formed over their stay, but they have helped to shape physically Rimbun Dahan in significant ways. We would never have considered moving heritage houses to the compound and restoring them if we had had no use for them, but the residency provided the justification that saved these beautiful old houses from decay and loss, as we use them for artists’ accommodation. Nor would we have ever gone looking for property in Penang, except that all the artists loved the city and enthused over what a great site for a residency it would be, so we then found a property in Georgetown that we converted into a hotel that includes a residency. Although it began as a way to pay back for everything we have enjoyed, the residency continues to enrich us.
And this is where Horsham comes in. Your position midway between Melbourne and Adelaide is significant to us, Hijjas studied in both places and commuted for a while between them, so he must have driven through Horsham in the early 60s in his VW or Morris Minor, or whatever he drove in those days.
Decades later we buy land here, and have the chance to extend something we have established in Malaysia to Australia: Melbourne and Adelaide are already saturated with artists so there is little point going there, so why not Horsham? So as many of you are aware, we are planning to build a residency here, and with Adam’s help in running it I’m sure Horsham will benefit as much as we have done at Rimbun Dahan.
A country town may not be where you expect artists to gravitate, same as the urban fringe of Kuala Lumpur, but if you provide the opportunity, they will come, and you don’t have to worry about them taking advantage of your generosity for anything other than doing the work that they have been itching to do for years. We have almost never been disappointed by the work ethic of our artists, they treasure the opportunity to develop their practices, and they will enrich your lives as ours have been. Artists always bring new ideas, not always the ideas you think they should bring, but certainly something that may jolt you out of the complacency of normality.
Anthony’s experiences in Kuang are now brought to you, in Horsham. Who would have thought that a body bag from Bukit Aman, our somewhat feared police headquarters, would be a subject of artistic interest? But here it is: reconsidered, reworked, and representing a lovingly woven carapace for someone who was loved but has been lost.
We can all share in this, it is our worst nightmare, but like a Malay funeral, where the body is bound in white cloth and laid directly in the earth, we all come to this ultimately, this is the human experience, for better or for worse, no different in Australia or Malaysia.
Thank you.