Malaysian

Renee 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.

In 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

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

Bio

Yuande 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.