Work by Ahmad Shukri at the Singapore Contemporary Arts Fair, 2002.
Ahmad Shukri’s work for the Rimbun Dahan residency is as profuse and multi-layered as a tropical garden. The artist will exhibit paintings, installations and a large drawing on canvas, all in his highly decorative and richly referential style.
Out of the explosion of work in his studio he identifies four major series. Two installations of ‘incubators’, structures filled with hundreds of white and black plaster eggs, draw on the yin-yang concept to suggest the inevitably heterogeneous nature of the world. As Shukri puts it, within a hundred white eggs there will be a black egg, and vice versa.
The ‘people’s forum’ (sidang rakyat) installation consists of multiple pairs of boxing gloves cast in plaster and set atop a low table covered in a patchwork of textiles. For Shukri, the boxing gloves represent the sparring of politicians, while the textiles are the backdrop of unresolved and perhaps unresolvable situations against which their competitions take place.
A series of diskettes embedded in perspex sheets and overlaid with resin and silk-screen printing point to the irresistible spread of technology, which he sees as again neither wholly good nor bad but always composite. In the voyager series of paintings nature and culture morph into each other: the blades of a ceiling fan echo the petals of a flower and a chicken appears both as a living animal and as a child’s plastic toy. Whereas the installations illustrate socio-political conditions as Shukri sees them, he describes the paintings—featuring paper boats and planes, dragonflies, butterflies, cartoon characters, scrawled scraps of text—as diaries, eclectic personal records of memory and experience.
Many of the motifs—the eggs, the chickens, the fabrics representative of Malaysia’s main ethnic groups, the diskettes—are familiar from Shukri’s previous work, but for the artist the significance of these images is inexhaustible and ever elusive. A thread running through Shukri’s work in this exhibition is precisely this multivalent eloquence of objects: a loosely sketched rabbit in one painting alludes to the rabbit-breeding business started by a friend of the artist, whereas the origami rabbit appearing in the same work is suggestive of Japan’s influence on Malaysia.
An interest in texture and textiles and the play of surfaces also underlies Shukri’s work. His canvases are layered with squares of fabric or cut-out numbers, reflecting, he says, the multi-layered nature of the world. Several of the paintings feature scraps of fabric machine-embroidered with bands of thread in subtle gradations of colour. The use of techniques such as these, from outside the strictly traditional artist’s repertoire, as well as the incorporation of images of found objects like coconut husks and flowers, spring from Shukri’s belief that art is embedded in everyday life. The everyday world revealed in Shukri’s work is one of vibrant, chaotic and constantly changing multiplicity.
Margot was the Australian artist of the year-long Malaysia-Australia Visual Arts Residency in 2001.
Biography
Breathing Space, 250cm x 99.5cm, pastel on paper, 2002.
Australian artist Margot Wiburd began her creative career as an advertising copywriter, followed by work as a producer’s assistant with ABC Television in Melbourne. After extensive language studies in Germany and Spain she returned to advertising for five years, working with Saatchi & Saatchi Compton in Madrid.
After a nine year absence, Margot returned to Australia to study art, graduating from RMIT with a Bachelor of Fine Art in 1989. Since graduation, steady development in painting has been complemented by a stimulating ten years assisting feature film director, Paul Cox, in a variety of roles, including a writing collaboration. During this period Margot was awarded a short tuition scholarship at the Academy of Realist Art in Seattle and was accepted into the Ecole Albert de Fois in France to study classical oil painting techniques for six months and a further three months the following year. A masterclass in portraiture followed with Jacob Collins in New York.
In 1998 a residency at the Banff Centre for the Arts in Canada resulted in her first solo exhibition. Later that year, at the conclusion of work on a major feature film in Hawaii, Margot lived for a month in a beach shack on the outskirts of the remote settlement of Kalaupapa (a former leper colony) on the island of Molokai. The isolation, tranquility and overwhelming spirituality of her surrounds resulted in the first of her multi-panelled works combining figurative and abstract elements to create the mood of a particular place and time.
Several group shows and a further solo exhibition in Melbourne reveal a consolidation of the main features of her work: an exploration of space, calm and simplicity.
During her residency at Rimbun Dahan, Margot worked both in pastel on paper and oil on canvas, inspired by the abundance of natural resources at her disposal at Rimbun Dahan, by her travels within Malaysia, by the jade bracelets she so admires, and from still life. She considers the Rimbun Dahan residency to be one of the finest opportunities available world wide through which an artist can focus, take risks, grow and give themselves heart and soul to their work in an atmosphere of complete support and kindness, with the added interest of immersion into a challenging new culture.
Works by Margot Wiburd hanging in the Underground Gallery at Rimbun Dahan.
‘Breathing Space’
The Japanese aesthetic of wabi-sabi suggests that greatness exists in the inconspicuous, the minor, the hidden and the ephemeral. Pared down to the essentials, the beauty of things modest and humble can gain strength through understatement, creating a reverberation on a sensory level. Kandinsky spoke of the choice of that object corresponding to a vibration in the human soul. “As every word spoken rouses an inner vibration, so like-wise does every object represented.”
The French poet, Francois Ponge, writes: “A shell is a small thing, but I can exaggerate its size by putting it back where I found it on an expanse of sand. What I’ll do is to take a fistful of sand and observe the little that’s left in my hand after almost all of it has run through the interstices between my fingers; I’ll observe a few grains, then each grain, and not one of these grains will still seem a small thing; soon the form of the shell, this oyster shell or this razor clam, will impress me as an enormous monument, colossal and yet exquisite. Mysterious.”
I have attempted through my drawings and paintings to capture that intangible sense of something greater than ourselves that one can find in nature or in a carefully crafted object. I hope to engage the viewer’s intuitive love of beauty, letting his or her mind wander into the painted image, soak up the quiet space, go inward and beyond.
In Australia I draw sustenance from the ocean’s infinite horizon. When you sit by the sea, the clarity and expansiveness of the image can trigger haunting memories, dreams, emotions.
Here in Malaysia, as the lush surrounds of Rimbun Dahan’s fertile garden jostled for attention, my work became preoccupied with isolating elements from their prolific, competitive environment, separating them from the mass of sensory input, giving them space to breathe and convey a sense of their uniqueness. In a quest for peace, beauty and space, I found myself continually eliminating elements, reducing the images to a state of unencumbered simplicity.
‘Grace’, 153cm x 122cm, oil on canvas, 2002.
‘Drift’, 167cm x 178cm (variable), oil on canvas on wood, 2001.
Noor Mahnun Mohamed (Anum) was the Malaysian artist of the year-long Malaysia-Australia Visual Arts Residency in 2000. The works from her exhibition were presented in the Underground Gallery at Rimbun Dahan from 16 February to 14 March 2001.
Anum was also the Visual Arts Residency Manager at Rimbun Dahan for several years, and curated the annual fundraising Art for Nature exhibition.
Conversation with the artist
Laura Fan talks to Noor Mahnum Mohamed about the body of work produced during her residency at Rimbun Dahan. This is an excerpt of their conversation.
How has your time in Rimbun Dahan influenced your work?
Being at Rimbun Dahan settled me down and got me back on the track of working as a painter again. I returned from Germany to Malaysia at the end of 1997 and stayed in Kelantan for a year to be with my family. There I had a studio but I did not produce any significant work – only one small oil portrait of my dad’s goat. In my second year I moved to Kuala Lumpur, bunked in at a friend’s apartment, didn’t have a studio and didn’t paint much that year either. By the time I moved to Rimbun Dahan for the residency program, I was eager to work again, to smell oil and turpentine.
Rimbun Dahan provides me with just the right environment and facilities. Here I find myself getting back into my usual work habits. I feel at home here and I’m at peace which is necessary for me to paint, be productive, and develop my ideas.
These paintings are a continuation of what I have done before. For example the Karaoke singers are figures in a room, isolated and dominant, in a composition using flat perspective. On the other hand, being in a tropical climate there is much more human activity happening outdoors, in the open. And being at Rimbun Dahan I am surrounded by nature so I become interested in going ‘back to nature’ and landscapes, such as the painting of a lady looking out the window. Nature or landscape is reflected in the window pane. She wants to be in the landscape, but not yet. The painting is self referential because that is how I feel.
In what other ways has that outdoor shift influenced your work?
At the moment, the landscape appears only as a detail or as a background to a painting (for example the lady by the window), or the three faces. I put each face in a different location, one in a room, one outside by the pool and one underneath the trees in the orchard. I am still getting to know the landscape in itself: the horizon, the sky and the ‘geological drama’ of the ground. At the moment I feel it is much more comfortable to look at a landscape through a frame, a window view.
But if you look at it through the window you’re always looking at a framed view and not the entire scene. Isn’t that limiting?
I am interested in window views because frames have a relationship to the framed structure of a painting. The window is like a viewfinder where I can analyze a scene. It’s a controlled image with different qualities of light and colour depending on which time of the day I look at it, from the glaring to the sublime. And I sometimes find so much visual sensation that I have to close the folding doors of my apartment or studio.
This aspect of control is very interesting, especially in relation to your figurative paintings. Looking at your preliminary sketches, I can see that your initial figures re much more emotive, but in the final work the emotion disappears and the figures are very controlled – event though sometimes there’s a sense that the emotion still exists under the visible surface. Your work creates a relationship between coldness and emotion.
The figures in my work are in their own world and they do not need to communicate with the audience. The emotional distance creates a space between the painted figures and the viewer; it is deliberate, so the emotion is a tension beneath the surface. I prefer these undercurrents rather than a direct emotional confrontation.
To create this distance I manipulate shapes and colours. Using flat perspective as a structure in my composition, the choice of colours applied becomes important to convey the pictorial space. A wall can look as it if has no depth or is very solid depending on my intention as I use layers of colours to get to the right hue.
Why is it so important for you to create distance?
Because I find buffer zones necessary.
Is there a relationship between your desire to create distance and your interest in still life paintings?
When I do figures, they tend to be narrative. With figurative themes, I will be distracted by other concerns such as the expression of the figure in relation to the whole colour compostiion. Still life is much more neutral as a subject, it can tell a story, but while painting a still life, my main concern is the painting process and how painterly I want the work to be. In my still life, I just focus on how it is presented through colour, texture, shadow, luminosity, shape and brushstroke.
For me painting is about exploring things. It is like being a traveler, where covering distance is more important than the destination. I feel like a traveler all the time.
Stephen Turpie was the Australian artist of the year-long Malaysia-Australia Visual Arts Residency at Rimbun Dahan in 1998.
Stephen’s is currently a lecturer of painting and drawing at LaTrobe University, Bendigo, and his qualifications include DipArt (Painting-VCA), GradDipFine Art (VCA), MVA (RMIT). Stephen has a range of interests that include sculpture, installations and time-based work along with his continuing practice as a painter. His research involves major phenomenological questions about the self, visual analogy and the engineered world, expressed in a metaphorical and sybolic format. Stephen Turpie has undertaken numerous other residencies, including at Green Street Studios , New York (1986) and Padiès Château , Lempaut, France (2008).
‘Tinkerer,’ 184 x 147cm, oil on canvas
‘Kampong 2,’ 183 x 122cm, oil on canvas
‘Clades House,’ 107 x 138cm, oil on canvas
‘Bedwrecked,’ 122 x 152cm, oil on canvas
Catalogue Essay
In these new works, Stephen Turpie explores the evasive qualities of appearances; the ambiguity of things which have not come into sharp focus, but are demanding of our attention and ‘as through a glass darkly’ we try to make sense. Fusing imagery from biology, construction and abstract thought (mathematics, physics and philosophy) he traverses the natural and cultural worlds. This symbolic play in the metaphorical landscape resonates with an emotional intensity gained only from personal and ontological inquiry.
Turpie’s visual themes are influence by a diverse array of artists and works: from Joseph Beuys’ conceptual investigations into the fundamental principles of energy and the effects of both natural forces and of art, to Jean Miro’s symbolic innovations and Ken Whisson’s abstract treatment of the landscape.
The formal concerns of past works in painting, as well as sculpture and performance, recur again in this new series. His painted forms display the solidity and presence of three dimensional objects which are poised in ambiguous landscapes and receding intimate spaces. These arrangements are reminiscent of Turpie’s sculptural works of over a decade and a half ago in which clusters of discarded objects were delicately balanced in small museum boxes. These curious objects were the decaying leftovers of another time whose concealed histories conferred a certain dignity to their presence, the significance of which remained quietly elusive.
Stephen Turpie’s work contemplates ancient modes of thought alongside modern and contemporary ideas which reflect something of the all-at-once attempts to render life and appearances in theoretical guises. The use of the landscape genre is a significant choice for this subject as the natural cycles and biological processes have been commonly employed as metaphors for psychological and social phenomena in both ancient and contemporary descriptions. Turpie’s images are carefully constructed between the borders of figuration and abstraction, as such, his ‘figures’ are neither fixed in meaning nor anchored in the landscapes over which they hover.
Turpie’s choce and use of symbols reflect the flavour of Pre-
Socratic and Platonic modes of analogical thought. The invisible correspondences by which “all things pass through all things”; the similarity in dissimilars, were uncovered by the principle of analogy, for example, almonds are good for the eyes, walnuts for the brain, the seven planets with the sun and the moon relect the nine portals of the body (macrocosm=microscosm). The ephemeral nature of these protean transformations was underpinned by the notions of singularity and duality, sameness and difference, harmony and strife.
Throughout these works, T-junctions, chromosomes, blue intruding figures, houses and wedges group together in pairs, clusters or alone, their identity of difference forming the basis of their relation. For example, the house stands in relation to the cultural landscape as the chromosome to the internal microcosm of the body, as the defining points of civilization and humanity. These symbols display simultaneous features of singularity, self-same duality and multiplicity, yet, their identities are never simple: a T-junction can be a signature (of the artist perhaps), a letter referring to the building blocks of language and representation, it could be a telephone pole signifying energy and communication grids imposed on a barren landscape, or perhaps it represents the junction of various levels of existence, the organic and inorganic, or the biological and social. Two T’s join together to form a gateway, a bridge or a simplified dog. The chromosomes sometimes curiously look like two copulating figures, in other places like a solitary floating character. Electric blue figures invade the picture plane resembling cells in mitosis, ovum or phallus, or perhaps neurological cross sections indicating either the dualistic tension of creativity, the genesis of life, of the beginnings of intelligence and complexity.
Turpie’s imagery concurs with Richard Long’s description of his work as “a balance between patterns of nature and the formation of human abstract ideas”. Lattices, webs and branching structures are observed throughout the natural world from biology to chemistry and the mathematical descriptions of contemporary physics. The ambiguity of the brain/cell division when juxtaposed with such structures also brings into question the relationship between the structure of the world and the structure of our perceptions. The extent to which these patterns of order are inherent in the world or are imposed on sensations by the brain remains in question. In natural and human sciences as well as in art, the dividing lines between invention and discovery are hazy. For over a century, these issues have been hotly debated through the perennial questions of evolution theories and their explanatory metaphors.
Turpie’s depiction of the wedge/arrow, indicates the dark underbelly of evolution theories (competition and biological arms races) as well as the teleological notions (arrow of the Great Chain of Being) which Darwin’s wedge had overturned. The patchwork effect of some of the larger works reflect the newer modes of describing evolutionary change (and perhaps the creative process of the artist) as ‘biffrucation, tinkering and bricolage’. In biological terms, these notions emphasise the historical contingency and the exquisite imperfections of the actual structures which developed by chance from the myriad possible alternatives which had insufficient opportunity to develop. It also provides an apt metaphor for the artist and his work. According to evolutionary biologist, Francois Jacob:
“…often without knowing what he is going to produce, he (the tinkerer) uses what ever he finds around him, old cardboards, pieces of strings, fragments of wood or metal, to make some kind of workable object. As pointed out by Claude Levi-Strauss, none of the materials at the tinkerer’s disposal has a precise and definite function. Each can be used in different ways. What the tinkerer ultimately produces is often related to no special project. It merely results from a series of contingent events from the opportunities he has to enrich his stock with leftovers.”
The historical result of this process of tinkering is not a seamlessly engineered creation, but as Jacob proposes,
“a patchwork of odd sets pieced together when and where opportunity arose. For the opportunism of natural selection is not simply a matter of indifference to the structure and operations of its products. It reflects the very nature of historical processes, full of contingency.”
Turpie is both a tinkerer of symbols and a bricoleur of ideas. His fascination with the processes of nature, thought and art are both hidden and revealed in the verdant ‘openness’ of his paintings which allows us to explore the question of how ideas and experience are ordered in our attempts to apprehend the world. To the Appolonian urge for clarity and definition, Turpie’s fuzzy chromosomes reply,
“Do not befriend an elephant keeper,
if you have no room to entertain an elephant”.
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
Thornton 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.
‘Rimbun Dahan’, 1997, watercolour and ink, 35 x 25 cm.
‘The ladder (Malaysia)’, 1997, oil on tarpaulin, 183 x 168 cm.
‘The orchard (Malaysia)’, oil on tarpaulin, 238 x 223 cm.
‘Cempedak I’, 1997, watercolour, 76 x 56 cm.
‘Cempedak III’, 1997, watercolour, 76 x 56 cm.
‘Lychees’, 1997, watercolour, 76 x 56 cm.
‘Malaccan bowl with limes’, 1997, watercolour, 76 x 56 cm.
‘Seven Chinese bowls’, 1997, watercolour, 76 x 56 cm.
‘Malaccan bowl with 3 limes’, 1999, watercolour, 76 x 56 cm.
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.
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.
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.
‘Vibrations,’ 100cm x 150cm, oil on canvas
‘Tree Hug,’ 100cm x 150cm, oil on canvas
‘Quantum Leap,’ 150 x 100cm, oil on canvas, 1995
‘Jungle Scream,’ 40cm x 28cm, Acrylic and oil on paper
‘Primal Scream,’ 100cm x 150cm, Oil on canvas
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/EmotionalPhysical 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
‘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
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.
‘Whispering Corridors’ oil on canvas, 1994, 46 x 27 cm
‘Torso of male dancer’ dental rock, 1994, 12cm & 15 cm
‘Actor at rest’ charcoal on paper, 1994, 64 x 46cm
‘Dialogue of light & shadow’ oil on canvas, 1994, 76 x 76 cm
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.
Out of the explosion of work in his studio he identifies four major series. Two installations of ‘incubators’, structures filled with hundreds of white and black plaster eggs, draw on the yin-yang concept to suggest the inevitably heterogeneous nature of the world. As Shukri puts it, within a hundred white eggs there will be a black egg, and vice versa.
