Helen Bodycomb of Castlemaine, Australia, had a residency at Rimbun Dahan in 2006. She returned to Malaysia in 2009 with three other mosaic artists to work on the collaborative artwork ‘The Shyness of Trees’ at Hotel Penaga.
Bio
Helen Bodycomb moved to the Castlemaine area in late 2007 from Melbourne, where she had lived on and off for almost 30 years. Born in Adelaide and raised as a young child in Elizabeth (SA), she went to Uni High and later – to art school – in Melbourne. She completed a BA in Fine Art (majoring in Painting) at Victoria College, Prahran and then a Post-Graduate Diploma at Monash Uni. See http://www.helenbodycomb.com/
“Saya Cinta Kamu”, 2005, Acrylic on canvas, 100 x 130 cm x 2.
Arahmaiani’s exhibition, entitled Lecture on Painting, Part I, accompanied by photographs by Bernice Chauly, will be on display at Vallentine Willie Fine art from 24 August 2005 to Saturday 10 September 2005.
The artist will give a talk on her work on Saturday, 3rd SEPTEMBER, 2005, at 3.30 pm. Tea will be served.
Vallentin Willie Fine Art,
1st Floor, 17 Jalan Telawi 3
Bangsar Baru
59100 Kuala Lumpur
Malaysia
Tel: 60 3- 2284 2348
Fax: 60 3- 2282 5190
rachel@artsasia.com.my
www.artsasia.com.my
Southeast Asian Paintings & Works of Art
Gallery & resource room opening hours Monday – Friday: 12 noon – 6pm. Closed on Sundays and public holidays.
About the artist:
Coming soon to VWFA is one of Indonesia’s most outstanding contemporary artists, Arahmaiani (b. Bandung, W.Java, 1961). Working mainly in performance and installation art since the early 80s, Arahmaiani has gained an international reputation for her often provocative work. Her Indonesian
roots, Western art training and humanist concerns has bought Arahmaiani to numerous exhibitions and performances, ranging from those held directly in streets protests in Indonesia, contemporary art museums in Asia, Europe and America, and notably to events as such as the pretigious 50th Venice
Biennale 2003 and the “Breaking Words” Performance Art Expo in Nagano, Japan (2004). More recently, Arahmaini has been working on art and social projects in Kuala Lumpur and Germany.
For her first solo exhibition in Malaysia, Arahmaiani will use this private gallery as a platform to question the mechanisms and politics that govern the making and selling of art. As the artist aptly puts it “I am not against the market, but I hate market fundamentalism, exploitation, monopoly – market terrorism!” To express this delicate negotiation between her needs and personal journeys as an artist with the pressures of mass consumerism, the artist will present a series of painted diptychs and also give a performance. “I want to turn the medium of painting into performance. I want to transform the individual ‘product’ of painting for the commercial art world into a complex question of authorship and its marketability”. Photographs by Bernice Chauly of Arahmaiani’s performance ‘body/text’ will also be on view.
Choy Chun Wei is enjoying his time playing the “collector” and the “engineer” in Rimbun Dahan. Look around and you will find his workspace populated by jars and tubes of paint in different degrees of exhaustion, while piles of unidentifiable junk and a plethora of paraphernalia lay scattered across the floor. When I visited his studio recently, he tells me “I still return to the city to collect all this junk”. The process of collecting and constructing, or building, forms the root of Chun Wei’s artistic approach. Whether in the form of photographs, paint, ink, or other found materials, the potential in each of the artist’s materials will be stretched out, deconstructed, reconstructed and layered to present unique views of life within an urbanscape. Those familiar with Chun Wei’s body of work will recall his early photo-collage series such as Citadel and Link House from 2001. They were the result of a morning ritual whereby the artist would walk with his camera to work, photographing random exteriors of homes in Bandar Utama to relieve the monotony of this routine. The collection of photographs captured from these walks later grew into a series of musings about home within our fragmented urban environment seen through the eye of an outsider.
In his latest series, Construction Site, paint and found materials have replaced photographs to become the building blocks in the artist’s work. He tells me that every single paint mark and object is treated as an individual units, “like Lego blocks”, built layer upon layer, one over the other. Each work begins with the overlaying of paint onto the surface ground in broad sweeps. “I rarely know what is going to happen during the early stages so I just let it happen.” Once these initial sweeps have been established, ‘units’ of paint and materials are incorporated into and over the initial foundation through the use of a diverse range of tools – hands included – as well as other media to create a spectrum of marks and textures. It is clear, through this new body of work, that the artist has discovered a more instinctive and energetic process in creating image and texture; there is an obvious sense of play, as well as a newfound confidence in distilling the images to near abstraction.
The urban landscape and mapping continue to figure prominently in Chun Wei’s work. The ritual of returning to the city to collect the artist’s ‘junk’ bears poetic resonance in the artist’s dedication to his subject matter. While his mapping process may have begun within the immediate confines of Bandar Utama, his concerns have since extended into farther reaches, taking on a wider worldview beyond geography and tangible matter. Perhaps this development has been prompted by changes in the artist’s personal life. Marriage and moving out to a new home has shifted his outlook on life; he is no longer the wandering outsider looking in, but rather someone who has found hearth and home.
Construction Site begins with The Construction of Metaphysical Site I. While the spatial arrangement in this painting may appear conventional to the eye, it is nonetheless striking in its composition and form. It recalls the imaginary maps many of us would have drawn during childhood. Colours and simple geometric shapes are employed to demarcate different territories and densities while incidental marks may imply roads, railway tracks or borders. The Construction of Metaphysical Site II suggests a fantastical yet apocalyptic cityscape alluding to Italo Calvino’s Invisible Cities. Vertical forms, or monoliths, grow from opposite directions; they weave in and out of the dramatic foliage, moving towards each other, drawing closer to convergence.
Subsequent works such as The Changing Mindscape, Intimate Dwelling Site and Configuration l, demonstrate to the viewers that the spatial configuration in each painting has grown progressively tighter and denser through the course of development. The drama and density of this series culminates in the epic Big Dwelling Site. Impressive and intense, the painting’s expanse and tight overlapping layers of paint and found materials overwhelm the senses. The eye picks out the random details and unexpected textures as it roves through this dense forest of marks and colours; you will find bits of corrugated board here, unidentifiable slices of plastic and dried materials there, a shaved off bar code somewhere above. The painting possesses a cubistic resonance as the artist breaks up the picture plane to create multiple perspectives. They also remind us of Mondrian’s earlier paintings where grid and lines form the artist’s primary motives. Spaces move in and out, shifting from two-dimensional to three-dimensional planes, taking our eye on a manic ride through tightly wound nooks and crannies, before launching into exhausting claustrophobic areas that slowly ease off towards the edges.
Configuration lll (Breathing Space), one of the later pieces, sees the artist side-stepping his usual media employed in this series. It is perhaps the most carefree piece in this body of work, and as the title suggests, this painting provides a beguiling reprieve from the intense concentration of heavy impasto marks and texture. Here, the brush takes over from the palette knife to create a delicate yet intricate web of lines. They float evocatively in space, layered in muted neutral shades, amidst collaged drawings of furniture culled from the pages of an IKEA catalogue. The minimal treatment draws attention to the construction of the image, allowing the visual narrative and emotional content to exude its understated charm.
Adeline Ooi
December 2005, KL
Garden Objects
This is part of a series exhibited in Art for Nature 2005 that delves into the formation of mental maps to explore human dwellings within the landscape. The garden is a place for tactile and sensory engagement, where one may expand sensibility within space. Click on the thumbnails above to view larger images.
Biodata
Choy Chun Wei (b. 1973) is a graduate and full scholarship holder from the faculty of Graphic Design at Central Saint Martins College of Art and Design, majoring in Illustration. He has been actively painting and exhibiting in a number of exhibitions in Kuala Lumpur and won an Honourable Mention at the Philip Morris Malaysia/ASEAN Art Awards in 2003. In 2004, Chun Wei received the Juror’s Choice Award (2D) at the Malaysian Young Contemporaries Exhibition organized by National Art Gallery. He became the artist-in-residence at Rimbun Dahan Artist in Residence Programme in 2005.
Immersed in the richness and complexity of nature at Rimbun Dahan, Jasmine was searching for a dialectic experience with the plants and objects around her. Obsessed with the regular pattern of the lines and textures on plants, different sizes of leaves were collected as models and cast with plaster of Paris. Slabs of soft clay were pressed against the plaster moulds to question the ephemeral nature of the objects and things around us, and render the impermanent permanent.
‘Ceramic by its nature cannot escape medium-hood’. For an artist like Jasmine ‘working in a medium so identified with craft-based procedures, her clay sculpture is immediately subject to sustained discussion on its material language’, challenging the perception of the custody of material use and the art forms in contemporary art practice today in Malaysia.
Installation, as the British writer Michael Archer described it, is ‘a kind of art making which rejects concentration on one object in favor of a consideration of the relationships between a number of elements or of the interaction between things and their contexts’. In Jasmine’s case, her works were a suggestion of scene and environment, which derived from her memories as well as from reality. The imprinted clay leaves were glazed with color and scattered on fabric, referring to the changing seasons. For instance, the imprinted lotus leaves of various sizes mimic the green summer water pond. All these pieces of work bring the connection of the scene from outside to inside, from exterior to interior. The relationship of human to nature was revealed through Jasmine’s intellectual interest, her participating in nature and sharing that experience with others.
Stone carving, like clay forming, is a slow and time consuming process. The physicality of force and the gradual changes of surface and shape were important to Jasmine and can be seen in her stone sculptures. Inspired by the curved and pointed elegance of the Jade Vine flower, Jasmine used marble to reinterpret her chosen subject through the physical process of carving. The smoothness and reflective nature of the marble was tarnished, the solid surface was opened and revealed by force. The original shape of the Jade Vine was copied, altered and magnified. The meaning of the work lies not in the work itself but in our attitude towards the art work.
Jasmine Kok’s work ‘does not reproduce what we see, it makes us see’. Her intention is not simply about recording the natural world but in transforming an object, a space and environment into something profound and intellectual. The work offers a fresh vision to her and to the viewer. The perceptual knowledge about the place around her, about things and objects she encounters and feels, are shown through her sculpture and installation works in a stage of ‘metaphysics concerned with the nature of existence’.
During her studies in London, Jasmine participated in an organization called ‘Art Express’, where she taught wood and stone carving within the community for several years. She was also involved in art therapy projects with problem children and the homeless, and the feedback was positive. She had some special experiences working with other artists from different countries while in London, and shared different culture experiences when working in the quarries and sculpture parks.
In the past, Jasmine Kok’s sculpture was primarily figurative, but since her residency in Rimbun Dahan, her art practice has embarked on a whole new journey by exploring nature and different materials. The artist in residence programme allowed her to explore new perceptions within her art, while assisting her to develop and understand the arts of her homeland.
‘Blue Symphony,’ 110 x 110 x 3 cm, ceramic clay, glaze, glue, perspex and velvet, 2004.
‘Green Summer Dream 1,’ 46x 46 x 4 cm, ceramic clay, glaze, glue and velvet, 2004.
‘Green Summer Dream 5,’ 150 x 80 x 4 cm, ceramic clay, glaze, glue and velvet, 2004.
‘Peace,’ carved from a single block of Langkawi limestone.
‘Transformation (detail),’ 145 x 52 x 63 cm, marble, 2004.
‘Transformation,’ 145 x 52 x 63 cm, marble, 2004.
‘Transformation’ being lowered into the Rimbun Dahan underground gallery.
Biography
Jasmine Kok Lee Fong
Date of birth: 28th October 1970
Nationality: Malaysian
Address: C109, Kampung Kundang, 48020 Rawang, Selangor, Malaysia.
Visual artist Jean Weiner was the Australian resident artist in the year-long Malaysia-Australia Visual Arts Residency at Rimbun Dahan in 2002.
The scientist does not study nature because it is useful. He studies it because he delights in it, and he delights in it because it is beautiful.
Jules-Henri Poincaré
Jean Weiner’s bold, organic, painted surfaces play on the ambiguity between abstraction and realism, and between art and science. The works are abstract, yet are also re-presentations of physical reality. They are a fusion of art and entomology: an in-depth look at colours and patterns of butterflies, moths and beetles, enlarged so that they impact upon the senses.
The artist’s aim is to encourage the audience to become aware of their physical, intuitive and emotional responses to colour and pattern. To encourage this embodied meditation between a composition and its audience, the artist employs a wet-on-wet technique of blending oil colours through the use of a variety of fine brushes in order to produce his signature-style blurred borders and smooth finishes. This technique arrests focused vision, invoking a momentary feeling of chaos, but ultimately invites a new sense of ‘alive calm’.
Jean Weiner is particularly versed in his subject, bringing together in an interdisciplinary approach: a Master of Art in painting; a Bachelor of Arts in philosophy, for which he received first class honours; and his work as the honorary curator of foreign lepidoptera (butterflies) at the Australian Museum. Like the new theories in science and philosophy, the artist’s practice demonstrates the interconnectedness of both natural and cultural life. His works especially resonate with Chaos Theory’s ‘Butterfly Effect’. This environmental notion of the beating of an insect’s wing in one hemisphere having, through a web of events, possible catastrophic outcomes in another, becomes in the artist’s work a statement of hope, a way of exploring new ways of being. Just as the natural world is interrelated, so are cultures: as an Australian of Czech and French origin who has lived and practised in Sydney, Asia and Europe and exhibited internationally, he lives and celebrates this (bio)diversity.
Ultimately, Jean’s art is about wonder; it reminds us that the world, even in its smallest detail, is extraordinary.
Jean’s work has received growing recognition and acclaim through university conferences, judged and curated exhibitions, government and philanthropic grants, artist residencies and public collections. His paintings have been exhibited in museums and galleries in Sydney, Los Angeles, New York, Aix-en-Provence, Paris and Kuala Lumpur. Recently he was selected by the National Art Gallery of Malaysia to participate in the Alami II Science/ Art conference at Mt. Kinabalu as part of UNESCO’s international year of the mountain. The artist’s upcoming exhibition will show the work – based specifically on Malaysian butterfly, moth and beetle species – that he has produced during his year-long artist residency at Rimbun Dahan.
Paint not the thing, but the effect it produces… Mallarmé
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.
‘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
