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Kenneth Tan

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With support from The Krishen Jit·ASTRO Fund

Narratives in Malaysian Art project editors-in-chief Nur Hanim Khairuddln, Beverly Yong

Editors for this volume Nur Hanim Khairuddin, Beverly Yong

Consulting editor T.K. Sabapathy

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REACTIONS­NEW CRITICAL STRATEGIES

NARRATIVES IN MALAYSIAN ART

VOLUME

®

EDITED BY NUR HANIM KHAIRUDDIN AND BEVERLY YONG, WITH T.K. SABAPATHY

Contents

6 General Acknowledgements & Editors' Notes 8 Notes on Contributors

12 Preface T.K. SABAPATHY

14 Introduction

NUR HANIM KHAIRUDDIN & BEVERLY YONG

22 Manifesto Generation Anak Alam 24 Anak Alam: Behind the Scenes

NUR HANIM KHAIRUDDIN

31 Towards a Mystical Reality: a Documentation of Jointly-Initiated Experiences by Redza Piyadasa and Suleiman Esa

55 An Empty Canvas on Which Many Shadows Have Already Fallen SIMON SOON

70 Dynamism and Sophistication: Malaysian Modern Art in the 1970s SAFRIZAL SHAHIR

81 • Chong Kim Chiew, Isolation House

• Yee I-Lann, Malaysia Day Commemorative Plates

• Nadiah Bamadhaj, 1965: Rebuilding its Monuments

• Chai Chang Hwang, Rukun Negara 98 An-Other May 13: An Ongoing History of Artistic Responses

MARK TEH

113 Invisible Body: An Othering Narrative TANZI HAO

127 • Nirmala Dutt Shanmughalingam, Statement 1: Pollution Piece,

Statement 2, Statement 3 - A Comparison 1975-1979

• Ponirin Amin, Chess Alibi, Pulau Bidong 136 Towards an Utopian Paradigm: A Matter of Contingencies

and Displacement !SMAIL ZAIN

146 New Art, New Voices: Krishen Jit Talks to Wong Hoy Cheong on Contemporary Malaysian Art

154 Malay Artists and the Postmodern Situation: Thematic Approaches since the 1990s SARENA ABDULLAH

166 DiffeNnt Visions: Contemporary Malaysian Art and Exhibition in the 1990s and Beyond MICHELLE ANTOINETTE

186

204

221

231

243

256

272

289

297

309

319

334

336

337

352

• Wong Hoy Cheong, Lalang

• Zulkifli Yusoff, Power 1

• Liew Kung Yu, Wadah Untuk Pemimpin

• Bayu Utomo Radjikin, Warbox Against the Grain: Photographic Practices in Malaysia

since the 1950s ZHUANG WUBIN

From Mass to Multimedia: Malaysian Art in an

Electronic Era HASNUL J. SAIDON & NIRANJAN RAJAH

Languages and Locations: Video in the Malaysian

Art Context ADELINE 001 & BEVERLY YONG

Malaysia's New Media Art Landscape

SUZY SULAIMAN

• Apa? Siapa? Kenapa? • Ahmad Fuad Osman, Hoi hoi... apa ni?! Dia kata hang

salah, hang kata dia yang tak betoi ... sapa yang salah~ sapa

yang betoi ni?!!! Hangpa ni sebenaqnya nak apaaaaa???

• Anurendra Jegadeva, Running Indians and the History

of Malaysian Indians in 25 Cliches Radical Gestures in Malaysian Performance Art

RAHMAT HARON

The Street is Our Canvas: Grafitti Art in Kuala Lumpur

EVA MCGOVERN

Re-Negotiating Spaces: Site, Space and Place in

Contemporary Art in Malaysia

YAP SAU BIN

• Noor Azizan Rahman Paiman, Cleansing Rituals

• Mark Teh, Sudden Death Four Currencies in Contemporary Practice

SIMON SOON

Timeline of Events

Illustrations List of Illustrations List of Acknowledgements

MARK TEH

54 Refer to Gan Pei Ling, 'Mahasiswa jurubicara rakyat', The Nut Graph, last modified 12 August 2010, http://www.thenutgraph.com/"mahasiswa-jurubicara-rakyat"; Gan Pei Ling, 'The decline of the student movement', The Nut Graph, last modified 17 August 2010, http://www.thenutgraph.com/the-decline-of-the-student-movement; Gan Pei Ling, 'Semangat mahasiswa 1960-an', The Nut Graph, last modified 18 August 2010, http://www.thenutgraph.com/semangat-mahasiswa-1960s; Gan Pei Ling, 'Leading the student movement in the 1960s', The Nut Graph, last modified 20 August 2010, http://www.thenutgraph.com/leading-the-student-movement-in-the-1960s.

55 Martin Vengadesan, 'May 13, 1969'. 56 Chantal Mouffe, The Democratic Paradox, London-New York: Verso 2000, p. 29. 57 Ibid., pp. 33-34.

58 Jacques Ranciere, The Politics of Aesthetics, trans. Gabriel Rockhilr, London/New York: Continuum 2004, p. 85. Dissensus is defined here as "not a quarrel over personal interests or opinions. It is a political process that resists juridical litigation and creates a fissure in the sensible order by confronting the established framework of perception, thought, and action with the 'inadmissable' i.e. a political subject".

59 Chantal Mouffe, 'Artistic Activism and Agonistic Spaces', Art&. Research 1:2 (2007), http://www.artandresearch.org.uk/v1n2/mouffe.html, retrieved 20 December 2010.

60 Benjamin McKay, 'Reclaiming history', p. 162. 61 Ibid., p. 164.

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INVISIBLE BODY: AN OTHERING NARRATIVE

Invisible Body: An Othering Narrative TANZI HAO

GOSTAN FORWARD HISTORIOGRAPHY

To begin writing is to begin narrativisation, to set foot in a territory with contesting voices. Narratives in Malaysian Art makes such an effort. In the process of narrativising Malaysian art history, it embarks on a detour by taking a few steps backward to seek refuge in the writings ·of pioneering art historians 1 before assuming an agency to negotiate for a re-narrativising of events; a reversion for greater propulsion; a Gostan Forward.2

Marion D'Cruz's Gostan Forward provides an apposite allegory. In the manner in which her body enacted a doubling act - a body retrospec- <

tively prospective - the narrativising of a legacy feels almost like a belated , obligation yet a historical necessity [81]. Marion's performance lecture was realised primarily because of a sense of discontinuity: "there is now at least one generation of audiences who have never seen Marion D'Cruz 'dance"'. 3 Yet Gostan Forward was performed to commemorate the 25th anniversary of Five Arts Centre in 2009. More than just remembering Marion as a dancer, it re-members a generational crevice amidst a 25-year timeline. The absence of Marion is thus subsumed in retrospection, into a "continuous presence and relevance in the local art scene" 4 (my emphasis). And it is at this dis juncture of gostan and forward, or absence and presence, that I wish to conjecture a reading of the body5 in Malaysian arts to proceed writing an othering narrative.

Confronting history with such a hesitant body, however, is to defy the expectation of time - the angel of progress. 6 It is to perceive the body as a site for both (re)configuration and disfiguration: every moment of commemorating arrests a moment for reimagining, and invariably, every moment of remembering encompasses a moment of forgetting. 7 Our pros­pect is only warranted on behalf of the colonial retrospect; for example, in attempting to pinpoint the beginnings of Malaysian modern art, the incorporation of Western stylistic development is almost always perceived as a prerequisite, standing in for artists' embodiment of modernism, 8 be this in the form of"English values and taste': 9 the "Western-influenced artist': 10 or the "School of Paris".11 However, Western penetration does

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not, by definition, imply our entering into "modernism': To the post­colonial body at large, this association reveals the precariousness of this History, with a capital H. It beckons the body to conform to a sacralised narrative preoccupied with the "fetishism of presence': 12 It is a progressive destiny based on a domineering legacy, so long as "Malaysian modernism" is marked to create a sense of "development", or else, moving forward becomes conceptually unviable.

It is tempting to inscribe the body with memories, but impaired by colo­nialism (and to an extent nationalism), there is the partial impossibility for narration in our precondition, for History has long forsaken our narrative. Interpellated by a totalising colonial identification, the post­colonial body recounts experiences of erasure and absenteeism. Reveal­ing absence, therefore, becomes indispensable in our narration; it is the gostan forward historiography where a story awaits to be de-historicised, to be unshackled from historical determinism. We can take off here from Charles Taylor's comment on Saul Bellow's infamous statement ("Who is the Tolstoy of the Zulus? The Proust of the Papuans? IQ be glad to read him"): "First, there is the implicit assumption that excellence has to take forms familiar to us [them?]: the Zulus should produce a Tolstoy. Second, we are assuming that their contribution is yet to be made:' 13 These two assumptions laid bare by Taylor are inherent in any colonial prejudice and are manifested upon the body as racism, reinforcing one another in a stubborn bipartite: the alien native knows no value and is therefore uncivilised. Thereupon the bodies are made inferior, perpetually ( 1) absent of value; and thus (2) absent of history or civilisation.

Such absence is a colonial residue, foregrounding our condition, a ghostly supplementl4 disparaging our modernist ideals. ls Consider this conun­drum as a pathway to a previously occluded signifier. In allowing for the absented body in this rereading of "modern'' Malaysian art, the gostan forward methodology will locate and punctuate into discourse an invisible body that rests amidst the interstices of absence and presence.

LOCATING THE INVISIBLE BODY I: THE SPLITTING BODY

In the discourse of Malaysian art since the National Cultural Policy (NCP), 16 there have been consistent attempts to reconstruct a national presence at the expense of absenting the body. For example, the Landskap Malaysia competition and exhibition organised in 1972 by the National

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INVISIBLE BODY: AN OTHERING NARRATIVE

Art Gallery presumed that "the beginnings of contemporary Malaysian art could be identified in landscape painting"11 while, throughout the Islamic Revivalist movement in the 1980s, Syed Ahmad Jamal consis­tently postulated a homogenising narrative by consecrating the primacy of non-figurative paintings. ls

These events cannot be fully narrativised without also narrating the invis­ible body situated amongst the remnants of the violent erasure. But that which is barely observable is not entirely absent, it prefigures instead an unanticipated presence. Its invisibility lies within the parasitic prefigur­ing that serves only as a decoy concealing the body: actually in visible form but conceptually invisible, present but not committed to the whole imagery, there but not then. In other words, the invisible body is helplessly interpellated into a logocentric metaphysics and may assume a position of a fixed "centre"; however, it still manages to shy away from narrative. This withdrawal signals a body cloven in two directions, a splitting 19~

body "less than one and double': 2o an embodiment of gostan and forward, latent and manifest. '

In Ibrahim Hussein's Aku dan Aku (1970), the invisible body can be located in his ambivalent self, configured in two bodies: there is firstly Aku as the artist vis-a-vis a secondAku as the Other, derived from Chairil Anwar's poem titled Aku [ 09]. 21 Isolated by a bright vertical slab, the two bodies do not reciprocate, only to inform us that the self is one and doubled. Despite being invisible to each other, each supplements the other. The identification of"Aku" further empowers the 'T' (the individualistic self) within the "Me" (the social self)22 and probes the "schizophrenic personality" 23 of the artist, whose individualism has been robbed, ab­sented or suppressed in a traditionally communitarian Malay society. Also relevant to us here is Goenawan Mohamad's astute insight on the pronoun "Aku" written in response to Chairil An war's poem: "We feel safer using the third-person plural inclusive pronoun 'kita: meaning 'all of us: to refer to 'I'. We do not yet regard the individual as someone who dares, needs and has the right to stand out, and yet at the same time is solitary and threatened always:'24 Reflecting Goenawan's enigma, Ibra­him's schizophrenic self, as it disfigures, testifies to a body splitting and fluctuating between selves.

This schizophrenic duality is likewise manifested in Amron Omar's exten­sive Pertarungan series where he wrestles himself in search of agency. The

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two silat fighters in duel illustrate "the self in conflict with the self"2s one of the fighters is conceptually invisible, a duplicate. Here, Amron's invisible body resurfaces in a negative dialectic which, by reflex, oscillates between "the seen and the unseen, the gentle and violent, the self-effacing and the rude, the placids and the amok': 26 Each strike cancels off another: a "gostan" for another "forward': the "Aku" for an-other "Aku': but the result is never zero, since each dissipation initiates pell-mell a dissemina­tion, insofar that what is graspable is only an "arbitrary closure"..27 This tension can also be found in the warriors of sculptor Raja Shahriman Raja Aziddin. Another maverick in the 1980s, Raja Shahriman's artistic journey is split by the NCP and the struggle between figurative and non-figurative representation at this time. His work epitomises a paradox, described as "a fusion of extreme beauty and threat': 2a or an "enigma ... riddled by contradictions''. 29 His warriors are configured with fragments so that one can only determine later "how each part fits into the whole''. 3o However, this putting-together is never accomplished with absolute certitude, the body is a whole forever incomplete, beautiful and threatening. Another notable similarity between Amron's and Raja Shahriman's portrayals of the body lies in their representations of the face; these are either imprecise or featureless, muted or torn between modernist and Islamic narratives. The artists' commitment to the body has initiated a reversal, a gostan, to which they can only gesticulate in silence, seen but invisible, drawing on the energy emanating from the body.

While the bodies we have discussed strive to escape annihilation from the national project, some artists have adopted the body to promulgate a nationalist agenda, but as a parasite leeching off the memories of a nation. They capitalise on the momentum of a developing nation, to exploit its acceleration by a humble suggestion of gostan, of retreating to the rural life since forgotten. This anticipates an unrepentant return to nostalgia favouring the national project, but one which is also politically motivated. As described by Boym: " [the] creative rethinking of nostal­gia was not merely an artistic device but a strategy for survival, a way of making sense of the impossibility of homecoming''31 (my emphasis). In the paintings of the Angkatan Pelukis Semenanjung (APS), nostalgia is a tactical subterfuge legitimising the representation of body under the pretext of nationhood. While gratifying the yearnings of an alien­ated urban Malay middle class, 32 the portraits mock their patrons and viewers, tease their spectators' voyeurism and longings for innocence. They are an ambivalence corroding the nation's confidence in cultural

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INVISIBLE BODY: AN OTHERING NARRATIVE

hegemony, and the bodies are often found waiting idly, still, as if cursed to an eternal suspension. Dzulkifli Buyong's Membakar Semut (1967) hints at a similar recourse to innocence unfulfilled. The bodies depicted are young but merciless. The newspaper in jawi might have informed the "pre-modern" (or more appropriately, "pre-Latinised") context of kampung, but the burning of jawi scripts, in our reading today, is almost sacrilege. This again reminds us of the imperative ofgostan (and forward): our modernity is acquired in tandem with a stricter monitoring of the Malay Islamic identity. Membakar Semut becomes a stain in our nostal­gic voyeurism today, a paragon of the invisible body now configured in the children innocent and cruel; the context holy and blasphemous; the modernity progressive and conservative.

The strategy of nostalgia continues in Kow Leong Kiang's paintings of the body today. His nebulous snapshots, coupled with his monochromatic palette, emit a subtle ambivalence that demands a slow reading, a qual·~ ity especially prevalent in his early works. Kow's treatment of the native female body is opportunistic; she has been portrayed as an "unreadable muse"33 and victimised by "an unfinished dialogue"34 filled with despair. The native body is often found overexposed and magnified, not to feed our nostalgia but recurring as a decoy to an invisible body. This invisible body is a body displayed but concealed, there but not then. One could ask, what is Kow painting when he is painting the native female body? When he is painting her, is he, in fact, painting her? Bypassing this decoy, one sees the mark ofKow's inferiority complex35 as a Malaysian Chinese painter: Kow is not painting "her" but "himself': not "she" but "he"; he who longs for a motherland, for a maternal/national approval; he who sojourns inside geographical boundaries but stares ahead, hoping to reach the horizon, yet is, unsurprisingly, obstructed by a native body (the decoy). In this sense, Kow's transition to Intimate Collisions (2010) and Soft (2011) is natural to the politicisation of nostalgia and his search for the native (or primitive) body [92).36 Throughout his repertoire, the native body has unfailingly resurfaced as a metaphor for something missing.

LOCATING THE INVISIBLE BODY 11: THE BODY ELSEWHERE

The invisible body is as cunning as History, it penetrates the fissures where History appears discrepant to narratives, or when the narrator stutters at narration, uncertain of the next utterance. Whilst History penalises this uncertainty and traumatises it into forceful presence (the official narrative

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is inevitably forceful and uncertainly certain), the invisible body welcomes the contamination of the uncertain, even exaggerates it to maintain its own suppleness, manoeuvrability and invisibility. To encounter this sec­ond conception of the invisible is to encounter estrangement per se, a phenomenon commonly resulting from a national-historical insistence on exclusivity. Indeed, the post-colonial nation often alienates its citizens by excluding the Other, estranging the Self by estranging the Other.

In Masnoor Ramli Mahmud's Bumi Manusia: Journey to Nusantara, one can ~n.d two. paintings, Barat Pun ya Cerita ( 2007) and Dua Daerah ( 2007 ), depictmg alienated bodies with their backs facing the viewer. As with the figures of Raja Shahriman and Amron Omar, the subjects' faces are barred from our gaze. Like Kow Leong Kiang's subjects, they are fixated on the ~orizon. Their bodies hint at a desire to transcend the skyline, seeking mterests located elsewhere. But can they transcend it, held back as they are by the nostalgic nation that has barricaded the body from foreign input, to th.e extreme of er~sing polygenetic traces and cultural multiplicity? In Cmta Dewa Dewt (2007), Masnoor has appropriated two characters from the Ramayana epic, appearing in the form of wayang kulit puppets {64}. He collocates the two puppets (one Javanese and the other Thai) at ei~her end o~ a triptych, separated by a central panel depicting a lush, placid forest, with rows of trees fading as they recede into the distance as if to draw the viewer into contemplation. This central panel introduces an in-ben:een space constituting a boundary figure, an invisible body that r~cogmses both Javanese and Thai as having "influence[d] the Malay ver­sion of the wayang puppet''. 37 At the same time, it addresses the modern nation ~s a f~!ed project,. for not recognising the indisputable fluidity of shared identities. The nation regards the boundary figure (the immigrant, the separatist, etc.) as a contaminant, a threat to fullness. But what is not contaminated? In the concept of"Nusantara': there is nothing Malaysian about Malaysia, nothing Indonesian about Indonesia. 38 One's identity is a medley of the Other, an invisible body elsewhere.

Ahmad Zakii Anwar strives to transcend not only cultural but also spiri­tual and religious boundaries. His emphasis on rasa 39 mirrors the notion of shared identities: he has painted fruits to paint humans; painted ani­mals to paint humans; painted Others only to paint himself {93}. 40 But seldom has he portrayed himself and his beliefs outright, for the essence he seeks lies elsewhere and everywhere; his body is there but never then. Ahmad Fuad Osman's Recollection of Long Lost Memories ( 2007) exemplifies

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INVISIBLE BODY: AN OTHERING NARRATIVE

yet another contaminant evoked with a decontextualised/recontextual­ised body [ 66]. Old sepia photographs documenting historic events are invaded by a contemporary figure, depicted in full colour and adorned in bright modern clothing, which further constitutes her/his discon­nectedness from the scenario s/he is partaking in. The main character is never supposed to be there, s/he belongs elsewhere, now intruding into the historical moment. S/he is hence the invisible body, the body visible but conceptually invisible, ridiculing the History as a "false memory", 41

sneering at a narrator that remembers at the expense of forgetting.

On a more hopeful note, Yee I-Lann's The sun will rise in the east and deliver us from this long night (2012) explores the relationship between two separate bodies {94]. It marks a combined action of gostan forward, articulated in the gesture of arms wrapping42 around each other, whis­pering solidarity, 43 in contrast to the stark line that divides them, a still­separating space. The blue of the background, like the ocean or the Sout~-:­China Sea that separates East and West Malaysia, i.s seen juxtaposed· with the orange of the arms, which radiate like the sun rising from the' Eastern horizon, channelling energy to an-other body (read: the Western peninsula). Culminating at the confluence of blue and orange lies what Josef Albers called the vibrating boundaries44 - the trembling, unseizable horizon(s). It is in this unknown skyline that we seek the possible, the nothing, yet everything. 45 In the case of The sun will rise ... , the unknown figures embrace one another with an intention to know, to transcend geographical demarcation. This moment of embrace indicates the mo­ment of gostan, a pause reserved for the "transference of energy" between estranged bodies. 46

By the same token, we see in the works of Shia Yih Yiing a horizon which grows ever more distant as the nation advances forward. Cleverly, she uses mother-hood to underline the estrangement of the mother-nation, she mingles with the estranged bodies for solidarity - her (m)othering instinct. In her early paintings, she collects and shelves together treasures of estranged bodies - elders, aborigines, even her children - to retain their agency. Examining her "shelf of memories", 4 7 we see that, among her "paraphernalia of life", 48 some boxes are empty, symbolising that "life is not yet full, and that there is much to learn and experience:' 49

This incompleteness in her works demonstrates the artist's tendency to seek out, to locate herself elsewhere, perhaps in the memory of different generations spanning across childhood, womanhood and motherhood.

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In Motherhood Games ( 2008), Shia makes sense of her experience of es­trangement between her daughter and herself by manoeuvering between the memories of childhood and motherhood, agostan forward [77}. Her artworks are "participatory practices", so weaving generational disparity, conserving displaced memories.

Artists have also sought new ways of engagement with the body by in­corporating performative elements. They scrutinise the physicality of the body, prompting fundamental questions: How does the body invite encounters? How can a performance recreate and modify microcosms by inviting the participation of other bodies? The performative body is regenerative; since it magnetises other bodies, it becomes a social nod­ule capturing or synergising with different sources of energy. It has the capacity to democratise the body by testing the parameters of figurative representation and subject agency. Lim Kok Yoong's installation When You Are Not Your Body (2008) questions the ownership of the body by virtualising it, 51 extending its presence to the screen. In this interac­tive installation, an automatic camera was in place to capture a portrait of each visitor; his/her photo was then randomly juxtaposed with an image of someone else's body, without special attention to sex and race [79}. The visitor's body is thus absented, replaced and estranged. The screen becomes a plane of phantasmagoria, leaving no body safe from de-inscription (from race/racism, sex/sexism, etc.); the face is the sole mark of belonging. With Lim's coffin-like light box, the body descends into a derisory signifier, deflated and desacralised. The invisible body becomes a democratic posthuman embodiment, a shared asset to be rented or recycled, with an origin beyond redemption.

Where Lim dis-owns and de-inscribes the body, Liew Teck Leong exposes his body to an orgy of stamping, re-inscription and reclamation in his Stamping Project series (2009-2012) [82}. The body here forms a critique of the authority that "stamps" and signs agreements without consult­ing the public. Here the act of stamping on Liew's body by the public, in exchange for Liew's stamping on bodies from the public, signifies a questioning oflegitimacy, for it re-enacts and parodies the moment of failed democracy in the bureaucrat's office. His interaction encapsulates an ersatz democracy: the privacy of his body is now traded for public­ity; his private body bears the burden of the public. s2 Each marking or inscription invariably re-interpellates him into the national imagining, but he carries with him testimonies of the absented bodies, he connives

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with a community of bodies in his assault against totalising national projects. s3 Conflated, his body becomes an embodiment of disembodi­ments, a public repository engineering a presence for absented bodies, and at this point, the invisible body emerges as a palingenesis of other bodies narrating a story elsewhere.

In the works of both Lim and Liew, the absenting of a private body is compensated with a resurgent public body. Their notion of the body is almost always contaminated by alterity: the former by prosthesis, the latter by stamp marks. Here is a strategy that recognises the oxymoron of post-coloniality, that being contaminated (by colonialism or national­ism) and impure is necessary;s4 and both artists have capitalised on this defect to gostan forward, to revisit a narrative the nation wishes to erase.

RECONFIGURING THE POST-COLONIAL AGENCY ·~

The project of the modern nation cannot entirely comprehend the splitting body, nor accept the generosity of the body elsewhere, for the emergence of a nation and its accompanying nationalism is nurtured by a sense of own­ership and of belonging to an essentialist, originary presence. Restricted by state boundaries, the nation very often forges a narrative that margin­alises those left indefinite. They are the invisible bodies, a conjunction of disjunction, refusing to take sides yet seducing History for co-option · (to disturb it, in return, from within). They waver between absence and presence, gostan and forward, accomplishing the capacity of Bauman's undecidables, the "neither/nor, that is, simultaneously, either/or''. 55

The artists in discussion here have generated active sites for discourse. But the locality of the invisible body remains temporary, for it pedals along historical destiny, without indulgence. It is an absence-presence dyad conceived at tipping points of a soon-to-be dysfunctioning His­tory, identical to Simmel's stranger:" ... [s/]he, who is close by, is far, and strangeness means that [ s/] he, who also is far, is actually near:' 56 The body is spatially close but socially far, one that is "familiar and foreign''. 57 Be­ing invisible also eventuates in hypervisibility, for it attracts longing and seeking. It continues to reverberate and destabilises the national project through this hypervisibility - there but not then, felt but ungraspable. It is through this "process of splitting that the conceptual ambivalence of modern society becomes the site of writing the nation': 58 and through this critical reflexivity that a gostan forward historiography can be practised,

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not only by artists but also "narrators" (who may include artists, critics, historians, etc.). Seize the fleeting moment to mock the History that has deprived us of agency, cling onto its myopia so that we might de-historicise our History and re-narrativise our narrative.

1 In Narratives in Malaysian Art Volume 1: Imagining Identities, the editors pay "humble tribute to the legacy of those who dedicated their lives to the development of the Malaysian art scene". Existing texts from the 1970s to 90s written by "influential figures such as Syed Ahmad Jamal, Redza Piyadasa, T.K. Sabapathy, Sulaiman Esa and Zainol Shariff" were included to create a "sense of conversation". This return to legacy is often belated but necessary to conjure a historical lineage. Nur Hanim Khairuddin & Beverly Yong, with T.K. Sabapathy (eds), Narratives in Malaysian Art Volume 1: Imagining Identities, Kuala

Lumpur: RogueArt 2012. 2 Goston Forward, a solo performance lecture by Marion D'Cruz, directed by Mark Teh.

Performance at The Annexe, Central Market, produced by Five Arts Centre, 8-10 May 2009. 3 Mark Teh, 'Notes on Goston Forward', Five Arts Centre, last modified 6 May 2009,

http://www.fiveartscentre.org/pf03.php, retrieved 5 September 2012. 4 Simon Soon, 'Back and Forth', ArteriMalaysia.com, last modified 9 May 2009, http://arteri.

search-art.asia/2009/05/09/back-and-forth/, retrieved 21 August 2013. 5 The word "body", besides representing the physical body, is also a metaphor for the

"figure" or the "figurative" used to represent the body-subject in the works of art. Readers interested in this topic may refer to Narratives in Malaysian Art Volume 1 specifically for these two essays: Laura Fan, 'Shaping the Malaysian Figure: Changing Norms, New Orientations and Points of Resistance in the late 1960s and 70s', pp. 114-122; and lzmer Ahmad, 'The Body in Modern Malaysian Art', pp. 252-261. lzmer Ahmad has also conducted an in-depth study associating the "absenting of the body" with the tradition of circumcision. While this essay has no direct reference to his study, it is indebted to some of the discussions expounded in his research. See lzmer Ahmad, 'Tracing the Mark of Circumcision in Modern Malay/sian Art', unpublished PhD thesis, University

of Victoria 2008. 6 Anne McClintock, 'The Angel of Progress: Pitfalls of the Term "Post-Colonialism'",

Social Text, 31/32 (Spring 1992). 7 Janadas Devan, in his commentary on post-colonial development, understands this

situation as a "structural necessity". Janadas Devan, 'My Country and My People: Forgetting to Remember', in Our Place in Time - Exploring Heritage and Memory in Singapore, Kwok Kian Woon (ed.), Singapore: Singapore Heritage Society 1999, pp. 21-33.

8 In regards to the perception of modernism in the early Malaysian Chinese painters, there is a pertinent statement that I wish to present here: "They hoped to 'rescue the East from its backwardness' with 'the progress of the West'. Such a lack of confidence in the 'collective cultural psyche' inadvertently led a lot of Chinese artists to see an 'East-West synthesis' as a perfect formula for their work." Chai Chang Hwang, 'A Study on the Subjectivity of Malaysian Chinese Painters (An Outline)', trans. Yap Sau Bin, in Nur Hanim Khairuddin & Beverly Yong, with T.K. Sabapathy (eds), Narratives in Malaysian

Art Volume 7: Imagining Identities, p. 87. 9 Redza Piyadasa, The Treatment of the Local Landscape in Modern Malaysian Art, 1930-1981,

Kuala Lumpur: Muzium Seni Negara 1981, p. 29. 10 Redza Piyadasa, 'On Origins and Beginnings', in T.K. Sabapathy (ed.), Vision and Idea:

ReLooking Modern Malaysian Art, Kuala Lumpur: National Art Gallery 1994, p. 26. 11 Redza Piyadasa, Rupa Malaysia: A Decade of Art 7987-7997, Kuala Lumpur: National Art

Gallery 1998, p. 16.

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12 Victor Burgin, 'The Absence of Presence: Conceptualism and Postmodernism', in The End of Art Theory: Criticism and Postmodernity, London: McMillan 1986, p. 48.

13 Charles Taylor, 'The Politics of Recognition', in Multiculturalism, Amy Gutman (ed.), New Jersey: Princeton University Press 1994, p. 71.

14 A Derridean term, "supplement" is something additional that may simultaneously enhance and substitute the receiving object. To Derrida, writing is one such example, for it is the letters that supplement the speech (that supplements the thought); the "sign of a sign". Such semantic repetition is not pure reproduction but is capable of producing differences, since the writing is not (but also) the speech is not (but also) the thought. The supplement is therefore "a surplus, a plenitude enriching another plenitude", but it "adds only to replace". Jacques Derrida, Of Grammatology, trans. Gayatri Chakravorty Spivak, Baltimore: Johns

Hopkins University Press 1967. 15 In the words of Wong Hoy Cheong: "the angst ... is a sensibility so much a part of

modernism"; and Sulaiman Esa: "Nowhere is this sense of inner conflict and cultural confusion more evident than in the commitments of some Malay-Muslim artists to ... modern Malaysian art". Krishen Jit & Wong Hoy Cheong, 'New Art New Voices: Krishen Jit Talks to Wong Hoy Cheong on Contemporary Malaysian Art', in What About Converging Extremes?, Kuala Lumpur: GaleriWan 1993, p. 9; Sulaiman Esa, 'An Islamic Identity In Contemporary Malaysian Art: Achievements and Challenges', in ldentiti Islam Dalam Senirupa Malaysia: Pencapaian dan Cabaran, Kuala Lumpur: National Art Gallery 1992, p. 24.

16 The NCP was formulated by the National Cultural Congress (NCC) in 1971, a response to .-; the May 13 racial riots. Implicitly, it narrowed the interpretation of "~ational culture" to that of "Malay (and Islamic) culture" and attempted to confine artists, especially Malay-Muslim

artists, to non-figurative paintings. 17 Syed Ahmad Jamal, Contemporary Paintings of Malaysia, Kuala Lumpur: National Art Gallery

1988. 18 Fuelled by the NCP, already popular non-figurative styles continued to dominate the art

historical narrative in the 1970s and 1980s. Abstract Expressionism was depicted as a liberating approach adhering to the greater call for independence from the "colonial West". Together with the rising Islamic sentiments, many Malay-Muslim artists have "recognised the need to exalt Malay cultural roots and their Islamic belief in their work". Sarena Abdullah, 'Malaysian Postmodern Art and Its Strategies', in New Asian Imaginations, Singapore: Nanyang Academy of Fine Arts 2008, p. 217. For more discussion on this hegemonic association of "Malay-Islamic" and "Abstract Expressionism", in addition to other emerging alternatives, see Sarena Abdullah, 'The Early Postmodern Artistic Strategies

in Malaysian Art', sentApl 1:7 (2010). 19 In psychoanalysis, the splitting of the self is a defense mechanism. Therefore, the

emergence of an invisible body can also be read as the creation of a safety net or a figurative refuge to escape disruptive History.

20 "Less than one and double" is one of Homi K. Bhabha's notable ideas where he appropriates the notion of splitting and deconstruction from La can and Derrida respectively, for the analysis of post-colonial power relations. The "less than one and double" comprises a self-contradiction that destabilises colonial authority and legitimacy. Homi K. Bhabha, The Location of Culture, London: Routledge 1994.

21 Anwar's infamous poem Aku has inspired many other artists in Malaysia and abroad. See T.K. Sabapathy, 'Thematic Approaches to Malaysian Art History', in T.K. Sabapathy (ed.), Modernity and Beyond: Themes in Southeast Asian Art, Singapore: Singapore Art

Museum 1996, p. 42. 22 Referring to the symbolic interactionist concept of self, in which the self is a process

combining the subjective "I" and the objective "Me", George Herbert Mead elucidates: "If the 'I' speaks, the 'me' hears. If the 'I' strikes, the 'me' feels the blow". George Herbert Mead, 'The Social Self', Journal of Philosophy, Psychology and Scientific Methods, 10 (1913), p. 375.

23 T.K. Sabapathy, 'Thematic Approaches to Malaysian Art History', p. 42.

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24 Goenawan Mohamad, 'Aku', in Sidelines: Thought Pieces from TEMPO Magazine, trans. Jennifer Lindsay, Jakarta: Equinox Publishing 2005, p. 13.

25 Niranjan Rajah, Bara Hati Bahong liwa; Expression and Expressionism in Contemporary Malaysian Art, Kuala Lumpur: National Art Gallery 2002, p. 56.

26 This statement by Zakaria Ali is specific to Amron's Portret Diri (1982), which portrays one visible body, but it remains relevant to Amron's preoccupation in Pertarungan, and rightly, Zakaria interprets Portret in relation to the "theme of duality". Zakaria Ali, Merdeka SO: A

Celebration of Malaysian Art, Kuala Lumpur: Islamic Arts Museum Malaysia and Perdana Leadership Foundation 2007, p. 31.

27 "Meaning continues to unfold, so to speak, beyond the arbitrary closure which makes it, at any moment, possible. It is always either over- or under-determined, either an excess

or a supplement. There is always something 'left over'." Stuart Hall, 'Cultural Identity and Diaspora', in Jonathan Rutherford (ed.), Identity: Community, Culture, Difference, London: Lawrence & Wishart 1990, p. 230.

28 Ilse Noor, 'The Strength of Raja Shahriman', in Rhythm of the 21st Century Monologues of Raja Shahriman, Kuala Lumpur: Galeri Petronas 2009, p. 102.

29 Hasnul J. Saidon, Semangat Besi: Retrospection of an Enigma, Kuala Lumpur: Galeri Petronas 2002, p. 32.

30 Zakaria Ali, 'The Versatility of Raja Shahriman', in Rhythm of the 21st Century, p. 42. 31 Svetlana 8oym, The Future of Nostalgia, New York: Basic Books 2001, p. xvii.

32 T.K. Sabapathy, 'Merdeka Makes Art, or Does It?', in Vision and Idea: Relooking Modem Malaysian Art, p. 58.

33 Beverly Yong, Other People, Kuala Lumpur: Valentine Willie Fine Art 2007, p. l Kow's earlier subjects are often caught In reverie, inviting viewers to decipher a narrative as if out of murky memories.

34 In his solo exhibition Silent Conversations (2005), Kow's leisurely portraits are often matched with strikingly defensive titles a strategy familiar since his controversial Mr Foreign Speculator, Stop Damaging Our Country (1998). To name a few: You were lying to me all along, I've heard this promise before and I won't think of you anymore. Daniel Chong acutely observes: "Who is the 'I'? Who is the 'you'? And why was it said? What is offered to us is

actually an unfinished dialogue with no specified speaker. Adding to this ambiguity is the timeless and nameless setting." Daniel Chong, Silent Conversations, Kuala Lumpur: Valentine Willie Fine Art 2005, p. 2.

35 "Every colonised people - in other words, every people in whose soul an inferiority complex has been created by the death and burial of its local cultural originality - finds itself face to face with the language of the civilising nation; that is, with the culture of the mother

country." (my emphases) Frantz Fanon, Black Skin, White Masks, New York: Grove Press 1967, p. 18. I wish to postulate that Kow's invisible body has encountered the same erasure

of "originality", one whose privilege is unrecognised due to the immigrant status of the ethnic Chinese. Kow's nostalgia possesses an almost similar magnitude of obsession with

the superior other, but unlike Fanon's black obsession with the white, his is of a Chinese immigrant obsessed with the Malay body; perhaps a second-rate citizen fantasising about the motherland, seeking a maternal-native approval in order to be recognised as a

privileged native, or a body from the soil (having bumiputera status), a body with origin. 36 Kow's rather primitive Soft (2011) was exhibited in Indonesia; according to Rifky Eflendy,

the artist "admitted that his desire to depict naked bodies only became possible in

Yogyakarta and later in Bandung. Because opportunities to work with nude models are very limited in Kuala Lumpur, Malaysia, where he faces cultural questions around the human body and ideas of nakedness and nudity." Rifky Effendy, Soft, Yogyakarta: Jogja

Contemporary 2011. 37 Anurendra Jegadeva, Bumi Manusia: Journey through Nusantara - Masnoor Ramli Mahmud,

Kuala Lumpur: Galer! Petronas 2007, p. 15. 38 In the "Nusantara", or, "Nusa" + "Antara" (the in-between, or, the other islands), one's

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INVISIBLE BODY: AN OTHERING NARRATIVE

identity always lies elsewhere: being Malaysian is more about being beyond Malay and being multicultural, than being the Malay Malay; the oft-quoted description on Filipino food: "prepared by Malay settlers, spiced by Chinese traders, stewed in 300 years of Spanish rule and hamburgered by American influence" points to the notion that there is nothing Filipino about the Philippines.

39 The Malay word "rasa" derives from a Sanskrit word of the same spelling, which denotes

various meanings in Sanskrit, from "essence", "emotion", "juice" to "taste" and so on. Rasa in Malay is commonly used as a word for "feeling", "sentiment" or "emotion" and even "taste". Rasa is therefore formless, and to Zakii, it "has to be manifested, always, in tangible things". This makes plausible his perception of form without retreating to formalist

and essentialist renditions; even if his paintings look realistic, the subject matter is only secondary, serving as a "conduit for that rasa". Understanding this, everything becomes a floating signifier where he is free to pick whatever he feels appropriate in materialising his

rasa. Eddin Khoo, 'A Conversation with Ahmad Zakii Anwar', in Disclosure, Kuala Lumpur:

Galeri Petronas 2008, p. 18. 40 Zakii's paintings of fruits have strong sexual connotations; in his paintings of animals, he

perceives in animals "the ingredients that make up the human being" and claims that his depiction of animals is about "exploring particular aspects of the human being"; in regards to the paintings of his models, he states: "I am painting myself ... All of the paintings are

about my, not the model's psyche." Ibid .. p. 19. Anurendra Jegadeva has also observed that the different bodies depicted by Zakii "draw resonance from different faiths and ·'<"

denominations but are expressed with such equal tenderness and qire that they find a commonality that transcends their difference". Anurendra Jegadeva, 'Ahmad Zakii Anwar

& The Search for Divine Truths'. in Disclosure, p. 11. 41 Carmen Nge, Recollections of Long Last Memories, Kuang: Rimbun Dahan 2008. 42 Yee has explored batik as a metaphorical "wrapping" of our identity in Orang Besar series

(2010), where it "wraps around the body enveloping the wearer within its narrative." Simon Soon, 'High Seas of Resistance', C·Arts, 16 (2010); see also Yee I-Lann, 'Wrapping

the Figure', in Hasnul J. Saidon & Beverly Yong (eds), Between Generations; SO Years Across Modem Art in Malaysia, Malaysia: Universiti Malaya, Universiti Sa ins Malaysia and

Valentine Willie Fine Art 2007, pp. 45-46. 43 The sun will rise ... (2012) demonstrates reconciliation and solidarity, a move away from

Yee's previous criticality. Tired of being disgruntled, she focuses on "condolence, comfort, transference of energy and sympathy" within grassroots movements. Interestingly, the contrasting colours stay unsettling, and perhaps the voice of the artist-as-critic still resounds, only held in abeyance to revitalise the body. Cheah Ui-Hoon, 'The Malaysian

Dream', The Business Times 30 March 2012. http://www.businesstimes.com.sg/archive/

thursday/lifestyle/arts/malaysian-dream, retrieved 16 November 2012. 44 Alluded to by Yee in a personal conversation. Vibrating boundaries occur ·between

colours which are contrasting in hue but also close or similar in light intensity", "they often appear as shadow on one side of the boundary as light reflected on the other side.

Or sometimes this vibration presents just a duplication or triplication of the boundary line." Josef Albers, Interaction of Color, revised and expanded edition, New Haven: Yale

University 2006, p. 61. 45 See artist's statement, Yee I-Lann, Horizon, Kuala Lumpur: Valentine Willie Fine Art 2003.

46 Cheah Ui-Hoon, 'The Malaysian Dream'. 47 Ooi Kok Chuen, 'Peeking into an ordinary life', New Straits Times 8 July 1998.

48 Sharifah Hamzah, 'Ode to the everyday', Sun Magazine 7 July 1998.

49 Ibid. 50 When Shia is exploring the relationship of childhood and motherhood in her studio, she

is "only ever partially absent from the family circle". Her paintings become channels of engagement. Cecily Chea, 'Participatory Practices between Mother and Daughter: The Art of Amanda Heng and Shia Yih Yiing', in Rachel Epp Buller (ed.), Reconciling Art and

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M othering, Surrey: Ashgate 2012, p. 101. Sl Simon Soon, Bombay Sapphire Art Project OB: Lim Kok Yoong, When You Are Not Your Body,

Kuala Lumpur: Valentine Willie Fine Art 2008.

S2 In a personal conversati on with Liew, he stated that his body would become a body for

the publ ic, the social, the cultural or the political at the moment of stamping. It turns into

an embodiment of voices and subliminally the stamping interaction becomes a form of

conversation between his private self and the public. S3 In Stamping Project #1: Penang Clan Jetties (2009) and Stamping Project #2: Pudu (2010),

Liew's performances lend a voice to the marginalised cultures displaced by rapid urban

development; in 1 Black Malaysia #001 (2012), Liew appropriates political scientist and

activist Wong Chin Huat's "lBlack Malaysia" (initially coined as a response to the Perak

constitutional crisis in 2009) t o mock the rather superficial national campaign "lMalaysia".

It should also be noted that Liew had been employing his body to redeem the voices of

minorities even before the Stamping Project series, especially in Seal (200S) and Swallow

a.k.a. Te/an (200S).

S4 " [T]he entire post-colonial project usually posits precisely the impossibility of that

identity ever being 'uncontaminated': just as the word post-colonialism holds within it its

own 'contamination' by colonialism, so too does the culture itself and its various artistic

manifestations ... ". Linda Hutcheon, 'Circling the Downspout of Empire', Ariel, 20:4 (1989),

p, 171.

SS Zygmunt Bauman, 'Modernity and Ambivalence', Theory, Culture & Society, 7 (1990), p. 146.

S6 Georg Simmel, 'The Stranger', in The Sociology of Georg Simmel, trans . Kurt Wolff, New York:

The Free Press 19SO, p. 402.

S7 S. Dale Mclemore, 'Simmel's "Stranger": A Critique of the Concept ', The Pacific Sociological

Review, 13 (1970 ) , p. 86.

S8 Ho mi K. Bhabha, 'DissemiNation: time, narrative, and the margins of the modern nation',

in Homi K. Bhabha (ed.), Nation and Narration , London: Routledge 1990, p. 297.

126

Nirmala Dutt Shanmughalingam, Statement 1: Pollution Piece (1973), Statement 2 (1975), Statement 3 -A Comparison 1975-1979 (1979)

Statement 1 : Pollution Piece (detail), i973, mixed media, National Visual Arts

Gallery Collection

"In 1973 the National Art Gallery organised a competition entitled

Man and His World . Nirmala submitted her famous work Statement

l, 1973, which won the Major Award. She shared the award with

Sulaiman Esa, who submitted his Self-Portrait [Man and His World]

(1973). Both pieces were conceptual art works. In retrospect, Nir­

mala's Statement 7 (1973), has become a significant milestone in the

history of contemporary Malaysian art.

127