Ever the keen observer of his surroundings, Hoo Fan Chon draws attention to the kitschy aesthetics of quotidian spaces to celebrate their visual idiosyncrasies. In his youth, he was occasionally treated to lavish banquets at Chinese restaurants in Kuala Lumpur by his father. Every aspect of a meal, from the decor to the plating of dishes, was indelibly imprinted on his mind. Naturally, Hoo turns to Chinese culinary and dining culture in The World is Your Restaurant (世界大酒樓)—an exhibition that presents paintings, video, and installation art—to consider not only the visual lexicon that lends the banquet its whimsical qualities, but also the historical development of the local Sino-foodscape alongside the economic rise of KL.

This exhibition frames the banquet as a site of what anthropologist Arjun Appadurai calls “gastropolitics,” where intricate social interactions unfold over the course of a meal. As a microcosm of the world, real and ideal, it serves as a stage for some to declare their social status and for others to perform their class aspirations. In the eighties and nineties, a thriving economy drew aspiring entrepreneurs from provincial towns and prized chefs from Hong Kong to the capital city. The resulting culinary boom widened the range of dining establishments where eager customers could forge new social ties and business deals.

Growing up in Pulau Ketam, a fishing village off the coast of Klang, Hoo has a special affinity with fish, which is a recurring motif in his artwork. In a banquet, fish is sought after for its nutritional and symbolic values. Here, Hoo scrutinizes its classification, plating, and cooking methods to reveal the class distinctions that operate under the veneer of taste as much as man’s domineering relationship with nature. The live fish trade, which shows no signs of slowing down, is threatening the robustness of the marine ecosystem. By treating the world as a boundless feast, the rapacious man hurtles it towards an imminent ecological crisis. It would appear that we devour ourselves, as we eat to our hearts’ content.

This exhibition is jointly produced by Mutual Aid Projects and The Back Room

About the Artist

Hoo Fan Chon (b. 1982, Selangor) is an artist and curator currently residing in George Town, Penang. He is a co-founder and a member of the Run Amok Gallery art collective. He received his Bachelor’s degree in Photography from the London College of Communication in 2010 and has since exhibited locally and internationally. He was selected as one of the participants for the Japan Foundation Asia Center Curators’ Workshop in 2015-2017 and participated in the No Man’s Land Residency by the Nusantara Archive in Taiwan from 2017-2018. In 2019, he was selected for the Makassar Biennale and in 2022, he will be pursuing a residency with the SEA AiR Studio Residences for Southeast Asian Artists, organised by NTU CCA and the EU, in Helsinki, Finland. His last solo exhibition was Biro Kaji Visual George Town at Narrow Marrow, Penang.

About Mutual Aid Projects

Founded by Eric Goh in 2020, Mutual Aid Projects (MAP) is a curator-run independent art space formerly located in Wisma Central, Kuala Lumpur. It seeks to address the unique set of challenges that come with making art and curating in Malaysia, and to encourage the development of critical artistic and curatorial practices in the region.

“The World is Your Restaurant (世界大酒樓)” marks the final exhibition of MAP. It is accompanied by a publication that covers the entire curatorial project.

Gazing Into Absence: All the Lands Within the Seas

The doorway to dreams lies ajar, a sinuous road passes through. What will I find on the other side, where, with a shiver of fear, the bold would confront monsters? The void?
– Henri Lefebvre

This project grapples with absence. 

In many ways, it has long been a struggle for Southeast Asian historians – especially those dealing with pre-colonial times, or who attempt to tell the story of the marginalised – to draw upon authoritative records to paint a picture of the past.

Often, the choice can seem to be a stark divide between turning to “reliable” sources such as the colonial census (that are import with political intent) or treating with the realm of legend and folklore, such as the Hikayat Hang Tuah, and mining whatever historical content is available. Some, like James Warren’s work on sex workers and rickshaw pullers in early 20th-century Singapore, have with great ingenuity and painstaking determination reconstructed what we know from unconventional sources like the diaries of labourers, receipts and hawker menus. In the end, however, historians of the region often contend with resounding silence; voices are either lost, destroyed or drowned out over time. 

But absence is not a black hole, without light, without possibility of seeing. The past holds no lanterns, but we can peek through the keyholes to piece together a version of yesterday. The task, then, is ultimately imagination – an imagination informed by research, careful consideration and no small amount of intellectual labour – but an act of imagination, nonetheless. This is not to engage in some post-fact alternate reality where sources cease to matter, but to recognise the fallibility and malleability of human memory, and to embrace the artifice of history-making. In many cases, the task requires an oblique approach to history, an examination of the margins of official narratives, creative engagement with alternative sources and a willingness to acknowledge that context is the bedrock of our work. With that being said, not all imaginations are created equal: some are compelling and exhaustively rigorous, while others are lazy and limp in their purpose.

To paraphrase the words of Aristotle, history abhors a vacuum. Where there has been emptiness, narratives have rushed to fill the void. In the case of Melaka, many of them have been egregious in their desire to fetishize a glorious Sultanate, to emphasise the centrality of the port city. In part, this is fuelled by a kind of shame about our own colonisation, a pride deficit that has manifested in a compensatory history that must aggrandise how wonderful Melaka was to make up for the subsequent years of subjugation and humiliation (both real and perceived). And so, as is most particularly propagated in Malaysian history textbooks, the history of Melaka is conflated with the entire historical arc of the present Malaysian geography, and even the entire region. When so much is bound with so little, the construction of historical identity becomes fragile, delicate. So, it is no surprise that when the historian Ahmat Adam, asserted that the historical existence of the figure of Hang Tuah could not be proved, he was met with protest, derision and threats.

When grappling with the history of Melaka, we too must grapple with absence. Oftentimes, to fill the void, there is a great temptation to view Melaka as a centre of gravity, to lionise its legacy, and to then render the rest of the world as celestial bodies orbiting this sun of a port city. After all, Melaka has been inserted into our national narrative as the cornerstone of Malaysian identity. It is a legacy laden with baggage as a site of deep contestation and emotional import, for Melaka must carry all the weight of the pre-colonial Malaysian story: Melaka must be both Malay and “multicultural”, it must illustrate the “social contract” between the races and it must also trace the moral arc of Malaysia. In short, Melaka must be the righteous parable and raison d'être of the contemporary nation-state — this is its burden, and, thus, also its power.

How do we begin imagining a Melaka unencumbered by this compensatory history? Indeed, as we explore the many faces of Melaka, we cannot escape the nationalistic stakes that have already been ingrained into the discourse of the port city. Absence acquires its own face, after all. But it is also contingent upon this project to present a different side of Melaka. The Melaka we paint is one that does not predicate its relevance in centrality, but in relations: to bodies of water, to the inland, to maritime Southeast Asia, to trade routes, to the winds.

Moving away from defining the city and its history through the port, fort and palace –correspondingly, through commerce, conquest and monarchy – we instead turn towards bodies of water: rivers, straits and oceans. By centring water as the body of the city, we seek to pluralise a vision of Melaka beyond that of a self-contained city on a hill. To paraphrase the historian Sunil Amrith, the sea is equal parts geographical expanse, two-dimensional cartography and mental map, connected not only by trade, but also by telegrams, letters, debts, journeys and stories. Melaka’s relationship to the sea is not as simple as being a conduit for the flow of goods; rather, the sea undergirds a way of conceiving Melaka as a floating web of relationships, places and ideas.

There are a diverse range of records, certainly, about how Melaka was a crucial port of trade, of its battles, of correspondence between kings and emperors. There is also a wealth of folklore surrounding Melaka, from the Sejarah Melayu to fantastical hikayat. These, while primarily the stuff of legend, hold their own important insights into the history, culture and shifting perceptions of Melaka. 

Should we turn our gaze to more specific subjects of inquiry – like how a warehouse during the time of the Melaka Sultanate would have been organised or the role of women in the marketplace – then much of the records are non-existent or lost to time. On the other hand, there are many records from the colonial period; after all, for many colonial powers, the act of documentation was crucial to exerting control. On one hand we are faced with a void, on the other a singular view. 

Instead, our project is an expedition into the historical imagination, to envisage a more expansive vision of Melaka through its visual artifacts. While most of the images we reference certainly hail from the colonial era, it is our hope that where words are definitive, seeking to establish authority and control, we may yet find crevices of possibility within images. The images may hail from the time of imperialism, but through the act of noticing, of careful observation, they do not necessarily tell an imperial history.

We take Melaka not as a centre, but as a point of transit: we travel its world, from the reaches of the politics of Deshima, Venice, Havana and Masulipatnam; its dwellers and sojourners from the Orang Laut, the Sama-Bajau and the Luçones; to the Dutch, British and Portuguese colonists who sought to capture it. We read the texts that define Melaka, but we focus on the images, oft-neglected as illustrative footnotes. Between text, image and world, fictions and truths alike are entangled in the imagination of Melaka. Tangled, interconnected networks of trade, kingship, patronage and rivalry were par for the course for Melaka during the Sultanate’s existence. Melaka did not exist in isolation but in seas of constant negotiation, continuous change and shifting relationships. Its very existence depended on such webs, which this exhibition seeks to envision.

As the years pass, tides rise and fall, rivers ebb and flow, the straits narrow and widen, monsoon seasons come and go. Ships seek passage, goods are exchanged, ideas spread and mutate. When we pause to consider water as an agent of history, we expand our imaginations of Melaka. Cracking the vise of cultural origin, we hope to invoke a spirit of contingency, to conjure a plural image of what Melaka represents and how it is represented.

It was in such a spirit that it was decided to not only display historical prints (both original and reproduced) but also three original woodcut prints by the Sabahan artist Bam Hizal, as well as a digital collage by Amanda Gayle. Both engaged in acts of seeing; carefully going through the various images that spanned geographies as expansive as the Antilles or the Moluccas, the era of the Ming to the present day, peoples from humble boatmen in the rivers of Ethiopia to admirals and kings. Their gaze was unbounded by modern strictures of national borders or predefined museum routes. Like the nomadic Orang Laut, traversing the waters of the region, their eyes found connection in shared visual languages: small details in the ways a wave is rendered, the shape of a wooden bridge, the bright red of a flag recurring in a ship thousands of miles away in another century. The result was a kind of synthesis, where layers of history, weavings of networks and their own attractions to particular forms sedimented in their work. In many ways, their process of seeing mirrors the kind of experience we would like viewers to have – wandering, weaving, with a sense of whimsy. Their visions are not presented apart from the original artifacts or the reproductions (whose authenticity, in turn, are not marked on the walls). We present them as part of a constellation of images, as part of an interconnected web of global relations enmeshed in unexpected ways.

And so, we look towards not the singular Melaka, the shining city of the port, fort and palace, but as one of many, one of All the Lands Within the Seas.

We have learned that to master the blue oceans people must engage in commerce and trade, even if their countries are barren ... All the lands within the seas are united in one body, and all living things are being nurtured in love; life has never been so affluent in preceding generations as it is today.
– Sultan Mansur of Melaka to the King of Ryukyu, 1 September 1468 

This exhibition is a cloud project supported by CENDANA.

cloud projects is a maker and publisher of critical, intimate, and beautiful things. Founded in 2021, we bring together artists, graphic designers, writers, academics, and more to question form, ideas, and narratives.

Project team: Amanda Gayle, Felice Noelle Rodriguez, Lim Sheau Yun, Ong Kar Jin and Nisrina Aulia.

Featuring works by: Amanda Gayle and Bam Hizal.

Original historical prints on loan from the collection of Ong Kheng Liat

The project was made possible by Creative Commons and the copyleft economy. All original writing is held under a Creative Commons Attribution-Share Alike (CC BY-SA4.0) License. Reproductions are sourced from Atlas of Mutual Heritage, Gallica, and Wikimedia Commons.

September

I began this series of works on paper while I was delving into indigenous plants in relation to the traditional arts and culture of my home state, Kelantan. As I studied the various techniques of drawing botanical subjects — in pen, graphite, and watercolour — it became clear that botanical drawings require a certain discipline in regard to how the workplace is set up. The tutorials gave practical advice on how to lay out your workstation and the selections of a restrained colour palette. In botanical illustrations, the modus operandi for watercolours is more specialised and rigorous. Practicing wet-in-wet or wet-on-dry technique, I got to know the characters and performance of watercolour papers, their assortment of textures and weights: hot-pressed or cold-pressed, grain fin or grain torchon. Then, the myriad of brushes: sable, Kolinsky or synthetic… Clearly, I’d fallen down a rabbit hole.

Watercolour has always been my medium of choice when making preliminary drawings for larger figurative works. Its fluidity and expressive nature facilitate the smooth flow of ideas. A light material, with a saturation and vibrancy of colours, a transparency and luminosity that make it ideal for studies of future oil paintings.

The pattern used repeatedly in this series is a combination of zigzags and diamond lozenge shapes. It is first constructed in a grid formula using pencil, then erased so that the markings are barely perceptible but still visible enough to guide the colours for the structured design. This pattern appeared in my squid series and some larger watercolour and graphite works exhibited in my solo at the Edge Gallery in 2017. The pattern-making process is time-consuming, not the sort of labour that’s meditative. It started off as a sympathetic gesture in perseverance but later grew into an obsession.

I was also thinking about alternative ways that I could share my works publicly and navigating different social media platforms. Mireille Mosler sent me an exhibition catalogue of drawings published on Issuu (Bring your digital content to life) — I found this attractive, as the flipbook was a pleasant way of viewing the works, akin to leafing through a physical catalogue. Browsing at this pace is, for me, much more preferable than a virtual exhibition room viewing, which feels like playing the video game Doom. I toyed with the name ‘September issuu’ for my exhibition — pun intended, referencing the “September issue” of American Vogue, which I used to follow.

September begins with ‘sky blue’, a piece made for the exhibition Karyakata at RumahLukis, which showcased a thematic selection of artworks in the collection of Pital Maarof. Artists and friends of RumahLukis were asked for an anecdote or quote relating to any of the works on display. I decided on ‘Cerulean Blue’, a small oil on linen painting of a squeezed oil tube, painted for my solo xxv (2010) which featured still lives and portraits. Instead of writing about the work, I decided to submit my thoughts on paper in watercolour. Cerulean blue is a favourite colour of mine. Ralph Mayer, in The Artist’s Handbook of Materials and Techniques, provided a brief history: “A bright sky blue, quite opaque. Permanent for all uses. Known as early as 1805. Introduced by George Rowney, England, in 1870 under the name of Coereleum, derived from caeruleum, Latin for sky-blue pigment, applied by the Romans mainly to Egyptian blue.” From that initial piece, the exercise grew and continued with variations of the same pattern, differing only in lightness of wash or colour.

‘sky blue’ evolves into ‘blue sky’. One describes colour while the other describes a state of mind or a weather condition. Blue skies: everything is nice. A mental attitude. Adding a warm yellow on the zigzag pattern gives dimensionality to an otherwise flat pattern. ‘indigo’ reminded me of the natural dye, popular for batik and denim colouring.

The ‘wow’ triplets are associated with landscape and nature, as inspired by the view from my studio, which overlooks a thick and tangled growth of verdant trees and underbrush. I have always wanted to paint this scenery, but the task is quite daunting — so many leaves! “Wow” could also be an expression of wonder, a surprise or a sigh.

Reading Dave Hickey’s essay ‘Pontormo’s Rainbow’ in his book Air Guitar: Essays on Art & Democracy led me to research Isaac Newton’s Opticks, a book on prisms and the colours of the rainbow: red, orange, yellow, green, blue, indigo, and violet. With these hues in mind, I combined the seven days of the week with the seven colours to create the Blue Monday paintings — ‘cerulean blue monday’ and ‘cobalt blue monday’, tributes to the track by New Order. The rest of the weekdays and their assigned pigments remain in my sketchbook for the moment.

‘nocturne i’ refers to the mural by Giotto in the Scrovegni Chapel in Padua, presumably painted between 1303–05. I have visited it several times during my intermittent sojourns in Italy. Of all the frescoes adorning the rectangular hall of the chapel, I find the cobalt blue barrel vault ceiling studded with golden stars the most spectacular. ‘nocturne ii’, rendered in cobalt blue and metallic silver, is a tribute to Karl Friederich Schinkel’s 1816 stage set design for the Hall of Stars in the Palace of the Queen of the Night scene in Mozart’s opera Die Zauberflöte. Perhaps Schinkel was inspired by Giotto’s deep blue sky too.

What started as an amusing diversion turned into a serial preoccupation. This fluid, luscious, and unforgiving medium continues to seduce me. A large order has just arrived for me, containing stacks of bigger and heavier cold-pressed watercolour paper. Fingers crossed for further experiments and happy meanderings. xx

Noor Mahnun

About the Artist

Noor Mahnun Mohamed graduated with a Masters in Fine Art from the Hochschule für Bildende Künste in Braunschweig, Germany in 1996. Since then, her artistic practice has continued to take her all over the world. In 2000, she was the Malaysian artist-in-residence at Rimbun Dahan in Kuang, Selangor. She was awarded the Italian Government Scholarship in 2003 to study printmaking at the International School of Print and Graphic Il Bisonte in Florence, Italy. In 2005 she was selected for the Australian High Commission in Kuala Lumpur’s Visual Arts Residency at Gunnery Studio, Sydney, Australia. From 2012–13, she researched printmaking in Japan as an Asian Public Intellectual under the Nippon Foundation Grant. 

From 2003–05, she was a curator at Valentine Willie Fine Art and from 2006–12 she was the Arts Manager of the Rimbun Dahan Art Residency programme. She has taught Art Criticism and Professional Studies at the Malaysian Institute of Art and courses in Visual Communication and Design at the University of Malaya, both in Kuala Lumpur. Currently, she teaches Art Curatorship at UiTM Shah Alam, Selangor. As a painter, she has had several solo and group exhibitions, locally and abroad. Noor Mahnun is known for adapting the traditional technique of oil painting into a style that has been praised for its simplicity and meticulousness. Beneath their guise of naïvety and delicacy are carefully crafted works that weave subtle psychological narratives with a dark wit and emotional depth.

Mini Zoo is Hasanul Isyraf Idris’ poignant testimony of his experience navigating the loss of three family members since Malaysia’s lockdown in 2020. The exhibition’s title refers to the artist’s feeling of being trapped in his own physical and mental space throughout this period, a feeling he explored simultaneously through the related theme of biological metamorphosis as he observed the evolving caterpillars and pupae he cared for in his studio. It is through drawing that the artist found solace in these dreams, observations, and collected images. This exhibition bears these exercises in remembrance and acceptance.

The topic of mortality is not unfamiliar to Hasanul’s oeuvre. His second solo exhibition in 2014, Back from Planet Luvox, was a psychedelic journey into a world where skeletons melt into tie-dye prints on splattered surfaces and rib cages hang as ornaments on trees. This was the speculative ecosystem into which the artist dove, a tribute to the flower garden of his childhood home that he shared with his ill mother.

Several subjects from this previous series re-emerge here in ink paintings of crawling skeletons sliced by a pink curve, a splotchy skull, a red-eyed raven. In Mini Zoo, however, the treatment is much looser and more anecdotal. Between paintings of moths and butterflies that stand to represent the mutation of the soul, it is rich in hints about the places and non-places where mourning takes a hold of us: the neon glow of the “Family” on a Family Mart’s facade, an evening trip to 7-Eleven, a plate of bacon, or the back of a father’s head. The fantastical parallel worlds characterising Hasanul’s previous works are here eschewed for soft and wet dyes of ink and watercolours that stain spare backgrounds, evoking these subjects not so much as everyday sightings but haunting carriers of death’s symbolic forms.

These spectres of the artist’s past and present are organised on the gallery’s walls in two pyramidal arrangements, a tribute to the artist’s deceased brother, whose name in Arabic means ratio. At the same time, these works invite viewers to approach them as building blocks in a project still undergoing construction, each representing a tool in the work of mourning. The first wall is anchored by a self-portrait of the artist in deep slumber. His head carves a visible concave in the pillow’s creases to suggest the gravitational weight of daily grief. On the second wall, the artist’s father is placed at the centre of the composition in proximity to a painting of his grandson. In both pyramids, these central paintings of the artist’s worldly ties gradually ascend to dimly-lit paintings of an escalator, here standing to represent one’s transition to the realm of the deceased. The effect of such an arrangement is to convey a path for mourning traced out by, and for, Hasanul, one that journeys in circles in search of connections between the worldly and the other-worldly but ultimately finds itself at an inevitable summit.

Mini Zoo is thus an exhibition about the journey of developing one’s language of mourning, the abstract forms that materialise in the mind of the grieving individual and those peering in from the other side of its wire fences.

This exhibition is in collaboration with Richard Koh Fine Art.

About the Artist

Hasanul Isyraf Idris was trained at Mara University of Technology (UiTM), Perak, and is presently based in Penang. His practice spans a variety of media, including painting, drawing, installation, video work and sculpture. His works typically manifest a fictional, surreal iconography drawn from personal invention as from a melange of pop cultural references, such as comic books, science fiction, street art and film. He personifies his personal struggles as an artist with strange characters that inhabit his invented universes.

He was a finalist in the Bakat Muda Sezaman (Young Contemporaries) Awards in 2007, and has shown in Malaysia, Singapore, Brunei, India, Switzerland and Jakarta. Selected exhibitions include: HOL: Scab: Crying Tiger In The Night Market (2019) at Art Jakarta, HOL Chapter 2.3, Wound: Environment of Naga and Doubt (2016) at VOLTA NY, United States, HOL Chapter 3, Scab: Lucky Draw (2018), HOL Chapter 1: The Fall (2016), Back from Planet Luvox (2014), Clash of the Pigments (2011), all at Richard Koh Fine Art, Kuala Lumpur, Malaysia. Public collections include Singapore Art Museum (SAM), Galeri Z (Malaysia) and ILHAM Gallery (Malaysia).

The exhibition features Liew Kwai Fei’s latest series of paintings exploring the game of form and colour in painting. Fei is one of the rare formalist painters in Malaysia, and this exhibition considers the full gamut of his appreciation for the medium and its expressive potential.

For almost twenty years, Fei has explored the potential for order and play - two seemingly opposing partners - to synthesise in the painting process. At the heart of this system was a humorous yet rigorous investigation into colour, shape, quantity, and scale. In series such as Light & Space (2018), shaped paintings were riotously broken down into single units of colours and rearranged in endless configurations, bringing forth the rhythmic bliss that surfaces from such an experimental approach to the medium’s essential elements.    

Building from these investigations, here, Fei offers us his latest set of rules or what he terms the ‘game’ of painting. This game occurs on a board of four principles - expanding, grouping, layering, and comparing - onto which the artist rearranges his pawns to strategise new alliances: deep blues and blacks entering into conversation; tactile veins of paint diluting cool wintry strips relieved by a warm blush. These are articulated in a vocabulary of bands that fill from edge-to-edge and therefore seem capable of repeating themselves beyond the frame into infinity. Everything is relentlessly the same, and yet within this repetition emerge deliberate breaks that showcase how painterly surprises and the formal decrees of geometry can indeed co-exist.

In this way, the modernist tradition is undeniably present, and Fei’s paintings resuscitate a period during which artists sought to distinguish painting from everyday experience, or anything else. Yet the artist is much less theatrical and self-consciously profound; these paintings are in some ways more humane: they are intimate in scale, indifferent to sublimity, and most of all uninterested in telling grand mythologies. 

This apparently reticent materiality may be demanding to consume, since they deliberately dodge the burden of representation and association. Rather than searching for hidden meanings, however, Fei’s chief suggestion in 靠譜，離譜。In Order (To Play) is that forms are there for us all to see. We simply need to play the game. 

Liew Kwai Fei is recognised today as one of the most exciting new generation of contemporary painters in Malaysia. Spanning over a decade, his practice explores the hybridity of the painting medium and its capacity to communicate ideas spanning class, race, and language to the humbling experience of the unspeakable when we encounter art. Liew has had ten solo exhibitions to date and has participated in numerous group exhibitions in Malaysia and Singapore. His work has also been collected by institutions such as the National Art Gallery, Kuala Lumpur and the Singapore Art Museum.

Residues of Our Present

Collage emerged as a design practice during the late twentieth century as a vehicle for dissent, as a response to unstable disciplinary and political agendas within an emerging landscape of photomechanical reproduction. At the time, the appropriation of elements from heterogeneous domains relied on access to printed matter like magazines and found objects, combined with access to machinery that could reproduce and extract them from their original contexts. In place of these processes and with the putative passing of the age of mechanical production, we now copy and paste, clone, liquify, save as.

The focus of this essay is not to distinguish these digital collagists from their predecessors in design, for the gulf between digital and analogue collages has often been overstated. Instead, what I want to suggest, and as the exhibition’s title aims to show, is that the transference of collage from the rotogravure to Photoshop did not act to remove the most fundamental quality of the medium: its ability to unify diverse and decontextualised fragments, and in rearranging them to reinstate new meanings onto them. Moreso, the designers in question specifically reject the seamless and reality-bending potentials of new digital rendering software. Instead, they leave open the seams and hark back to the quality of analogue collages whereby differences in textures and perspectives are made explicit. By continuing this lineage of collage, Amanda Gayle, No-to-scale*, and Studio Karya’s works stake out a position of radical exceptionality in design and therefrom assure us of the potential to experience our present in other and ultimately more redeeming ways.

In Amanda Gayle’s work we see collage’s autobiographical impulse and its feeling towards experiment and invention. Collage, according to Daniel Kane, is ‘both the exterior experience one has of the world and an interior choice one makes to determine and shape one’s relationship to that world’.¹ This is true also for the manner in which Gayle puts collage to use: the premise is not to represent anything specifically, but to suggest that when faced with a situation whereby one is overloaded with the endless chance encounters of the modern experience that a productive response is to lean into it, destroy it, and make it anew.

Her works in this exhibition are like visual residues of her digital experiments on these variegations of the everyday. Take for example the layering of photographs of rockets and empty terrains in Stills 05/12 (2019) distorted with the marks of her wiping gestures. Clarity, precision, and communication - the hallmarks of graphic design - are replaced by the designer’s preference towards the serendipitous results of letting go to software and device. Likewise, she revels in the pure state of experimentation in Pyro (2019), layering the same image over a hundred times on Photoshop and seeing the pixels ‘get messed up’ to reveal new textures. In an interview with the designer, she offers a charming anecdote of her once having carefully organised several sheets of images and printouts on her floor, all of which were subsequently scrambled and left to the whims of her Roomba. The works displayed in this exhibition encapsulate these beautiful accidents of modern life, and our response can be to experience the impression of living in them and the spaces created between them.

No-to-scale*’s collages demonstrate an archivist’s impulse too, retrieving a hodgepodge of overt and covert political imagery such as the Statue of Liberty and Mies Van der Rohe’s collage for the Chicago Convention Hall to populate their compositions. Yet, the distinction between No-to-scale* and Gayle’s work lies in the tone with which they present their findings to us: while Gayle’s works deliberately leave us with irresolvable oppositions, No-to-scale* recombines these fragmented images in order to generate a message that is boldly visible and politically charged.

Architecture, to the studio’s founders Shamin Sahrum and Nur Nadhrah, can serve as a measure for this imagination. In particular, it is the practice of retrofitting models that inspired such an approach. Sahrum conjures a retrofitted model of a cyborg taxidermy animal he made during his student years as his basis. Here, a hand-size taxidermy kiwi is happily disfigured with wings from a drone which are punctured into its sides, as a schematic yet effective representation of a speculative taxidermy zoo in which extinct animals are reanimated to hover and zoom across visitors. The model is a brilliant encapsulation of two aspects of collage which are intrinsic to their practice: 1) the agile, journalistic sensibility it offers to respond quickly to its brief, and 2) its poking at and dismembering of history in the name of imagining an entirely new species of both being and thought.

This iconoclasm is productive; it aims to tackle contemporary issues of race and corruption, at times humourously and at others to evoke the blinding force of absence and loss, as in works like The Sun, the Room, the Sky (2021). In this abstract landscape consisting of two conjoining circles, images of workers carting bodies away in PPE equipment recede into their individual compartments. The transposed fragments and the haunting abyss of their imposed cells do more than just represent loss; they embody it, emphasising their existence somewhere else and our distance from it. Place this against works like Rights to the Table (2020) where the viewer is inundated with references across time and geographies from the historic Civil Rights movement to the toppling of Robert the Bruce’s statue in Stirling, as a statement of the enduring violences of anti-black racism and the shared yearning for equality coursing between historical movements. In these two works the versatility of the collage is brought to the forefront: through absence and profusion, the medium offers these designers the prospect of reconstructing a fractured society, and in some way to contribute towards a more inclusive, informed, and equal one.

If No-to-scale*’s collages are, in their extreme forms, reactionary comments on contemporary society, in the works of Studio Karya collage becomes an instrument for a learned and deep engagement with the theoretical foundations of the architectural discipline, and a tool for naming and reclaiming things. Here, ‘Architecture’ is treated primarily by the studio’s founders, Hazazi Hamzah and Ashran Bahari, as a site of critique, from which the architects aim to question the motivations behind the construction of form and, working backwards, how to remedy existing structures which have failed their inhabitants.

Working backwards is also a symptom of collage’s archaism, its suspicion of the value of novelty and innovation and in turn its approach to rework the readymade into message, or as Rosalind Krauss once suggested, the ‘setting up [of] discourse in place of presence’.² Along these lines, in an essay written in 2019 polemically titled Crafting Critical Intellectuals: The Great Discourse That Never Happened?, Studio Karya calls for a deeper and more critical engagement with architecture, stating that for the past 20 years Malaysian architectural discourse has suffered from a disproportionate focus on building and not thinking. Their accompanying series of workshops, lectures, and conferences, entitled Non School, which aims to ‘cultivate diversities in the discipline of architecture’, is another crucial aspect of their practice which opens up a wider understanding of their collages as a pedagogical medium. In that sense, their collages are not about aimless pluralism but are motivated by the goal to trigger a process of dialogue and research-driven reevaluation.

The architects demonstrate this investigative lens in their speculative project, Right to the Padang (2017), where they diagnose the various bureaucratic and political pitfalls which historically contributed towards Dataran Merdeka’s failed potential as a public space.³ In a bid to reclaim it, the architects envision a speculative insurgent space whereby trees are communally planted in rows across the field, thus symbolising a space of possibilities where the spirit of urban life can be cultivated. In the accompanying collages, the nostalgic quality of their black-and-white clippings of palm trees cloned underneath a red sky boldly assert a new frontier: ‘the Padang by the people for the people’. In Screen (2017), the architects employ the stylised spatial logic of Islamic illuminated manuscripts to represent the regeneration of an underused area in a private religious school in KL. The choice to reference an art form interested in the description of built structures through texture and striking design elements, rather than logical spatial relations, is deliberately evocative. What they draw out instead are the linear rhythms of their screens, the individual activities and functions of each demarcated space, and the movements of figures in and out of the flattened structure. The latter is perhaps most crucial to the success of this series: one can enjoy the experience of inhabiting the structure indoors and outdoors at the same time. In this way, the flattened collage offers a holistic consideration of the ways all aspects of the space can be used, and in turn the central role that architectural interventions play to delineate as well as open up passageways between human activity.

All this is to distill the essence of their practice, which is to demonstrate that the work of the architect is ideologically loaded and to think about architecture critically is also to understand the social and political consequences of making and occupying space. Towards this purpose, collage is seen here as the most effective tool in an architect’s arsenal to speculate alternatives to the discipline’s service to capital and to reclaim it for the public.

As for us, Copy / Paste / Displace is an open invitation to consider alternative ways of seeing and practicing, this time with the mandate to make it our own. In a world of excessive accumulation and diminishing attention, these designers break it down into parts and organise its residues into their most eloquent forms in our service. And within the spaces that they leave for us to fill, these collages are deliberately posed as the catalyst from which a wider process of understanding and reconciling the present is encouraged. These designs of our time are a welcome moment for reflection.

By Denise Lai

Denise Lai is an art and design historian based in Kuala Lumpur. Her research explores all forms of culture from the mid- twentieth century to the contemporary, with a particular interest in themes surrounding mythologies, alternative modernities, and history as a public practice. Denise has a BA in History of Art from the University of Oxford and recently completed her MA in History of Design at the V&A/Royal College of Art in London. When she’s not writing, she also explores body-based practices as a dancer and jewellery maker under her label Object Vitamin.

Works Cited

1          Daniel Kane, What is Poetry: Conversations with the American Avant-Garde (New York: Teachers & Writers Collaborative, 2003), p. 12.

2         Rosalind Krauss, ‘In the Name of Picasso’, The Originality of the Avant-Garde and Other Modernist Myths (Cambridge: MIT Press, 1986), pp. 23-41 (p. 38).

3         Studio Karya, The Padang: Right to the Padang, essay, 2017, http://www.studiokarya.com/#/padang/ (accessed 27 May 2021).

About the Artists

Amanda Gayle is a graphic designer who enjoys both analogue and digital image making processes, and engages in projects which reframe pre-existing ideas about the world. There is often an unplanned approach to her work which is heavily inspired by the human experience and her surroundings, providing new aesthetic freedom whilst celebrating complexity and imperfection in the process. Having completed her BA in Graphic Communication Design at Central Saint Martins, she is currently based back home in Kuala Lumpur where she runs a publishing house with two of her friends while pursuing her passion for designing posters.

No-to-scale*, led by Shamin Sahrum and Nur Nadhrah, acts as a design research platform for the exploration of forms of resistance through narratives. Both designers obtained a MArch RIBA Pt. 2 from the University of Greenwich, London, with interests in curating, object-art, and analog/digital fabrication. Works by NTS acts as a socio-political commentary to various issues addressed through works widely published in both electronic and print format. NTS is currently based in Kuala Lumpur & operates globally.

Studio Karya believes in architecture and design as a means of problem solving extending beyond style and trends in line with their notion of ‘Building Non-Buildings’. The studio’s projects range between ideological, typological and craft, where the essence and values of architecture can be captured the most without necessarily leading to a building as the end product. Studio Karya is led by Ashran Bahari & Hazazi Hamzah.

白曰依山尽，
黃河入海流；
欲穷千里目，
更上一层楼。

飘逸的游丝时而生发成墨色的荡桨，漫长的线条在不规则的律动中张扬著一种极富动感的旋律，彷佛以水墨在纸上歌唱抒发情感。一气呵成，唱一首歌。

书画家王嘉堃的书艺个展「歌」(Sing A Song) 以自己独有的书写风格，一种亦书亦画的创作，体现了他的创作是具有当代特色的水墨视觉艺术。

1996年毕业於马来西亚艺术学院纯美术系的王嘉堃，历廿余年书画生涯，不断致力於寻找中国书法和当代艺术之间的契合点。他的展览「歌」，包含了9幅的行草以及4幅的篆书，两种书体释放的气息气象显然不同，但同样是突破了书法与绘画之间的界线。

最见性情的行草，在王嘉堃的挥洒中打破行距的限制；线条时时交叉，墨晕时时叠合, 水墨和书道成了他登楼放歌抒怀的媒介。以9首写景抒情的唐诗为内容的一系列行草作品，其中一幅作品是重复书写唐朝诗人王之涣的《登鹳雀楼》。不过，它们线墨节奏、密疏、质感的不同却构成截然不同的空间神韵。换言之，王嘉堃以唐诗、以汉字为基础，让笔墨流淌出具有生命感以及音乐感的抽象山水画。

当观者以为欣赏「歌」的一系列作品时是无需辨识字迹，有著抽象艺术的感觉，王嘉堃却以一笔一划章法分明的篆书，书写他自己喜欢/想到的短句，书写马来西亚当代诗人温任平的粤语诗等。他让当下生活的语汇走入书法艺术，他用古老的汉字书体来表现当代内涵。传统对於王嘉堃来说，是养份，不是包袱。

於2021年1月16日至2月21日，王嘉堃在吉隆坡市中心的艺文空间The Zhongshan Building，The Back Room的展览「歌」，特邀观者前来呼应《登鹳雀楼》的精神哲理: 催人抛弃固步自封的浅见陋识，一同登高放眼，就此拓展出崭新的视觉联想。

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The Brush Sings

The white sun sets behind the mountains,

The Yellow River flows into the sea

To see a thousand-mile view

Ascend yet another storey.

Wang Zhihuan, Climbing Stork Tower

The ink spreads like floating hairs on rice paper and some merging to form dark, rolling paddles. The enduring lines move, unruly, expressing a dynamic rhythm, as if giving birth a melody and feeling on paper. A breath, a song.

Graduating from the Fine Arts Department of the Malaysian Institute of Art (MIA) in 1996, Ong Chia Koon has been immersed in the worlds of calligraphy and ink painting for more than two decades. Much of his career as an artist has been in a tireless search for the convergence between Chinese calligraphy and contemporary art. Sing A Song, consisting of 9 cursive scripts and 4 seal scripts, is a meditation on the brush: while the two kinds of calligraphy have distinct impressions, brought together they blur and break the boundaries between calligraphy and painting.

His solo exhibition Sing A Song is a display of this quest, a demonstration of his idiosyncratic style that is at once both calligraphy and painting. Like much of his previous work, it is a stroke between worlds, blending the age-old conventions of ink painting with a spark of the contemporary.

Lines bisect and intertwine, ink merges and melds. Oscillating, undulating, Ong Chia Koon’s brush sways with the most sentimental of curves to transgress upon the limitations of his art form. These expressions have become confession box and performance stage for his inner rhythm and deepest thoughts. Drawing from Tang Dynasty poems that depict the scenic and the lyrical, the artist has produced 9 artworks. Among them, one features Tang poet Wang Zhihuan’s epochal poem “Climbing Stork Tower”. In Ong Chia Koon’s hands, this literal act transforms the verses—the interpretation of density, rhythm, texture of each line, stroke, and ink drop constitute a particular affect. Indeed, each poem, each word serves as the foundation block to build an abstract landscape that almost trembles with musicality and life.

Perhaps it is convenient then, given the constant transgressions, to believe it matters not what is written, to write it all off in one stroke as ‘abstract art’ where words hold little meaning. Yet Ong Chia Koon is conscientious with his texts, painstakingly writing his favourite phrases such as Malaysian Wen Renping’s Cantonese poems (most active in the 1970s and 80s) in a clearly defined seal script. The parlance of current daily life is allowed to seep into the more ‘traditional’ style of calligraphy. In turn, ancient Chinese script is used to express contemporary thoughts and connotations. For the artist, when employed deftly, tradition is sustenance, not the burden of legacy.

This exhibition is an exhortation, a call for viewers to embody the spirit of “Climbing Stork Tower”: to cast off our shell of self-deception, to “ascend yet another storey”, to expand our horizons, to look ahead together at “a thousand-mile view”. 

Text by Teoh Ming Wah / Translation in English by Ong Kar Jin

About the Artist

Ong Chia Koon is a calligraphy artist based in Kuala Lumpur. Graduating from the Fine Arts Department of the Malaysian Institute of Art in 1996, Chia Koon has been immersed in the worlds of calligraphy and ink painting for more than two decades, constantly striving to create work at the intersection between Chinese calligraphy and contemporary art. Whilst still a student, he was awarded first place at the Malaysian Open Calligraphy Competition in 1995 and 1997. Chia Koon has since exhibited both nationally and regionally, with his work being shown across Malaysia, Korea, Thailand, Taiwan and China. Choice exhibitions include the Busan Calligraphy Biennale (2007 & 2009), a solo at the Mind of Still Tianmei Art Gallery in Tianjin (2010) and the Sokko Gakkai Gallery in Kuala Lumpur (2012). In addition to calligraphy, Chia Koon has worked on pottery design in Yixing and Jingdezhen in China, painting performances, live music and art direction. This is his tenth solo exhibition since his first in 2004.

Chia Koon’s work has been informed by his close-knit relationship to the literary, drawing inspiration from sources as varied as Tang dynasty poetry as well as Malaysian Cantonese poems from the 1980s; as an artist he reflects both past and present as he pushes boundaries with bold brushstroke and his flirtations with the boundaries between calligraphy and painting. His latest exhibition at The Back Room, To Sing A Song, represents a convergence of many years of dedication—an expression of lyricality on ink and paper, a reflection of Chia Koon’s history and memories. In his own words: “Trying to untie the constraints of calligraphy lines is not about readability. Imitating the free fluctuation of music, I also want to push the possibility of calligraphy to another visual effect.” Old songs are sung new; new songs are sung old, singing life forever.