In 1974, the opposition MP Lim Kit Siang declared that a “batik curtain” had fallen over Malaysia. Calling for parliament to enshrine equal political and social rights of all, especially between Malaysians in Borneo and the peninsula, Lim remarked: “Mankind has dismantled the ‘Iron Curtain,’ the ‘Bamboo Curtain,” but we in Malaysia are erecting the ‘Batik Curtain’ to separate Malaysians from Malaysians.”
While batik was no more than a metaphor for Lim, it belied a set of national cultural politics that set the scene for textile culture. The tradition of textile art, memorialised in textbooks and tourist traps, is most often characterised between the twin techniques of batik, where lines of wax are applied to cloth then dyed, and weaving, which plays with the interlaced grid of the warp and weft. The former, lauded as national heritage, was widely disseminated as culture and industry. It is also the only textile genre to have definitively crossed the elusive boundary from craft to art with the development of batik painting in the 1950s.
Weaving traditions, however, took upon a different fate. In Borneo, indigenous weaving traditions such as ikat and anyaman were side-lined: the 1988 Sarawak State-Wide Art Competition infamously allowed only three mediums, “oil, watercolour and batek.” In the shadow of the 1971 National Culture Policy, weaving has only recently been reclaimed in a public imagination. Yet weaving and batik capture only a small fraction of textile practices, which are oft relegated to the realm of domestic work.
Common Threads pulls back the batik curtain, revealing ongoing conversations and developments in the world of contemporary textile art. Taken as a whole, these spirited explorations are bold declarations in the incipient language of contemporary textiles in Malaysia. Embroidered, woven, stitched, beaded, glued, pinned, knotted, stretched, these works collapse the boundaries between genres to imagine geographies and mythologies anew.
Marcos Kueh’s work interrogates the cultures and systems of textile production: Paper Tiger sardonically pastiches tiger rugs as commercial and national icons, while We came from the waterfalls is a sensitive exploration of origin stories, blending Sarawakian myths with the Malay tradition of songket weaving. Iona Danald then turns the process of production inward, using the act of making to reckon with her past. Aba Muas and Dirty Laundry traverse a memory realm of the domestic, where cloth bears a historical relation to the pleasures and pains of womanhood. Like Danald, Lim Shan Shan uses emotion as a generative process: Swayambhu systematises specific feelings into colours, juxtaposing the controlled self-as-data with the blurry, inconsistent quality of dyes. Finally, Tetriana collapses the boundaries between painting and textile, revealing the surface of painting – canvas – itself as cloth. The Thing in Between II is a meditation on the duality of gender, but also on the instability of medium, flickering between painting, sculpture and textile.
The Iron Curtain, the Bamboo Curtain, the Batik Curtain. Where cloth has historically been a metaphor for division, Common Threads works toward reconciliation. We find that commonality cannot be taken for granted: it must be narrated; it must be threaded. We have caught these artists in the moment of making.
Works Cited
Lim, Kit Siang. Time Bombs in Malaysia. Kuala Lumpur: Democratic Action Party, 1978.
Yee, I-Lann. “Love Me In My Batik.” In Narratives in Malaysian Art Volume I: Imagining Identities, 262-278. Edited by Nur Hanim Khairuddin, Beverly Yong, with T.K. Sabapathy. Kuala Lumpur: Rogue Art, 2012.
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Text by Lim Sheau Yun
