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).