Our Country Right or Wrong

written for the forthcoming edition of sentAP magazine

video from the National Art Gallery made by Kamal Sabran

(Being a review of Zulkifli Yusoff’s National Art Gallery exhibition - Negaraku – Kuala Lumpur 26^th July to 26^th September 2010)

Negaraku translates as my country.  For Zulkifli Yusoff that is the freshly liberated country – Malaya into which he was born in 1962.  During August and September this year Zulkifli Yusoff’s latest exhibition reminded, revealed and suggested questions of what is ‘my’ country, that country to which we all relate uniquely, personally and individually.    

The exhibition - Negaraku was a timely revelation of what could only have been Zulkifli Yusoff’s singular country - his personal milieu.  In that exhibition the artist presented the country of his psyche, sometimes with nostalgia, sometimes with a crystal clear eye and mind.  It is the country of the artist’s past, where he had grown and the experiences which had, to some degree, shaped the artist’s reality coupled with those things which had been shared with others within that unique entity - formerly Malaya which, since September 16^th 1963, has been known as Malaysia.

The expansive and multi-layered exhibition straddled two galleries on the second floor of the Balai Seni Lukis Negara (National Art Gallery Malaysia) – Gallery 2A and Gallery 2B.

This was a well planned and crafted exhibition, presenting a variety of mediums, surfaces and imagery to keep the wandering visitor transfixed.  Large acrylic canvases fused two of Zulkifli Yusoff’s best known styles – the ‘printed’ flat (Pop Art) style and the energetic ‘expressionistic’ style, into a surprising delight of essentially black and white fully laden, and ultimately deeply symbolic, imagery.

Why black and white - I don’t think that it had anything to do with Stevie Wonder and Paul McCartney’s ‘Ebony and Ivory’, Michael Jackson’s ‘Black or White’ or Subhash Ghai’s  film of the same title – or maybe it has to do with all three.  Perhaps it is because modern man is so conditioned to accept the viability of text and images if they are presented in black and white.  If it’s in the newspaper it must be true; there it is, we say – ‘spelled out in black and white’, it’s official, it must be right because it’s printed (and read [red]) there in black and white. 

Black and white, and of course sepia, are the colours of the past.  B/W represents those intimate days of radio broadcasts, before TV created passive zombies.  It is the colour of photographs, the colour of cherished memories, of past magazines in the days when the world was captured, for posterity, in lush black & white, or toned in that curious brown of sepia.  Zulkifli Yusoff re-presented us with the marvel which is black and white and presented the greater part of his exhibition in these colours of memory and nostalgia. 

We were informed, by a well placed black wall plaque with white text, that there were sub-headings for the exhibition.  They were Patriotism, Economy, Government (broadcasts), National flower and Peace – 5 sub-headings in all, incidentally mirroring the petals of the Bunga Raya – the national flower. 

To emphasise the overall point of nationhood and nostalgia, the exhibition ran over that period of time which incorporated both the Merdeka and Malaysia Day national celebrations, at a time when patriotism and nationalism is upper most in many people’s minds.  The exhibition was, perhaps, a thoughtful and thought provoking counter to the worse extremes of jingoism.

The visitor moved past the hoardings announcing the exhibition - now in red, black and white and into the first gallery.  It was there that the visitor encountered an installation of small print covered objects, reminiscent of those small collections by the American Surrealist Joseph Cornell; items neatly laid out in pleasing geometries, covered with print.  On one papered box a printed hand of bananas was neatly offset by a small (yellow) ribbon bow, on another the image of a bitter gourd, yet another a cut durian.  A paper and print covered wheelbarrow and two paper and print-covered, symmetrically placed child’s pull carts greeted the visitor with a calm, orderly vision setting out its wares in a carefully laid out display.  

On the walls, on small printed blocks there were names of companies, like Felda, engaged with agriculture and types of barely remembered rice, past and present– Malinja, Mahsuri etc.  Other wall blocks housed semi-3D imagery of fruit or prints of insects, fruit or vegetables.  The visitor was alerted to the danger of the nation’s agriculture being relegated to museums – where only representations of reality may survive in image form, the original long since perished leaving wayan kulit shadows playing in Plato’s cave.  The installation might have been titled ‘Memories of a rural past’, or ‘Boyhood in a rural setting’.

 We moved swiftly on to Kebun Pak Awang II (Uncle Awang’s Garden II ) linked by content but not by style to the former.  Kebun Pak Awang, many will recall, was the name of a popular Government radio programme, highlighting farmer’s problems, back in the 1970s. 

Kebun Pak Awang II was the first large black and white canvas in the exhibition.  The 244 x 366 cm canvas was dominated by a single phallic ear of sweet corn on the viewer’s left and images of bitter melons encased in a very feminine ellipse on the right.  If this were an Indian painting I would been talking about lingam and yoni.

That painting was a stunning piece, beautifully rendered.  Was it a wistful lament for missing fields of corn which once swayed adjacent to the kampongs under Malayan breezes - maybe.  Was there interplay between the corn - brought to this country by foreign settlers and the indigenous vegetable bitter melon – a thought that the exhibition visitor may have pondered.  Were we to read that corn plus bitter melon equals Malaysia being the child of foreign and the indigenous worlds combining, that is a thought.

Would I be naive to believe that the artist was alluding to radio broadcasts and his own controversial Professor Katak (frog) character from previous exhibitions, I wonder.  FYI - Bitter melon is known as peria katak in Malay.

There was something reminiscent of the Puerto Rican artist Rafael Tufino’s linocuts, about this painting, perhaps it was the strong black and white lines coupled with the obvious fondness for the rurality of the image and the starkness similar to linocuts.

A large part of Zulkifli’s exhibition was devoted to Malaysia’s national flower (since 28^th July 1960 that is) - the Chinese Rose Hibiscus (Hibiscus rosa sinensis), renamed the Bunga Raya.  Songs devoted to the flower are woven across paintings, while images of the hibiscus flowers occur on etching plates, screen processed images and their painted forms appeared and re-appeared across a number of canvases, boards and surfaces either in full bloom or in bud – nascent or pre-nascent. 

The multiplicity of hibiscus imagery begs the notion, and discourse, on the wanton use and misuse of imagery, thereby provoking endless conversations on the devaluing of one symbol, chosen out of a seven possible, to imbue national symbolism and therefore meaning into.

The Bunga Raya has come to be revered, amongst many other things, for its five petals representing the five principles of Malayan nationhood – Belief in God, Loyalty to King and Country, Supremacy of the constitution, Rule of law, Courtesy and Morality.  It is laden with significance, symbolism and injected with meaning and it is no surprise that there is a proliferation of hairdressers, tourist spots, island resorts et al, all proudly proclaiming to be Bunga Raya - alluded to in Zulkifli’s work Kedai Gunting Rambut.  

Popular 1960s songs (including those by M Noor and The Night Shadows etc) equated women to the Bunga Raya, unaware that the naming of things often reinterprets a symbol’s meaning.  I hear a little bird called Andrew singing and a Belgian proudly proclaiming that this is not a pipe.

The hibiscus pièce d résistance, for me, was the large painted canvas replete with giant hibiscus flower, painted left of canvas, exposing its stamen as a dalliance for its audience, while balanced by its potted sister on the viewer’s right.  The painting was a masterpiece, full of energy, vibrancy and gusto.  A nice gesture was ‘alif, lam, lam, ha (or Allah) painted in Arabic, top right of canvas, reminding the viewer who is responsible for the delicate beauty of the Bunga Raya. That essentially ‘floral painting’ took the concept of floral painting not just to a new level, but defied the concept of levels altogether – Georgia O’Keefe eat your heart out.

In other, more personal works, the audience was introduced to Zulkifli’s mother (through collage) and his teacher father.  The artist’s mother is represented through love hearts, scraps of 1960s radio, film and Wanita (Woman) magazines as well as Muslim readers and multiple images of Bougainvillea flowers under the title Koleksi Ibu (Mother’s Collection).  At the end wall of Gallery 2A, one board had a ‘positive’ image of the artist himself, in red on board, while a corresponding board held a ‘negative’ image of the artist’s father, the two images were separated by an expanse of wood with the words to Malaysian jingoistic songs carved into them - the three works were called - Aku, Ayah dan Lagu Patriotik (My father and a patriotic song).

Finally we came to peace, or were at peace, represented by collages and wall mounted CND ‘ban-the-bomb’ signs in tubular metal – reminiscent of bicycles.  Odd really that Gerald Holtom’s simple symbol, initially constructed out of the semaphore (flag signalling) letters N and D for the British Campaign for Nuclear Disarmament should have such resonance around the world as a universal sign for peace, and in Malaysia too.

In a series of works, in his exhibition, Zulkifli used that CND logo accompanied by another universal symbol, or rather two.  Along with the CND sign Zulkifli used a hand sign universally acknowledged as being a sign for ‘peace’ – the two fingers rampant, palm outward, made popular by Winston Churchill.  But if the visitor were to observe very closely, some of those hand images were reversed, an indication not of the universal sign for peace but the aggressive, insulting, V sign said to have derived from British battles with the French, the showing of bowmen’s two fingers.

There was a, ceiling mounted, projected film in Gallery 2B, but sadly on the day I viewed the film was too bright against the wall and all that could be seen were flashes of white light.  Instead I listened to the dialogue and Kamal Sabran’s marvellous music.

 Within the historical narrative which has become Zulkifli Yusoff’s work, time has moved on from those days of Malaya from before the artists’ birth to the 1960s and 70s. Yes, it is the artist’s remembrances, it is his country – Negaraku, but it is also the country of all those who have lived there and/or continue to live there.  It is, to quote the often misquoted lines of Stephen Decatur’s sentiment - ‘our country, right or wrong’.