Postcards from Another Reality

Galeri Petronas, secreted on the third floor of the Kuala Lumpur City Centre (KLCC),  reveals an exciting new exhibition.  It is the other worldly work of Penang artist Chan Kok Hooi displayed from 12^th October 2010 to January 9^th 2011.

That nugget, that little hidden gem of an exhibition, within the mainstay of the general Petronas Galleri is a small exhibition which is well named, tucked away, as it is, virtually out of sight. It belongs to one of Malaysia’s most exciting young artists – Chan Kok Hooi. It is the exhibition - I SEE(K) YOU.  To discover this gem the visitor has to negotiate an exhibition of landscapes, through a virtual maze and literally SEEK out the splendours of Chan’s painstaking detailed work, but it is well worth the effort.

It was to have been a much larger exhibition but it was necessarily shortened to make way for more work in the landscapes exhibition.  It some ways it was a cruel blow to the visitor, for Chan has been recognised for his talents across the world – recently London and Taiwan, soon Singapore and New York and for his home country to diminish his exhibition is somewhat short sighted. 

Within Chan Kok Hooi’s fascinating works there are gross elements of superb pictorial comedy embedded within the more recent works produced by that young master surreal fantasist.  While mostly appearing as decaying postcards, vague memories of perhaps a digital time lived, these works are snapshots of a world to one-side of commonplace reality, a land where the Asian version of the ‘Microsoft messenger’ icon lives along with his 3D icon family and 3D icon pets. 

 

We witness the humble lives of simple 3D icons, set in Asia – with ball heads, three dimensional triangular bodies and arms with no hands.  We frequently see typical Asian bathrooms, un-flushed Asian toilets, Asian hallways where family pictures hang from the walls as if to fall at any moment, family pets carrying other ball-headed creatures, young perhaps, abattoirs where captives are bound by microphone cord forced to perform into poised microphones amidst a backdrop of freshly killed carcasses, blood dripping into a plastic bucket.

There are murder scenes where liver-pocked ball-heads have their head staved in with a durian, their ghost seen exiting the body while a figure sits on the bed having watched TV until the channel closes.  More bathroom scenes, yet more bathroom scenes as we realise that the bathroom is central to life, the cleansing and excreting processes involved, enabling us all to get through the day of seemingly endless cubicles – ‘boxes little boxes ...and they’re all made out of ticky tacky, and they all look just the same’ with boringly repetitive computer screens.

It is a chess board.  The gallery floor is a chessboard.  As the figures in Chan Kok Hooi’s canvases are but pawns in some celestial chess game demonstrated by the black and white squares on many floors of the paintings, so to the gallery visitors move white square by tentative black square, to and fro, canvas to canvas.  I wonder if any of the many visitors to this show are aware of the delicate game they enter.

In one sense it would have been easier to replicate these images using computer generated imagery (CGI) or modelling programmes like Maya, 3ds Max, Carrara or even lightweight programmes such as Bryce 3D but no, Chan Kok Hooi chooses to deliberately and diligently paint his images with acrylic paints on various surfaces including, for this exhibition, jute.

Chan Kok Hooi is, as many talented and able people are, a quiet, humble man.  His day to day persona is the Clark Kent to his artist Superman, the more unassuming and modest the man seems so the artist in him makes imaginative leaps and creative bounds leaving us all breathless and wondering at this modern day super hero of a painter.  Like many modern Malaysian artists Chan Kok Hooi is beginning to be known, and appreciated, around the world.  His meticulous style of painting prohibits a rash of gallery openings, but the paintings that we, the viewing public, do come across are to be savoured for their intricate detail and painstaking work, barely revealing a brushstroke or the ‘hand’ of the artist.

This is the artist’s triumphant technique, and the final trick to capture the audience with his engaging works of art.  While the size of the works (often 122centimetres by 153 centimetres) baffles an entire audience expecting small postcards, and the computer monitor-like ‘buttons’ on the frame of each piece give a very 21^st century dimension to the images, that final illusion of the hidden artist’s hand completes the fantasy that we have stumbled upon postcards not from the edge, but from another reality - the secret life of the computer icon, or the day to day life of the chess pawn.

The exhibition I SEE(K) YOU by Penang artist Chan Kok Hooi is currently running at Galerie Petronas, 3 rd Floor Suria KLCC, Kuala Lumpur from 12^th October 2010 to January 9^th 2011.