Yee I-Lann's Fluid World- not a book review

For six days and six nights the winds blew, torrent and tempest and flood overwhelmed the world, tempest and flood raged together like warring hosts. When the seventh day dawned the storm from the south subsided, the sea grew calm, the, flood was stilled; I looked at the face of the world and there was silence, all mankind was turned to clay. The surface of the sea stretched as flat as a roof-top; I opened a hatch and the light fell on my face. Then I bowed low, I sat down and I wept, the tears streamed down my face, for on every side was the waste of water. The Epic of Gilamesh, Assyrian International News Agency, Books Online - www.aina.org

I was about to partake in a quite meagre lunch when I noticed a yellow package which had been slipped between the slightly rusting bars of my rustic garden gate.  Concerned that the package may be snatched by a passing jentayu, or munched by a myopic water buffalo I, eagerly and with barely a hesitation, slipped on my plastic (pseudo) Japanese slippers and flip-flopped my way to the waiting gate. 

I admit to being a little curious about the package as I strolled - not knowing quite what to expect from the yellow and, one could say, quite sun-dazzling parcel.  In time I retrieved said package - which nearly fell apart in my hands and completed the unravelling experience as I flip-flopped back to the welcoming shade of our house by the lake.

A rectangular book some 29.5 centimetres long, 22.5 centimetres wide and approximately 2 centimetres in depth smiled back at me as it slid from what remained of its mellow packaging. Instantly I recognised the cover image as being that of Yee I-Lann’s Sulu Stories: Barangay (2005).  It was then that an altogether different kind of light began to dawn on me. I held in my hands, at last, a copy of Yee I-Lann’s long awaited book - Fluid World.

front cover

Fluid World is an edition of essays and images which was originally intended to surface at the Bogeyman exhibition, but was delayed.  The distinctive essays included in that volume are offered from Dr Isobel Crombie and Dave Lumenta, with an interview of Yee I-Lann by Huzir Sulaman, a textual conversation between Yee I-Lann and Professor Anthony Milner and an introduction by Beverly (Rogue Art)Yong and in between are introductions to some series of the artist’s work.

The title of the book, though really never in doubt, was confirmed on seeing the grey text title hovering above a sepia tinted front cover image. The well-designed book forms a textual and visual overview of the artist Yee I-Lann’s contemporary art works from ‘snapshot’ (1993) through to ‘Boogeyman’ (2010).  I say ‘overview’, as it has been impressed upon me that the book is emphatically not a ‘retrospective’.  

The book, not being a retrospective, is a teaser.  It allows access to some, and no more, of the artist Yee I-Lann’s artistic back catalogue.  It is not, emphatically not, that retrospective mentioned earlier for, as it was pointed out to me by the artist - a retrospective would cover the artist’s entire oeuvre and this book does not do that.  Besides, the artist has miles and years to go before thoughts of retrospectives permeate into her consciousness, therefore Fluid World is not a retrospective but, instead, perhaps a nicely framed window through which we may access some of the signs, symbols and metaphors painstakingly embedded within the artist’s carefully crafted work.  It is a Johari window perhaps, revealing some of the above to the world, while keeping others known only to herself. 

To springboard from the title - Yee I-Lann’s landscape of imagery is indeed a fluid world.  It is a multi-layered, multi-textural, malleable, plastic world containing multiple narratives, back stories and a tender weaving of digital and photographic manipulation to enhance already existing narratives, or to bring forth narratives anew. 

To do this, to arrive at a presentable narrative the artist must first select, isolate, capture, desquamate and then combine disparate imagery to form a meaningful whole - much in the way any other artist might, only Yee I-Lann is prone to work with high definition photographic imagery, captured by her image intensive Mamiya camera, scanned and transformed through her skill (with the digital process) and printed on high quality photographic paper to present new ‘truths’ in art.

Salvadore Dali

Yee I-Lann’s intriguing creations are, essentially, stratified juxtapositions, digital collages, Derridian deconstructions and reconstructions revealing both illusions of truth (not in painting but in the artwork) and truth through illusion.  There would be a temptation here to recall Max Ernst’s montages, Dali’s surreal juxtapositions – specifically burning giraffes (L’Age d’Or – 1930; The Invention of Monsters – 1937; Burning Giraffe - 1937), and the slick rendering of modern (or is that post-modern) CGI (Computer Generated Imagery) - but I shall resist it as Fluid World is about so much more than I-Mac enhanced process and Freudian psychoanalysis.

detail of The Ch'i-lin of Calauit

Yee I-Lann forms her own visual language, ocular sentences and paragraphs, chapters which generate fresh narratives – such as those found amidst the wavy waters of the Sulu Sea - where pale sand islands give shelter to storied giraffes, sexualised palm fronds and past Philippine dictators (The Ch’i of Calacuit from Sulu Stories).

a rousing account of migration in the language of the sea

In the watery wetness of I-Lann’s milieu, amidst other waves, in other seascapes, water buffalo churn waters (A rousing account of migration in the language of the sea, from The Orang Besar series, 2010) surrounded by plastic shopping bags bearing a resemblance to the colonial British ‘Union Jack’.  The water buffalo churned waters are turbulent, the sky stormy, there is fright and concern on the faces of the buffalo as they search for direction and eventually head off, on-mass , into the depths of the waters.

Yee I-Lann’s Fluid World is not Ukiyo – the Floating World of lustful Edo Japan.  When we consider the notion of fluid world it does not necessarily conjure the pleasures of Yoshiwara, but instead provokes comparisons between the grand floods of antiquity, those of Mesopotamian Gilamesh, or the cleansing floods of Biblical Noah.

 

Aside from ancient deluges there are questing floods, diluvial peregrinations, Ballard’s fictional Drowned World, Kevin Costner’s filmic Water World, Whitman’s poetic seas of immortality - seas which separate, seas which bring together and looming horizons which stretch out both physically and metaphorically, inclusively and exclusively – giving their promises and dashing them in the offing or becalming them in the doldrums. And, in a way, this book - Fluid World is all of those, and none.

What the book – Fluid World does is chart the expansion of the artist’s ideas, concerns and notions of identity, image making and milieu. Through the design and intent of the book we observe these ideas of identity mature, flow, transform over 166 pages, informed by supportive text, glossary, image details etc. 

To begin at, almost, the beginning....

Snapshot I

Snapshot (1993, p18 Fluid World) presents us with the almost nostalgic sepia tints of ‘ethnic’ children, questioning ‘photograph’ and ‘identity’. I say almost sepia tints because, as you may expect with Yee I-Lann, nothing is quite what it seems.  Within these images there are important issues revolving around Derrida’s questioning of the ‘frame’, whether it is ergon (interior to the work) hors d’oeuvre (exterior to the ‘canvas’), or indeed parergon - standing out from both the wall and the work. In Yee I-Lann’s case we observe the photo image and are asked to consider what the notion of framing does to meaning, significance etc.  Framed, unframed, masked images in ‘snapshot’ stand on the political and ethnographic borders of Malaya/Malaysia, revealing notions of personal and national identity. It all seems to begin, for Yee I-Lann, here in the framing and the un-framing, in the metaphorical reminiscence and re-looking at identity. 

  

In slightly later sections of Fluid World (Buy in Yee I-Lann & labDNA - 2001, and Buy Me - 2002) the reader/viewer is introduced to the fragility of identity, how Western consumerist materialism wishes to impose upon identity, subsume it into itself, make us all the same.  ‘Through Rose-Coloured Glasses’ (2002) shifts that emphasis slightly and, along with ‘Malaysiana’ (2002), throws up identity as question and provokes dialogue around previously imposed values of station/class, this is highlighted by the questioning of ‘studio’ photography - who has/had access to it and who could afford the luxury of photography.  This ‘highlighting’ also provokes another debate (not entered into here) revolving around ‘access’ to the work of art by the impoverished, and concepts of artistic elitism.

Lagenda

Horizon (2003, p 68 Fluid World) is a pivotal work. While not being physically at the centre of the book Fluid World, ‘Horizon’ is metaphorically or perhaps spiritually, at the epicentre of Yee I-Lann’s issues surrounding identity, belonging and distance.

Yee I-Lann has this to say about her concept of horizon, p69-Fluid World......

‘So I took photographs of the horizon, of the unknown, to try to know it.....I would use photographs to surrender the horizon to the “hyper-real”; the image would become my accomplice.  I would put a horizon back into our landscape and see what it would tell us.’

And there the horizon would stay, informing those stormy black and white images in the ‘Horizon’ series (2003), and through to the ‘Boogeyman’ (Bugis-man?) exhibition (2010) and highlighting the foreground images which remain all at sea - like the congkak (mancala) forever drifting like some metaphorical Kon-Tiki amidst those forever fluid waters, under perennial stormy skies, delineating the afore-mentioned buffalo/new batik islands which simultaneously welcome and repel cultural migration.

Huminodun

From Horizon to Boogeyman that globally curved line of the horizon also seems to stand as a referential frame, reframing distance, nearness, taking us back to ‘snapshots’ and those Derridian concepts of inclusion and exclusion, in-ness and out-ness, framed and the unframed, ergon, hors d’oeuvre or parergon.

But, while we may want to express these notions, included within the works in the book Fluid World, as universals ultimately Yee I-Lann’s works, in all their provocation and ‘knowing’, are personal.  They are as personal, private and unknowable, in their own way, as the works of Hannah Hoch (1889-1978), Frida Kahlo (1907 – 1954) and Meret Oppenheim (1913 – 1985). 

There is a sense of a full stop at the Boogeyman exhibition, it being the last series in the book.  In that section/exhibition those concerns brought to our attention in ‘snapshot’ seem to have reached fruition, blossomed, solidified pictorially and in metaphor, begging the question – and what next.  For that we shall have to wait and see.

Fluid Word by Yee I-Lann, in conjunction with Rogue Art and Valentine Willie Fine Art, may just be the most important book about art to have been produced in Malaysia within the last few years, but that is, of course, an my entirely subjective view.

Enigmatic/Absorbing visions of Rafiee Ghani

Moonshine 2011

‘The State of awareness of visions is not one in which we are either remembering or perceiving.  It is rather a level of consciousness at which we experience visions within ourselves’ Oskar Kokoschka (1886 – 1980), originally delivered as part of a lecture in Vienna, 1912.

Three things become abundantly clear when you witness the artworks of Rafiee Ghani.  The first is the artist’s love for the environment, the second is the artist’s unwavering love for colour and the third is the artist’s inimitable vision of his world. 

It has been clear since Rafiee Ghani’s early works - including Ingatan dari Gunung (Memories from the Mountain -1985) – shown at Pameran Bakat Muda Sezaman 85 (Young Contemporaries 1985), that these loves – environment, colour, vision have teased Rafiee to wander down some very exciting artistic pathways, and sometimes into ‘The Painted Garden’.  

In Rafiee’s works, sometimes, it is the colour sculptured figurative which takes dominance, sometimes it is the artist’s fascination with colour abstraction and sometimes – like in these latest works, it is a delicate and exciting fusion of both the figurative and the abstract - fulfilling the artist’s own unique vision, which delights and excites us.

Hermann Bahr reminds us that ‘The history of painting is nothing but the history of vision – or seeing.  Technique changes only when the mode of seeing has changed; it only changes because the method of seeing has changed’ (written in 1914 and published in Expressionismus, Munich, 1916).  Of course our relation and reaction to sensory data changes both chronologically and experientially and we would, naturally, expect that an artist and an artist’s work would also change over time and through experiences. 

The French philosopher Maurice Merlleau-Ponty, in the Phenomenology of Perception, makes the point that ‘...had we not eyes, or more generally senses, there would be no painting at all for us, yet the picture ‘tells’ us more than the mere use of our senses can ever do’ (p389, Colin Smith English translation, England, 1962).  Both time and experience effect the recording of the ‘vision’, and the end result – the painting, in this case Rafiee Ghani’s paintings, are more than their summation, imbued not just with paint on canvas but with all that the artist has to give of himself, his experiences, skill, his vision of his world and his internal vision.

Over the last few years Rafiee Ghani, on his artistic journey, has steadfastly worked towards a delicate melding of line and colour, figurative and abstract, symbol and metaphor.  The combinations of these attributes presents Rafiee’s viewer with sometimes complex narratives which weave symbolic fantasies reminiscent of artists like the French painter Odilon Redon, coupled with a vibrancy of colour sense and a gusto gleaned from Rafiee’s excitement with the pulsating works of Dutch master painter Vincent Van Gogh.

The astute viewer might want to add the Austrian abstract Expressionist artist Friedensreich Hundertwasser to that list of artists we are reminded of when coming close to the works of Rafieee Ghani for, increasingly, there is a playful, colourfully organic feel to Rafiee’s newer works.

Beach Drive 1 2011

Already, in the Rainbow Warrior exhibition - Kuala Lumpur, 2010, those organic elements were bubbling through with paintings such as Ali’s Wonderland (2009), The Piano Beach (2009) and in the pockets of surf graced with butterflies in Blue Butterfly Beach (2008).  Those playful organic elements are more in evidence in these latest landscape works, specifically the stunning Beach Drive 1, Beach Drive 2, Beach Studio 1, Beach studio 2, Wetlands, Kashmir 1 and Kashmir 2 - all finished in 2011.  Those few dazzling works echo the excitement and intensity of a Van Gogh, or even a Monet, but are ultimately all Malaysian and all uniquely Rafiee Ghani, right down to the two pods of green Petai laying strewn in Beach Studio 2. 

The figurative is not forgotten, but plays its part in the miasma, dream, vision as demonstrated in The Wait and Moonshine – both, incidentally featuring an enigmatic woman, head crocked, gazing in remembrance and expectancy, perhaps waiting for her lover, or maybe overseeing the small, thoughtful boy who inhabits so many of Rafiee’s later canvases including Baywatch 01 (2008), Beach at 10 (2008) The Calligrapher (2008) and Overslept (2011). 

 

Monet Woman with Parasol

In the canvas Moonshine (2011) Rafiee depicts the light of the full moon falling on a seated woman.  In the moonlight she holds a red umbrella and, in holding that umbrella, brings to mind all those Impressionists and post-impressionist paintings which were so enamoured with ladies holding umbrellas – Claude Monet’s Woman with a Parasol (1875) or Eugene Boudin’s Woman with a Parasol on the Beach (1880) perhaps, or there again Pierre Auguste Renoir’s Woman with a Parasol and Small Child (1874/76).  There is an irony, for many of the Impressionists of the West looked towards the East for inspiration, specifically to the woodblock Japanese prints of artists like Toyokuni III otherwise known as Kunisada (1786 – 1865) or the great Utagawa Hiroshige (1797 – 1858).  In Moonshine Rafiee returns those images of women with umbrellas back to the East.

The beloved boy, seen in some previous outings of Rafiee’s works, is man as boy and acts as boy as proto-man exuding a certain pensiveness, drenched frequently in colour amidst a sun-kissed landscape.  In Baywatch 01, the young boy squats on a very Van Gogh yellow beach – also a reference to a previous painting – Yellow Wind Coming (2008).  In the Baywatch painting a drawn-out shadow indicates that the sun is at the boy’s back.  A yellow car, now forgotten in play, rests to one side of the boy as he sits with his hands upon face.  There is a brief question mark - is that car, beside the boy, Joni Mitchell’s Big Yellow Taxi (circa 1970)? Will we allow ourselves to be teased by Rafiee into considering the destruction of the rainforests by loggers, by Palm Oil plantations and all manner of ills such as malls and areas for parking as we silently sing ‘They paved paradise and put up a parking lot’?  Well, perhaps.

The Calligrapher 2008

A boy – is it the same boy, sits with his legs akimbo on a beach in the painting - The Calligrapher (2008).  This painting amply illustrates Rafiee Ghani’s love of both form and colour.  The boy’s back is towards the sea, which is caught and inflamed by the setting sun and instantly reminds you of Paul Claudel’s description of poetic colour.  Colour drapes the boy and gives him form, picked out in shades of grey and green.  His orange (Crocs) shoes compliment the greenness of the boy, the cooked-salmon-pink of the sand and the mesmerising Istanbul-blue of the boy’s shadow.  On the sand, in the cool blueness of the shadow, is the practised calligraphy of the boy as he tries to get to grips with his Jawi (Islamic script) learning.  The boy concentrates on his writing – the light of the sun is at his rear but the light of his recognition seems yet to appear.

Beach at 10 (2008) sees the boy stretching – callisthenics or sleepy stretching, we don’t know, but the figurative element of the boy draws the viewer’s attention to him as he stands proud amidst an ever increasingly abstracted background.  In Overslept (2011) the boy reclines - part figurative part abstract himself, not yet fully awake to become completely a part of the figurative world, but resides still in the dreamy, organic abstracted world, which may, or may not be the real world.

While Rafiee’s colour draped neo-Expressionistic figures may appear, at first glance, to be pensive, pondering, thoughtfully watchful or dreamily wistful, his landscapes, or more correctly his colour-scapes, are buoyant, vibrant and as wonderfully effervescent as any Der Blaue Reiter Franz Marc or 1908 Wassily Kandinsky.

Rafiee Ghani does nothing if not excite.  He wets our visual appetites for more stimulation and sets about stirring a virtual visual orgasm of colour and form within us.  Rafiee is a natural born colourist.  He absorbs form, colour and shade nuanced by experience from his frequent travels.  But as far as he travels Rafiee always returns to his homeland to reveal his country’s passion, beauty and vibrancy.   In his feel for abstraction, Rafiee emphatically reveals the sumptuousness of his country – Malaysia.  That country is revealed as being forever a feast - a banquet, a ‘High Tea’ buffet for you to take your fill at.  The luxuriant bounty is seemingly an open ended basket, a cornucopia where everyone may dig deep and feast upon the delicious fruits, but in his wisdom Rafiee also reminds his viewers that the basket must be cared for, nurtured, for it to remain bountiful lest, one day, the bounty should cease.

Oscar Grillo Seaside Woman 1980

Occasionally enigmatic but always absorbing, Rafiee’s latest works burst into the viewer’s consciousness with all the energy, colour and zest of an Oscar Grillo (Kia Ora and Seaside Woman) animation.  Rafiee Ghani’s works echo Hari Raya, Deepavali, Christmas and Chinese New Year, in so much as they are celebrations, not just of country but ultimately of life, nature and of a consciousness with that ability to appreciate all the former.

Ultimately it is just not enough to stand once before these breath-taking works.  Difficult enough as it is to tear yourself away, there is a compulsion to re-visit, over and over again so that you may fill your senses with Rafiee Ghani’s visionary song of colour, light and shade which emanates from these extraordinary works.  These tints and shades, these melded artworks will fill your life with colour and, when away from them, their freshness of colour will grace your consciousness until your return and then your eyes are opened once again to that visual melody giving you, the viewer, paroxysms of delight to be once more face to face with Rafiee Ghani’s works.