Contexts @ 69

‘Jalan Petaling - Ice Man at rest’  Azwan Mahzan

1839, Frenchman Louis Jacques Mandé Daguerre presented photography (through his daguerreotypes) to the waiting world. It was a marvel, unique and astonishing. Since the 1820s Daguerre had been researching his invention, fine tuning the camera obscura, and dabbling with the diorama to bring his moment of truth to the Académie des Sciences. It was a triumph.

Last night we, once more, trod the long flight of steps down to the French owned Gallery Fine Art 69, this time lit by ‘night light’ candles. It was six pm and still light, nevertheless the thought was there, and those minuscule candles did not look out of place in that splendidly romantic garden. We, for once, were on time and a little surprised to see that we were some of the first to arrive for the opening of the CONTEXT photography exhibition.

I have always had an ambiguous relationship with photographs. For the philistine that I am, when it comes to photography, photographs have to be great in tone, sharpness, colour or subject matter to impress. Man Ray knew this, and produced some excellent images to puzzle, entertain or simply to awe at, particularly his portraits of Kiki. Henri Cartier-Bresson too knew his relative aperture from his shutter speed, and produced some of the most memorable photographic images the world has seen, but last night we were left, decidedly, wanting.

It was an exhibition of three photographers, judicially arranged to include all three major races in modern Malaysia - Chinese, Indian and Malay, and entitled Context. As the visitor stepped into the gallery, they stepped into the half space exhibition of Mahen Bala (Indian), opposite was the work of Azwan Mahzan (Malay), and down the steps, in a much larger space, was the exhibition belonging to Alecia Neo (Chinese, but from Singapore). From the knowledge of the distribution of the relative exhibition spaces, there seemed an imbalance highlighted, later, by the arrival of the Singapore Ambassador to Malaysia, technically a High Commissioner though called Ambassador several times throughout the evening.

part of Tokyo Serie by Mahen Bala

Mahen Bala’s works were in black and white, or should I say in varying shades of grey, not unlike the infamous book series by E.L.James, but without the sex and were taken of and in Tokyo. On first glance, ‘Tokyo Serie’ was an unprepossessing collection of grey images,  with a larger image to offset the smaller. There was a distinct lack of contrast in those images and, at times (as in the larger) a struggling to determine the subject. My wife guided me back after a cursory unimpressed glance, to let me gaze a little longer, and take the images as a series. That worked better. ‘Tokyo Serie’ is indeed a series, practically a Manga, of sequential photography, working only as a collective, and not individually. I was unsure if the lack of contrast was due to the digital nature of the images - digital photography does have a tendency to flatten out the tones; or a distinct statement on the flatness of Salaryman’s (Sarariman) lives in the city of Tokyo, and therefore an irony.

Home visits by Alecia Neo

Alecia Neo’s plentitude of works were in distinct contrast to those of Mahen Bala. They were bright, colourful - and staged. It was a style of photographic portraiture which seemed to come into being sometime during the 1980s and which, unfortunately, is rapidly become trite. There was a similar exhibition of portraiture in Phnom Penh before Christmas, by a female Vietnamese photographer portraying the ‘real’ (staged) lives of gay couples in Vietnam. The stillness and the colourfulness were there, as was Alecia Neo’s sense of isolation or loneliness, but there was an added attraction of prying into the lives of those living on the fringes of society, which gave those Vietnamese images a depth greater than those displayed by Alecia Neo. As entertaining as her images of Chinese individuals and others are, they lack symbolic depth and had me fairly running sent back to the images captured by Azwan Mahzan, up the stairs and opposite those of Mahen Bala.

Jalan Petaling self portrait Azwan Mahzan

Azwan Mahzan has a keen eye for texture, and for not doing the obvious in his photography. Like the other two photographers in the exhibition, Azwan Mahzan uses digital photography. At times he captures life as it is presented to him - no obvious studio lighting to gain ‘romantic’ or ‘isolated’ ahhhhs from his audience, and at other times Azwan Mahzan indulges in the odd bit of photoshopic trickery to shake us up a little, as in ‘Jalan Petaling, self portrait’. Both ‘Home from the Market’ and ‘Jalan Petaling - Ice Man at rest’ demonstrate an unselfconsciousness absent in the works of Alecia Neo’s work, plus, and this is a big plus - lots of lovely texture - green walls with red stain or white walls with dirt black stains, both are exquisite demonstrations of city life. If I were prodded with a hot telephone lens, I would have to comment that I found one or two of those images in need of a little sharpness, to bring out the texture a little more.

Context was an apt name for this exhibition. All three photographers were shown within the context of their spaces in the gallery, albeit larger (Alecia Neo) or smaller (Mahen Bala and Azwan Mahzan). Mahen Bala’s works, worked only within the context of sequentiality, whereas those of Alecia Neo continued a popular trend in photographic portraiture, putting her work into that staged context, whereas the works of Azwan Mahzan drew their strengths from the contexts of their environment. There was, therefore and perhaps, something for everyone as there should be in any group exhibition worth its compressed weight in digital megabytes and perky pixels.