Love Me in My Batik

Love Me in My Batik by Joseph Tan, and author Martin Bradley

For a long time I thought that collage artwork by Joseph Tan was called Love Me and My Batik, perhaps some sort of lovers ultimatum - if you love me, you’ve got to love what I am wearing too. I was wrong. 

ILHAM gallery, Levels 3 & 5, ILHAM Tower no 8, Jalan Binjai, 50480 Kuala Lumpur, who opened their doors for the first time last year (2015) have presented, in their still pristine galleries, an array of Malaysian and Indonesian batik art works called - Love Me in My Batik, the actual title of that 1968 work by Joseph Tan.

In the book ‘Batik Fabled Cloth of Java’, (2004) Inger McCabe Elliott mentions;

“The roots of batik are ancient, everywhere, and difficult to trace. No one knows exactly where and when people first began to apply wax, vegetable paste, paraffin, or even mud to cloth that would then resist a dye- But it was on the island of Java and nearby Madura that batik emerged as one of the great art forms of Asia. Batik is known to have existed in China, Japan, India, Thailand, East Turkestan, Europe, and Africa, and it may have developed simultaneously in several of these areas. Some scholars believe that the process originated in India and was later brought to Egypt. Whatever the case, in A.D. 70, in his Natural History, Pliny the Elder told of Egyptians applying designs to cloth in a manner similar to the batik process. The method was known seven hundred years later in China. Scholars have ascertained that batik found in Japan was Chinese batik, made during the Tang Dynasty.” (p22)

Exhibition poster

Previously (1964) Nik Krevitsky, in his book ‘Batik Art and Craft’, had this to say about Batik;

“The art of batik has been known for centuries, but its origin, probably thousands of years ago, is still obscure. Briefly, batik is a resist technique for producing designs on fabrics. The process, in simplified form, follows these general steps: Selected areas of the fabric are blocked out by brushing melted wax or a special paste over them. After the wax is applied, the fabric is dyed by brushing dye over it or by dipping it into a dye bath. The waxed areas, repelling the dye, remain the original color of the fabric. To achieve more intricate designs with further combinations and overlays of color the waxing and dyeing process is repeated.” (p7)

For the purposes of the ILHAM exhibition, only local batik work (from Indonesia and Malaysia) were exhibited for, like all exhibitions, there must be focus. Batik from those countries simultaneously developing the craft up to two thousand years ago (Egypt, China, India etc), were held in abeyance, as were Contemporary Western batik paintings from the 1950s, most especially those from Professor of Design (University of California at Riverside) Mary Adrienne Dumas. Her intriguing batik work (for example ‘Wall Hanging’, 1952 and ‘China Shop’,1953, batik on silk) were produced a year or so before Malaysia’s, China born, Chuah Thean Teng began his batik ‘paintings’  at the closure of his batik cloth factory in Penang (1953).

One sector of the ILHAM Gallery

The new ILHAM gallery was not difficult to reach, using the Ap Waze to navigate from the Selangor wilderness to the Kuala Lumpur city heart, at Ampang. The ILHAM Tower has its own car park, and a separate lift which whisks the perhaps slightly wary visitor up to the aforementioned pristine galleries. Cornered concrete, jutting out at unsuspecting angles lent the sense of being in a human maze, the passages leading to the male toilet especially so. It was all very contemporary and, I understand, architecture is what ILHAM is all about. The main gallery, on the 5th floor was spacious, but seemed a tad clinical. Perhaps it had been a high powered CEO office space which had recently been vacated. The exhibition design was what you might have expected of Contemporary art galleries some 20 or 30 years ago but, perhaps, not of a recently constructed one.

Because of the spaciousness of the gallery, many of the works seemed dwarfed. Was the gallery, perhaps, designed to house large art works, sculptures, or to cater to huge adoring crowds on opening nights? If that be so then I understand the magnificence of that space, however the design of the exhibition ‘Love Me in My Batik’ was entirely unsuited to the large white walls of that space. 

Yee-I-Lan, Orang Besar Series, (detail)

Don’t get me wrong, it was a splendid attempt at the modern history of batik painting, and told the story well, with several obvious omissions. I was excited to see those wonderful works by Khalil Ibrahim, and am sad to have lost contact with him. I also revelled in the Ying-Yang Series - Soul and Form, by Lee Kian Seng, in all their psychedelic hippiness and was surprised to see Bambang ‘Toko’ Witjakson’s works, which I had previous presumed to be screen prints. But it was the design of the exhibition which, overall, made all the efforts seem a little lacklustre. I had a nagging Heath Ledger ‘Joker’ sinisterly rebuking Christian Bale’s Batman in my head, ‘WHY SO SERIOUS’. Many of the works called for a more lighthearted, or at least Contemporary, display. True, there were the gloriously large works by artists such as Yee-i-lan with her Orang Besar series, rippling in the air con, adding some movement to the overall static mounting but, ultimately, it wasn’t enough to take the starchiness from the overall display design.

Since the end of the eighteenth century, galleries and museums were places opened to the public, and where the public engaged and brought their life, their toddlers barely walking. Galleries and  museums were spaces in cities which replaced parks on rainy days, and were happy to do so. The concept of the pristine, wholly white, gallery came to us via the obsessions of Nazi Germany (1930s), as a symbol of purity, and it has stuck. Before the white cube, gallery walls would be painted to suit the pictures being hung. There would be more interaction between those elements of ‘gallery’ and the current exhibition. Modern exhibitions/displays in Malaysia need to move away from the concept of passiveness, pristineness and aim more towards inclusiveness and a social experience for the community.

Malaysian exhibitions noted for their well designed displays might include Dr. Choong Kam Kow’s Retrospective Exhibition, at the National Visual Arts Gallery, and The Untiring Engraver, an exhibition of Loo Foh Sang’s works at Soka Exhibition Hall, but there have been, no doubt, many that I am not aware of.