Chao's Caprices

Left Martin Bradley, right Chao Harn Kae

Chao Harn Kae’s ceramic and sculpture solo exhibition, at K.L’s Oriental & Cultural Association, along the Old Klang Road, displayed all the ingenuity of a modern revelatory whimsy. A former Malaysian Institute of Art painting graduate (1997), Chao lives mostly in Hong Kong these days creating bronzes, ceramics, painting in oils and making sculptures. He returned to Malaysia to hold his first solo exhibition. This was launched some days after a M.I.A. old boys and girls massive get-together at Datuk Ramil Ibrahim’s Sutra House.

Whimsies are capricious, fanciful, playful. Chao’s Human Beast Series whimsies had the quality of being drawn from memories of childhood, and/or the more capriciously metamorphic elements of Western mythology. Petite white and blue porcelain centaurs (perhaps children of those sons of Ixion), pranced from Thessaly and Ovid’s Metamorphoses onto aged Malaysian railway sleepers. A blue-faced mermaid, her body pale, her piscine tail brushed blue, rested on a rough crafted breeze block. In her broken limbed stance she was another Aphrodite, risen from the sea and echoing the other from Melos, by Alexandros of Antioch. By another block of distressed wood, a blue-armed, white figure lay with its torso and lower body coiled, like a snake. It was most reminiscent of Grendel’s mother, the Anglo-Saxon sea-witch, bane of beowulf, but this male perhaps more resembled the Greek Typhoeus (miniaturised).

Chao was conquering our hearts and minds with his tiny caprices, enchanting his visitors with their sad little faces, be-rouged and frequently coy. A lonely, lost couple sat in a small boat on a railway sleeper sea, one tiny blue rabbit-eared figurine looking this way, another black one that. It was as if they were observing we visitors, forever curious of our curiosity.

Elsewhere in that tantalising display was Chao's Portrait Series, with tall white plinths which enabled intricately manipulated ceramic busts (as the genealogy of those myriad creatures was uncertain perhaps austs is more appropriate) to look out. It all began, Chao intimated, with the one head and neck piece. It was a simple figure. You could imagine it to be the face of a clown, disguised with pale blue make-up, perhaps wearing a tight fitting earthen coloured coif head piece, or cowl. Is the face a mask? Where lies the real persona? Is it behind the mask, or is there no mask but a face, pinch-lipped and cautious-eyed as a character from some Moebius Bande Dessinee perhaps.

Chao developed the concept further. Other head and neck sculptures began appearing, but this time with cowls resembling those of medieval fools, jesters with ass ears like Shakespear’s Nick Bottom (1500s), or Jacob Cornelisz van Oostsanen's “Laughing Jester” (1515) and Hans Sebald Beham’s "A dancing fool” (1500s). Many of Chao’s series resembled busts of The Lost Boys’ in their Neverland animal costumes, hailing from Walt Disney’s cinematic “Peter Pan” animation (1953). They were cute, but with a distinctive otherness and each with a distinctive, often haunting, face. 

Seeing deer antlers reminded Chao of hands, with fingers. He developed the idea into the head and neck series, then replacing ears with out stretched hands, or placing a hand on the head between the ears. His craftsmanship allowed his visitors to accept his concepts. His deftness and design encouraged a wilful suspension of disbelief as we, the audience, were drawn into his endearing fantasies. 

Aside from the fascinating works of art displayed, and they were fascinating too, Chao admitted that the whole could not have been achieved without a little help from his friends. During the setting up, one friend would advise this, another that, until the display took the splendid shape it was in when I visited. The exhibition visitor was immediately struck by the uniqueness of the display, and of the display materials themselves. To present Chao’s captivating works to their fullest potential, plinths and exhibition blocks had been constructed of breeze-blocks, sections of railway sleepers, distressed and corroded metal troughs as well as the usual white stands, of varying sizes, this resulted in a meld of materials which was both eye-catching and mesmerising.