Art Sharing in Klang, Malaysia

Towards an Abstraction, in Chinese catalogue for Yeo Eng Hin

... through the new spirit, man himself creates a new beauty, whereas in the
past he only painted and described the beauty of nature. This new beauty has
become indispensable to the new man, for in it he expresses his own image in
equivalent opposition with nature.

Piet Mondrian in the pamphlet, Le Néo-plasticisme: [principe général de l'equivalence plastique] by Rosenberg’s Galerie L'Effort Moderne, Paris 1921.


There is an English idiom; the apple doesn't fall far from the tree, meaning that the child will resemble the parent.

The Malaysian artist, Yeo Eng Hin’s works stride the lacunae between figurative and, for want of other terms, what we might want to call abstraction. Yeo reveals organic hints of his Italian teacher, the Bolognese artist Leonardo Cremonini. Cremonini, a 20th century European master painter who inspired both artist Francis Bacon and poet W.H. Auden, revelled in his predilection towards semi-abstraction. This is demonstrated in energetic works such as Le Cap (1981) and Vegetazione Invadente (1960-1961) which trends towards notions of a neo-metaphysical art. While simultaneously accepting Yeo’s debt to Cremonini, Yeo’s art works also hint at the stunning, explosive, abstractions of another of his Parisian mentors, the Chinese artist and resident of Paris, Zao Wou ki.

Zao Wou Ki, a graduate of the famous Hangzhou National Academy of Fine Arts, now called the China Academy of Art, in China, relocated to Paris in 1948. He began experimenting in oil on canvas, ink on paper, lithography, engraving, and watercolour, and amongst his circle of friends were modernist artists such as Alberto Giacometti and Joan Miró. Zao frequently, yet subtly, references his Chinese ancestry in his oil painting in a methodology seemingly eluding many proponents of Singapore/Malaysia’s Nanyang. Yeo was a student of Zao’s, and of Cremonini, in the early 1980s.   

Yeo had an extraordinarily fortunate artistic upbringing. Before residing in Paris at the Ecole des Beaux Arts, for four years, and studying drawing and painting under the notable artists mentioned above, Yeo had spent his formative years studying, in Kuala Lumpur, under the renown Malaysian artist, Chia Yu Chian, for two years. It was a close relationship, not just founded in art but because Chia and Yeo came from the same Chinese dialectical background - Teochew. Chia recognised in Yeo, a young man very committed to his art, a little of himself. Chia was very lenient towards Yeo, guided him and let him stay well beyond his appointed hours at his studio, to finish his work. It was those little things which endeared Chia to Yeo, helping him understand the professionalism of the man. Chia’s advice to Yeo, was for him to go directly to Paris, rather than spend unnecessary time at Nanyang Academy. Though schooled well by Chia, Yeo understood that he was not ready to go directly to Paris, and needed to strengthen his skills before going abroad.

The opportunity to study under Chia gave Yeo a foundation strong enough for him to enter the Nanyang Academy of Fine Art (NAFA), in Singapore, for three years (1976-1977). This was at a time when teaching of the fine arts (meishu xueyuan) at Nanyang, had started to develop into a broader based art school (yishu xueyuan) providing training for visual arts, design and performance subjects.
Eschewing both the newly established Malaysian Institute of Art (MIA, 1967), and the even more recent Kuala Lumpur College of Art (KLCA, 1968), it was at the Nanyang Academy of Fine Arts that Yeo was able to further absorb nuances from the Nanyang masters, such as Georgette Chen (Chang Li Ying, Zhejiang, China). Chen had been a student at the Art Students League in New York, and later studied art at the Académie Colarossi and Académie Biloul in Paris, France. Chen was still teaching painting and drawing at Nanyang (1954 to 1980), when the young Yeo attended. Chen was amongst the immigrant Chinese population of Singapore who had became Nanyang’s Western/Eastern stylistic fusion forerunners. Echoes of those Nanyang teachers can be seen in Yeo’s early works such as Tea-picker in Cameron Highlands (1976), and echoed in later works such as Sound of the Lotus (1995) and Orchids (1997). 

That is not to say that Yeo’s paintings resemble those of his teachers. They emphatically do not. And yet, there are essences, or better yet Baudelairian ‘correspondances', connections and interactions between the works of the pupil and of the teachers. As his mentors before him, Yeo has striven to generate a style of his own; a style looking forward towards abstraction, while remaining, perhaps temporarily, anchored in the figurative.

This may be witnessed in ‘sparkling’ paintings such as Kuala Lumpur at Night and Johor Bahru before Dawn. In his larger painting, Kuala Lumpur at Night, Yeo works with a neo-impressionist attention to light, making the painting shimmer with light in its textural splendour. While capturing the city’s imposing array of modern buildings, Yeo lends an ‘other worldly’ sensation to the whole, hinting at the city as a fantasy. I am reminded of Jean-Luc Goddard’s French style poster for his film Alphaville, created by Jean Mascii, in all its 1965 ‘futurism’. In the landscapes Niah Cave 1 and Niah Cave 2, there are hints of Cremonini’s use of semi-abstraction as a method of depicting that which reveals itself in characteristic shapes and textures. Yet Yeo resists the inclination to be just another Cremonini, but strikes out on his own, seeking inspiration from his subject matter.  Yeo’s flower series leans more towards a melding of Chinese Ink Brush painting, and contemporary acrylics, again with hints of an abstraction which had been demonstrated with the master China’s Zhang Daqian’s paintings, like Peach Blossom Spring (1982).

There is little doubt that Yeo’s work reached a pinnacle of excellence with his recent series of very spiritual paintings, concerning Cambodia’s Angkor (2014), which I have written about elsewhere. However, that is not to dismiss Yeo’s other landscapes, his flower paintings or his sparkling cityscapes, which all deserve reviewing.

My article in Soka Gakkai magazine Cosmic December 2017

Poetry Reading Hotel Duran, Figuers, Catalonia, Spain December 2017

Histories, Practices, Interventions: A Reader in Singapore Contemporary Art, A Re-View

Histories, Practices, Interventions: A Reader in Singapore Contemporary Art, edited by Jeffery Say and Seng Yu Jin. Published by the Institute of Contemporary Arts Singapore, Lasalle College of the Arts, 2016, is a ‘reader’, an anthology. Although it is, specifically, a ‘reader’ concerning textural undertakings with regard to Singaporean writing about contemporary art, I look at this volume as an object.

Some while ago, when the physicality of the ‘book’ was hot off the press, Jeffery (Say) had asked me if I would care to write a review. I immediately said yes. He sent a copy to my Kuala Lumpur address. Due to the vagaries of the Malaysian postal system the book has never arrived.

I continued to be eager to review the book. I asked if I could  arrange for a friend to collect another copy from Lasalle, in Singapore, and have him physically transport the same to Cambodia, where my wife would collect it and transport it to me, in Kuala Lumpur. With thanks to those involved in getting this book into my hands, this is the review, incidentally written in Spain. It is a well travelled book.

At first glance, the physical book Histories, Practices, Interventions: A Reader in Singapore Contemporary Art (housing a collection of writings from illustrious and erudite art historians such as TK Sabapathy), successfully promotes the overt impression of esoteric contemporaneity. The book design (by Every Matter, Singapore) demonstrates, and quoting from Gunalan Nadarajan (and a passage within the book) a “commitment to alternatives”, “a sense of discomfort” and “a willingness to take risks” (p3). The risky design of the book reaches to aesthetically enhance a notion of the contemporary.  The design triumphantly highlights the tome’s ephemerality (a partial book cover, partially glued), leaving its delicately thin paper contents vulnerable and therfore impermanent. In turn, it provokes the thought that the design itself denies the concept of book cover its raison d'être, i.e. to cover and to protect. Thin paper becomes necessary for this book, due to its already imposing girth, weighing in, as it does, at 412 pages, and the final words (by Tan Boon Hui) are printed on the inside of the, equally thin, card, back cover.

The first presenting page in the volume, bears the legend “Dear Mr President, I am an artist, I am important, Yours sincerely Tang Da Wu.” It is a note from 1995. We are informed (on page IV), that those poignant words are taken from a performance piece “Please Don’t Give Money to the Arts”, by Tang Da Wu, recreated for a Fukuoka Asian Culture Prize exhibition, Japan.

Sadly, by the time that I was able to read the book, some abrasive substance had made its mark across the right hand side of the first page, hence my comment about vulnerability. The colour photographic image of a thumb has the print ripped from it. At first I wondered if this were deliberate. Perhaps it was a profound statement about fragility, ephemerality, deliberately made to draw emphasis to the printed statement and, ultimately, to the contents of the book. I touched the damage, concluding it to be very real and, finding the culprit (its bubble wrap pocket and glued flap to which the missing print adhered) seemingly accidental. The rip (reminiscent of the cover of an album by The Mothers of Invention) offered itself up as a single mar on my single copy.

That aforementioned ambiguity, brought about by the marked cover and the potentially significant stigma, proffered itself as a critique concerning the art of contemporaneity. Frequently, by becoming Sophist with meanings and pronouncements, contemporary art allows itself to become transfixed on twin horns of dilemma (or double lemma). Its novelty provokes adoration and praise akin to the Emperors New Clothes, amongst the self proclaimed elite. This, naturally, becomes counter balanced by damnation for that very intellectual elitism, and the continuing use of justifications and dialogues observed by those outside of the ‘in crowd’ as confiscating and opaque in its writings and justifications. 

The image of a group of San Francisco’s Museum of Modern Art visitors, in 2016, gazing in awe at a pair of eye glasses, unable to distinguish between art and artifice, comes to mind. Serious writers about contemporary art, perhaps Singaporean ones, may have galvanised their critical senses in defence of this. Reminiscent, for some, of Oscar Wilde’s fox hunting maxim (that of the unspeakable in pursuit of the uneatable).

The book Histories, Practices, Interventions: A Reader in Singapore Contemporary Art bears the existential (and literal) weight of its being, through this tremendous undertaking, for there is the (undisputed) claim for the book to be the first of its kind, certainly in Singapore. As Sabapathy indicates (in the Foreword), the book contains 33 texts, spanning 40 years of Singaporean writing about contemporary art. Therefore, in a very real sense, the book becomes an exercise of writing about writing about art, with art, contemporaneous or not, being a tad displaced out of the necessity to draw attention to the oft overlooked practice of art writing. In the Preface to this collection, editors Jeffery Say and Seng Yu Jin suggest that the book is a resource, a bridge ‘between readers and art writing’. They further suggest that the book is a catalyst for ‘the proliferation of critical dialogue on contemporary art’, in fairness to the engineers of this endeavour, tempus narrabo (time, will tell). 

As a final note, it would be apt, and more convenient, were this book and its erudite contents available as an ebook.

Martin Bradley, Catalonia, December 2017.

(923 words)

The Blue Lotus issue 10

On Visiting the KL Biennale 2017

I admit that it was with some trepidation, but also with soupçon of excitement, that I approached the new Kuala Lumpur (KL) Biennale 2017, currently held at the National Art Gallery, and across Kuala Lumpur, Malaysia. The latest Biennale spans Kuala Lumpur city between 1st of November and the 31st of March 2018, in locations as diverse as the Soka Gakkai Hall and the Ilham Gallery.

The main exhibition acts as a treatise on contemporary art, and is at the Malaysian National Art Gallery which, for some time, has had a below par reputation. Blame for this might be found in many quarters, not least in the paltry sum the Malaysian government extends to art, its conservation and its preservation.

In this respect, Malaysia is unlike its neighbour, Singapore, which has all the veneer of understanding the necessity of the spiritual, as well as the fiscal value of art. Singapore has rallied around contemporary art, with copious initiatives, galleries and museums and has taken the local initiative with recourse to the vagaries of contemporary Art, love it or hate it. The Singapore Art Museum (SAM) has been at the forefront of contemporary art in the region since 1996. Now it is Kuala Lumpur’s turn to shine.

Sheltering under the umbra of a Biennale, Kuala Lumpur has collected many works by 120 international artists, from countries as diverse as The Philippines, China, Cambodia, Sweden, Palestine, Singapore, Indonesia, India, Thailand, Bangladesh, Japan and, of course, Malaysia, to be seen by visitors until March 2018. This is not to be confused with Malaysia’s other biennale, the northern ‘Langkawi Art Biennale’ which began in 2014, and continued last year (2016).

Terms like ‘biennale’ and ‘contemporary art’ can appear somewhat confusing, and elitist. Biennale has come to mean an exhibition of ‘contemporary’ art, every two years and is, of course, Italian, hailing back to 1895, with origins in La Biennale di Venezia (Venice Biennale) Venice, Italy.

That original series of Venetian exhibitions is now 122 years old. By 1910, La Biennale di Venezia was exhibiting works by the Futurist Marinetti, the ‘secessionist’ Gustav Klimt, Renoir, Courbet, but not Picasso. His work was deemed too novel for the delicate Venetian taste. According to the Venice Biennale’s history, 1920 was the time of the avant-garde with Impressionists, Post-Impressionists and Die Brücke being exhibited.

Between1948 and1954, and here is the confusing part, ‘ the Art Exhibitions became an observatory on contemporary art and avant-garde work. Awards were given to Braque (1948), Matisse (1950), Dufy (1952), Ernst and Arp (1954). In 1950, the US pavilion presented works by Pollock, Gorky and, for the first time, De Kooning (in 1954 he returned with 27 paintings). Alexander Calder, in 1952, was the first major American artist to win the Gran Premio di Scultura.’ Or so we are told by the Venice Biennale website. Confusing? Yes, confusing, because the history of the term ‘contemporary art’ varies enormously.

According to the New Museum of Contemporary Art, in New York, ‘contemporary art’ begins in 1977, others are less precise and select somewhere within the 1970s as the beginning. The Institute of Contemporary Art (ICA), in London, was founded in 1947 and, as we saw above, the Venice Biennale was already engaging with ‘ contemporary art’ back in 1948. Britain’s Tate suggests ‘In relation to contemporary art museums, the date of origin for the term ‘contemporary art’ varies.’

If the new Kuala Lumpur Biennale 2017 is about contemporary art, which seems suggested in the Biennale handout - ‘Among the objectives of the KL Biennale are: to expand NAG’s networking and collaboration opportunities; to drive the development at international level of the country’s contemporary art industry…’ then what is this thing called ‘contemporary art’?

Where ‘modern art’ seemed to be mostly concerned with painting and sculpture, ‘contemporary art’ is so widely based as to gather to itself performance, installation art, video or other types of lens-based art and, in other words, art which is seen as contemporary may, and is, made from anything. It is no longer static, and frequently embroils itself in controversy.

In one contemporary art museum in Milan (MA*GA, opened 1966), exhibits to the ‘Urban Mining’ display included a variety of materials including Cesare Pietroiusti’s aged paper with type-written text, Christiane Löhr’s grass sculptures as well as experimental video. In the recent (21st October to 5th November 2017) Karachi Biennale, Huma Mulji's broken and twisted street lamp installation ('An Ode to a Lamppost That Got Accidentally Destroyed in the Enthusiastic Widening of Canal Bank Road,’) inside an old law bookshop (Pioneer Book Store), caused a ruckus in and out of the art world. Conservationists, book store owner and bookshop conservationist were appalled at the insensitive installation of such a large, flickering, fractured, lamp post within such a small space. It threw up questions of artists’ privilege, sensitivity to natural environment and, most of all, was controversial and a constant talking point.

When we peak of ‘contemporary art’, there are, of course, tie-ins to what we have called avant-garde art, to Dada and Surrealism and practitioners like Marcel Duchamp (readymades), Max Ernst (frontage, collage and montage), and the American Joseph Cornell (surreal boxes) and, certainly surrealism and cinema (Robert Wiene’s ‘The Cabinet of Dr Caligari’ (1920), Rene Clair’s ‘Entr’Acte' (1924) and Salvador Dalí and Luis Buñuel’s ‘Un Chien Andalou’ (1929)). Which begs the question as to the originality of ‘contemporary art’ or, alternately, if we are now in a state of anything goes, perhaps originality no longer matters and we are all free to loan from past decades, be inspired by other media just as Pop art (Roy Lichtenstein) loaned from comic books, or Picasso and Brancusi were inspired by African art.

Biennale’s have began sprouting up like art mushrooms around the globe. In his book ‘Playing to the Gallery’ (2014) British artist Grayson Perry counted as many as 220 biennales around the world. As well as Malaysia’s two biennales, KL and Langkawi), its neighbour, Singapore, held its latest biennale in 2016. Across the globe, Ecuador, Turkey, Russia, the Democratic Republic of Congo, Sweden, USA, Italy, Lithuania, Brazil, Republic of Korea, Indonesia, Nigeria, France, Taiwan, China, Pakistan, Germany and others held at least one biennale in 2017.


The KL Biennale 2017 presents Alami Belas (translated by the National Art Gallery as …Be Loved). In the handout, ‘Alami Belas’ is referred to as being….

‘Quite close to the meaning of the phrase 'be loved'. ‘Belas’ refers to the sense of love
that comes from the depth of the soul, and relates also to compassion, sincerity, happiness, honesty, hope and sustainability. Belas is an important aspect of living together in a shared space. This biennale’s theme of "Alami Belas / Be Loved" highlights a plethora of social issues related to human reactions to and interactions with nature. The aim is to provide moments of contemplation to reassess various human actions and behaviours as reflected in the works by invited artists featured in the "Petals of Love" segment'.

There are five segments to the Biennale, which include;

1.Love For Humanity.

The love for humanity focuses on disaster victims, the disabled, indigenous people, the poor in urban and rural areas, the elderly, orphans, homeless children, single mothers and the victims of abuse.

2.Love For Nature.

The love for nature focuses on the nature, endangered habitat, natural environment, flora and fauna to ensure a balance between sociology development and nature preservation.

3.Love For Animals.

Love For Animals is a special dedication for abused animals and animals going to extinct. The focus is on the endangered species due to habitat destruction caused by human.

4.Love For Heritage
.
Love for heritage can be divided into tangible heritage such as architecture and nature such as flora and fauna as well as intangible heritage such as performance arts, visual arts, religious ritual, music and songs that are an added value for the tourists.

5.Love For Our Legendary Icons / Spiritual Love
.
The Love for our legendary icons is evaluated through the legacy of culture and arts. This activity will be focusing on the contributions toward societal development, animal, heritage and environmental conservation. The spiritual theme will showcase artworks that are spiritual.

I had visited the main exhibition, at the Malaysian National Art Gallery, on its seventh day of being open to the public. It was impressive. Possibly the very best that the National Art Gallery has yet to present, however, there were still a few flaws.

While many of the galleries were (mostly) up an running, by no means all were. Essentially, one week into public viewing, object labels were missing, as were textural wall panels. Here I give the National Art Gallery the benefit of the doubt, and assume that those exhibits now with only Malay text panels will, at some point, also have English for those many foreign visitors who would not understand Malay.

Several galleries on the first floor, and one on the top floor, had workmen busying themselves amidst dust and rolls of bubble wrap. Step ladders were strewn everywhere, as were cables, tins of paint and an assortment of tools and implements. While I understand that the ‘opening’ of the Biennale is on the 23rd of November, perhaps the National Art Gallery should have delayed its opening to the public from the 1st of November until the 24th, as the galleries are not yet ready.