Posts Tagged ‘Malaysia’
Maimed, melancholic, meta-textual.
A portrait of a young boy missing a limb, the dismembered stump dissipating into polychromatic, painterly wisps where skin and flesh should be – like so many of his fellows. A child sits with a paper-bag over his head; another is poised before what looks to be a row of Japanese soldiers in hachimaki headbands. A boy in a sailor suit and a girl perched atop a tiger-skin rug strike poses — in two different paintings — before renderings of Friedrich’s Rocky Reef on the Seashore. A seemingly unfinished triple portrait includes a re-presentation of Caravaggio’s David with the Head of Goliath (the Borghese version), with a filmic projection placed squarely over Goliath’s head, introducing a constant glare of shifting, flickering disruptions into the visual field.
Such is the iconography of enigmatic, near anonymous Singaporean painter Huang Wei.
According to local gallery owner Alan Oei (the man behind Evil Empire and the annual OH! Open House event), who also curated the present show at Valentine Willie’s space in Kuala Lumpur, the story of the discovery of Huang runs like this:
In mid 2009, my [Oei’s] friend Nora Samosir called me. She said her uncle-contractor had found rolls and rolls of old paintings. At that time, I was deeply interested in the Equator Art Society – a group of Chinese Social Realist painters who were largely forgotten. To come across an outsider artist who didn’t even make it into our art history – was an incredible find !
The paintings of strange and maimed children were just completely at odds with everything I knew about Singapore. Me and Nora, and a few others decided to organize a lecture-performance. Nora is a veteran actress so she presented it while I helped with the research about the artist and restoration of the paintings. Part of the attraction was that there was so little material about him – one trunk of personal effects – and I’m not exactly an archivist researcher, so there was a fair amount of conjecture. I became obsessed with this romantic archetype of the melancholic artist painting in his own warped universe.
Of what little is known about Huang:
Huang Wei is a Singaporean artist born in 1914. He worked in his family photography studio even while he was in school. My guess is that his first love was art not photography. He won an art scholarship for instance, and also studied with the famous Richard Walker, art superintendent of Singapore. But his paintings are all heavily influenced by photography.
(From an interview published in the show’s accompanying pamphlet.)
In a nutshell, that’s pretty much it for facts.
And the significance of Velázquez, so tellingly namechecked in the title ?
Cue Huang’s triumvirate from the early ‘60s: The boy in the arch, The boy with the glacier, The girl with the tiger. (See above.) That the three paintings belong in a series of sorts is clear at first glance: Arch and Tiger both feature the back of a large canvas as a salient motif, the first on the right side of the composition, the second on its left, as if the same canvas – visual details also correspond in both works – had been stretched across the interstitial gap. And a rendition of Caspar David Friedrich’s Rocky Reef on the Sea Shore (c. 1824) appears in Tiger and in Glacier: mounted on the wall in the former, as a surreally large copy in the latter. The motific parallels to Velázquez’s Las Meninas (1656) are unmissable, if somewhat ambiguous: the canvas with it’s back to viewer, of course; the slant of sunlight moving in from the right of the space in Glacier (Las Meninas is similarly lit); the painting of a painting (like the del Mazo renditions of Reubens in the background of Meninas, themselves depictions of copies, or paintings of copies of paintings); the pendant around the necks of the girl in Tiger and the figure of doña Isabel de Velasco (standing to the right of the princess in Meninas), as well as the tiger’s head in the former, and the dog in Velázquez.
Many of these parallels are perhaps oblique visual references, and less by way of outright similarities, but the fact remains that Huang seems to have been greatly taken with the work of the Spanish master:
When I [Oei] saw Huang’s paintings with these bizarre motifs that present the back-of-canvas, I could only think of Las Meninas. And true enough, Huang was inspired by that painting. I don’t know exactly what inspired him, but he made at least 30 drawings and paintings around this iconic work …… Michel Foucault, the French theorist, suggested that Las Meninas was the first history painting to recognize and embody the idea of representation. The world that exists within paintings (and texts) is not the same as reality. Representation organizes signs and information within different systems.
(From the interview.)
Oei is of course referring to Foucault’s famous disquisition on the painting – far too detailed and extensive to reproduce in its entirety here – which concludes along these lines:
Perhaps there exists, in this painting by Velázquez, the representation as it were, of Classical representation, and the definition of the space it opens up to us. And, indeed, representation undertakes to represent itself here in all its elements … indicated compellingly from every side: the necessary disappearance of that which is its foundation – of the person it resembles and the person in whose eyes it is only a resemblance. This very subject – which is the same – has been elided. And representation, freed finally from the relation that was impeding it, can offer itself as representation in its pure form.
(See the chapter “Las Meninas” in Foucault, The Order of Things.)
You’ll have to read the essay for that to make sense, but the bottomline is this: Las Meninas is a representation of representation, a painting in which the praxis of two-dimensional depiction, in all its strategic methods, manipulations and craft, is depicted two-dimensionally – the gaps in the narrative, such as it were, foregrounding the artifice of an aesthetic construction.
And it is that sense of the performative, of a painter painting a deliberately painterly painting, an art historical art, which leaps out at the viewer. The nexus of cross-gazes and semantic lacunae which Foucault identifies in Las Meninas is missing here, but Huang’s work remains imbricated in various layers of citational self-reflexivity, of discursive canniness, of teasing, ambiguous hints and half-truths, of occluded, private spheres of meaning. What, in other words, does one make of the tiger’s head in Girl with the tiger, the feline motif also recurring in The boy with the tiger (c. 1960; below) ? The latter seems to be a self-portrait of a young Huang, if the photographs uncovered by Oei, and included in the show (below), are anything to go by; the juxtaposition of boy and tiger may be an expression of personal preference, or it may be personal in another way altogether (1914, the purported year of the artist’s birth, being a Year of the Tiger). As a creature slaughtered and skinned, lying at the feet of a winsome, comely young thing, does it assume yet another channel of significance we are not privy to ? (A lost love maybe ?) And the allusion to Friedrich ? Rocky Reef is not one of the German painter’s better-known works – what of its inclusion not once, but twice, in two different paintings ? In Boy with glacier, the work has been enlarged almost to the point of taking on the character of a realistic backdrop; the choice of a work sans Friedrich’s trademark Rückenfigur may or may not be of import. Is the boy then to be read as a reversal, of the absent “back figure” (literally) contemplating the sublimity of a romantic topography – here conspicuously turned to face the viewer, acutely aware of the “burning gaze” (as Oei puts it) of the reality beyond the canvas ? And the reduction of Friedrich’s painting to its original dimensions, firmly embedded within a domestic interior, in Girl with tiger ? The wildness of the landscape, in this case a murkily visible presence contained in a frame, a controlled sublimity; the ostensible ferocity of the tiger’s head, in actuality no more than a rug beneath the subject’s feet; even the flowers, resembling rather a naturally-blooming branch, is as carefully cultivated as a pot of bonsai, as aesthetically appealing as a still-life (the geometric angularity of the pot measured against the biomorphic shapes of the plant, the profusion of foliage and flora tapering into a slender stem) – the disparity between the tamed nature which characterizes the girl’s domestic milieu, and the deliberate verisimilitude of Rocky Reef as a backdrop for the boy, seems to gesture at some form of gendered asymmetry at work. Finally, how does one imagine the relationship between the tiger girl and the boy beneath the arch, if indeed the depicted canvas unites the pair ? And the boy with the glacier ? What is his relationship to his fellows ? How does one account for the triangulated iconography suturing the three works ?
As with so much concerning Huang Wei, answers – or even leads – seem to be in short supply at this stage.
Another reiterated motif in Huang’s oeuvre is that of the maimed child: often missing an arm, sometimes an eye. And – again, in the absence of the displaced artist, who cannot or will not speak out of the silence to which history has relegated him – we have only Oei’s word to go on: Alan Oei, who willy-nilly seems to have become a posthumous alter-ego of sorts for Huang, speaking for, or channeling, if you will, in the manner of a conjuration or a possession*, the dead man, the ghostly overtones of that process evoking the no less eerie, spectral entities of Huang’s paintings, haunting the present moment like so many anomalous apparitions. In any case, here is Oei on the topic of Huang’s malformed children:
Huang lost his family – his two children and his wife – at the start of the Second World War when the bombs fell. I don’t know if he was specifically trying to express or sublimate that trauma onto the canvas, but it certainly feels that way. It’s hard not to relate this to the violence of war. However, I do think there is much more than that. Perhaps it’s also the futility of making paintings in a time of photography, of new ways of looking at the world.
(See his interview.)
* Although it has to pointed out, perhaps, that in this case the line between the roles of possessor and possessed are far from clear.
It may be a little difficult perhaps to make a case for Huang’s aesthetics of negation and transformation vis-à-vis photographic technology – the “the futility of making paintings in a time of photography, of new ways of looking at the world” – almost a century after the advent of Impressionism, which emerged in part at least as a response to the new scopic regime of the photograph. Most of his paintings on display here date to the 1950s and 1960s, only a short while, one notes, before the relationship between the autographic and photographic arts was reconfigured again by the photorealist movement, which took flight in the late ‘60s. If anything, Huang’s work seems deliberately anachronistic: harking back to an earlier era of the studio photograph-portrait, adopting a citational idiom teased out from the work of the Baroque masters – at a time when his peers, like the Nanyang school folk, were still indebted to the visual vocabulary of the various Modernist -isms.
Yet, at the same time, Huang also strikes the one as being more … oddly contemporary than many of his contemporaries. (Though ‘contemporary’ in this case may be something of a relative term.) Take The boy with the golden collar (above), the figure quite visibly wanting a left limb. Despite the conventions of portrait painting which informs so much of Huang’s vision, the point at which the human body is disrupted here – the boundary between broken arm and exteriority – is rendered destabilized, ambivalent, heteroclitic. The departure from the nominally naturalistic idiom of the painting is striking: the child’s coat-sleeve has seemingly vanished along with his phantom limb, leaving in its place an abstract mess of thread-like skeins resembling splinters of ripped-off fabric – or, more significantly, brushstrokes that never quite cohered into a recognizable form. The phenomenon becomes even more pronounced in The boy with the emerald sleeve (above): where the rest of the figure’s right arm should be is instead a kaleidoscopic complex of painterly gestures in bejeweled hues, a complex of dripping, bleeding runnels of surreal chromaticism. The motif of the fractured body, then, of the breakdown of bodily integrity, dovetails, at both visual and conceptual levels, with an inflected, irregular mode of mimesis, a grammar of naturalism interrupted by hints of the sort of Pollock-ian painterliness that came to dominate the Ab Ex school – as if, at the very point where the mimetically-depicted human body surrendered its fleshly unity, the means of representation itself relinquished any claims to verisimilitude, assuming instead the abstraction of process-oriented actionism, with the conceptual shift occurring spatially at the site of a corporeal distortion.
Untitled (unknown date), Huang Wei. Oil on linen (and video projection).
Perhaps no other work in the show encapsulates, or crystallizes, the issues concerning the Huang Wei myth better than the untitled piece (above), a seemingly unfinished, undated/undateable canvas featuring a troika of figures including two unidentified personages – although one of those bears a rather uncanny likeness to Singapore’s eminent Minister Mentor – as well as a reproduction of Caravaggio’s version of David with the Head of Goliath in the Borghese gallery. The curator – I think – decided to augment the piece, such as it were: Oei projected video footage of the head of Goliath, said to be a self-portrait of Caravaggio, over its painted counterpart, a projection which assumed the angular contours of a four-sided canvas, thus imposing onto the real canvas a meta-painting of flickering light, with the subject matter of both – Goliath’s, or the artist’s head – meeting in a precisely calibrated position. One, an actual, three-dimensional object, a work sedimented in numerous layers of contextual, iconographic and semantic uncertainties; the other, a thing of light and shadow, insubstantial as the evacuated meanings behind the first. One, an obscure artist unknown in his time and now dead; the other, a curator-archeologist whose personal presence at the site of the first seems in equal parts excavation and intervention.
It’s all almost delectably confused.
Image of the day: an advertisement for Malaccan artist Charles Cham’s t-shirt enterprise, The Orangutan House.
Local Sing-Malaysian vernacular is all about the “lah” apparently, nevermind the entire plethora of other er, verbal add-ons.
Life’s like that lor.
Worth a check-out: Valentine Willie’s latest show, Wawasan 2020: The Malaysian Dream.
Wawasan takes as its jumping-off point Mahathir’s programmatic vision of Malaysia in the year 2020: a progressive, affluent, unified utopia, no longer “developing” but “developed” – to use an often ill-adjudicated prescription. The show presents a fairly diverse congregation of the country’s emerging generation of artists, a cross-section of imaginaries conjuring “their own future through the lens of the past, present and beyond, taking Malaysia’s plans for modernity as outlined in Wawasan 2020 (Vision 2020) … The premise being that by 2020 Malaysia would be a self sufficient industrialised nation that encompasses economic prosperity, social well being, world class education and political stability .” It “seeks to uncover how do [sic] artists feel about where Malaysia is going given the current socio-political landscape of the country. What are the concerns, anxieties, optimisms, and hopes for the future of Malaysia Boleh?”
The de-suturing, in other words, of faultlines running beneath the level of uncritically affirmative public discourse in Malaysia – the political, religious and racial fractures exposed by even the slightest social judders, so close to the surface of the everyday do they operate – constitutes the chief thematic thrust. Immediacy of expression seems to be key to the most compelling articulations here: Jalaini Abu Hassan’s imbrication of various gestures, materialities and referential orbits in The Prince and the Pauper; the excavation of social invisibility sedimented in squatter sub-culture by Eiffel Chong; Gan Chin Lee’s disrupted tableau limning the contours of various alterities; Anurendra Jegadeva’s iconographic mash-up of personal narratives and marginalized historical and political motifs; Sharon Chin’s installation dealing with outlawed texts, which invites the viewer’s participation and subsequently emits a flashing light and screeching noise, the resultant sensorial trauma evoking in a very visceral way the public histrionics attending the censored object and its perceived transgressions.
Other works seemed less cogent – or remained inadequately contextualized – but the show’s inspiration is laudable.
Wawasan 2020 runs at Valentine Willie Fine Art till 22 April.
Since Heman Chong’s having a show on right now (my review here) …… a recap of something else he did earlier this year. Plus, I have a massive backlog of badly-taken pictures – of shows I’ve seen – just sitting in my iPhoto folder, doing plenty of nuthin’.
This is Chong’s hilarious series, Obscenely Bad Guggenheim Joke, shown at Valentine Willie’s annual survey of Singapore art in August.
I think these are wasted in a gallery space, by the way. Humour requires an audience, and these posters (such as they are) need to be embedded in a public arena, where their sly, unexpected wit can find its natural niche as a subversive disruption of the lived everyday — and *not* as a monumental statement in and of itself, which the circumscription of a gallery display imposes.
Bit of trivia: Chong seems to hold the number ’7′ dear. The year 2017 here, the duration specified in his Calendars work (1,001 images = 77 years multiplied by 13 images per year) … Oblique references to his year of birth perhaps ?
You snigger, but a Johore Bahru incarnation of the Gug ? – it could happen.
Three words: Crystal Bridges Museum.
This site’s been pretty dead the last couple of months, hasn’t it ?
In my defense though, I’ve had a deadline or two, as well as certain er, bodily issues to contend with.
Anyways. Just to kick things off again, I thought I’d share this: local pioneer of conceptual art Cheo Chai Hiang is in the midst of preparing for his latest project, titled DON’T SIT ON ME (Moulding the Future of Pisang Goreng). The installation will consist of contributions from some hundred or so individuals – including a number of Cheo’s fellow artists – each involving a modified chair, and on each piece Chai Hiang himself will add a bronze pisang goreng sculpture, and a stained flooding mark. While I’m given to understand that the work is partially informed by a reading of Singaporean playwright Kuo Pao Kun’s Descendants of the Eunuch Admiral, its chief thematic thrust lies in, to quote the artist himself, “meaning-making through inter-textuality, translatability, the inventive use of language … explored via carnivalesque strategies.” The title was inspired by a piece of rather explicit graffiti found scrawled on a subway seat (above).
Sounds awesome, doesn’t it ? Picture it: a large-scale installation of an utter profusion of alien-looking furniture, chairs of every shape and size tweaked, altered, reshaped, revised, mutilated, metamorphosed, evolved; completely re-conceptualised in some cases and even perhaps transfigured, rendered incorporeal … A cacophonous, “carnivalesque” plenitude, each constitutive unit boasting an incongruous, gleaming bronze banana as testament to the work’s originary impulse in so prosaic and fundamental a fact as lewd graffiti.
The work was initially slated to open in Singapore, but – due to a glitch or two – will show sometime early next year in Malacca instead, after which it’ll travel overseas.
In the meantime, these are instructions for er, chair-modification:
1. Find a discarded broken chair or stool. 找一张破损的板凳或椅子。
2. Change it into a 5-legged chair/stool with 3 long and 2 short legs. 将它改成五只脚，三长两短。
3. Make sure that your chair/stool is able to stand freely, no matter how precarious it might appear. 只要能站立而不倒塌，样子稳不稳定却没关系。
4. Finally, you should be able to move the chair/stool from point A to point B with one hand and the object will remain free standing in one piece. 板凳或椅子改造之后，最好能轻易用一手将它移动位置，之后依旧固然竖立。
5. Your chair/stool can be of any shape, size or colour and as whacky as you fancy. You can either take a minimalist’s approach or go extremely excessive; avoid the obvious or make the obvious even more obvious!随心所欲去做，或因陋就简，或精致夸耀，一概请便。
And here are some of the results:
That’s it. Just a sneak preview.
I think the project’s still open to contributors. Interested parties may drop me a line at firstname.lastname@example.org; all e-mails will be forwarded to the artist.
Members of the local LGBT community – and beyond – would not be unfamiliar with Ouyang Wen Feng, the gay Sino-Malaysian pastor who was thrust into the limelight when he came out in a very public manner back in the mid 2000s.
You’ve got to give it to the guy: he’s Chinese, Christian and gay. Across the Straits of Johor, that’s three kinds of undesirable. He may as well be dead, as far as mainstream Malay-Muslim society is concerned.
But he’s not.
In fact, he’s living well in NY these days (the best revenge, as the maxim goes) — and planning to take full advantage of New York’s recently-enacted equal marriage law.
The full scoop from The Lede:
GAY MALAYSIAN PASTOR’S WEDDING PLANS STIR ANGER.
By J. David Goodman. Published August 16, 2011.
Government officials in Malaysia have expressed outrage over the plans of a prominent gay Malaysian to marry in New York — and celebrate the wedding back in his home country.
The Rev. Ouyang Wen Feng, a Chinese-Malaysian pastor who has lived in the United States since 1998, said on Tuesday that after he married his partner of roughly two years at the end of this month, the couple would travel to Malaysia for a wedding banquet, The Associated Press reported.
The move is likely to further inflame conservative officials in Malaysia, where Muslims are in the majority. Since the planned wedding in New York was announced last week, government officials and newspaper columnists have fumed that the union would harm Malaysian society.
“Day by day we see various attempts to destroy our value system and Pastor Ou is doing it in the open,” a columnist wrote in Utusan Malaysia, a conservative daily owned by the ruling party, according to a translation by the Web site the Malaysian Insider. The columnist added that Mr. Ouyang’s “attempt to break this value system to marry the same gender in this country has to be opposed. In fact the government has to act to block him.”
The country’s Islamic Affairs minister, Datuk Seri Jamil Khir Baharom, said on Sunday that “social problems” would arise if such “extreme human rights” were permitted. “I think it will encourage liberalism in Malaysia and this understanding is worrisome,” he told reporters.
The couple plan to wed in New York on Aug. 31 — the Malaysian independence day — but a date for the banquet in Malaysia has not been announced. New York legalized gay marriage this summer and began marrying same-sex couples in late July.
In 2006, Mr. Ouyang, who also goes by his birth name, Ngeo Boon Lin, became the first public figure in Malaysia to come out about his sexual orientation, according to a biography on the Web site of the Metropolitan Community Church, a mostly lesbian, gay, bisexual and transgender congregation in New York. In addition to his pastoral work, he is also a journalist and has written a column for the Sin Chew Daily, the largest Chinese-language paper in Malaysia.
But the Malaysian authorities have shown little tolerance for his message, or for public acceptance of homosexuality. Earlier this year, the country’s leading private radio broadcaster censored portions of Lady Gaga’s “Born This Way” because they were perceived to be offensive. “The issue of being gay, lesbian or (bisexual) is still considered as a ‘taboo’ by general Malaysians,” the broadcaster, AMP Radio Networks, said in a statement at the time.
Mr. Ouyang, 41, who grew up in a conservative Christian household in Malaysia and is currently traveling to Hong Kong to promote his book on homosexuality and Christianity, faces opposition from the country’s majority Muslim community as well as its Christian minority.
The National Evangelical Christian Fellowship, an umbrella organization of Malaysian churches, has opposed the planned union.
In 2007, Mr. Ouyang laid the groundwork for a church that would be accepting of openly gay congregants in the suburbs of Kuala Lumpur. Mr. Ouyang was ordained in the United States that year.
“For some of us, especially our gay brothers and sisters, we have experienced firsthand that Christianity has been used to persecute minorities,” Mr. Ouyang said during his first service in Malaysia in 2007, before calling on the roughly 80 gays and lesbians in attendance to “reclaim our faith and celebrate our sexuality.”
Despite stiff opposition, Mr. Ouyang has continued to push for greater rights for gay Malaysians. This month he called on gay Malaysians to come out, saying that discrimination by the Malaysian government was based on “ignorance” and that staying in the closet would “perpetuate prejudice.”
But to do so takes courage. A Malaysian man who came out in a YouTube video in December was forced to take down the video, “Saya gay, saya okay,” after he received violent threats. Seksualiti Merdeka, a Malaysian gay advocacy group that helped post the video, explained the decision to remove the video and lamented that “so far nobody in authority has denounced the threats of violence.”
In celebration of our Malaysian friends who yesterday braved an onslaught of institutional brutality to make their voices heard.
Bersih boleh !
Happy International Museum Day in advance !
IMD happens on May 18 of each year, and the theme for 2011 – I didn’t realize they had themes – is Museum and Memory.
Read more about it on the official IMD site.
As a personal tribute, I’ve complied a list of all the museums I’ve visited in my lifetime. While it looks fairly lengthy, I’m mostly reminded of how many of the great ones are still missing: the Louvre, the British Museum, the Tate, the Taipei National Palace Museum, the Getty …
Rubin Museum of Art (NYC)
Museum of Modern Art (NYC)
Brooklyn Museum (NYC)
Guggenheim Museum (NYC)
Asia Society Museum (NYC)
Whitney Museum (NYC)
Jewish Museum (NYC)
Japan Society Gallery (NYC)
Frick Collection (NYC)
The Noguchi Museum (NYC)
New Museum (NYC)
Neue Galerie (NYC) [Yuck ...]
Dia:Beacon (Beacon, NY)
The Newark Museum (Newark, NJ)
The Barnes Foundation (Lower Merion Township, PN)
Museum of Fine Arts, Boston (Boston, MA)
Isabella Stewart Gardner Museum (Boston, MA)
Arthur M. Sackler Museum, Harvard Art Museums (Cambridge, MA)
Fogg Museum, Harvard Art Museums (Cambridge, MA)
Art Institute of Chicago (Chicago, IL)
Museum of Contemporary Art, Chicago (Chicago, IL)
Smart Museum of Art, University of Chicago (Chicago, IL)
New Orleans Museum of Art (New Orleans, LA)
Museo Nacional de Antropología, National Museum of Anthropology (Mexico City)
Museo Casa de Leon Trotsky, Leon Trotsky House Museum (Mexico City)
Museo Frida Kahlo, Frida Kahlo Museum (Mexico City)
Museo de Arte Moderno, Museum of Modern Art (Mexico City)
Museo Nacional de Historia, National History Museum (Mexico City)
Museo Tamayo de Arte Contemporáneo, Tamayo Contemporary Art Museum (Mexico City)
Museo Nacional de Arte, National Museum of Art (Mexico City)
ArtScience Museum [Double yuck ..]
Muzium Negara, National Museum, Malaysia (Kula Lumpur)
Islamic Arts Museum Malaysia (Kuala Lumpur)
National Museum of Cambodia (Phnom Penh)
Tuol Sleng Genocide Museum (Phnom Penh)
Museum Sonobudoyo (Yogyakarta)
EAST & SOUTH ASIA
The Shanghai Museum. Image courtesy of this site. (Couldn’t locate some of my older pictures …)
Palace Museum, Forbidden City (Beijing)
National Museum of China (Beijing)
Beijing World Art Museum (Beijing)
Beijing Art Museum, Wanshou Temple (Beijing)
Shanghai Museum (Shanghai)
Shaanxi History Museum (Xi’an)
Xi’an Beilin Museum (Xi’an)
Henan Museum (Zhengzhou)
Yunnan Provincial Museum (Kunming)
National Museum, New Delhi (New Delhi)
CENTRAL & EASTERN EUROPE
Kunsthistoriches Museum, Museum of Fine Art (Vienna)
Österreichische Galerie Belvedere, Belvedere (Vienna)
Naturhistorisches Museum Wien, Museum of Natural History Vienna (Vienna)
Leopold Museum (Vienna)
Museum of Fine Arts (Budapest)
Mimara Museum (Zagreb)
Croatian Museum of Naïve Art (Zagreb)
+ numerous smaller galleries and museums along the historic Dalmatian Coast, the exact names of which now escape recollection …
And just what was the Lan Fang Republic 兰芳共和国 ?
According to promotional material for Lan Fang Chronicles: A Project by Choy Ka Fai, a brief gloss runs like this:
The Lan Fang Republic was the first democratic republic in South East Asia, set up by the Hakka Chinese in West Borneo. Founded by Luo Fang Bo in 1777, the Republic existed for 107 years with ten presidents until its reign came to an end with the Dutch occupation in 1884.
The Chinese first came to Borneo as gold miners and formed various clans grouped by the area of their origins. Originally known as Lan Fang Kongsi (Company), Luo Fang Bo united all the Hakkas in the area to form the Lan Fang Republic.
After the Dutch invasion, the descendents fled across the region to Sumatra, Kuala Lumpur and Singapore. Many scholars believe that one of the descendents later became the founding father of Singapore. While the Hakkas are a minority in Singapore, it is the Hakkas who played an important part in the establishment of Singapore as a cosmopolitan city-state today.
The show ran at 8Q in September last year for a brief month. I’ve been meaning to review it here, but other matters – like sleep and sloth – got in the way. First things first though: the seemingly offhanded factoid about founding fathers calls for some debunking. The deliberately imprecise terms in which the declaration is couched suggests the murkiness of its origins: “Many scholars believe …”, “ … one of the descendents became the founding father of Singapore.” (Which scholars? And why not just name this founder?) As every true blue Singaporean knows, the mantle of Founding Pater really belongs to only two individuals: Sir Stamford Raffles, who, according to the official PAP-espoused narrative, sailed into the isle of Singapura in 1819 to transform a somnolent Malay kampung into a thriving port-of-call for the British Empire; and, closer to home, our ex-Prime Minister himself, Mr. Lee Kuan Yew, whose credentials as the chief architect of the independent city-state of Singapore – from the unrelenting cleanliness to the booming economy to the proscription of gum, just to name a few things we’re renowned for these days – brooks no reservations. Common sense dictates that we have but, of course, one candidate who fits the bill. And nowhere does LKY ever suggest that he traces his lineage to the Lan Fang Republic, a fact that, knowing his oft-expressed pride in his roots, would have reared its head had even some semblance of veracity existed. Here, from the horse’s own mouth, is the (abbreviated) story of the Lee family’s provenance:
My family history in Singapore began with my paternal great-grandfather, Lee Bok Boon, a Hakka …… Lee Bok Boon was born in 1846 in the village of Tangxi in the Dabu prefecture of Guangdong …… My grandfather, Lee Hoon Leong – whom I addressed as Kung or “grandfather” in Chinese – was born in Singapore in 1871 …… My father was born in Semarang in 1903, in the Dutch East Indies.
Chua Kim Teng [LKY’s maternal grandfather] … was born in Singapore in 1865, into a Hokkien Chinese family that came from Malacca. … His first two wives had died and the third was my grandmother, Neo Ah Soon, a large, broad-shouldered Hakka from Pontianak in Dutch Borneo, who spoke the Hakka dialect and Indonesian Malay.
(From Lee Kuan Yew, The Singapore Story: Memoirs of Lee Kuan Yew [Singapore: Times Editions, 1998], pp. 26-7 and p. 29.)
The second bit about his maternal grandmother’s origins in Pontianak provides the one point for speculation. Short of irrefutable evidence one way or the other, it’s perfectly possible of course that Neo was descended from a member of the Lan Fang cohort – a likelihood that, however, as mentioned, seems rather dim in light of LKY’s pleasure in detailing the recipe of his genealogical soto.
Anyways. The project, as it’s dubbed, is really a multi-media exploration by a group of artists, headed by Choy, of the long-defunct Lan Fang Republic – an ethno-political entity based in the city of Mandor on the island of Borneo, founded by immigrant Hakkas, for immigrant Hakkas. Scant contemporary research in English exists on this bit of SE Asian history, apparently. (At least I came to the show knowing nothing.) The pamphlet provides the short blurb reproduced above, and a somewhat more involved account of the rise and fall of this little republic – which first saw the light of day as a kongsi, or a shareowners’ group – is available on the Asiawind website, which makes clear where that rumour about LKY’s roots came from. A check with Lynn Pan’s indispensible The Encyclopedia of the Chinese Overseas turns up a couple of brief mentions of Lan Fang, framed within discussions of the Hakka diaspora in Borneo and the main areas of Khek emigration like the Meixian and Dabu counties in Guangdong, China. (Personal aside: Like old man Lee, I too trace my paternal roots back to Dabu … yes I’m one of ‘em.)
Now why such an obscure slice of regional lore, you ask? According to the artists/organizers, “This project investigates the concept of ‘insignificant histories’, and its subtle parallels with the Singapore story. This research-based exploration will be presented in various contexts such as visual arts, theatre and film.” I like that first bit about recovering neglected narratives; any purported parallels with the “Singapore Story” though, probably requires greater elucidation. Modest in scope, the show occupied two galleries on the fourth floor of 8Q. In one room were the installations that comprise Insignificant Landscape (below), video documentation of a series of present-day sites in Mandor and in Meixian that were connected with the LFR and founder Luo Fang Bo; these ranged from the latter’s ancestral home and memorial building in the town of Shishan, China, to views of the Kapuas River and a “recycle [sic] gold mine field” in West Kalimantan, perhaps the historical setting of the republic’s headquarters. Projected onto a row of screens stretching out across the breadth of an entire wall, the effect is panoramic: the camera pans leisurely across the terrain, affording us a bird’s-eye perspective on these locales as they exist today in all their worn, dilapidated glory. As the label informs us, “The landscape is a witness to the erosion of historical significance as the mundane manifestations of life takes over. The revisits to these locations are attempts to create an impossible access to the past that can only be imagined today.”
Elsewhere, Chronicles of Disappearance is comprised of a series of artifacts, objects and installations