10,000 Mosquito Hearts was May Lyn’s attempt at visualising the incredible requests made by the legendary Puteri Gunung Ledang in exchange for her hand in marriage by Sultan Mahmud Shah. Among the requests: 7 trays of mosquito hearts. What would a mosquito heart look like, how would you go about procuring one (let alone 7 trays’ worth), and, having achieved that, what would you even do with them?
If the story took place now, it would parallel the same excessive, selfish, and ruinous demands that modern development places on our land — such demands as those that caused the flooding of May Lyn’s studio, or the weeks of haze in the middle of this year.
In other “floods”, Balai Seni Negara’s Bakat Muda Sezaman (“Young Contemporaries”) exhibition was probably the most discussed event in Malaysian art this year — for all the wrong reasons.
The exhibition happened concurrently with the Leonardo da Vinci Opera Omnia exhibition, which flooded Balai with an unprecedented number of visitors. The spillover into the Bakat Muda Sezaman exhibition led to various damages and even a theft as visitors flouted gallery rules by touching, sitting, and stepping on artworks for the sake of selfies.
As the images of the selfies and of the damaged artworks circulated around social media and mainstream news sites, it unleashed a second flood in the form of Internet backlash. Some commentators recommended that Balai should install more guards or CCTV cameras to monitor the space better, while others scolded the Instagram culture vultures for failing to give art its due respect. The fiasco gained the exhibition its reputation, more so than the artworks.