Covid is over, now it’s business as usual.
By Ellen Lee
In 2022, art and commerce returned with a vengeance. The past years of lockdown feel like a distant memory now, its memory lingering only through the persistence of the face mask. If not for them, you wouldn’t know that Covid-19 existed at all; the topic hardly crops up in conversation anymore, much less in art. If 2020 saw art grappling with Covid and a world in emergency, and if 2021 saw art dealing with Covid’s aftereffects, then 2022 was the year that we finally came out the other end: where exhibitions no longer made any allusions to Covid at all, not even in passing.
2022 in ARTISTS AND EXHIBITIONS: More experimentation with new media and new approaches to exhibiting
This year, the emergence from lockdown saw artists pushing the boundaries of art exhibitions again—not by bringing them to the virtual world, as they did during the lockdown, but through more experiments with form. Opening up the year was Gan Siong King’s All the Time I Pray to Buddha, I Keep on Killing Mosquitoes in January at the newly-opened Petaling Jaya Performing Arts Centre, a video installation that melded video, diary, social investigation, and storytelling into a unique narrative form. Organised by the Japan Foundation, the exhibition comprised two video essays: The Koganecho Gesture, which spliced footage filmed during Gan’s residency in Yokohama, Japan in 2020 with personal reflections upon art and art-making, and CITIZEN, a collaborative film made with Makarim Salman about the immigrant experience in Japan. It was accompanied by Dear Bev, a lengthy email conversation between Gan and Beverly Yong of RogueArt that was published on Gan’s website.
A still from The Koganecho Gesture by Gan Siong King.
Another noteworthy exhibition “experience” was chi too’s It Will be Noisy, Messy, and Very Touchy-Feely at The Back Room in April. The artist filled up the tiny gallery with ten red air dancers all going at full speed, creating an experience that was chaotic, to say the least, but also oddly emotional. The air dancers got entangled with each other, bumped into visitors, knocked against the gallery’s walls and the tiny space vibrated with their power.
It Will Be Noisy, Messy, and Very Touchy-Feely by chi too at The Back Room. Photo credits: Kenta Chai.
Two group exhibitions this year stood out for the unique experiences they afforded to visitors: the inaugural ILHAM Art Show at ILHAM Gallery in May and the Jelajah group exhibition by Lostgens’ in August. The ILHAM Art Show was a packed spectacle, showing works by thirty contemporary artists from all across Malaysia and serving as a neat summary of trends and practices today. The institution’s fifth floor gallery space was filled to the brim with large, statement-making works and new, experimental forms of presentation. It featured a number of works in new media, including an AI-generated artwork by Eddie Wong, a video game by Chong Yan Chuah, and an interactive rock (its experience truly is as surreal as it sounds) by Tan Zi Hao. For a brief period of time, the show catapulted ILHAM to digital fame when it became a hotspot for TikTokkers and Instagrammers—the profusion of new media and the large scale of the works made the show extremely photogenic. This is perhaps not the response that the exhibiting artists hoped for, but it gave some insight into how art is consumed by the youth of today.
Jelajah, on the other hand, got to play with more ample amounts of space. Curated by the Lostgens’ art collective, Jelajah was an outdoor group exhibition in the KL Hokkien Cemetery which sits atop a hill overlooking Kuala Lumpur. The artworks were scattered across the cemetery grounds (the exhibition was accompanied by its own map to aid the journey) and the striking choice of site pushed the artists to think innovatively about how to work in tandem with the natural surroundings and history of the cemetery. Poodien constructed a bamboo portal over a small stream, while simple textile and paper installations by Ahlan and Emily Chow played upon the natural elements to “activate” their artworks.
Dulang by David Wong in the Jelajah exhibition organised by Lostgens’. Photo credits: Lostgens’.
In the same year as ILHAM’s survey of contemporary artists, the National Art Gallery finally reopened its doors with NUSA, a survey of modern and contemporary works from their collection. For the past two years, our nation’s leading art institution had been on an alarmingly long hiatus, allegedly due to renovation works. Walking through the exhibition, it’s unclear why the renovations took so long considering that the gallery spaces look the same, but the delight of getting to revisit such an extensive range of works across Malaysian art history (including a few hidden gems, like a series of works by Inauk Gullah, a little-known Sabahan artist) offsets the initial confusion. In another survey, the collector John Ang’s self-produced and self-funded exhibition, Splendours of the Malay World at KEN Gallery, was also remarkable for its scope and initiative. Splendours featured 650 textile pieces from across Southeast Asia from Ang’s own collection, and was the first local exhibition in recent memory to showcase such a diversity of regional textiles.
IMAGE: Splendours — https://www.instagram.com/p/ChD6RbcKDNM/
On the other end of the spectrum, we had Chang Yoong Chia’s A Leaf Through History at CULT Gallery in April, an exhibition that stood out this year for being more dense, old-fashioned, and serious in its pursuit of a historical theme. The exhibition was the first major showcase of Yoong Chia’s batik paintings, a medium that he uses as an entry point for excavating the history of rubber plantations in Malaysia.
Another artist who made a return this year with a new medium was Saiful Razman. Last year, Saiful made headlines when he won the regional prize in the 2021 UOB Painting of the Year award; he followed up the win with two showcases this year: Far/Near, a show of oil paintings at Rissim Contemporary and Tugu Atas Bukit, a video installation at the National Art Gallery. Both presented recent works that deviated from the medical gauze paintings that has characterised the artist’s recent practice, and which he won the UOB painting prize for.
2022 in GALLERIES: There sure are a lot of them!
The National Art Gallery wasn’t the only gallery that opened up this year. As soon as the masks were off, things started picking up pace with multiple new spaces and galleries opening up with fresh faces. At one point, it felt like there was a new gallery opening every week! New galleries in Kuala Lumpur include Galeri Puteh and Sareng, opened by alumni of Segaris Art Centre and TAKSU respectively. Meanwhile in Penang, there was the opening of Blank Canvas in Love Lane, a not-for-profit gallery that aims to show more experimental forms of art. In September, Blank Canvas partnered with A+ Works of Art (KL) to present Immediate Conception, a small exhibition that had the intriguing premise of featuring works that were made within a given time constraint of 24 hours.
IMAGE: Immediate Conception — https://www.instagram.com/p/CibizuwJCTy/
2022 in ART FAIRS AND EVENTS:
Returning to business as usual in a world suspicious of “business as usual”
In April, the People of Remarkable Talents (PORT) Perak organised a group of artists to represent Malaysia at the 59th Venice Biennale, thus reestablishing the country’s presence at the prestigious art show after our 2019 debut. Though Malaysia did not have a national pavilion this time around, a collateral event was organised at the Archivi della Misericordia. Titled Pera + Flora + Fauna, the showcase featured works by Azizan Paiman, Kamal Sabran, Kim Ng, Saiful Razman, and the Kapallorek and Projek Rabak collectives. Its curation was centred on indigenousness and the way specific indigenous identities are communicated to a global audience.
This loaded topic was chosen out of an awareness of “the global aestheticisation of notions of indigenousness”, an apparent reference to the way indigenous—and, I would add, Southeast Asian—identities are utilised to lend social relevance to these massive displays of glamour and wealth, and to give art the appearance of serving an “essential” social and political role. Pera + Flora + Fauna aimed to “re-imagine nature and Indigenousness in relation to ethics and aesthetics, questioning who owns nature and who owns the Indigenous history”, but was undermined in this its lack of indigenous artists in the line-up. For a show in such a far-flung region, it brought the already niche subject even further away from its context, becoming an example of the exact “aestheticisation of indigenousness” that it sought to challenge.
On the international level, the most talked-about art phenomenon of the year must have been ruangrupa’s curation of documenta fifteen and their brutal takedown over accusations of antisemitism. These overwrought accusations snowballed into a media fiasco for the prestigious international art event, culminating with the resignation of several of the event’s directors and a number of participating artists withdrawing their artworks in protest. It represented the challenges and pitfalls of translating local contexts to a global audience, and seemed to signal the end of the identity politics that has served to shield the rampant commercialism of the art world for the past decade or so.
Installation view of Pera + Flora + Fauna.
On a local level, big art fairs and events also made their return to the Malaysian art scene. Kuala Lumpur saw the return of two of Malaysia’s leading art fairs: Art Expo Malaysia and CIMB Art-ober. Art Expo Malaysia presented a massively reduced edition of the fair this year, featuring only twenty galleries (with no international names) and taking place in the fourth floor of GMBB mall instead of at its usual premises of MATRADE Centre. CIMB Art-ober, on the other hand, actually expanded its offerings this year to include a fashion showcase alongside its art fair at KEN Gallery in October.
In November, the multimedia projection-mapping collective Filamen revived its Immersio showcase (following its launch in 2017, and iterations in 2018 and 2019), a celebration of emerging artists working in new media. The latest instalment occupied the entire Muzium Telekom building in the heart of the city. Like the ILHAM Art Show, Immersio offered something new from traditional forms, and drew a massive crowd. The showcase featured names not typically seen in the commercial art circuit: artists, coders, and programmers working in the fields of light, space, and technology, even featuring a virtual reality experience produced by Motiofixo. It revealed a whole parallel world of creative engineering and coding happening right beneath our noses that hardly intersects with the commercial art sphere at all. Though not a great exhibition in terms of artistry (many of the works showcased engineering prowess but lacked narrative or clear intention), it’s always interesting to see the way art is interpreted by a different set of people, coming from different backgrounds and expertise.
Pamela Tan’s Tatu, one of the works featured in Immersio 2022 by Filamen. Photo credits: Eugene Kong.
One new and noteworthy art event that appeared on the scene this year was the Klang River Festival, produced by the team behind KongsiKL. It offered the experience of art and festivity on a scale that was more modest compared to the other fairs and festivals this year, but that made the festival all the more accomplished for being so. The festival blurred the lines between art, culture, heritage, and urban planning towards a more fluid notion of locality and creativity, in line with KongsiKL’s existing modes of working and thinking.
A still from Welcome to Kampung Radioaktif by Liew Seng Tat, featured in the Klang River Festival. Photo credits: Klang River Festival.
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In 2022, Malaysia’s art scene is all work and action. There’s never a dull moment or a weekend without plans. Covid appears to be over, and our faith in life and art have been renewed. (NFTs now seem like a distant mania, a weird blip in the radar.)
All across the country, new methods of creating and thinking are being introduced along with new artists who arrive bearing new forms, new mediums, and new approaches to exhibition-making. Many of these new trends have been informed in some part by the lockdown, whether that’s the itch to see something spectacular and make a loud statement after years of “duduk diam-diam di rumah”, or whether that’s the focus on the local and grassroots after years of doom and gloom in the news. Whatever the motivations are, Malaysia and its art scene appear more than ready to leave the past behind and plunge into the future.
Maybe we have entered a new Malaysia after all…
Cover photo: Installation view of Untitled by Rat Heist, produced for Jelajah, an outdoor group exhibition curated by Lostgens’ at the Kuala Lumpur Hokkien Cemetery. Photo credits: Ellen Lee
Ellen Lee is a writer based in Kuala Lumpur. She assists with operations at The Back Room gallery while pursuing writing on a freelance basis.