June 2023
VMAC Article
Portraits, through the camera-eye – Malaysian contemporary artists’ videos, Kok Siew Wai
A portrait shows us a representation of a person – their physical appearance, of course, but more fascinating is the aura and personality. The visual characteristics of the physical appearance allow us to distinguish one subject from another. Beyond this external identification is the exploration and deeper understanding of the subject’s underlying and even hidden qualities, as well as their interrelationships with other components. A film or video artist uses the ‘camera eye’ as an extension of the artist’s vision to show us the world as the artist experiences it. The camera is both subjective, as an artistic perspective, and objective, as a neutral recording device. How does the landscape of contemporary Malaysia look through the eyes of artists working with moving images? What are their stories? And how are they telling their stories?
As a developing country, Malaysia has undergone radical changes in its physical appearance over the past 30 years. If you left the country in the 1990s and have not returned since, the landscape you remember would be very different from what you see today, particularly in the major cities. While growth and progress are necessary, it takes careful planning and a mature mindset to keep up with such sweeping changes. Demonstrating the negative effects of incompetent urban planning, Ong Sau-Kai’s Plaza Rakyat (2018) uses 12 black and white photographs to construct an abstract video with rapid cuts and rhythmic sounds, showing the pictures of Plaza Rakyat, an abandoned development project since 1998, in the heart of metropolitan Kuala Lumpur, the capital city of Malaysia. Pow Lai-Xiang’s LOTUS . ELEPHANT (2012) shows a mother and son in gas masks wandering through a vast, apocalyptic, empty land, bringing a sombre message of environmental concern to the land they live in. Azmyl Yunor & A-Jun’s Kurangkan Maju (2018) is a slow-paced music video with a melancholic guitar solo and static shots to capture the streets of old shops and juxtapose them with the expansive highways in Klang, a city that was the capital of the state of Selangor in an earlier era before the rise of Kuala Lumpur. The title literally means ‘reduce development’ or ‘reduce moving forward’ in response to the country’s overdevelopment.
Fadly Sabran’s Karoog Kiha Nyep (2022), or ‘Fragile and Disappearing’, is a short documentary that highlights the concerns about preserving indigenous communities and the recently discovered cave paintings in Malaysia. The film was shot in Kinta Valley, Perak, a northern state in the Malaysian peninsula. British artist Andrew Stiff, who comes from a different place and context, has lived and worked in Malaysia for several years and is fascinated by the architecture of the cityscape. In Alor Setar Pulse (2015), Stiff uses images of colourful hand-painted sun blinds printed with advertisements for Chinese herbal medicines from the northwestern city of Alor Setar. He edited the images based on graphic elements and pulsating sound beats. Such hand-painted blinds are now rare due to modernisation. These works that centre on place express concerns about the loss of historical and cultural landscapes in modern Malaysia in the name of ‘progress’.
Rapid technological advancements have an impact not only on our physical living environment, but also on the augmented reality and virtual worlds, blurring the line between what is real and what is not. With so many social media platforms, apps, games, and AI advancements, do we not wonder if modern man prefers to live in the land of imagination rather than the physical world? In placetheearthbeneathyou* (2019), artists Sim Hoi-Ling and Yew Jun-Ken use found footage images from various online platforms, manipulating and distorting them to construct a glitch art video with noise and glimpses of chaos and disorientation, as if to question our mental states and perceptions in the virtual world. While Sim and Yew use glitches as imagery to demonstrate the confused virtual world, Tsa Meera and Talha K.K decided to participate in that world, portraying it as a protagonist using gaming technology. In their work, Checkpoint (2021), the discontented protagonist attempts to migrate to ‘another world’ (the virtual one?) in order to be somewhere ‘greater’. In their notes, the artists express frustrations caused by numerous technical problems in the creative process: ‘It was like sitting in a rocket ship, having more than a dozen buttons available… and you not being too sure which button to press first…’ They conclude the experience as ‘hard to balance so many technical aspects and still create an engaging story that was intimate… No wonder robots haven’t told any remarkable stories…’[1]
Artists are often sensitive beings, and they engage in self-exploration and self-reflection on personal and intimate issues as a kind of self-portrait through moving image. Safwan Salleh uses video diaries to make Night Without Light (2015) and KEMUBU (2019). Night Without Light is a short home video about his student life staying with friends in the same apartment with a warm and friendly atmosphere, accompanied by a monologue softly spoken by the artist. He continues to adopt the use of monologue in KEMUBU, a vertical video shot on a mobile phone, showing images of rural landscapes from train journeys. With a melancholic and nostalgic voiceover, Safwan uses humble personal expression to expose the negative effects of reckless development, such as deforestation and pollution, before his own and the camera’s eyes. Using written texts, Chloe Yap Mun-Ee’s (?)’s Gaze (2016) is a silent video that exposes parts of a couple’s bodies in intimate gestures and conversation to discuss issues in romantic relationships such as gender, sexuality and power relations. Both Salleh and Yap use personal stories to address important issues facing young Malaysians today. In addition to self-portraits, the artists use moving image to create portraits of other artists. Gan Siong-King is a visual artist specialising in painting and video; the ‘Chia Koon Talk’ series is part of a 10-year video essay project tentatively titled M.A.W (Malaysian Artist at Work). Chia Koon Talk #4: Words & Works (2014), is the fourth in a series of four short videos on the basics of Chinese calligraphy, narrated by Malaysian Chinese calligrapher Ong Chia-Koon and featuring his personal practice. The video adopts the documentary mode while incorporating interesting visual aesthetics, sounds and a charming humour in keeping with the personality of its subject, the calligrapher Chia-Koon.
Conceptual performance is a means for video artists to depict abstract thoughts and feelings, portraying an inner landscape of the psyche. Faris Nasir is a performing bubbleologist and digital artist, whose video Self Reflection (2019) uses images of bubble performances and body movements to illustrate life’s challenges and the healing process. Gogularaajan Rajendran’s short video Ode to Procrastination (2021) is about morbid procrastination, with repeated patterns performed by the actress with a touch of dark humour. Kok Siew-Wai uses repetition as an aesthetic concept in Face(s) (2002), a solo performance in which the artist gives herself a facial massage and looks directly into the camera. Five layers of video are superimposed, symbolising the five senses — eyes, nose, mouth, ears, and skin. The video plays with levels of opacity, creating an ever-changing facial expression as the video layers morph into each other, ebbing and flowing like waves. The fluidity of the movement suggests that human perceptions through the five senses are intimately connected and impermanent. It is a reality in flux.
Since the ‘birth of video art’ in Malaysia in 1989, videographers have begun to collaborate with artists from other disciplines, such as dancers.[2] In SSEGAR ANGIN (2023), sound and video artist Kamal Sabran collaborates with choreographer and dancer Aida Reza on creating a music video with contemporary dance movements inspired by the traditional Asian-Pacific Malay performances Main Puteri and Mak Yong. The video takes place in a natural setting by the water, where the musicians and dancers perform on small rocky islands as a designated ‘healing performance stage’. In Skin to Nature (2021), another choreographer and dancer, SueKi Yee, together with Carmen Cheah Kai-Wen, explore and contemplate the relationship between nature and modern humanity, which is becoming increasingly distant from its origins. The dance movements, cinematography, sets, costumes and make-up are carefully crafted to create an enigmatic video with substantial visual elements and enchanting natural sounds from nature.
As Malaysia is a multicultural, multilingual, multiracial and multi-faith country, the Malaysian authorities tend to portray themselves as a harmonious and diverse society of generosity and tolerance. In general, it is true that Malaysians live in a relatively peaceful environment compared to the diverse societies in some other countries. But insecurity, tension and conflict over differences do exist. Due to the unique sensitivity to mixed cultures in Malaysia and the peaceful nature of its people, such tensions are often explored by artists with a touch of humour. Songwriter and musician Azmyl Yunor charmingly demonstrates this when he collaborates with Alina Wong on the aesthetically D.I.Y. style music video Orang Kita (2021), which literally means ‘our people’. A Malay song with catchy but thoughtful lyrics, it explores cultural differences, national identity and the artist’s yearning for a truly diverse society that embraces difference without hypocrisy. Azmyl sings in the lyrics, ‘Who am I…. What are you? This is my final answer: I’m a HUMAN BEING!’ In Okui Lala’s Chinese Whisper (2018), the artist, the artist’s father, and her cousin’s aunt repeatedly recite a nursery rhyme in the Teochew dialect in split screens. While Malays are the largest ethnic group in Malaysia, the Chinese come second, making up 22.4% of the population. Chinese Malaysians’ immigration history dates back to the 19th century,[3] and Chinese Whisper presents this cultural history of the family and generations of Chinese people living in this country with refreshing simplicity, devoid of a loaded narrative.
Artists are not only skilled craftspeople but also critical thinkers. Chloe Yap Mun-Yee’s work often embodies a sense of self-reflection and critique, in this case, on the film medium and industry. Confessions of a Film Programmer (2018) was originally made as a ‘promotional video’, but has taken a slightly different direction, more artistic as it were. Yap interviewed several film curators and programmers, asking them to share their thoughts on cinema and programming. She has edited the video to weave the individual statements into a collective narrative that is both personal and objective, revealing what cinema means to them. Fissio (2018), a work by Taiwan-based Malaysian animation director Raito Low Jing-Yi, is a refreshing stop-motion animation that uses both analogue and digital cameras with colourful accessories to portray a ‘camera family’ of three and their family issues. While the ‘family drama’ itself is quite typical, the stop-motion animation is skilfully executed. The fact that analogue cameras are used, and that Low makes a point of this in the story, highlights the issue of preserving film history in both photography and filmmaking.
In Malaysia, video is a rather ‘young’ art form. As writers Adeline Ooi and Beverly Yong point out in their article for the KLEX 2013 festival, the first mixed media installation of sculpture and television monitor (with a performance by dancer Marion D’Cruz) in Malaysia was documented in 1989, with the work entitled A Passage Through Literacy at the National Art Gallery by visual artist Liew Kung-Yu. This marked the ‘birth of video as a medium in visual art’ in Malaysia.[4] Other prominent Malaysian visual artists such as Wong Hoy-Cheong and Hasnul J. Saidon also contributed to the early development of video art in the country. In 2009, Hasnul J. Saidon and Naguib Razak collaborated with Japanese video artists Hiroaki Sato and Katsuyuki Hattori on the MJVAX — Malaysia-Japan Video Art Exchange 2009/2010, which featured Malaysian artists such as Nur Hanim Khairuddin, Masnoor Ramli, Kamal Sabran, Kok Siew-Wai, and Sharon Chin. It was an exchange project where the Malaysian artists travelled to Japan to show their works, and vice versa. The exhibition in Malaysia was held at the National Art Gallery in Kuala Lumpur.[5]
In its formative years, video was often explored by Malaysian visual artists, who initially worked in traditional media such as painting and sculpture, as an alternative to being integrated into, and usually exhibited in, visual art galleries. By the turn of the century, a broader landscape and more diverse platforms had been established to showcase artists’ videos, experimental films, and audio-visual performances. Video artists from diverse backgrounds such as filmmaking, video art, animation, media studies, music, dance, theatre, performance came into the picture. With this expansion, the artists’ works of moving image have gone beyond the conventional setting of galleries and opened up new prospects.
In the mid-2000s, grassroots initiatives, alternative artists-run collectives, art spaces and D.I.Y. festivals started to emerge. They organised film and video screenings, small installations, visual and sonic performances, informal talks, and sharing sessions. Working outside the traditional visual art and academic structure and bureaucracy, these independent venues and initiatives enjoy greater freedom in terms of creative content and operation; however, they have limited resources and support. Amongst them is the Kuala Lumpur Experimental Film, Video & Music Festival (KLEX), founded in 2010. It had run ten iterations consecutively before the coronavirus pandemic broke out in 2020.[6] The annual festival is on hiatus at the moment, but it continues to run event series and special programmes locally and internationally. KLEX is possibly the longest running artist-run festival in Malaysia that is dedicated to experimental film, video, and music. All these grassroots initiatives have added colour, diversity and complexity to the landscape of moving image by Malaysian artists, which is worthy of further study in the future.
Endnotes:
- Meera, Tea & Talha KK. Artists’ notes on the creative process of Checkpoint. December, 2022.
- Ooi, Adeline & Beverly Yong. “Languages and Locations: Video in the Malaysian Art Context”. KLEX 2013 festival booklet. KLEX, 2013, pp. 8-15.
- Malaysian Chinese. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Malaysian_Chinese. Accessed 20 June 2023.
- Ooi, Adeline & Beverly Yong. “Languages and Locations: Video in the Malaysian Art Context”. KLEX 2013 festival booklet. KLEX, 2013, pp. 8-15.
- Saidon, Hasnul J. “Screening Malaysia Through Video Art (SMTVA). KLEX 2013 festival booklet.
KLEX, 2013, pp. 5-11. - KLEX festival. https://www.klexfestival.com/. Accessed 20 June 2023.
Editor’s note:
Videotage recently commissioned Kuala Lumpur-based artist and curator Kok Siew-Wai to assemble a collection of Malaysian video works. This addition marks the expansion of VMAC into Southeast Asian countries. Please see the VMAC catalogue on our website for more information on the works discussed here.
(The views and opinions expressed in this article published are those of the author/s. They do not necessarily represent the views of VMAC.)
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Twenty-six years later, the city faces another wave of migration. This time, it seems that the question of ‘going’ or ‘coming back’ is no longer relevant, as ‘leaving’ is a true farewell….
About VMAC Newsletter
VMAC, Videotage’s collection of video and media arts, is a witness to the development of video and media culture in Hong Kong over the past 35 years. Featuring artists from varied backgrounds, VMAC covers diverse genres including shorts, video essays, experimental films and animations. VMAC Newsletter, published on a bi-monthly basis, provides an up-to-date conversation on media arts and their preservation while highlighting the collection and its contextual materials.