Personal Memories and Embodied Knowledge of Space and Place

ALIA SWASTIKA

Over the past five years, Yim Yen Sum has been exploring the history of houses or buildings in her works. She is fascinated by the shifting notions of the home/house or place/space across different historical narratives: under colonial influence, political contexts, natural disasters and changes of landscape, economic growth and other aspects. Yet, interestingly, Yen Sum expresses her curiosity on these issues from a personal standpoint, a standpoint seemingly unavoidable as a Chinese Malaysian woman who had grown up witnessing the rapid development of her surroundings. This specific way of seeing (and thinking) generates quite an interesting yet delicate point of view that represents the worldview of the artist. For me, her standpoint contributes a notable female gaze into the history of a city, and particularly to the intimacy and feelings attributed to the buildings.

In our previous conversations for her solo exhibition at A+ Works of Art, Threshold of Memoirs (2021), I recognized a powerful expression of feminine strength in her works. Instead of hiding away the feminine nature of her works and methods — since this quality is often perceived as being weak or submissive — Yen Sum confidently states her approach, comprising a feminine gaze and materiality. Her subjects are articulated with clear positionalities and therefore genuinely relate to her own experiences.

As late capitalism increasingly moves into the metaverse, we are forced to imagine a different understanding of space and our relationship with(in) it. The expansion of space into the non-physical conjures another meaning of reality. With the mixed and fluid boundary between the visible and invisible world, how do we keep the conversation across memories?

From her investigations on shop houses to the concept of the house as shelter (especially during the Covid pandemic), Yen Sum explores the blurring boundaries of private and public, of personal and social, of the visible and invisible through her choice of materials. The transparent strip fabric that she chooses describes the various critical questions that arise in learning about how a city changes and develops. The fabric is transparent, translucent. The fabric is vulnerable and delicate. The fabric transformed into thin and visible boundaries, that defines here and there, outsider and insider, you and them. The imagery of houses and landscapes, created with her embroidery machine that she displays in her performances (as in her solo exhibition in 2021), translates her memories and experiences into strong black lines. In these detailed works, the houses invite participants to look closely and consider the different textures, forms, and creatures, so that we could intimately relate our own memories into the experience of seeing and looking.

In my previous text, I refer to her choice of medium and technique as a feminine gaze: a subtle and sublime reflection of place/ space that expands into critical questions of urbanism, gentrification, historical amnesia, as well as a postcolonial situation. Rather than expressing those criticalities in direct ways, Yen Sum raised her female subjectivity with poetic metaphors defined by minimalist portrayals of city and landscape with a medium typically confined to “domestic” space. But this genuine approach, including her performance of sewing, reminded us of the importance of articulating memories and knowledge through bodily experience, to underline an intimate and personal point of view.

For Art Jakarta Gardens 2023, Yen Sum dedicates her works to her childhood memories in nineties Kuala Lumpur, relooking past histories of several areas that were affected by rapid development of the city. In her artist’s statement, she singles out her memory of Razak Mansion and her strong connections to this particular building. Razak Mansion was a low-cost housing development built in 1962 by Prime Minister Tun Abdul Razak to accommodate population migration. It was the last of the remaining iconic Kuala Lumpur government housing projects from the late fifties to sixties. The mansion was demolished to make way for new developments, Razak City Residences, as planned by Prime Minister, Najib Razak, who is son of Prime Minister Tun Abdul Razak. The once 658 residents of Razak Mansion were displaced from their homes when the demolition order was finalised.

“This triptych work is a reference to Razak Mansion, which was a place I often wandered around after school. Now, I return to it again and attempt to stitch together memories of my childhood playground. The inspiration behind the series, “The further you stand, the clearer you see”, come from memories of my primary school, SJK(C) Confucian. In fourth grade, I used to stay back at school because I took extra-curricular classes in computer graphics. Since I was there, I tended to play with my classmates who lived near the school after classes ended. Once, I went to my classmate’s house and found the walls interesting. Why are there so many holes in their wall? Some residents even stuffed the holes with their household items. These walls become their own storeroom, their shelves. My classmate’s mother could ‘spy’ on us through the hole of the wall but we from the ground hardly see her (Artist’s Statement, 2023)”.

Her reflections on these childhood memories are the bodily and invisible archives of her city’s histories, that maybe could not be traced from any archive centre or documentary. In the beginning, it seems like Yen Sum has a sense of nostalgia of how the building was a meaningful part of her childhood. But more and more, she breaks down the nostalgia to a critical fixation on the building’s iconic walls and holes. Can we write an architectural critique based on a child’s description of walls and holes? I think that is a hidden proposition offered by Yen Sum with her project.

In her study of gaze and architecture, Eva Illouz (2018) looked into the concept of voyeurism, or the pleasure of looking, borrowing from Freud’s term to describe our urban culture. She argues that it is so common in the urban environment, presented in various mediums (advertisement, cinema, photography, etc), that people are shared and exchange subject positions. Illouz then refers to Benjamin (1936) and Baudrillard (1970) in looking at how cities are abundant in reproductions of images. These concepts remain relevant today. The act of looking — peeping or spying — as acknowledged by Yen Sum herself, challenges the sensation of visual pleasure, or how public space creates a power contestation between seeing and being seen in an urban environment. The use of transparent materials then also changes the state of openness.

Where Nigel Whitely (2003) outlines how transparency is a complex concept involving honesty, democracy, accountability, legitimacy, surveillance, spectacle and virtuality, Yen Sum, using her fabric, stands in the thin lines of the state of openness and the right of privacy in order to highlight the contradictory nature between the two.

We might often drown in the rapid changing of space and place, so we might not remember all the places we’ve traversed, and are no longer able to recall all the physical changes happened to a building or to a site. But there are some intimacies and memories that we unconsciously select, that persist in our minds, carrying us to new understandings of our relationship to the place/building.

Every building is a collection of different memories and narratives, created by individuals who experienced the space with their own habitus and subjectivity, and this leads to various meanings of the buildings. These meanings and memories together create a new imagination, and I think Yen Sum had given her childhood memories a space to express a longing for an open playground in the city. This imaginative spirit enables her and her friends to embrace diversity instead of building segregated apartments with all their modern surveillance techniques. In Yen Sum’s nostalgic memory, the hole is also a form of surveillance that is more visible, whilst the new surveillance systems of today have developed sophistically to connect each other so they would find us in every dot and movement of our lives.

The Shade of Translucency underlines this possibility of a subtle thin border that could either connect us or divide us apart. The transparent fabric chosen by Yen Sum encourages visitors to peer into the small holes, throwing our gaze into the unknown situation. While seeing, the abstract images coming from various disruptions of our reality would lead us to a wandering imagination. This shifting from manual hole to machine surveillance proposes the shade of our lives, the blurring territories of public and domestic, of outsider and insider, and how the human is objectified to dots of digital data and algorithms.

Alia Swastika is a curator and writer based in Yogyakarta, Indonesia. She is now Director of Biennale Jogja Foundation, where she served for curator in previous editions. In 2007–2018 she was the Program Director for Ark Galerie in Jakarta and Yogyakarta, then she transformed the platform to a farming and studio based residency in a village in Yogyakarta.