The blue lotus 10

Lotus

(Bonus) Issue 10 2017

The Blue

Arts Magazine

in this issue Chong Kok Choon Chin Wan Kee Kexin Zhang SC Suman Mohamed Zakaria Soltan Chrissie Westgate James Ethos Klaus 1

Lotus The Blue

Arts Magazine

The Blue Lotus remains a wholly independent magazine, free from favour and faction.

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The Blue Lotus Arts Magazine is an entirely free and non-associated publication concerned with bringing Asia to the world, and the world to Asia

malaysian institute of art 1967 - 2017

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inside....

6 Editorial

Thoughts on the current issue

by the Founding Editor

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Journey 50 Malaysian Institute of Art (MIA) turns 50

20 Lost Souls

Photography by Chong Kok Choon (MIA graduate)

30 Sculpturing is Meditative

Chin Wan Kee (MIA graduate)

42 Awakening of Love

Exhibition with curator Vikki Ho (MIA graduate)

58 My 3 Kingdoms Artist Kexin Zhang, galleryist Warren Tan (MIA graduate)

72 KL Biennale 2017

1st Kuala Lumpur Biennale

100 The Art of Mithila

S.C.Suman 114 Mohamed Zakaria Soltan

Digital Pharaoh

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Front cover; Man with the Orange Beard, Chrissie Westgate

(Bonus) Issue 10, 2017

126 Tales of India

Chrissie Westgate Photography

140 Reflections from my Heart

Cheung Pooi Yip solo exhibition

150 Raw Malaysia

Photography

106 A Taste of James

Colour sketches by James Ethos Klaus

Malaysian artist Honey Khor

The Blue Lotus Editor Martin Bradley

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Lotus Welcome to

The Blue Lotus Arts Magazine.

September This issue marks is a bonus. the end Too of much Summer. wasThe happening, days begin to especially change, and in with Malaysia, it our forthoughts. me to ignore.

This fresh Hence issue of The an extraordinary Blue Lotus reveals issue,spiritual between paintings issues, for from your India, Pop Art from Japan, delectation fish from and Singapore delight. and Surrealism This year hails thefrom 50thCambodia.

Anniversary of the founding ofThere the Malaysian are Amazing Institute digital of paintings Art, and the from first a young Kuala Lumpur Indian painter (KL) Biennale. living inThere the Middle are also East, intriguing and paintings works from fromEgypt, one of Singapore Malaysia'sand masters, Nepal,as sowell sit back, as buns relax, from and the Chinese diaspora and enjoy an insight into Malaysian food.

The Blue Lotus is a platform for international cooperation, aiming bring creative Asia to the The Blue Lotus is atoplatform for international cooperation, world, and aiming the to creative bring creative world toAsia Asia.to the world, and the creative world to Asia.

Now read on

Now read on Martin Bradley

Martin (FoundingBradley Editor) https://www.facebook.com/ (Founding Editor) bluelotusartsmagazine/

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Xin Tang old town, China

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MI M A L AYS I A N I N S T I T U T E O F A RT When Malaysia and Singapore separated, in 1965, potential students for the (well established) Nanyang Academy of Fine Art, now in another country Singapore, found difficulties in attending what was then the only reputable local school of art.

Coming to Malaysia's aid, was Chung Chen Sun. Chung was born in Malacca and was also a graduate of the Nanyang Academy of Fine Art. Two years after that potential art school dilemma, Chung Chen Sun opened the doors to his Malaysian Institute of Art (MIA), in 1967.

It is notable that MIA began,

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IA and continues, with some of the best creative minds in Malaysia.

MIA has produced a remarkable coterie of Fine Artists, of all races, as well as harbouring tutors/ lecturers who lead their fields in a variety of creative endeavours including painting, print making, ceramics, ink and brush painting, dance, song and music.

This year MIA celebrates half a century.

'Journey 50' is an exhibition created from the works of the Institute's alumni, while 'Legacy and Beyond' is a gala dinner held in honour and celebration of Malaysia's first school of art, now turning 50.

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Sivarajah Natarajan (left)

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Artist Honey Khor with MIA founder Chung Chen Sun

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Artist Honey Khor with Malaysian premiere dancer Ramli Ibrahim

'Journey 50' is an exhibition created from the works of the Institute's alumni, while 'Legacy and Beyond' is a gala dinner held in honour and celebration of Malaysia's first school of art, now turning 50.

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Artist Honey Khor with her artwork

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TBL Editor Martin Bradley

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Lost Souls 7

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Lost Souls 5

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Lost Souls 24

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Lost Souls 23

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Lost Souls 14

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chong kok choon Chong Kok Choon is a Kuala Lumpur based photographer.

He graduated from the Malaysian Institute of Art (MIA) back in 1996 and has previously participated in various group shows locally. He was the former Art Director of Art Square in Kuala Lumpur, Malaysia before he decided to embark full-time into professional photography in 2011. His works art mostly in large format.

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Lost Souls 12

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Sculpturing is

Meditative Works by chin wan kee

While Kuala Lumpur’s first art Biennale (2017) opens its doors to an inquisitive audience, the doors are beginning to close on an excellent exhibition of bronze figurines by Malaysian Institute of Art graduate Chin Wan Kee, and Senior lecturer at Tunku Abdul Rahman University.

The exhibition ‘Sculpturing is Meditative’, by Chin Wan Kee, at the National Art Gallery in Kuala Lumpur, at first glance seems the very opposite of traditional concepts of meditation. In meditation, one might presume an act of stillness, serene calmness, not the effervescent dynamism and vibrance of Chin’s figurines which erupt into graceful dances of shadow and light. Everywhere in that gallery the stuff of myth and dreams are narrated. Stories are whispered between the darkness of shadow and the traditional whiteness of the cube gallery.

The intrinsically meditative nature of Chin’s approach to his art seems embedded within art’s therapeutic embrace. It is not therapy, as such, but, perhaps, a mindful and spiritual ‘Focussing’ of the inner man upon the task he has set himself (as set out by American psychologist and philosopher Eugene Gendlin, in 1978). It is somewhat Buddhist in approach.

Creating works of art, e.g. sculpturing, is an immersive process from beginning to completion. The mind must be focussed not just on concept, idea, structure and process but on the bringing together of the disparate elements within that act of creation, its completion, and the happy accidents along the path to the work’s fruition. The British artist Francis Bacon had this to say about happy accidents…

‘In my case all painting... is an accident. I foresee it and yet I hardly ever carry it out as I foresee it. It transforms itself by the actual paint. I don't in fact know very often what the paint will do, and it does many things which are very much better than I could make it do.’

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Dreamer

However, Chin’s sculptures, in their own acts of being, become objects for meditation, as well as by-products of meditation. Chin’s figurine ‘Pregnantly’ (his small bronze from 1991), is holding our, the visitors’s, anticipations as we enter the gallery, expectant, full of our own subjective imaginings. These imaginings become reconfigured upon espying Chin’s wonders of solidified Chagallian dreams, his hints of Picasso’s Minotaurs and that torn, earth-bound, motif of a doomed Icarus. To this aged critic, Chin’s works seem to re-imagine European artists like Salvador Dalí, Pablo Picasso, Marc Chagall and the British artist Michael Ayrton. It is with the memory of Aryton’s acute renderings of the Greek mythos, of the doomed Icarus and his father Daedalus, that brings with it the insights into Chin’s intimations of ancient Greece, but resurrected here, within Ptolemy’s Golden Chersonese.

Chin, in his objects for meditation, be they derived from Cartesian (deus ex machina or cogito ergo sum) or Aurelian discourses, has make solid a plethora of man’s philosophical and psychoanalytical representations.

Symbols, from birds and crescent moons to Dalíesque spindly-legged horses, grab our attention and lead us to smaller human figures which portray both the dance and the stillness of everyday life. This ‘glance’ is given through Chin’s metaphysical frames, and actual (bronze) frames, in works like ‘The Perplexed Soul’, 2014.

It is, perhaps, an ambiguity to talk about stillness and dynamism together, and yet good sculpture does just that. In the perpetual ‘frozenness’ of Chin’s meditative moments, caught forever in a Heideggerian ‘augenblick’ (or brief moment in time), the artist simultaneously presents the beauty of movement within the context of serenity, of a calm quietude . Action becomes stilled. Yet our eyes and minds are also pregnant with anticipation of the next moment, and the next in perpetuity. The bewinged ‘Icarus’ bronze (Dreamer, 2016) sets off to follow his dreams but, as his father Daedalus has warned, he mustn’t fly too close to the sun of his imaginings, lest he fall.

In the quieter moments of Chin’s ‘Beyond mind and the words series’, we see a laying bronze figure (A Book with ‘TRUTH’, 2007), holding a book. One side the book is inscribed with ‘TH’. A bird sits on the reader’s right knee. Chin appears to use birds as symbols of freedom within his figurines. It is natural to assume that the figure laying down may be reading about the concept of freedom, or escaping through the act of reading, hence achieving a form of freedom of his mind or, alternatively, 31

looks not at the book, but beyond to his unseen cage, and aches for his freedom, provoked by the book.

In Chin’s catalogue, which accompanies the exhibition, the aforementioned Dalíesque spindly-legged horse (Wisdom, 2015, page 59), comes with the note ‘Wisdom is not dependent on the depth of your knowledge’. It is a common expression, perhaps rooted in Marcus Aurelius talking about the arrogance of supposed knowledge. In this bronze, Chin has a small man atop a golden horse with elongated legs.

The seated man is, quite literally, looking backward instead of forward.

Another man, below, seems perplexed with the action as he spread his hands, maybe shrugs. A bird flies from between the horses legs. The man is on his ‘high horse’, which in common parlance (derived from England circa 1380) means being in a position of power, remote and proud.

In modern English being on a ‘high horse’ is now a term of derision.

Chin’s seated figure is bent headed, thoughtful, if not woeful, perhaps in debate with the man standing. Freedom seems to be escaping the seated man, even though his haughtiness has seen to have dissipated. He has knowledge, but has been unable to use it wisely.

Much of Chin’s work is allegorical or metaphorical. It is steeped in mythos and ancient wisdoms. Chin’s narrative structures speak loud and clear from thoughtful bronzes, which are both by-products of his meditative approach to his art, and objects of mindfulness and are meditations in themselves. There is motion is Chin’s dialogues/narratives inherent in those enrapturing works, physical motion, frozen motion, caught within a series of Heideggerian ‘augenblicks’ as frozen moments.

Transporter

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A Conversation with Freedom

Dreamer

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Asking for the Moon

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In many respects, the show at Kuala Lumpur’s National Art Gallery is a retrospective, spanning twenty years (1997 - 2017) of the artist’s working life. They are, naturally, selected works, chosen to reveal the creativity of this master craftsman and to suit the gallery they are in. One benefit of a smaller, more intimate, gallery, is that light may be manipulated sufficiently to add the dimension of shadow play upon the walls, as it is for Chin’s works in this gallery, which is splendidly effect in revealing Chin’s meditative movement(s).

Yin-Yang Obsessions

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The Enlightenment

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A Conversation with Freedom

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Duality

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Choices

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Anticipated Cheers

The Host of Soul

The Followers

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Mother and Son, sculpture, by Zhu Qingtang

‘Awakening of Love; The Female Figures as Subjects in Art’, It is naive, perhaps, to believe that I could render justice to anywhere near the feeling one gets when visiting this exhibition. I cannot do the exhibition justice, for there are so many splendid worlds of art on show, and there is not time enough to go into the detail which would be needed to adequately review this year’s annual undertaking of an institution which takes both ‘Awakening’ and ‘Education’ seriously enough to want to impart both to citizens of this country. Thankfully, Soka Gakkai Malaysia has made a small, handy, book available, giving valuable insights into the exhibition, amidst a selection of images taken from the exhibition.

This intriguing exhibition - ‘Awakening of Love; The Female Figures as Subjects in Art’, currently running at Soka Gakkai Malaysia (in the Hong Wen Exhibition Hall) until 10th December 2017, develops along four main themes. They are - Myths and Legends and the concept of nobility (1), Motherly Love, and nurture (2), Devotion and Passion (3) and Individual Uniqueness, or the ‘true self ’ (4). It is a large scope, for some daunting, but is skilfully accomplished through displaying some fifty two artworks, taken from the Soka Gakkai massive collection of art, in various mediums from ink on Xuen paper paintings to varieties of sculpture in wood and other materials.

As well as being an exercise in theme (Awakening of Love), the exhibition successfully reminds its public of the ability of Soka Gakkai to draw upon its collection to produce such a wide variety of stunning, and thought provoking, artworks. This is, or rather should be, the purpose of huge collections of art, to assist we, the general public, in becoming more familiar with artworks, and artists, aided by thoughtful presentations and knowledgeable curation headed, in this instance, by a Malaysian Institute of Art graduate.

Being (practically) a life long admirer of the works of Salvador Dalí, 43

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Snuggle, sculpture, by Zhu Qingtang

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Ha Mulan ink on paper, by Chen Yanning

Wang Zhaojun ink on paper, by Huang Yao

it would have been no surprise had I rushed to gawp at his ‘Venus with Drawers’ a small, pale blue ‘Pâte-de-Cristal and silver sculpture, which was standing towards the entrance to the exhibition. I did not rush to that Dalí. Instead, my attention was taken by two ink on Xuan (or Shuen) paper hangings, their intricacies, their similarities and their differences, and the real beginning of the show.

It is entirely appropriate that an exhibition enquiring into ‘Female Figures as Subject in Art’, within a Chinese setting, reveals (mostly) artists of the Chinese diaspora. This remind us of the differences between our cultures and notions of beauty (inner and outer), by firstly presenting ‘Western’ idealisations of the female form, encapsulated in notions of the Venus/Aphrodite mythos (Arman and Dalí), then countering these with a more traditional Chinese mythos with its materials and subjects, leading, naturally, into Eastern artists drawing from their knowledge of Western materials to depict their Easterness.

To the left is ‘Hua Mulan’ by Chen Yanning, an ink and colour on Xuan paper (1987) painting, the other ‘Wang Zhaojun’ by Huang Yao, is another ink and colour on Xuan paper (1982). The character Hua Mulan, (known to many through the Disney animation Mulan) appears in the ‘Ballard of Mulan’ (from the fifth or sixth century AD), seen written on the upper part of Chen Yanning’s ink painting. A daughter, skilled in the martial arts, disguises her gender and takes her father’s place in battle, fighting twelve years as a man. Alternatively Wang Zhaojun (also known as Wang Qiang) has come to symbolise physical beauty, as well as a spirit of goodwill bridging different cultures. She is dressed in red, holds aloft the Chinese musical instrument, a Pipa, and rides a camel.

Her epic journey to Xiong Nu, her growth from maid of honour to wife of a king, her personal sacrifice, her trials and tribulations are marks of her, and our, tenacity and fortitude. Though both paintings are of a similar material, the styles vary enormously. Mulan is painted as strong yet demure, her face almost angelic and detailed. Wang Zhaojun, astride 47

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Confident Girl, by Bob Yan

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Sun - Mother by Li Zijian

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her camel, is more cartoonish with a very loose Chinese calligraphy suiting the needs of the illustration.

The exhibition is full of surprises. In completely different style and materials from those already mentioned, Li Zijian’s ‘Sun Mother’ at 164 by 264cm is one of the larger works gracing this exhibition. We stood before it, knowing that the artist Li Zijian hails from Shaoyang City, Hunan, China and, in the year this artwork was painted (2000) was engaged in a world tour called ‘Humanity and Love: Li Zi Jian World Tour’, which touched Malaysia too. ‘Sun Mother’ is part of the artist’s quasi-realist oeuvre which includes scenes of Tibet, shepherds high in the mountains, and portraits like that of Secretary-General Kofi Annan, from the United Nations. I was particularly drawn to this painting, not just because of its size, but its subject matter and use of the artist’s composition to direct the audience’s eye to one standing figure who’s eyes seem to follow the viewer around the room.

That subject’s serene face is realistically painted, while others of the grouping remain half finished, in a painterly style. From her face, the viewer notices that other areas of the large canvas are either detailed or roughly painted.

We are led, from her face, across to the left hand side of the canvas where our attention is caught by bushes of red hibiscus flowers, called ‘Bunga Raya’ in Malaysia, (the national flower). Following a northern track from that bush we are led into the green splendiferous idyll which is the Malaysian pastoral countryside. Various tones of yellow catch the sunlight on the costumes of young women.

They are enjoying each other’s company, and are evidently rejoicing in the company of their children too. The whole is reminiscent of various scenes from Jules Breton’s paintings of women working in the rural French countryside, but with an emphasis on harmony and the delight in the company of women.

Further around the exhibition hall, ‘Loving Me, Loving You’ (2014), is an oil on canvas by Nanyang Academy of Fine Arts, Singapore, graduate Heng How Lin. Heng

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capitalises on his previous, tender, ‘Mother and Child’ series. The artist gravitates to warm, earthly colours to depict the natural love a parent has for a child. It seems entirely natural that Heng, in his four decades as an artist, should graduate to a more painterly artistic stance which seeks to involve his viewer more within the embrace of his work.

Like his ‘Mother and Child’ (2014), in ‘Loving Me, Loving You’ Heng awakens latent energies within us which enmeshes with closeness, love and the embraced play between parents and children. It is a form of love which the Ancient Greeks understood, for they named it ‘Storge’. It is familial love, the automatic, natural, and life long bonding between children and parents. In his painting, Heng denotes the vibrance of that instantaneous movement of picking up children, encountering tender embraces, demonstrating that that utter closeness (of the parent child relationship) is, and can be, like no other. With the painterly ‘movement’ in ‘Loving Me, Loving You’ there is the beginning of the feeling of Pablo Picasso’s ‘Trois femmes’ (1908) or distant echoes of Boccioni’s Italian futurism, with all that canvas movement stopping short of losing the subject within Abstract Expressionism.

And so, back to that small Dalí, the ‘Venus with Drawer’ (La vénus aux tiroirs blue - Daum) dated 1988 and made from crystal, standing only 43 cm tall. The Daum website tells us that ‘Pâte de cristal is a rare and ancient glassmaking technique, which dates back to 5000 bc (pieces have been found in the tombs of pharaohs).in 1900 Daum rediscovered this technique that had been long forgotten, then further developed it in 1968.

The process of melting glass coupled with the lost wax technique that Daum has developed, ensures a perfect reproduction of the original piece just as the artist had imagined it. today, Daum is the only crystal maker in the world able to produce this exceptional material so perfectly. Pâte de cristal is a mutable substance, which has translated every whim of the imagination of the master glass makers for over a century, in this way, no two pieces are identical, because the fragments of groisil blend and merge at will as the crystal melts.’

Dalí has mischievously titled his piece ‘Venus with Drawers’, after the name of the original statue ‘Venus de Milo’, which is itself a misnomer. The original statue is not of ‘Venus’ but of Aphrodite, for it is ancient Greek,

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Venus with Drawers, by Salvador DalĂ­

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La maternitĂŠ, crystal, by Catherine Lorain

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not Roman, and was created by Alexandros of Antioch, then found on the Greek island of Melos, in 1820. Throughout his lifetime, Dalí had been fascinated with the Aphrodite/Venus mythos, right from his earliest experience of making a clay study of the Venus de Milo as a child to his various ‘Venus’ incarnations include sketches dating back to 1934 and a half-sized plaster statue, made in 1936, replete with drawers and pom poms. In one drawing (Drawers of Memory, 1965) we are awakened to the concept of drawers as memory, hidden secrets. Perhaps awaiting an awakening.

I have teased with a small selection from the exhibition, in the hope that these words might encourage you, the potential viewer, to visit.

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Katherine Chui

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Vikki Ho

Honey Khor

Martin Bradley

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The Bird,Yogyakarta's 2

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Ra

Dialogue with OHD,You Can Touch Me, 2016, Performance Installation

Caging Desire "The bird should be allowed to fly, but only in the cage. If there is no cage, the bird will escape.” Chen Yun (God father of China’s "Bird Cage Economics”) In 1986, Chinese economist Chen Yun explained his economic theory thusly…

‘The enlivening of the economy is permitted under the guidance of (state) planning, and must not overstep the guidance of planning. This is like the relationship between a bird and its cage, The bird must not be held tightly in the hand or it will die, It should fly, but only within the cage; without the cage, it will just fly away. Naturally the size of the cage has to be appropriate...[and] must be adjusted frequently.'

(Chen, 1986, p. 287; quoted in Li & Lok, 1995, p. 290).

In the very heart of Kuala Lumpur, Warren Art Gallery presents the recent works of Chinese artist Kexin Zhang. Zhang was born in 1957, in Harbin, China, but has travelled widely, far from the land of his birth.

In Zhang’s Kuala Lumpur exhibition, ’My 3 Kingdoms: Contemporary Art by Kexin Zhang’, the audience is presented with an array of Zhang’s more recent works, some on canvas, some ink on rice paper, some ink on silk, as well as a small collection of intriguing wood carvings.

The notion of ‘3 Kingdoms’ hails from the Chinese ‘Three Kingdoms Period (between 220 and 280) when Wei, Shu and Wu states warred against each other for overall supremacy. In his 14th century novel ‘Romance of the Three Kingdoms’ Luo Guanzgong wrote about those conflicts, legends, magic, and morality which formed both history and 62

Model Lotte-Tarp by Werner Bok

aoul Ubac, Masson Model, 1938

kelberg, head in birdcage, 1965

story towards the end of the Han dynasty. There is also some referencing to Chen Shou's ‘Records of the Three Kingdoms’, within Zhang’s artworks as presented.

Zhang reinterprets the concept of ‘3 Kingdoms’ through his personal experience of dwelling in three countries, Beijing (China), Jakarta (Indonesia) and Bangkok (Thailand). He is a self-proclaimed ‘nomad’.

Despite Zhang’s notional freedom to travel, and his proclaimed nomadic nature, he constantly depicts himself with his head inside a birdcage, as if bounded by its constraints.

In a black and white photograph, in the inside page of the ‘3 Kingdoms’ exhibition catalogue, Zhang is pictured with his head inside a birdcage, replete with live sparrows. Two pages later a similar image occurs on page 3, this time in colour, while bottom left runs the legend ‘The Bird, Yogyakarta’s 1’, it is dated 2015. On page 4 there is yet another image of the artist, in black and white, in a birdcage, titled ‘The Bird, Yogyakarta’s 2, again taken in 2015, and the ‘head in a birdcage’ becomes a central motif for the exhibition. That motif is no mere whimsey, no empty gesture but featuring constantly within the exhibition. Zhang’s notion of being in a birdcage had already become a performance installation (‘You Can Touch Me’, 2016), part of the main theme for the launch of that year’s exhibition.

In that Warren Art Gallery exhibition, one large (96cm by 90cm) multi-narrative ink on rice paper painting,‘View Spot’, draws our attention to a figure dressed in a white gown, flailing his arms. That figure has a Chinese-style birdcage upon his head, a similar figure is seen (bottom centre) in the ink on silk painting, ‘Faith, The Bird’ (152cm by 113cm) looking furtively around. The figure is, of course, Kexin Zhang; the birdcage may be seen to represent a notion of Chen Yun’s limitations of the individual, within a Chinese Communist society. It is a society where people are free but only within certain, malleable, limits. But I want to nomadically explore another interpretation.

Other paintings in Warren Art Gallery, incorporate the artist within his works, indicated in ‘Farewell the Lonely Island’, ’From Bangkok to Beijing’ and ‘Looking for the Spiritual Home’. Zhang becomes the chief character, as well as author, of his narratives. Zhang is very much the ‘My’ or me/I in his ‘My 3 Kingdoms’.

The Catalan painter Salvador Dalí had, narcissistically, placed his own image into his paintings, mixing the dream of Dalí with reality of Dalí in his Surrealist fashion. Zhang, alternatively, poignantly reminds his audience whom the paintings are about, giving his audience indications to the predicaments he finds himself, and his societies, in.

Rene Magritte, in 1937, painted ‘The Therapist’, where a man’s whole upper torso and head are a birdcage. In 1938, Raoul Ubac (Belgic painter, sculptor, photographer and engraver), had created ‘Mannequin dressed

by Andre Masson, Exposition Internationale du Surrealisme’. A naked mannikin, breasts exposed, has her head caged in a wickerwork cage, her mouth bound with towelling and a flower over her lips. She is exposed and must remain silent, unable to object to her objectification.

In 1965, Salvador Dalí had persuaded Danish actress, Lotte Tarp, to be photographed by Werner Bokelberg, at Dalí’s home in Port Lligat, Spain, with a four tier birdcage on her head. Just seven years later, in 1972, at Marie-Hélène Rothschild’s infamous Surrealist Ball, just outside of Paris, the actress Audrey Hepburn arrived with her head in a wickerwork birdcage filled with token ‘birds’.

In many aspects the head in a birdcage has become a trope. Surreal 63

Xin nuxing (New Woman), Ruan Lingyu caged, 1934

images of people with their heads in birdcages is not new. Similar images hail back before Surrealist imagery, back to monstrous devices such as the medieval ‘Scold’s Bridle’, essentially a cage with a mouthpiece which prevented talkative women from talking. The most gruesome is the public death exhibiting ‘Gibbet’ - a full body, metal, cage where criminals were left, dead or dying, until their flesh fell from their bones.

The Birdcage analogy is particularly poignant to Chinese society where, for centuries, Chinese people have prized their birds in cages.

Hua Mei, song thrushes, found mostly south of the Yangtze River, in China, are particularly popular. Some owners keep their cages covered, with the cover being removed at sunrise, for the bird to sing. Owning a good bird cage had become a symbol of social status of Chinese rich men, or high officials, in pre-Communist China.

Chinese Bird cages, some gilded, some decorated with decorative, intricate, wooden patterns, are nevertheless still prisons. This idea came to fruition in Chinese feminist dialogue, in the 1930s, with the film ‘New Women’ (1935) and those splendid performances by the actress Ryan Lingyu, playing the housewife We Ming. In Cai Chusheng’s film ‘New Women’, marriage is equated to the entrapment of a birdcage, demonstrated in the frames of Wei Ming (the tortured housewife), who is unable to go out with her husband, clasping her hands and woefully looking at two birds in their birdcage as the realisation dawns that they and she share a similar fate.

In her 2012 work, ‘The Birdcage’ (photograph on plexiglass substrate), the artist Mei Xian Qiu, formerly of Java, Indonesia, now living in Los Angeles, North America, ‘talks’ about the psychological repression of women in society. In much the same way as Cai Chusheng’s film, she equates freedom being exterior of the birdcage, the place which entraps her mind. The central figure’s head (her mind) is encased in a birdcage, her seductively dressed body, replete with alluringly red lipstick painted lips, is free. A yellow (happy, wise) canary, the previous occupant of the cage, now remains uncontrolled and able to sit atop of the cage. The fetching woman becomes the new captive. This photograph reminds the viewer of Zhang’s male figure, dressed in white, with his mind trapped with desire for the trappings of modernity and of the body, which are his birdcage.

In his artwork ‘The Packing Box, from Beijing to Magelang’ (2016) Zhang reveals a large wooden box. The box is full of the ideas, memes and metaphors he has brought with him, from China to Indonesia. The man with the white robe and birdcage on his head escapes. Like a child playing aeroplanes, the figure runs from the box, exhilarated to be free.

But he is not free. His head remains caged. His thoughts bounded by the bars of the physical cage, just as Chen Yun’s limitations brought a false 64

Looking for the Spiritual Home (detail)

The Packing Box, from Beijing to Magelang

sense of economic freedom to China with the trappings of materialism and consumerism, but without a comprehensive access to the knowledge of the full internet, which forbids sites such as Google and YouTube.

Throughout Zhang’s exhibition, images of physical and psychological desire, for houses, cars (‘I Live in Gray and Blue’) demonstrate how firmly we become imprisoned by our desire, the source for our suffering. Despite imprisonment, we attempt to break free, drift in imaginary boats to encounter spiritual awakening. Nature in all its natural gentleness awaits, but our ancestral culture, and possessions weight us down (‘Looking for the Spiritual Home’). Through ‘Meditation’ we are released, though to become so we need to divorce ourselves from the weighty desires which surround us. We must seclude ourselves in nature (‘Lonely Island’), away from intellectualism, away from the erotic thoughts which trouble us and, ultimately, cause our suffering (wood carving ‘The Thinker’).

Lonely Island (detail)

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http://www.marshallcavendish.com/marshallcavendish/genref/ManekMischiefs_B1062_Singapore.aspx

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Extract from

‘The Stump in the Hole under the Casuarina Tree in the Garden of the Mansion by the Sea' From Lee Su Kim, ‘Manek Mischiefs: Of Patriarchs, Playboys and Paramours’ 2017, Marshall Cavendish Int Asia :Singapore.

‘My father was a very pragmatic man. He decided straightaway that as we were a British colony the way to succeed was to learn the way of the British. When I was sixteen, he put me on the steamer, this mighty ship run by the P and O and sent me to England to study. I was petrified.

I was brought up an ordinary baba boy and had never ever met an ‘ang mo’ before. This ship was full of foreign devils, all going home to Mother England, and I was the only Asian on board! At dinner time, the men dressed in formal dinner jackets and the women wore evening gowns and sparkled with jewelry. Can you imagine my terror when I sat down to dinner the first time and there were all these instruments laid out in two rows to my right and left…a whole array of knives, forks and spoons!

What was I to do? All my life, I ate with my fingers at home! Luckily Pa had lectured me ‘When in Rome, do as the Romans do’, so I watched closely and copied everything they did.

But the worst was yet to come. For the main course, the waiter placed a spring chicken on my plate! I mean a whole chicken, imagine that!

My mother always served chicken in bite-sized pieces whether it was Chicken curry or Ayam pong teh or Ayam buah keluak. I’d never seen an entire chook before, bluish pupils eyeing me through half-closed lids, its legs trussed up against its bump. I watched the lady to my right and to my left and proceeded to carve my chicken. The bloody chicken sprung out of my plate! It waltzed giddily around on the floor and stopped near a greenish gown. I wanted to crawl under the table in shame.

But here is where I take off my hat to the English. In typical stiff upper lip fashion, they pretended not to notice. The woman seated on my right ...must be a duchess what with her tiara and white gloves, dripping with diamonds, commented, ‘Lovely evening, isn’t it ?’

I went down on my knees, searched for my chicken, picked it up and put it back on my plate. I managed to cut a sliver of thigh and chewed sheepishly on it. No one said anything nor raised an eyebrow, they all continued to make polite conversation. Only the distinguished, old gentleman sitting opposite remarked as he gave me a wink, ‘Jolly good, ol’ chap! It does say Spring Chicken on the menu,’ before he downed his glass of champagne.

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Extract from

‘The Bride who Refused to Strip’ From Lee Su Kim, ‘Manek Mischiefs: Of Patriarchs, Playboys and Paramours’ 2017, Marshall Cavendish Int Asia :Singapore.

'Every night, when we go to bed, she sleeps at the very edge. Whenever I reach out to touch her, she flinches and squeals her disgust, pulling her blanket embroidered in a blaze of butterflies tighter around her neck.

‘What’s the matter? I won’t hurt you, I promise. You… you must help me because I’m …er… new to this too,’ I try gentle persuasion.

She turns around and glares at me, her eyes flash disgust, she reverts to the same frigid position, staring at the pink curtains draped around her side of the bed.

If I attempt to go further, those beguiling eyes would moisten, then like an unexpected tropical storm, burst in a torrent of tears.

‘Oh no...don’t cry, please, please.’

The sound and fury of sobs and blubbering continue.

‘Please don’t cry. I’ll wait for you till you’re less frightened, less shy, okay?’

I insist, ‘You’ve got to overcome your shyness. We can’t go on like this.’

She nods, weeping uncontrollably, her lower lip quivers and her body trembles. Her tears roll down and splash onto her pillow. I stare fascinated at the damp patch they create on her pillow – an expanding map of a soggy, fat Malaya. I yearn to touch those tearstained cheeks, feel her glowing skin.

‘No rush, no hurry,‘ I try to assure her.

She sobs quietly, her hair worn in a bejewelled bun earlier, cascades around her face, a tantalizing come-hither' *****

Avalilability Online: Readers can purchase all my print titles via The Book Depository, Amazon.co.uk, Amazon.com, Fishpond.com internationally In Malaysia via Naiise.com.my and Mphonline.com

Ebooks: Yes, Manek Mischief is already available for download as an ebook.

Downloads are available via:

Amazon Kindle, Apple Ibookstore, Google Playstore, Kobo Books, eBooks.com, Overdrive, Goguru.com

And if buying from Malaysia, they are also available for download on e-Sentral.com

Availability in Australia- readers may purchase copies of the books online via The Book Depository, Fishpond and Angus & Robertson.

Ebook available via Amazon Kindle Australia, Google Play, Kobo, Apple Australia

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im

K u S e e L y b

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Dr. Lee Su Kim

Dr. Lee Su Kim is a bestselling Malaysian author, educator, language consultant and cultural activist. A sixth generation nyonya, she has published ten books of nonfiction and fiction. Her recent collection, ‘Manek Mischiefs: Of Patriarchs Playboys and Paramours’ completes her trilogy of short stories on the Peranakan community. Her debut collection, Kebaya Tales: Of Matriarchs, Maidens, Mistresses and Matchmakers won First prize in the Popular-Star Readers’ Choice Awards 2011(Fiction). This was followed by Sarong Secrets: Of Love, Loss and Longing in 2013.

Her books, Malaysian Flavours: Insights into Things Malaysian and Manglish: Malaysian English at its Wackiest are bestsellers. A Nyonya In Texas: Insights of a Straits Chinese Woman in the Lone Star State highlights hilarious cross-cultural encounters during her stay in the US. Su Kim was Associate Professor at Universiti Kebangsaan Malaysia where she lectured, researched and published widely on language, culture and identity. She is the Chief Editor of several books including Border Crossings: Moving between Language and Cultural Frameworks. Her Doctorate in Education from the University of Houston explores the multiple identities and identity constructions of non-native English language speakers.

An invited speaker at the Ubud and Singapore Writers’ Festival, she has given many talks and presentations in the US, UK, Australia and Asia. She is a founding member and the first woman President of the Peranakan Baba Nyonya Association of Kuala Lumpur & Selangor. She enjoys and shares cultural complexity beyond cuisine and sarong kebaya and is a frequent presenter of the rich diversity of being nyonya. www.leesukim.net https://www.facebook.com/LeeSuKimAuthor/

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KL BIENN KL Biennale 2017 A Few Thoughts

I admit that it was with some trepidation, but also with soupรงon of excitement, that I approached the new Kuala Lumpur (KL) Biennale 2017, currently held at the National Art Gallery, and across Kuala Lumpur, Malaysia. The latest Biennale spans Kuala Lumpur city between 1st of November and the 31st of March 2018, in locations as diverse as the Soka Gakkai Hall and the Ilham Gallery.

The main exhibition acts as a treatise on contemporary art, and is at the Malaysian National Art Gallery which, for some time, has had a below par reputation. Blame for this might be found in many quarters, not least in the paltry sum the Malaysian government extends to art, its conservation and its preservation.

In this respect, Malaysia is unlike its neighbour, Singapore, which has all the veneer of understanding the necessity of the spiritual, as well as the fiscal value of art. Singapore has rallied around contemporary art, with copious initiatives, galleries and museums and has taken the local initiative with recourse to the vagaries of contemporary Art, love it or 72

NALE 2017 hate it. The Singapore Art Museum (SAM) has been at the forefront of contemporary art in the region since 1996. Now it is Kuala Lumpur’s turn to shine.

Sheltering under the umbra of a Biennale, Kuala Lumpur has collected many works by 120 international artists, from countries as diverse as The Philippines, China, Cambodia, Sweden, Palestine, Singapore, Indonesia, India, Thailand, Bangladesh, Japan and, of course, Malaysia, to be seen by visitors until March 2018. This is not to be confused with Malaysia’s other biennale, the northern ‘Langkawi Art Biennale’ which began in 2014, and continued last year (2016).

Terms like ‘biennale’ and ‘contemporary art’ can appear somewhat confusing, and elitist. Biennale has come to mean an exhibition of ‘contemporary’ art, every two years and is, of course, Italian, hailing back to 1895, with origins in La Biennale di Venezia (Venice Biennale) Venice, Italy.

That original series of Venetian exhibitions is now 122 years old.

By 1910, La Biennale di Venezia was exhibiting works by the Futurist Marinetti, the ‘secessionist’ Gustav Klimt, Renoir, Courbet, but not Picasso. His work was deemed too novel for the delicate Venetian taste.

According to the Venice Biennale’s history, 1920 was the time of the avant-garde with Impressionists, Post-Impressionists and Die Brücke being exhibited.

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La Biennale di Venezia 1895

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Bashir Makhoul is a Palestinian artist born (1963) in Galilee. He has been based in the United Kingdom for the past 22 years. During this time he has produced a body of work, based on repeated motifs which can be characterised by their power of aesthetic seduction. Once drawn into the work however, viewers find themselves engaged with something far more complicated than a beautiful pattern. Economics, nationalism, war and torture are frequently woven into the layers of Makhoul’s work and often the more explicit the material, the more seductive the surface.

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Floating Free, by Bashir Makhoul

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ICA Installation shot of 'Growth and Form', Riuchard Hamilton, 1951

Between 1948 and 1954, and here is the confusing part, ‘the Art Exhibitions became an observatory on contemporary art and avant-garde work. Awards were given to Braque (1948), Matisse (1950), Dufy (1952), Ernst and Arp (1954). In 1950, the US pavilion presented works by Pollock, Gorky and, for the first time, De Kooning (in 1954 he returned with 27 paintings). Alexander Calder, in 1952, was the first major American artist to win the Gran Premio di Scultura.’ Or so we are told by the Venice Biennale website. Confusing? Yes, confusing, because the history of the term ‘contemporary art’ varies enormously.

According to the New Museum of Contemporary Art, in New York, ‘contemporary art’ begins in 1977, others are less precise and select somewhere within the 1970s as the beginning. The Institute of Contemporary Art (ICA), in London, was founded in 1947 and, as we saw above, the Venice Biennale was already engaging with ‘ contemporary art’ back in 1948. Britain’s Tate suggests ‘In relation to contemporary art museums, the date of origin for the term ‘contemporary art’ varies.’

If the new Kuala Lumpur Biennale 2017 is about contemporary art, which seems suggested in the Biennale handout - ‘Among the objectives 78

of the KL Biennale are: to expand NAG’s networking and collaboration opportunities; to drive the development at international level of the country’s contemporary art industry…’ then what is this thing called ‘contemporary art’?

Where ‘modern art’ seemed to be mostly concerned with painting and sculpture, ‘contemporary art’ is so widely based as to gather to itself performance, installation art, video or other types of lens-based art and, in other words, art which is seen as contemporary may, and is, made from anything. It is no longer static, and frequently embroils itself in controversy.

In one contemporary art museum in Milan (MA*GA, opened 1966), exhibits to the ‘Urban Mining’ display included a variety of materials including Cesare Pietroiusti’s aged paper with type-written text, Christiane Löhr’s grass sculptures as well as experimental video.

In the recent (21st October to 5th November 2017) Karachi Biennale, Huma Mulji's broken and twisted street lamp installation ('An Ode to a Lamppost That Got Accidentally Destroyed in the Enthusiastic Widening of Canal Bank Road,’) inside an old law bookshop (Pioneer Book Store), caused a ruckus in and out of the art world. Conservationists, book store owner and bookshop conservationist were appalled at the insensitive installation of such a large, flickering, fractured, lamp post within such a small space. It threw up questions of artists’ privilege, sensitivity to natural environment and, most of all, was controversial and a constant talking point.

An Ode to a Lamppost That Got Accidentally Destroyed in the Enthusiastic Widening of Canal Bank Road by Huma Mulji

Christiane Löhr’s grass sculpture

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That Place is the Mind, Sand T Kalloch

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Sand T Kalloch earned her MFA, Honorary BFA and DipFA from the SMFA at Tufts University in Boston, and her DipFA from Malaysian Institute of Art. She has exhibited her work nationally and internationally including 22 art fairs. Her work can be found in permanent art collections worldwide with the most recent acquisitions by the National Visual Arts Gallery, Le Nouvel at KLCC, and Dr. Steve Wong in Malaysia. Working with her art representative, TAKSU Galleries, Sand T has recently completed a large scale commissioned project entitled “Thousand Springs� in September 2017. This extensive wall installation is comprised of 80 panels that span over 70 meters. It will be permanently installed at Marina One in Singapore.

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When we speak of ‘contemporary art’, there are, of course, tie-ins to what we have called avant-garde art, to Dada and Surrealism and practitioners like Marcel Duchamp (readymades), Max Ernst (frontage, collage and montage), and the American Joseph Cornell (assemblage/ surreal boxes) and, certainly surrealism and cinema (Robert Wiene’s ‘The Cabinet of Dr Caligari’ (1920), Rene Clair’s ‘Entr’Acte' (1924) and Salvador Dalí and Luis Buñuel’s ‘Un Chien Andalou’ (1929)). Which begs the question as to the originality of ‘contemporary art’ or, alternately, if we are now in a state of anything goes, perhaps originality no longer matters and we are all free to loan from past decades, be inspired by other 82

Celestial Navigation by Birds, Joseph Cornell, 1948

media just as Pop art (Roy Lichtenstein) loaned from comic books, or Picasso and Brancusi were inspired by African art.

Biennale’s have began sprouting up like art mushrooms around the globe. In his book ‘Playing to the Gallery’ (2014) British artist Grayson Perry counted as many as 220 biennales around the world. As well as Malaysia’s two biennales, KL and Langkawi), its neighbour, Singapore, held its latest biennale in 2016. Across the globe, Ecuador, Turkey, Russia, the Democratic Republic of Congo, Sweden, USA, Italy, Lithuania, Brazil, Republic of Korea, Indonesia, Nigeria, France, Taiwan, China, Pakistan, Germany and others held at least one biennale in 2017.

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The KL Biennale 2017 presents Alami Belas (translated by the National Art Gallery as …Be Loved). In the handout, ‘Alami Belas’ is referred to as being….

‘Quite close to the meaning of the phrase 'be loved'. ‘Belas’ refers to the sense of love that comes from the depth of the soul, and relates also to compassion, sincerity, happiness, honesty, hope and sustainability. Belas is an important aspect of living together in a shared space. This biennale’s theme of "Alami Belas / Be Loved" highlights a plethora of social issues related to human reactions to and interactions with nature. The aim is to provide moments of contemplation to reassess various human actions and behaviours as reflected in the works by invited artists featured in the "Petals of Love" segment.'

There are five segments to the Biennale, which include; 1.Love For Humanity The love for humanity focuses on disaster victims, the disabled, indigenous people, the poor in urban and rural areas, the elderly, orphans, homeless children, single mothers and the victims of abuse.

2.Love For Nature The love for nature focuses on the nature, endangered habitat, natural environment, flora and fauna to ensure a balance between sociology development and nature preservation.

3.Love For Animals Love For Animals is a special dedication for abused animals and animals going to extinct. The focus is on the endangered species due to habitat destruction caused by human.

4.Love For Heritage Love for heritage can be divided into tangible heritage such as architecture and nature such as flora and fauna as well as intangible heritage such as performance arts, visual arts, religious ritual, music and songs that are an added value for the tourists.

5.Love For Our Legendary Icons / Spiritual Love The Love for our legendary icons is evaluated through the legacy of culture and arts. This activity will be focusing on the contributions toward societal development, animal, heritage and environmental conservation. The spiritual theme will showcase artworks that are spiritual.

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Installation based on tales by Sue Ulik Mayang illustrated by Sanuri Zulkefli

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Dinding', Mohd Noor Mahmud

Mohd Noor Mahmud was born in 1964, in Kelantan, and graduated with a BA in Fine Art from Universiti Teknologi Mara in 1988. He obtained a Master’s degree from Leicester in 1996. Mohd Noor has exhibited extensively including at the National Art Gallery in Kuala Lumpur, Sarawak State Museum, Sabah Art Gallery, Maybank Gallery, American Embassy and Australian High Commission in Kuala Lumpur and won the third prize in the “Pemandangan Malaysia” competition which was held by Kontena Malaysia in 1989.

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I had visited the main exhibition, at the Malaysian National Art Gallery, on its seventh day of being open to the public. It was impressive. Possibly the very best that the National Art Gallery has yet to present, however, there were still a few flaws.

While many of the galleries were (mostly) up an running, by no means all were. Essentially, one week into public viewing, object labels were missing, as were textural wall panels. Here I give the National Art Gallery the benefit of the doubt, and assume that those exhibits now with only Malay text panels will, at some point, also have English for those many foreign visitors who would not understand Malay.

Several galleries on the first floor, and one on the top floor, had workmen busying themselves amidst dust and rolls of bubble wrap. Step ladders were strewn everywhere, as were cables, tins of paint and an assortment of tools and implements. While I understand that the ‘opening’ of the Biennale is on the 23rd of November, perhaps the National Art Gallery should have delayed its opening to the public from the 1st of November until the 24th, as the galleries are not yet ready.

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Diana Lui is an artist and filmmaker of Chinese and Sikh origins from Malaysia. She was sent in the 1980’s at age 14 to further her studies in Los Angeles, California. After 12 years in the United States, Lui moved to Europe, first to Belgium and finally to France in 1998. Lui’s transient life between three different continents has developed in her a heightened sense of “rootlessness”. This “loss of self ” became later the center from which her art took shape. Consequently, her work for the last 30 years questions the changing definition of cross-cultural identities, past, present, future identities, hybrid identities as well as non-identities.

Diana Lui’s early art education was influenced by teachers Robert Heinecken and Jan Stüssy, prominent artists of the 1960’s Post-Modernist period. Lui specialized in photogravure and platinum/palladium printing under the guidance of Los Angeles master printmaker Anthony Zepeda, Rauschenberg’s former printer.

Diana Liu,Veil #13

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Dinding Potret Kanta, Jeffery Lim

Jeffrey Lim never formally went to art school. However he had a long history of creating arts for over 40 years. In the early 70s, he worked using Sakura poster colours on paper, showing his own personal styles.

In the year 1995, he had made a series of akrilik works on boats(board?) or paper. After 16 years, started painting acrylic on canvas.

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Dalmation Flower, Juhari Said

Juhari Said, born in 1961, and is now based in Hulu Langat, Selangor.

He received his art education from UiTM from 1979 to 1983. He is a printmaker, painter and sculptor, and also work in combination of the three discipline. in 1993, he represented Malaysia to an ASEAN workshop in Manila, and in the same year was awarded a research grant in Paris by the French Government. In 1994, Japan Foundation had awarded Juhari another research grant to study Japanese traditional printmaking in Japan, under the guidance of a national artist, Yoshisuke Funasaka. In 2008, he was appointed as an Inventor, or Creative Fellow in Universiti Sains Malaysia, Penang.

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Enjor Your Dinner, Mohammad Radzi Ismail

Mohammad Radzi Ismail was born in Langkawi, Kedah, (1982) and has come a long way since graduating from UiTM Shah Alam with a bachelor's degree in Ceramic Design (Sculpture). He won Honourable Mention during the Penang Open Show in 2005, and just a year after that, won the 1st prize. In 2009, he was one of the finalists for the IMCAS Award. And is the founder of Ilham Studio where he creates attractive, unique handcrafted ceramic products, souvenirs and gifts, as well as collectibles interior decoration.

All of his products are manufactured in Malaysia and use 100% local clay.

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Okon Nopo Itokou Isai Po'di, Loo Foh Sang

Loo Foh Sang was born in Gambang, Pahang in 1944. After studying at the Nanyang Academy of Fine Arts in Singapore (1963-1965), Loo furthered his education at the Ecole Nationel Superieure des Beaux in Paris in 1966. After graduation, he remained in France and studied printmaking under the tutelage of Stanley William Hayter.

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Born in 1966, Shia Yih Ying is a Malaysian fine artist from Kuching, the state capital of Sarawak. Her early education in art was from the Malaysian Institute of Art where she obtained her Diploma in Fine Art. Since then, she has been actively involved with the Malaysian art scene where her work has travelled across the region. Her body of work encircles around culture and heritage where elements of traditional clothing and such can be clearly seen.

Shia has been involved with many exhibitions where she was involved in the ‘Asean Visual Art Education Symposium & Workshop’ in 1994 which was held at the Philippines

Shia Yih Ying 90's , 80's Homage Coutre

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while in 1999, she was involved in the ‘Commonwealth Fellowship in Arts and Crafts’ held at New South Wales in Australia. Her show at Galeri Petronas in 2004 entitled ‘wOm(b)’ was one of the highlights of her art career while some of her paintings have been inducted into the permanent collection of the National Art Gallery as well as in corporations like HSBC (Malaysia). She has won awards like that of the Alternate Artist by the VSC Freeman Fellowship in the United States in 2007 while in 1997 and 1996 her works received Honourable Mention at the Philip Morris Asean Art award.

Shia Yih Ying 90's , 80's Homage Coutre

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Kalpanas Warriors, Shahidul Alam

Born in Bangladesh in 1955, Shahidul Alam is a world renowned photographer, writer, curator and activist.

A former president of the Bangladesh Photographic Society, Alam set up the award-winning Drik agency, the Bangladesh Photographic Institute and Pathshala, the South Asian Institute of Photography, which is considered one of the finest schools of photography in the world. We find out more about this innovative photographer.

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(Additional text from http://www.artgallery.gov.my/KLBiennale/?page_id=186&lang=en

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The Art of

Mithila Some many years ago, while I was still in England, I had bought a copy of ‘The Art of Mithila’, by Yves Véquaud (1976). I was then, and still am, fascinated by the style of art that was then produced, exclusively, by women and for the privacy of bed chambers and interiors of their tribal dwellings.

Mithila (Madhubani) folk paintings, are drawn from the Hindu mythos which has existed for hundreds of years in Bihar, between the Himalaya mountains to the north and the river Ganges to the south, in India. That is before the ‘discovery’ of the Mithila intricate artworks

by British Colonial Officer William G. Archer, in 1934. These interior geometric designs are cultural artefacts drawn onto the interior walls, and appear in line and bright colours, often depicting mythological events such as the marriage of Hindu gods Lord Ram and Sita), and are explicit to the culture of the area, and of the country.

In his book ‘What's the Use of Art?: Asian Visual and Material Culture in Context’ (2008), Jan Mrázek suggests that ‘Following local customs, the women of Madhubani produced designs for various occasions. For life-cycle rites they would outline auspicious geometrical designs, called aripan, on smooth floors and courtyards.’ For Madhubani read Mithila, the two seem interchangeable. Those paintings, which had been revealed to Archer, after the great Bihar earthquake, in 1934, were found to be painted in a large number of those broken houses. The images had complex designs/paintings, created using fingers, nib-pens, twigs, and matchsticks, on the inside of those buildings. The exact history of the imagery is unclear, but it has been suggested that those decorations might stem back to an ancient ruler ( Janaka, 4th to 5th century BC), who requested his subjects decorate their floors and walls with paintings, in celebration of his daughter’s wedding.

It had been common practice for the females of Mithila households (Maithils) in Bihar, North West India, to paint their images, drawn from their cultural history for the explicit purpose of linking their culture to newlyweds. The paintings had always been ephemeral. They fade over time and the previously painted walls are then whitewashed, ready for the next wedding and next betrothed couple. But that was to change.

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Tree of Life

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Mithila Cosmos New Narratives cover

Having investigated those revealed Mithila images, in 1949 Archer published a paper in the Indian art journal, Marg, concerning the drawing and paintings he observed in the broken villages of Bihar. It was the beginning of world wide interest in the art of the people of Mithila.

Further disaster, in the form of droughts, hit the region in 1966 and again in 1968, spoiling crops and further impoverishing the people of Mithila. To help the people to help themselves, one representative of the Indian government, Pupul Jayakar (head of the All India Handicrafts Board) encouraged the Mithila residents to expand their folk art onto other forms of substrate, such as paper. In the late 1970s, American anthropologist Raymond Owens visited the Mithila painters and was instrumental in the founding of the Ethnic Arts Foundation and the Mithila Art Institute (MAI) in Madhubani, where local people can train in the Mithila art tradition.

Those images, once the sole province of the Mithila culture are now to be found across the globe. Where once only women would have contributed to the images, now males too assist in spreading the culture to wider audiences.

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SC Suman SC Suman (b.1961) is a self taught artist who had watched his grandmother make ritual paintings in the Mithila tradition. He is a textile designer by profession, and a celebrated radio host in Biratnagar.

Suman is a Council Member and Head of Department of Folk Arts Department, Nepal Academy of Fine Arts . He has been actively working in different organisations for the development of art and artists for more than 30 years . He has served as a "Chief Judge" in different art competitions, organised at national and international level as well as Art workshops in Nepal from 2002 to 2016. He has participated in the 1st Kathmandu International Art Festival, Kathmandu Triennale and Beijing Biennale-2017, and the National Art exhibition."Below the Clouds" Exhibition of Nepalese Arts at bCoombo Gallery UK, 16th solo Exhibition and more than 25 group exhibitions in Nepal and abroad. He has participated in more than 50 art camps at National and International level. SC Suman has been honoured with several prestigious awards including a National talent award. He has been a speaker at several national-level talks and lectures including researching Mithila, Awadhi, Tharu, Santhal, Dhimal at the Folk Art Centre, facilitated by Chetena Sanrakshan Pratisthan at the Nepal Academy of Fine Arts.

'Since the beginning of my pioneer work in the field of Mithila painting, I have juxtaposed contemporary issues with the traditional form, natural colours and spiritual aesthetics of my native land. I have simply found myself as a link in the long heritage in the development of this home-grown works of art and have brought the techniques, tools and the outline (which were on the verge of extinction) of our social semiotics at the forefront of the international community. While doing so, my grandmother, being surrounded by nature, and my keen observation has proved to be the source of inspiration for me.

Progressive times have further motivated me to depict social change in my paintings.

Mithila art is original to its surrounding nature. It is an ancient, an indigenous and traditional art which is becoming modernized. My special focus is to revive traditional techniques, natural pigments and an awareness of people, through the aesthetic means of Mithila arts.'

Bashuki Nag

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Kalpvriksha Latpatuaa Suga (A Pair of Parrots)

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Celebration Around the Tree of Life

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Kobar

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Village Story

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Sakuntala

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Installation

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ART WILL SAV

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VEColors THEof WORLD Cambodia Colors of Cambodia offers time, materials and a safe place for the children of Siem Reap to develop a sense of self belief and self worth. Colors of Cambodia enables students to recognise, and develop children' artistic voices and unique styles. Children come to understand that art can be both an expression and a profession, for we at Colors of Cambodia truly believe that art will save the world. # 270 Mundull 1 Village, Sway DongKum Commune Siem Reap District, Cambodia Telephone: 855 (0) 63965021 Telephone: 855 (0) 12214336 - Phany Email: colors@colorsofcambodia.org http://www.colorsofcambodia.org/

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Totemic Family

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Mohamed Zakaria Soltan Mohamed Zakaria Soltan is an Egyptian Lecturer at the Faculty of Applied Arts of October 6 University, Cairo, Giza, Egypt. He achieved his “B.F.A.” from the Graphic Department at Helwan University, Egypt, in 1996, and his “Ph.D.” of Applied Arts from the Advertising Department at Helwan University, Egypt, in 2011.

Soltan has participated in more than 60 International art exhibitions, Biennials, Triennials, and art events in many countries and more than 40 art exhibitions in different governorates of Egypt. Soltan made 4 solo art exhibitions in Egypt and a solo art exhibition “Digital Pharaoh” across many countries.

Soltan achieved many awards in Egypt and abroad: such as an acknowledgment for computer graphic work in computer reproduced design for The 1st. International Exhibition of Exlibris, at The Gallery of Open University, Subotica, Serbia, November 2015, and Honorary Mention in the International Contemporary Miniprint, Kazanlak, Bulgaria, in 2015. His work was awarded the first Engraving prize from the Egyptian Armed Forces, in 2013, under the auspices of the Egyptian Ministry of Culture, and many others. Soltan formally represented his country (Egypt) with a Egyptian Ministry of culture “Travel Grant” to China, in two international art events: The first was “BIAB Biennial”: The 6th Beijing International Art Biennial” at NAMOC: National Art Museum of China, Beijing, China, 24 September - 15 October 2015. The BIAB biennial collected his artwork.

The Second was “Hangzhou China Global Arts Agenda”: Soltan represented his country in “Hangzhou China Global Arts Agenda” which was held at the Hangzhou Library “J building of Citizen Center” , from 11 October till 16 October 2016, his works were collected by The “Hangzhou Qianjiang International Art Museum” as well as him receiving a golden medal of “G 20 Outstanding Works Award” from the organizer of “Hangzhou China Global Arts Agenda”, October 2016.

For More Information:

Website : www.soltanart.weebly.com

Fanpage : www.facebook.com/SoltanArt

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World of the Digital Pharaoh

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Digital Pharaoh 03

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Digital Pharaoh 02

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Digital Pharaoh 20

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African Human Totem

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Chrissie Westgate

Tales of India Chrissie says 'A photographic image can expose so many emotions and almost always transcends nations. Images are such a capable and powerful way of exposing situations of conflict and misery throughout the world and offer a compelling means of bringing about change.

The essence of being a people photographer is gratitude. I am constantly grateful for the opportunity to see and spend time with people and to make images that allow me to share what I have seen with others.

When I am working in a country such as India, I am not just a photographer, I am also a witness. I try to have a balanced view of people and to connect with them as human beings, rather than strangers worthy of my compassion. I look for what we have in common, not for that which makes us distant. I constantly hope that I just might take a picture that will make a difference.

I can immerse myself in all genres of photography, and see it as a privilege to be asked to photograph a wedding or take family photographs, knowing they will be treasured and stay with those families forever.'

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The Man with the Red Beard

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Jesus Loves Me

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The Sweeper

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Dignity

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Varanasi Lady

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Young Married Meghwal woman - Bhirendiyare Village, Bhuj

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Destitute Mother and Child

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Street Urchin

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Street Man - Rajasthan

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The Red Bindi

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cheung pooi yip

Waterfall

Born in Penang, 1936, Malaysian renowned artist Cheung Pooi Yip has 60 years of experience with art. Cheung has held 7 solo exhibitions and his retrospective exhibition was showcased in the Penang State Art Gallery in 2014.

Cheung’s passion for art has never ceased. To date, he practises self-mastery by acquiring more skills and advancing his art career, producing numerous artworks with great depth.

To him, creating art is to bestow life into his artworks, giving every painting a unique story.

To do this, the artist has to exert his utmost efforts. He feels that life withers away quickly; only art will live forever.

Over the years, he has worked tirelessly on sketching, Chinese ink painting, oil painting, watercolour painting and acrylic painting. He incorporates the essence of different painting techniques and synthesises the delicate Chinese strokes and vibrant hues of western style in paintings. Every piece of his work is unique and non-repeating, presenting the beauty of natural sceneries in smooth brush lines.

Soka Gakkai Malaysia (SGM) is proud to present “Reflections from My Heart: Solo Exhibition of Cheung Pooi Yip”, with a display of more than 60 artworks comprising oil and acrylic paintings. Most of these are recent works, which were created after the year 2000. They represent the spectrum of his art expressions in that period.

Text provided by Soka Gakkai Malaysia

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Concerto in the Wind

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Highland

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Europe Street Scene

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Old Ruins

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one woman

Every so often a book appears that reveals and illuminates a project that might otherwise remain largely unknown by the outside world: ‘Colors of Cambodia’ is such a book. This is a highly personal and passionate account written by Martin Bradley and illustrated by Pei Yeou Bradley of her encounter with a remarkable art-based project in and around Siem Reap in Cambodia, and how she was drawn into practical involvement with the children for whom the project exists.

The book shows how a small NGO run by William Gentry in Siem Reap has been able to reach out to children in local schools, some in areas of great poverty, through the medium of art, and to give them hope for the future in a country that has suffered so much. The children and their families who are drawn into the project prove how art can cross all borders of language and culture. The book also tells of how Malaysian children and their parents have been encouraged to support the project and to become involved with the children and their work.

This is a highly personal and passionate account written by Martin B remarkable art-based project in and around Siem Reap in Cambodia, for whom the 148

n’s journey

And there is the additional touch of magic as Pei Yeou and Martin tell of their meeting and of how he too was drawn into the story, and contributes to it, and of how it changed his life. His sensitive words and poetry add another colour to this unique book In a world in which the news is bad more often than not, this inspirational book tells a story of optimism and success, and of how dreams can become true.

Richard Noyce, Artist and Writer, Wales, July 2012 contact honeykhor@gmail.com martinabradley@gmail.com http://colorsofcambodia.org/

Bradley and illustrated by Pei Yeou Bradley of her encounter with a , and how she was drawn into practical involvement with the children project exists.

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RAW Malaysia

Are you what you eat?

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a taste o Sumptuous Sketches by James Ethos Klaus

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of James

James is a creative designer at a leading payment solutions company and is the brainchild behind many of the company’s creative initiatives. Armed with a keen sense of observation, James has the ability to translate the people, places, cultures and food that he encounters into artistic representations. James is keenly passionate about his art as he is about his coffee; he enjoys a cuppa while sketching. If you spot him at a cafÊ, do join him, you may just get infected by the sketching bug too.

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https://www.facebook.com/theperfectsketchbook/posts/724543194377505

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Dusun Publications

Books by

Martin Bradley 178

Books by Martin

Bradley 179

CAMBODIA CHINA ITALY

WITH MARTIN BRADLEY

MALAYSIA PHILIPPINES SPAIN 180