Works by Susie Wong, 2011-2013
Works by Susie Wong, 2011-2013 Published after the exhibition,
My Beautiful Indies: a re-reading at Jendela, The Esplanade, Singapore 14th November 2013 to 5th Jan 2014
ISBN 978-981-09-0117-2 First published in 2014 In a limited first edition (hand-bound) of 50 by Susie Wong Email: susiewong08@gmail.com Website: www.suwongart.com Special thanks to Anmari Mrs Kam Tamares Goh Questal Tay RJ Paper Pte. Ltd. Copyright Š 2014 Artist and contributor(s). All rights reserved. No part of this publication may be reproduced, stored in a retrieval system or transmitted in any form or by any means, electronic, mechanical, photocopying, recording or otherwise, without prior written permission from the publisher and the copyright owners.
Printed in Singapore by Kairos Design Book design and layout by seed | projects www.seed.sg Photographs of drawings on 19, 21, 23-25, 27, 29, 31, 33, 35, 37, 39, 44, 45, 47, 49, 53-57 by Geraldine Kang Exhibition photographs on 3, 6, 8, 10-13, 17, 40, 43, 50, 60, 62 courtesy of The Esplanade Co. Ltd.
Type set in Diverda Sans 0n Maple White 100gsm (text block) and Maple White 250gsm (covers) Front cover, detail from You fInd the name of the country pretty often in collections of old voyages Back cover, detail from It had got filled... with rivers and lakes and names
Preface
Afterword
9
My Beautiful Indies
14
Breathing
41
61
Process + Biography
63
List of Works
64
To Those who Leave
Preface
The work for this exhibition began with preliminary trials of tracing over light boxes—usurping images found online. The work became closer to being realised with the pair of Cherry Blossoms, which then grew into the series of landscapes and large portraits. The exhibition comprised two installational bodies of works, My Beautiful Indies, and Breathing.
9
My Beautiful Indies: a re-reading
Residual images of Places call up remembered or fictive landscapes. Entry into Land opens up a myriad of possibilities. One enters Land to explore, to venture, to reconnoitre, to seek, to cultivate, to mine, to develop, to transit, to camp, to settle, to retreat, to invade, to colonise. Travelling extensively across Java in the late 1980s, I sought to settle somewhere in the highlands of West Java. For about three years it became a space of retreat and work as an artist. And then faced with incalculable difficulties of living in a land not mine, I left. The land is there, ”throbbing with life”, neither a “great emptiness”, nor a “blank 14
space”. We enter to “find that land of plenty” and like our predecessors, we “come and in a little while [we] go”1. Culling my personal as well as archival photographs online, I revisit these landscapes, whether remembered or imagined, of Java or Sumatra (in the archipelago of Indonesia). In looking back at the land, I also revisit the reasons for entry, and compile in my mind, the many layered experiences of I2 as I passed through the land. Some drawings in this series are based on personal photographs taken from my sojourns, which are exploratory traveler's photographs of a land made
with a frenetic desire of settling in the "new/old" land. These photographs are collected together with old and recent images/photographs of the "East Indies", photographic documentation that formed a part of a colonial survey of the land3. Like Mooi Indies paintings4, these photographs are framed with romanticism or nostalgia, much like the photographs taken on holiday trips to the archipelago. These drawings of landscapes are overlaid with texts from re-readings of Joseph Conrad's (1857-1924)5 fictional writings played out in the region or nearby. Such writings, marking out places such as Malaya and Java, and Africa, include Almayer's Folly, Lord Jim, Heart of Darkness and Outpost of Progress.
Notes 1
Texts quoted from Joseph Conrad’s writings.
Artist, foreigner, woman, a Chinese (outsider to the Chinese residents there) 2
Kleingrothe collection, Memory of the Netherlands: The Dutch East Indies in photographs, 1860-1940, http://www.geheugenvannederland.nl/?/en/ collecties/nederlands-indie_in_fotos,_1860-1940; Carlos Quiles/March 27, 2012, Tripa swamp; Hafiz Alfarissi, June 21, 2013 3
Iconographical “beautiful” landscapes of Indonesia first painted by European artists and followed by Indonesian artists, described as a genre of Indonesian art. 4
Conrad had been described as both an early post-colonial writer as well as a “bloody racist” (by Chinua Acebe).
5
15
The Road from the Sea 2012 30 sheets, 6x5 grid, 105 x 180 cm, pencil on various papers
16
The river, the forest, all the great land throbbing with life, were like a great emptiness 2012 63.5 x 96 cm UV Ultra II Radiant White 105gsm
18
Settlements some centuries old still no bigger than pinheads on the untouched expanse‌ 2012 63.5 x 96 cm UV Ultra II Radiant White 105gsm
20
Many tried to follow him and find the land of plenty 2012 63.5 x 96 cm UV Ultra II Radiant White 105gsm
You find the name of the country pretty often in collections of old voyages 2012 63.5 x 96 cm UV Ultra II Radiant White 105gsm
22
It had got filled …with rivers and lakes and names 2012 63.5 x 96 cm UV Ultra II Radiant White 105gsm
That was it! He had discovered a river! 2012 63.5 x 96 cm UV Ultra II Radiant White 105gsm
26
We called on some more places with farcical names‌ 2012 63.5 x 96 cm UV Ultra II Radiant White 105gsm
28
It was not a blank space anymore! 2012 63.5 x 96 cm UV Ultra II Radiant White 105gsm
30
To tear treasure out of the bowels of the land was their desire 2012 63.5 x 96 cm UV Ultra II Radiant White 105gsm
32
The land remains where God had put it; but white men they come and in a little while they go 2012 63.5 x 96 cm UV Ultra II Radiant White 105gsm
34
The sun was fierce, the land seemed to glisten and drip with steam 2012 63.5 x 96 cm UV Ultra II Radiant White 105gsm
36
…some situations where the barbarian and the, so-called, civilised man must meet upon the same ground 2012 63.5 x 96 cm UV Ultra II Radiant White 105gsm
38
Breathing
Breathing comprises two bodies of works. One, a series called Weightless, and the other a set of cherry blossoms, After Hokusai. Both were a response to suppressed grieving or trauma. Weightless comprises portraits of my father. Presented over lightboxes, the drawings creates a space for contemplation of the corporeal (body) and the ephemeral. This body of portrait-drawings is an ode to my father who passed on two years ago. I was a witness to the passing, and the memory of it is etched deeply in my memory and being. The portrait-drawings are meditations of his body, as it exhibits signs of deterioration or wasting, a
contrast to the liveliness reflected in his face and pose. The drawings are based on photographs (when he had gleefully posed for them, taking off his shirt in the process), taken a few months before his death, and this project—the first two drawings in Weightless—began before this trauma. The rest were completed after, with the last of the five finished in October 2013.
life, whose blooms are subject to fragility and a rather tenuous existence. The first cherry blossoms drawings were drawn after the the tragedy at Fukushima more than two years (witnessed online by the world) ago, and were made as a response to it.
Texts accompanying the portraits in this book are extracted from both tweets and a journal written during those days when he was flailing. Like the portrait-drawings with the expression of his joie de vivre set against the stark renditions of a frail body, cherry blossoms are symbols of rejuvenation and 41
42
Cherry Blossom 1
Cherry Blossom 2
2011 63.5 x 97 cm UV Ultra II Radiant White 105gsm
2011 63.5 x 97 cm UV Ultra II Radiant White 105gsm
Tsunami 1 2011 63.5 x 97 cm UV Ultra II Radiant White 105gsm
46
Tsunami 2 2011 63.5 x 97 cm UV Ultra II Radiant White 105gsm
48
Laughing all the way to Happiness
Weightless 1 2012 127 x 94 cm Map Litho paper 95gsm
52
Weightless 2 2012 127 x 94 cm Map Litho paper 95gsm
Weightless 3 2012 127 x 94 cm Map Litho paper 95gsm
Weightless 4 2012 127 x 94 cm Map Litho paper 95gsm
Weightless 5 2012 127 x 94 cm Map Litho paper 95gsm
Patient keeps asking where is the time, digital clock in the room. 646 we say. Turn on the light he says. What does he see? Eyes closed, turned inwards, the light’s on.
You touch the bones, the skin, fleshless body, cool, warm zones. What is life?
A body weighs a ton more without life in it.
Stop my heart, the patient says.
Pressing into the bones, the joints, massaging away the pain, his face, jowl, silent screams.
To the last gasps, the flesh of his face has fallen away.
Myths of the death began– it was this way, it was that way.
Afterword by Anmari
Reading the text my mother has prepared for this book, several things struck me and I make the following observations as someone who is inseparable to the work, process and artist, as well as someone quite removed from it all. As I read my mother’s written word, I can’t help but catch a side of her more personal than any I’ve met upfront. Yet, a side I don’t know, or recognize. Reading the text carefully I notice how ‘connected’ my mother is to the online world and how much this is present in the text, and work. Contrary to the somewhat archaic (to me, they symbolize the time I was born or beyond) images and memories she mines from personal history, she references similarly illusory ones from the Internet and other places- which she makes note of. The tragedy at Fukushima was “witnessed online by the world”, italics significant; she traced over “images found online”, and she ends the book with tweets of hers, logged memories and in situ thoughts. I think it significant that she straddles with not only new media such as pencil, paper and light box (as
compared to her earlier oil on canvas works) but with the media of death, grief and the Internet. In attempts to reconcile, recuperate and remember, the subjective has indeed become at once more “alive and possible” as much as it is “hopeless”. The subjective is well and alive in these works. Remembered and fictive landscapes colonize the mental landscape. Despite being very close, now more than ever, I felt my mother and I were of entirely different minds. She mixes old and new, fiction (Conrad) and non-fiction (her tweets?), physical (lead) and digital (pixels), photo documentation and holiday photos. This joie de vivre she speaks of—I don’t see. The gleefulness she says he possessed—lost by me. Whenever I could witness these sittings, I saw an embarrassed man, ashamed of his flailing body. And when I look at those portraits, not joie de vivre do I see, but a cry— misery, misery, misery.
61
The Process
Tracings form a large part of this body of work. The trace was made over an enlarged image over a light-box with a series of pencil hatchings (using pencils from 6H to 9B). Tracing enables repetition, to produce a copy and then again another copy, but this method of “copying” seems hopeless. Tracing (verb) generally entails an act of copying the objective (in this case, what is captured in a photograph), but in the process of tracing, especially made by hand as in this case, some accuracy is lost as it becomes a tussle between keeping true to, and losing precision or exactness. The exercise often ends in sheer muddling through the multiple layers - the paper, the light, the magnified image, the acrylic sheets - that obfuscates clarity.
Biography
In other words, in attempts to keep the subjective at bay, the trace ends up keeping the subjective more “alive and possible”1, which is perhaps what I fear most as it entails losing exactitude, and hence, perhaps, forgetting. It seems appropriate therefore for the drawings to be installed over light boxes, likening them to a display case or as a reliquary of transitory objects. All the drawings were installed either vertically or over desk-like surfaces and tables.
Susie Wong is an art writer, curator and artist. She is a painter in the oil medium, and works mainly in the figurative for her body of works. She has also developed installation works applying drawings, photographs, video media. She has had several solo exhibitions of her work since the 1990s in Singapore and Malaysia. My Beautiful Indies is Susie Wong’s 9th solo exhibition. Anmari majored in Literature at the National University of Singapore, and is currently working at Singapore Art Museum. She is Susie’s only child.
Notes Christopher Stackhouse: “Maintain a distance between Trace and/+ Body, to keep the Subjective, Alive and possible”. 1
63
List of Works
17
The Road from the Sea
29
19
The river, the forest, all the great land throbbing with life, were like a great emptiness
21
64
Settlements some centuries old still no bigger than pinheads on the untouched expanse...
We called on some more places with farcical names...
44
Cherry Blossom 1
31
45
It was not a blank space anymore!
Cherry Blossom 2
47
Tsunami 1
33
To tear treasure out of the bowels of the land was their desire
49
Tsunami 2
53
Weightless 1
The land remains where God had put it; but white men they come and in a little while they go
54
Weightless 2
55
Weightless 3
The sun was fierce, the land seemed to glisten and drip with steam
56
Weightless 4
57
Weightless 5
35
23
Many tried to follow him and find the land of plenty
24
You find the name of the country pretty often in collections of old voyages
37
25
It had got filled ...with rivers and lakes and names
39
27
That was it! He had discovered a river!
...some situations where the barbarian and the, so-called, civilised man must meet upon the same ground