VINCENT LEONG: Hari Ini Dalam Sejarah (This Day in History) in collaboration with RogueArt
17 October – 23 November 2014 Silverlens Singapore
Hari Ini Dalam Sejarah (This Day in History) by RogueArt
Vincent Leong’s practice has consistently engaged with structures and systems of representation to provoke a critical reconsideration of where and how we locate meaning. He uses various strategies to deconstruct our experience of popular, iconic or everyday material, at times subtracting, reconfiguring and recontextualising key elements, playing off the visual and other aesthetic codes that govern our perception. In this exhibition of new and recent works, Leong meditates on the contradictions and difficulties of framing a national consciousness, and the means of its representation. The works adopt or refer to familiar forms of expressing national identity and agenda – landscape paintings, school murals, a national monument, the newspaper, and a patriotic song – but they fail to articulate any clear messages. References are pulled from different key points in a national narrative – a colonial past, a moment of independence, a formation of a new nation, a current day, a vision of a united future; and then pulled apart. Emotional and aesthetic undercurrents of pride, nostalgia, youthful angst, frustration, and hope press against one another and up against the pane of this compromised narrative. The ideas for the works in this show have been developed over the past few years, growing out of the artist’s personal experience and anxiety as a citizen negotiating a problematic national and social context. Yet each of them pivots on a calibrated sense of disconnect with and between messages propagated about his national identity. They pose questions about nationalism and patriotism, news and propaganda, history and progress, and their meaning.
The title of photograph Kenapamu, Malaysia? (2014) can be roughly translated as “Why, Malaysia?”. It is a pun on “Keranamu Malaysia” (“For you, Malaysia”), the theme song for Malaysia’s National Day from 2000 to 2006. Leong’s photograph is of Malaysia’s national monument, the Tugu Negara, built in 1962 as a monument to the brave soldiers who fought the war against communism, which helped lead to the independence of the Federation of Malaya in 1957. The historical context of this conflict is in itself problematic 1, but the angle of this photograph poses a broader question: What does it feel like to look at a national monument from behind? Following the moment of Independence, Malaysia was formed in 1963 with the union of Sabah, Sarawak and Singapore. For the opening act of this exhibition, Singapore neo-rock ’n’ roll band The Pinholes performs the song “Divided Land”, celebrating Singapore’s entry into this union, or reunion, of communities. The physical meaning of “Malaysia” changed within a very short time. With Singapore’s exit from the union just two years later, and the very different paths the two nations have taken since, would young Malaysians and Singaporeans today recognise, or sing along to, the words of this song? Through its modern history to today, cultural unity has been a mainstay of Malaysia’s national agenda as a slogan of the ruling party and for global tourism 2, while component factions continue to lobby for a racialised agenda, dividing education and economic development according to racial categories. “Recently there have been heated arguments on ‘ keeping politics out of schools’; but it has always been part of our education. Propaganda gets to you at a very early age, when one submits to be part of the 1
system. For example, time and time again, we are told that we live in a multi-cultural nation, although it is mainly governed by and focused on only three groups of people: The Malays, Chinese and Indians (and sometimes ‘Others’). We learn that it is always important to know ‘who you are’ and ‘who they are’. I would like to believe that it wasn’t always like that.” – Vincent Leong
Impropaganda (2014) is a pared-down reflection on the role and character of the media today, which can be read both on a local and a global level. A stack of broadsheets emptied of text, it reduces the newspaper medium to its cold reality as space for rent, a form of real estate mapped according to the design of commercial and political interests. In this illegible, ambivalent works, questions hang in the air about the kinds of agendas shaping our contemporary reading of the nation.
For 1000Malaysia (2014), Leong has collected images of school murals propagating messages of 1Malaysia and cultural unity, compositing them into a jigsaw puzzle. Fragmented and incomplete, how do we begin to piece it together?
Leong’s interventions into various forms of national representation may appear as simple, playful formal exercises. Yet they are also emotional acts, expressing a sense of betrayal, frustration, disenfranchisement, fragmentation and loss.
Adult generations of Malaysians have accustomed themselves to the reality of limited press freedom, and the idea of mainstream newspapers, owned by companies linked to political parties, being a mouthpiece for political agendas. Mainstream newspapers’ messaging in response to the most recent elections, however, created a heightened furor against its prejudices.
The exhibition’s title is borrowed from an educational television and radio programme, “Hari Ini Dalam Sejarah”, aired on a daily basis on Malaysian national television and radio since 1980, which creates a bridge between the trials and achievements of a nation’s past to a present day.
“There have always been criticisms of mainstream media as propaganda, and its prejudice increases during election seasons; but of late, these war-chats are now a daily occurrence. Always searching for new threats, in hope of uniting against a common enemy. UMNO’s mouthpiece, Utusan Malaysia, has been provoking citizens by stoking religious and racial sentiments. Some writers of the hateful articles published don’t even dare to give their real names. Who are the organisers and what do they hope to achieve with this?” – Vincent Leong
Two digital works, made in collaboration with Martin Constable, create a similar bridge across history, using a form of node-based software to composite contemporary elements into early 19th century landscapes of Penang. In One Hundred Years (2014), a couple of young motorbike riders hang out in the foreground of a landscape captured by Captain Robert Smith, a British colonial artist in 1818, a tourist information complex now nestled in its once pristine hillslopes. In Pictures of You (2014), Smith’s Cascade, from the same year, and later popularized in print versions and modernday postcards, a damming project, complete with warning signs, interrupts the flow of a luscious cascade. 3 2
These picturings of a country’s landscape and identity have already been written over by the present. How will we see this day in history, tomorrow? In Roundabout (2014), we find a different kind of pun on the Malaysian landscape painting. The young biker character appears again, this time in the role of the painter, marking the canvas with the front wheel of his bike, in what is known in mat rempit slang as a “roundabout”. Illegal street racers who terrorise local traffic (and are at times hired by political parties to popularise their campaigns), mat rempit represent a renegade community, a racial and cultural stereotype of bored, frustrated youth out to prove their daring and masculinity.
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There is a kind of violent listlessness expressed in the act and form of this marking – a pointless journey in an autocentric landscape “where roads replace rivers, trees make way for concrete towers, automobiles behave like animals. This is our landscape now.” “If only I’d thought of the right words, I could have held on to your heart. If only I’d thought of the right words, I wouldn’t be breaking apart/ all my pictures of you.”
– Pictures of You (Robert Smith, 1989)
The Malayan Communist Party (MCP) was a crucial ally of the British dring the Second World War, fighting against the Japanese Occupation. After Japan’s surrender in 1945, the MCP changed its name to ‘Malayan Peoples’ Liberation Army’ (MPLA) in 1948, and the party began to campaign for a Peoples’ Democratic Republic of Malaya, which included Singapore. Thus began the long war between the MPLA and British colonial and then Malaysian forces, and the 12-year Emergency period, which ended in 1960. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Malayan_Communist_Party “Malaysia, Truly Asia” has been the theme for Tourism Malaysia’s promotions since 1999. The two works are titled after songs by British rock band The Cure, led by the vocalist and songwriter, Robert Smith. “During the early 1980s, the band’s increasingly dark and tormented music helped form the gothic rock genre.” http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Cure
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From left to right: 1000Malaysia, Impropaganda and Kenapamu, Malaysia? Installation view at Silverlens, Singapore Photo: Silverlens Galleries 4
Kenapamu, Malaysia? digital c-print mounted on 3mm aluminum composite sheet 59.06 x 40.16 in • 150 x 102 cm 2014 Editions of 15 5
Impropaganda offset print on newsprint, broadsheet format, 16 pages, 555 copies, in acrylic display case 45.48 x 8.27 x 17.32 in • 115 x 59.5 x 44 cm 2014 Editions of 2 6
1000Malaysia jigsaw puzzle 32.48 x 46.77 in • 82.5 x 118.8 cm 2014 Editions of 2 7
From left to right: One Hundred Years, Pictures of You (in collaboration with Martin Constable) and Roundabout Installation view at Silverlens, Singapore Photo: Silverlens Galleries 8
Roundabout old motor oil, tyre skid marks on canvas 10 x 10 ft • 120 x 120 in • 304.8 x 304.8 cm 2014
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One Hundred Years (in collaboration with Martin Constable) 20 minutes video, framed 32” LCD TV and USB flashdisk framed TV: 22.24 x 34.65 in • 56.5 x 88 cm 2014 Editions of 3 10
Pictures of You (in collaboration with Martin Constable) 25 minutes video, framed 24” LED TV, USB flashdisk framed TV: 27.56 x 18.5 in • 70 x 47 cm 2014 Editions of 3
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GALLERY EVENT
Gallery Event (Opening Reception) The Pinholes Performance 17 October 2014 watch full performance here 12
VINCENT LEONG
Vincent Leong (b. 1979, MY) is an iconoclast and saboteur whose works in video, assemblage and site-specific installation often pare down experience to sets of structures and systems. By selecting aspects of the ordinary and the popular, he investigates social misconceptions within a larger cultural context.
SOLO SHOWS
2007
The Independence Project, Galeri Petronas, Kuala Lumpur
2014
Vincent Leong: Hari Ini Dalam Sejarah (This Day in History), Silverlens, Singapore
Selamat Datang ke Malaysia, Gallery 4A, Sydney; and Valentine Willie Fine Art, Kuala Lumpur
2012
You Are Here, Valentine Willie Fine Art, Kuala Lumpur
4 Young Contemporaries, Num Thong Gallery, Bangkok
2007
Tropical Paradise, Sculpture Square, Singapore
The Exhibition That Was, Valentine Willie Fine Art, Kuala Lumpur
Threshold, 13, Jari Art Space, Gwangju and Zeroone Design Center, Seoul
2006
The Fake Show, Reka Art Space, Kuala Lumpur, Malaysia
2005
3 Young Contemporaries, Valentine Willie Fine Art Gallery, Kuala Lumpur
SELECTED GROUP SHOWS
ART RESIDENCIES
2014
Re/call/Re/form/Re/master, curated by Jason Wee, Silverlens, Singapore
2009
Koganecho Bazaar, Yokohama
Fall into the Sea, to become an Island, Run Amok Gallery, Penang
2007
Sculpture Square, Singapore
2013
No Country: Contemporary Art for South and Southeast Asia, Guggenheim Museum, New York
2006
Asian Cultural Contents Creation Center Workshop, Gwangju
2012
CUT2012: New Photography From Southeast Asia: Politics, Valentine Willie Fine Art, Singapore
AWARDS 2004
BT Goldsmiths prize in Digital Media, London
2004
Malaysian Video Award for Best Experimental Video: Amateur, Kuala Lumpur
2011
Tanah Ayer: Malaysian Stories from the Land, Selasar Sunaryo Art Space, Bandung
2010
The Future of Exhibition: It Feels Like I’ve Been Here Before, Institute of Contemporary Arts Singapore, Singapore
EDUCATION
2009
Some Rooms, Osage Gallery, Hong Kong
2004
13th Jakarta Biennale, Galeri Nasional Indonesia, Jakarta
Goldsmiths College, University of London, London Bachelor of Fine Arts (BFA)
2008
Contemporary Art in School Project (CAIS), Stella Maris School, Kuala Lumpur
2000
Centre of Advanced Design (CENFAD), Kuala Lumpur, Malaysia Foundation Studies
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SILVERLENS (Manila and Singapore), through its exhibition program, artist representation, art fair participation, and institutional collaboration, aims to place its artists within the broader framework of international contemporary art dialogue. SILVERLENS, founded by Isa Lorenzo and Rachel Rillo, has earned recognition from both artists and collectors as one of the leading contemporary art galleries in Southeast Asia. Artists represented include Maria Taniguchi, Patricia Eustaquio, Gary Ross Pastrana, Luis Lorenzana, and I Lann Yee. Recent collaborations include the Museum of Contemporary Art and Design Manila, Vargas Museum Manila, and Singapore Art Museum. Silverlens participates annually in key international art fairs.
in collaboration with
Vincent Leong: Hari Ini Dalam Sejarah (This Day in History) in collaboration with RogueArt Copyright Š 2014 by Vincent Leong All rights reserved. Published by Silverlens Singapore Pte Ltd Vincent Leong: Hari Ini Dalam Sejarah (This Day in History) in collaboration with RogueArt presented in Silverlens, 12 September to 12 October 2014, at 47 Malan Road, #01-25, Gillman Barracks. Exhibition Notes by RogueArt No part of this publication may be reproduced, stored in a retrieval system or transmitted in any form or by any means, electronic or otherwise, without the prior written consent of the above mentioned copyright holders, with the exception of brief excerpts and quotations used in articles, critical essays or research. ISBN: 978-981-09-3107-0 Cover Image: Kenapamu, Malaysia?, 2014; Vincent Leong (detail) Back Cover Image: Impropaganda, 2014; Vincent Leong (detail)
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