This Time: Contemporary Watercolour

THIS TIME : CONTEMPORARY WATERCOLOUR

Agus Suwage Chan Kok Hooi Chang Fee Ming Chang Yoong Chia Isola Tong Jon Chan Kentaro Hiroki Lêna Bùi Melati Suryodarmo Noor Mahnun Mohamed Orawan Arunrak Phuan Thai Meng Soe Yu Nwe Tith Kanitha

This catalogue published in conjunction with This Time: Contemporary Watercolour, a group exhibition featuring works by Agus Suwage, Chan Kok Hooi, Chang Fee Ming, Chang Yoong Chia, Isola Tong, Jon Chan, Kentaro Hiroki, Lêna Bùi, Melati Suryodarmo, Noor Mahnun Mohamed, Orawan Arunrak, Phuan Thai Meng, Soe Yu Nwe and Tith Kanitha. Held at A+ WORKS of ART, Kuala Lumpur, Malaysia from 30th October to 27th November 2021.

Albert Camus once wrote in a plague that there is “nothing to do but mark time”. In February 2021, A+ Works of Art unveiled Holding Pattern, curated by Aminah Ibrahim, an exhibition marking the suspension of time in the midst of Malaysia’s second Movement Control Order (MCO 2.0). The exhibition’s title referred to “the flight path maintained by an aircraft awaiting permission to land — an operation designed to delay an aircraft that’s already in flight, while keeping it within a specified airspace.” Six months later, we present our landing.

Preserving the analogy, This Time: Contemporary Watercolour might be considered as an exploration of that aircraft’s action of ‘taxiing’ along the runway — its movement along the ground under its own power. Let us evoke our own bodies moving forward at a specific time.

We could project our pent-up fantasies and frustrations as energetic aspirations for change and the unfamiliar.

The present exhibition aims to do so by irrigating this flow of critical practice and thought after a long period of stasis, channelled through a focused examination of the watercolour medium.

1

INTRODUCTION

2

3

4

STILLNESS SPOILS WATER? Denise Lai

This time is perhaps the most opportune moment for us to consider what assumptions we carry about the mediums we neglect. In the case of watercolours, it can be hard to focus on how things have moved on since we were first introduced to a Constable landscape, or the exoticising landscapes of Malaya produced by British topographical watercolourists for the colonial eye. In the present exhibition, much of this is left behind for a partial to complete uphaul of the medium, looking instead to its potential to speak to contemporary concerns and to wring new and exciting forms out of its composite parts.

Across the exhibition, watercolour is now facing unexpected encounters with other materials including but not limited to gold leaf, flower dyes, silk screen, tobacco juice, and mini freezers. The medium is dragged from the representational to the somatic, where we see watercolours negotiating its presence under the influence of other art forms. Others take it as a springboard for looking at watercolour through the lens of its composite parts — water, pigment, surface, and artist — to experience our time in bits and to variously emphasise or erase our entanglement with each. Much of their reflections on this time carry forward these themes of stasis, frustration, repetition, and yearning for change that define the unstable imaginary of being in the present day. Here are multiple forms of the quarantined artist playing out their efforts to challenge what we take for granted, to pour over and to mark time.

6

UNFAMILIAR TERRITORIES For artists like Kentaro Hiroki, Tith Kanitha, and Phuan Thai Meng, working for the first time with watercolours, the medium offered a challenge as to whether generating art during such a time is possible at all. In such circumstances, they have had to adapt their ways of seeing and working in order to sustain their practice.

For Kentaro Hiroki, this involved looking up. Four watercolour paintings depict the changing composition of the sky above his neighbourhood in Thailand, captured with his iPhone and re-examined in the confines of his home. The slow, careful intricacy of Hiroki’s practice typically manifests itself in colour-pencil recreations of found objects, with particular attention to his observations of such objects and idiosyncrasies marking the passage of time. In contrast, he sees watercolour as a forceful reversal of this process: he now has to observe how the medium reacts to his movements on the surface, with its essential unpredictability and its yielding of results both lawless and unanticipated. But this time, representing his first serious experimentation with watercolours, Hiroki sees its redeeming qualities: its proposition to challenge the artist in overcoming stasis and to look elsewhere for signs of the insuppressible, sites of exchange, and common ground.

His skies are reconciliations with such ideas, the dwelling place of myriad determinations and histories of art. If he was to start afresh and to put aside his identity as an artist, which he could no longer sustain in this time, perhaps the sky with its absolute neutrality (i.e. the difficulty of referring it back onto ourselves, evading description through its infinite conceptions at all times) would act as the perfect foil for such a letting go of the ego. This resignation to time and to material occurs also on the acid-bound paper that he consciously chooses as his surface: impermanent and decayed papers aged-tinted with brown stains. This overwhelming convolvuli of whites, blues, greys, and yellows against the paper’s mottled imperfections re-enacts Hiroki’s submission of control to the irreducible particulars of the exchange between body, pigment, fibre, time, and the meteorological.

This nervous albeit heroic leap towards an alternative practice/artistic identity can be observed in Tith Kanitha’s seventeen paintings and, like Hiroki, her first foray into the watercolour medium. For Tith, this series was about letting go; it was about loving the experiment and developing a commitment to that first unspecific direction of the brush. For the artist who typically produces wire-work sculptures, the realisation that such a turn was even possible came a short while ago during her residency at the Rijksacademie from 2019 to 2021. In the company of her fellow artists, Tith found herself in a space where she was 7

no longer questioned about her identity, as a Cambodian artist or more generally about what she as an artist hoped to achieve. Such a disconnection from the personal and the political became a moment to expand, or as she calls it, to free herself from a “survival mode” known intimately by the children of postwar Cambodia. The result is this series of affecting pictures, exploding gestures by the unburdened artist hoping with each sequence to find out how long she can sustain this freeform approach. And in each billow of pigment across the water, we pay witness to watercolour’s ability to absorb the artist’s emancipation into the privacy of its otherwise obstinate puddles.

Phuan Thai Meng’s After Default: Reality and Fiction, representing the artist’s first attempt at watercolours, demonstrates to us the intriguing results that occur when the medium is handed to the oil and acrylic painter. The painting’s subject continues the artist’s recurring interest in topics relating to Asian political and economic histories, this time looking back to the Asian Financial Crisis (1997–1998) and the IMF’s role in handling the crisis through a series of bailouts as portrayed in the Korean film, Default, from 2018. He recreates a scene from the movie where two figures are in the midst of a negotiation, surrounded by a mindmap of textual clues offered to the viewer as a way of exploring meaning through and beyond the financial crisis. An uprooted miracle tree is laid across the bottom of the composition, representing resilience to grow and remain flexible through periods of crisis. Look closely at the miracle tree and you would be hard pressed to find the unspecified splashes of brushwork that we find in Kanitha’s series. The treatment is much more calculated, and more akin to the investigative specificities of botanical illustrations in watercolour. Simultaneously, we see how Phuan experiments with the versatility of the medium to create blurry forms, a vignette effect that visualises the scene as a relic of a bygone era, yet, with the sharpness of its immediate counterpart as a scene with elements recurring in our present day. This back and forth between the bleary and the hyperrealistic echoes the artist’s sentiment in his chosen subject that, facing these challenges today, perhaps mobility and flexibility are the most decisive tools for our survival.

NEW ATTITUDES We may speak similarly about Orawan Arunrak’s watercolour drawings: sensitively rendered marks of watercolour tracing grayscale photographs beneath. Like Phuan, her treatment of the medium is a suggestion for attitudes in coping through the stasis of our present day: the purpose is not to seek an end-goal or to penetrate the image, but to hover in that space between our gaze, the artist’s marks, and the photograph beneath, where the act of crossing occurs.

8

Arunrak insists on this in-between place by presenting two photographs shrouded under a layer of ultramarine watercolour pencil marks, with analogous subjects depicted in a state of waiting. These are two photographs captured in January 2020 at Cái Bè, Vietnam, where the artist observed boats transporting flowers across to cities for the Vietnamese Lunar New Year. Slowly, she runs across the photographs with her pencil, and in doing so relives the event of waiting at the edge of the pier. Viewed from behind, we join her subjects in anticipation of that moment of crossing the river, but also that ideological crossing into that space between Arunrak’s marks and her photographs into which we can potentially advance. The gift of her paintings are to freeze us in anticipation, to remind us of the rewarding qualities of luxuriating in and contemplating over the experience of looking forward. êna Bùi’s two watercolour paintings on silk and paper also demonstrate this L intriguing renewal of the watercolour medium by observing its effects when applied on layered materials. In both works, the artist paints on a layer on thin silk with glimpses of colour from the painted paper below floating to the surface. Such an effect is used here to materialise Bùi’s thinking about past and future in relation to the ecological matters of our present, by creating, like Arunrak, this suspended gap between two surfaces: of air and of different times.

The present series continues the artist’s recurring fascination with water and botany, and the various rituals, myths, and speculative fictions that emerge from people’s relationships to and actions upon them. Bùi turns to the subject of water and palm trees, to envision new protagonists conjured from their beings inspired by the emancipatory potential of their histories. For the artist, the story of water and the palm tree, a versatile genus speaking to a breadth of contemporary and global ecological issue s —water salination, rising sea levels, industrial scale agriculture in oil palm plantations — offers the perfect springboard for this line of thinking. he fictions she conjures are auratic counter-parallel universes where motifs of T palms and bodies of water evolve into ritualistic charts, beginning with the alchemic grey matter at the centre of both compositions from which explodes Bùi’s synthesiser-fused waves pulsing towards the edges of the composition. The results are splendidly rich and bizarre, testifying the possibility for watercolours to hint at the possibility for new systems and mythologies of nature. In the layering of their translucent murmurings, these watercolours also carry with them that awareness/ fusion of past, present, and future, and the seeds of modern age’s destruction on our ecological systems.

9

MEDITATING OBSESSING Stillness then, but also a movement towards understanding. Such is the message for Chang Yoong Chia’s three paintings of Lion Dance heads. Chang’s interest in the art of Lion Dancing was spurred by his move from Kuala Lumpur to Tangkak, Johor during the pandemic.

Upon arriving at Tangkak, Chang learned of the town’s notoriety for Lion Dancing, the town’s troupe having been repeatedly awarded the title of Malaysia’s world champions. Bequeathed with two lion heads from their storage, the artist saw this as an opportunity to study and to dismantle the details of the signature art form of his new abode. hese portraits are slow, careful studies of the ornate surfaces and mechanics of T their structures. For example, the artist pays attention to the ridges of bamboo paper plastered over its surface creating vein-like forms, the pendulous rope that hangs limp from the mouth when placed on the ground — details we would easily miss in our usual view of these structures in dramatic motion. Chang’s works thus explore the sensation of being still in unknown territory, whilst harnessing that stillness to generate knowledge and familiarity of his surroundings. The artist’s eye, rotating around the still structure, poetically entraps the foreign object for examination followed by each laying down of the brush. The paintings’ meditative qualities are a measure of his success in this slowing-down of the gaze, a redeeming escape from the fast-food values of our time.

In contrast to Chang’s meditative works, Noor Mahnun Mohamed’s three paintings demonstrate the variety of ways in which an arduous and almost manic approach to the medium becomes an artist’s way of being in the world. In this new body of work, Noor Mahnun revisits her 2017 solo exhibition entitled Disco Lombok, featuring central motifs of squids and self-portraits of the artist as various flower-adorned personas. The motif of squids first began with Noor Mahnun’s work with the WCC (Women’s Centre for Change) in George Town, Penang, in 2015.

Noor Mahnun hoped to focus on the perseverance and patience of those women whose lives were affected by abuse: the squid — the phallic symbol repressed by the multiplying and pervasive sequences of the artist’s geometries. ver the years, as these patterns continue to recur across her practice, the artist O reflects on her pattern-making as an act that began as a “sympathetic gesture in perseverance” that evolved into an obsession. Each work is a long-term endeavour and a measure of time spent. In Bunga Telang and Limau, we see how the artist rehashes these patterns to explore a more recent obsession with botanical 10

illustrations and the discipline required of such a rigorous and specialised practice of the watercolour medium. Wet-in-wet, wet-on-dry, 300gm or 600gm, grain fin or grain torchon; the seductive gaze of her two personas on these botanical subjects, pulled close to the mouth, seems to mirror the artist’s real-life carrying away into the medium and what it asks of the artist.

Painting in watercolour, then, can be seen as a productive outlet for the channelling of one’s fascination with or intense scrutiny of a particular subject. In Jon Chan’s paintings we see one form of this project, one that celebrates the artist’s ability to draw idolised figures and influences together, to filter them through new spaces which are in turn subtly affected, and finally to re-enact one’s observations of their mutual exchange. Jutta Koether’s strategy of ‘affective import’ — the act of channelling a previous artist’s work in such a way that acknowledges painting’s ability to draw from the past, for both its potency and contradictory element s — provided much of the intellectual stimulus for Chan’s current series. These are homages to two painters admired by the artist, Cezanne and Georgette Chen. Rather than appropriating their works, Chan’s affective import of these two painters involves the sublimation of their paintings into his present as fragments within a larger structure, constantly in dialogue with his position as the paintings’ chief narrator. t all times, Chan is thinking about his artists’ characters, the way these personA alities exude themselves in their marks and gestures. For example, where he notices a more ‘iconic’ approach to the depiction of water in Georgette Chen’s works (geometric and condensed), in Georgette’s Flow they appear as brown and yellow clusters where lines highlight forms without the forms fully defining themselves.

The same can be noted in Schizoid Forming where the artist observes Cezanne’s “Schizoid personality” and tucks his painting, Banks of the Marne (c. 1888), into the upper right hand corner of his painting as a distant mirage. Watercolour’s ability to only glaze over its surface, to hide behind the trails of water left by a loaded brush, offers here an opportunity for Chan to offer sensitively some facet of his artists’ personalities and characters without sacrificing his own. This is a mutual exchange, where the artist possesses the subjects and is in turn possessed by them.

WET BODIES Mutual exchanges occur in the present exhibition not only along the lines between artist and subjects, but also in the dialogues between the artist’s body, water, pigment, and the spaces that they inhabit.

In Isola Tong’s performance-led paintings, the mutual exchange occurs with a corporeal, experiential encounter with the medium. Turning away from 11

pre-manufactured watercolours, Tong invents her own concoction — a tellurian blend of water, Chinese ink, and the clitoria ternatea flower used often as food colouring — into which she dips her hair and drags across paper laid on the floor.

In the recording of her performative “pag-pag”, we see the artist crawling over the space with the ends of her hair never leaving the floor beyond a few centimetres.

The proximity of her body to the ground brings intimacy to the quiet isolation of her surroundings, while the edges of her surface in turn dictate the rectangular space in which she travels. All elements are constantly in response to one another.

For Tong, this intimacy is specifically about the relationship between femininity, trans identity, and the deadly allure of long, unhindered hair in ghost mythologies. Performing her piece during the ghost month, the result is what she calls a “bloodletting”, a channelling of the wet, queer body’s embodied losses, anxieties, discriminations, and grief. In this entropic release the artist also guides us to an embodied sense of moving through and engaging with materials and space; in a conversation with the artist, we talk about our relationship to water with our everyday rituals (showering), how we carry it (60% of the human body contains water), our Southeast-Asian connection to the ocean, and the colonial myths that have sought to deepen the illusory boundaries between man from nature. Tong’s striking innovation with the medium is to draw our attention to water’s connection to the lived body, to activate it with somatic power and towards an increased awareness of the activation of the self on the spaces we inhabit. The dancer, dripping in earthly materials that fill us and from which we create, can be the main facilitator of that process.

In Melati Suryodarmo’s present series, we are presented with another form of how today’s artists experiment with the representation of performing bodies through water and pigment. The performance artist’s entropic release takes the form of gouache-stained abstracted figures in motion. Where we often consume Suryodarmo’s works as a public presentation of the artist’s body, these drawings are made in the private spaces of the artist of which we are not invited. These are products of the most intimate moments in Suryodarmo’s process during which she spills her secrets onto paper. She calls these spills “impressions of [her] being”, or projections of the indescribable and often blurry constructs of her memories. As is with her performance work, the unspooling energy of her brushstrokes create transforming works; they are evolving as she goes till the moment she eventually relinquishes the tool, and steps back to contemplate the avatar conjured in front of her. This is another form of that possibility for the transmission of performance practice, for watercolour’s ability to archive visceral embodied knowledge as externalised visions of the self.

12

REJECTING DILUTION One segment of this exhibition reveals how watercolours, when applied with a dry brush or layered intensively on the surface, can be built upon to produce a finish that is both thick and resilient. This method of application opens us up to histories and narratives that reject dilution. e see this in the built-up fluorescent yellows of Agus Suwage’s Borneo - The W Missionaries and the Hornbill, where the artist re-examines the history of the largescale Christianisation of Borneo’s indigenous communities. Christianity first entered Borneo in 1847 with the arrival of Rajah James Brooke, who gradually established an Anglican mission loaded with “civilising” aims to morally and materially uplift the Dayak communities. In Suwage’s telling of the story, six indigenous youths are painted behind a yellow hand on the left, a nod to Michelangelo’s God in The Creation of Adam with its index finger pointed in judgement. To the right, a half-hornbill, half-human figure, representing the symbol of the highest goddess for the Dayak peoples, turns towards the hand whilst gesturing in the opposite direction. Suwage’s message is clear: this is a time for countering ongoing processes of erasure and dispossession. With a surface composed of forty sheets of annotated sheets from a student’s notebook tied together with thread, Suwage transforms this palimpsest of thoughts and memories into a claiming space for autonomy and self-determinacy.

Chang Fee Ming’s two works, In Search of Native Bandanese and Remembering 8 May 1621, likewise demonstrate the potential for the intense and solid application of watercolour to assert the imperative of remembering and retelling colonial histories. In both paintings the sizzling red of nutmeg skin and clotted touches of sweat on his figure’s foreheads offers us these histories with a startling realism.

They elaborate on the history of Pulau Banda in Indonesia that marked the beginning of Dutch colonial expansion in Southeast Asia and the massacre of the Bandanese Orang Besar in 1621. Remembering 8 May 1621 weaves the story of the day where forty-four Bandanese chiefs were beheaded or quartered at Fort Belgica at Pulau Banda, placing in the foreground the island’s flourishing nutmeg trade which was claimed by the Dutch VOC and for which the Dutch continued the systemic decimation of the local Bandanese. In Search of Native Bandanese jolts us to the present day where the artist presents portraits of locals living in the islands, captured during his trip in 2019 in his search for the dwindling native Bandanese population amongst the islands’ multiethnic population today. Chang’s visceral treatment of his subjects with their steroid veins and saturated skies is an urgent plea for our attention and consideration for the lessons we have gained from this history and, today, how we reflect on the actions of our former colonisers.

13

An ardent traveller, Chang’s next series for the exhibition employs a similarly dense application of watercolours, but this time as a method to collage old travel encounters into new mythologies. 騎虎難下 (BHUTAN ) recreates a photograph taken by the artist in Bhutan of a seated monk gazing into the view surrounding his monastery. Painting a tiger on the monk’s supporting wall, Chang combines his fascination with Tibetan tiger rugs with the photograph’s intriguing composition to offer a playful take on the Chinese idiom: “騎虎難下 ” (literally, “if you ride a tiger, it’s hard to dismount”). The tongue-in-cheek approach continues in his second painting, 图腾的联想 (Bhutan), where a figure faces an ejaculating phallic totem, a pervasive motif across Bhutan’s architecture thought to protect dwellers from external harm. In both compositions, Chang’s strong black line work fuses the real into the imagined, designing his own universe where tigers float on stippled backgrounds and where his memories of scenes travelled coalesce.

In Soe Yu Nwe’s multimedia painting, we see the potential for watercolours’ soft exterior to be built on the surface of the paper and combined with other water soluble media to create sharp and blunt forms. This method is applied in Nwe’s Gunshot to support its gritty subject — the contemporary military atrocities in Hakka, the capital of Chin state in Myanmar. The present work continues the artist’s recent exploration of ink and watercolours representing her confined state, affected by both the pandemic and Myanmar’s military coup. Eight months into the coup, Myanmar continues to face unrest with a series of bombings occurring across the country (including one recently in her neighbourhood). Gunshot is the artist’s startling and urgent document of her country’s grave reality, inspired by a photograph from a Chindwin News Agency article depicting a cracked glass window pane punctured by bullets in Mindat Town, Chin State. Nwe’s recreation of the scene is equally documentary in its violence as it is hopeful; her addition of blood red to the original photograph as crisply smeared onto cracks as the glimmering streaks of white and gold leaf. It poses to its spectators an important question: are we inured by the documentation of not-so-distant violences of our times, or are we compelled to act because of it?

CONCLUSION Finally, we end with Chan Kok Hooi’s dramatic re-presentation of the watercolour medium in The Song of the River and The Spring in Winter. Chan’s revaluation of the medium lies in his attention to the medium’s reaction to time, gravity, temperature, or the changing of seasons. In thinking about the properties of water, Chan turns to the saying “流水不腐 ”. Stillness spoils water. In order to become a painting, watercolours, to whatever extent, will need to flow. His 14

horizontal cobweb of primary colours in The Song of the River are results of him dripping paints from the stretched canvas standing vertically from the ground, which he then shook to control the flow and rhythm of each trail. The painting acts as a record of the painter’s optimism about the future and the possibility for further movement to be enacted by art and the artist.

But it is with The Spring in Winter where the artist makes his most extraordinary response to the medium. Two palettes, shaped like flowers with yellow and pink petals, are arranged inside a mini freezer with ice-buildup offering a snowy cushion for them to lay. The artist’s intentions were to explore the medium’s new forms and the alternatives and possibilities that arise from a radically different treatment of its material. The effect is hauntingly beautiful; here they are frozen in eternal time, forever firm and hopeful yet hiding the swelling and transforming of pigments underneath. It’s also fun to imagine the installation’s afterlife: the various moments the freezer will be unplugged from its electric source, when the watercolours resettle into their original forms and the process repeats. In water, composition and decomposition are working in perpetuity. When asked if he experimented with the material post-thaw, the artist commented that he did not find them to have changed at all. Perhaps we are more resilient than we give ourselves credit for.

We still don’t have a full audit of what we lost during this time, but this exhibition provides a survey at once intimate and comprehensive of contemporary efforts to move forward. It speaks to a breadth of new ideas of what contemporary watercolours may be, using a medium at once familiar in its forms, but which, with attention to time and in dialogue with other art forms, becomes something with radically unfamiliar meaning. How have watercolours evolved with us and with our time? This is the question at the heart of this exhibition. Do contemporary watercolour’s forms merely mimic cultural trends and fashions in art, or was there something urgent about the need for its recalibration as some of these artists seem to suggest? What we can be certain about is that such a gathering of artists consciously stretching the possibilities of the medium can offer some clarity of the familiar spaces where we can realign, recalibrate, and push on.

15

16

17

18

19

Agus Suwage Borneo - The Missionaries and The Hornbill 2021 Watercolour, ink, tobacco juice, acrylic on old note student book 113 × 137 cm

21

22

Chang Yoong Chia Portrait of a Lion I, II, III 2021 Watercolour on paper 46.5 × 54.2 cm

24

Kentaro Hiroki The Sky I, II 2021 Watercolour, watercolour pencil, graphite on paper 50 × 70 cm

26

Kentaro Hiroki The Sky III, IV 2021 Watercolour, watercolour pencil, graphite on paper 50 × 70 cm

(2) (1)

(3)

28

(6)

(4)

(5)

Tith Kanitha (1) Untitled 25.4 × 17.5 cm (2) Untitled 17.5 × 25 cm (3) Untitled 18 × 24 cm * (4) Untitled 18 × 24 cm * (5) Untitled 18 × 24 cm * (6) Untitled 24 × 17 cm * 2021 Watercolour on 250g acidfree paper Watercolour on 300g acidfree paper *

(8)

(7)

(9)

30

(11)

(10)

Tith Kanitha (7) Untitled 25 × 17.5 cm (8) Untitled 12.5 × 18 cm * (9) Untitled 17.8 × 25.4 cm * (10) Untitled 19 × 24 cm * (11) Untitled 21 × 29.7 cm 2021 Watercolour on 250g acidfree paper Watercolour on 300g acidfree paper *

(12)

(13)

32

(14)

(15)

(16)

(17)

Tith Kanitha (12) Untitled 21 × 29.7 cm (13) Untitled 21 × 29.7 cm (14) Untitled 21 × 29.7 cm (15) Untitled 21 × 29.7 cm * (16) Untitled 21 × 29.7 cm * (17) Untitled 17 × 24 cm * 2021 Watercolour on 250g acidfree paper Watercolour on 300g acidfree paper *

34

Phuan Thai Meng After Default: Reality and Fiction 2021 Watercolour on Arches watercolour paper 56 × 76 cm

36

Noor Mahnun Mohamed Squid 2021 Watercolour and graphite on paper 57 × 38 cm

Limau 2021 Watercolour on paper 38 × 29 cm

38

Noor Mahnun Mohamed Bunga Telang 2021 Watercolour and graphite on paper 76 × 57 cm

40

Orawan Arunrak Crossing 2021 Watercolour pencil on photo, cardboard paper, transparent polymer paper, metal clip 29.7 × 42 cm (each)

42

Lêna Bùi Flashback of the Future 2021 Ink and watercolour on silk and paper 60 × 80 cm

Unwritten 2021 Ink and watercolour on silk and paper 60 × 80 cm

44

Jon Chan Schizoid Forming 2021 Watercolour on paper 75 × 43 cm

Georgette’s Flow 2021 Watercolour on paper 56 × 75 cm

46

Isola Tong Ghost Calligraphy 2021 Archival paper, ink, plant-based pigment, with video Suite of nine works 300 × 210 cm (100 × 70 cm each) 6 min 58 sec

48

Melati Suryodarmo (Left to right) Satu dan Satu* Study of a Movement Imagining Butoh I Yoga The Promise 2021 Gouache on paper 59.4 × 49 cm 49 × 59.4 cm*

50

Melati Suryodarmo (Left to right) Menggendong Imagining Butoh II A Birth of an Idea Self Portrait Narzissmus* 2021 Gouache on paper 59.4 × 49 cm 49 × 59.4 cm*

52

Chang Fee Ming Remembering 8 May 1621 2021 Watercolour and ink on paper 56 × 76 cm

54

Chang Fee Ming In Search of Native Bandanese 2021 Watercolour and silkscreen on paper 64 × 82 cm (20 × 15 cm each)

56

Chang Fee Ming 图腾的联想 Relating to Totems (Bhutan) 2021 Watercolour and ink on paper in Casa Armani frame 28.5 × 23.5 cm, 17 × 12 cm (image size)

騎虎難下 Riding a Tiger (BHUTAN)

2021 Watercolour and ink on paper in Casa Armani frame 35.5 × 30.5 cm, 24 × 19 cm (image size)

58

Soe Yu Nwe Gunshot 2021 Mixed media on arches paper (Ink, watercolor pencils, charcoal, gold and silver leaf) 76 × 56 cm

60

Chan Kok Hooi The Song of the River 2021 Watercolour on canvas 30.5 × 183 cm

62

Chan Kok Hooi The Spring in the Winter 2021 Mini freezer, watercolour in watercolour palettes, paintbrushes 47 × 48.5 × 44 cm

A

gus Suwage (b.1959, Purworejo, Indonesia) has participated in numerous international biennials, including the Asia Pacific Triennial of Contemporary Art (1996), Gwangju Bienniale (2000), Singapore Bienniale (2006), Jogja Biennale (2007, 2013), and Prospect New Orleans (2014-15), amongst others. Recent institutional exhibitions include: Sights and Sounds, Toledo Museum of Art, Ohio, USA (2018); SUNSHOWER: Contemporary Art from Southeast Asia 1980s to Now, Mori Art Museum, National Art Center, Tokyo, Japan (2017); Manifesto V: Arus, National Gallery of Indonesia, Jakarta (2016); After Utopia: Revisiting the Ideal in Asian Contemporary Art, Singapore Art Museum (2015); Panorama: Recent Art from Contemporary Asia, Singapore Art Museum (2012); Beyond the East, Macro Museum, Rome, Italy (2011); Beyond the Self, National Portrait Gallery, Australia (2011). In 2009, Jogja National Museum, Indonesia presented Still Crazy After All These Years, a retrospective dedicated to the artist on the occasion of his 50th birthday.

C

han Kok Hooi (b. 1974, Penang, Malaysia, where he currently lives and works). He received his Diploma in Fine Art on a full scholarship from the Malaysian Institute of Art, Kuala Lumpur. His solo exhibitions include: Art Seasons (Singapore, 2012); Pierogi Gallery (New York, 2010); Galeri Petronas, Suria KLCC, Petronas Twin Towers (Kuala Lumpur, 2010); Photo Store (Feijiacun Village, Laiguangying East Road, Chaoyang District, Beijing, 2008); and Red Mill Gallery, Vermont Studio Center (Johnson, Vermont,

64

2007). Chan has been awarded the Malaysia Young Contemporaries twice, the Jurors Award in 2006, and the Top 3 Winner in the 2D Category in 2004; and in 2003, he received the Top 5 Winner Philip-Morris Malaysia- ASEAN Art Award — all organised

by National Visual Arts Gallery, Malaysia.

His painting, 50 Years of Sorrow (2013), was nominated and exhibited at the Asia Pacific Breweries Foundation Signature Art Prize in 2014, organised by Singapore Art Museum.

Chan was the 2006–2007 recipient of the Asian Artist Fellowship at the Freedom Foundation Vermont Studio Award in 2007.

Institutional collections of his work include the Beppu City Art Museum, Japan, the National Visual Arts Gallery, Malaysia, and the Singapore Art Museum.

C

hang Fee Ming (b. 1959, Terengganu, Malaysia) is a self-taught artist who began his career in the early 1980s. Since then, he has become one of Asia’s most highly regarded artists working in watercolour. His works have been acclaimed, exhibited and collected throughout the world. For over 20 years, Chang Fee Ming’s subject has been the people and places of South East Asia, and he has also portrayed life and culture in places as diverse as China, India and the East Coast of Africa.

He is currently based in Kuala Terengganu, although he spends much of his time traveling through Asia. In his own words: “To travel and see and paint is for me a way of learning, part of my life philosophy”.

Fee Ming has exhibited working internationally, including Malaysia (Bank Negara

ARTIST BIOGRAPHIES

Museum and Art Gallery, 2016; Valentine Willie, Fine Art, 2010), Indonesia (Komaneka Fine Art, 2012; Chiang Mai University Art Museum, 2004; Galeri Nasional Indonesia, 2002), Singapore (Valentine Willie Fine Art, 2010; Singapore Tyler Print Institute, 2009), Thailand (National Gallery, 1995), Belgium (19th International Brussels Independent Film Festival Exhibition, 1997) and China (Shanghai Museum of Art, 1994; Tianjin Academy of Fine Arts, 1991). Fee Ming received the Year 200 Winsor & Newtong Art Competition Award in 2000.

C

hang Yoong Chia (b.1975, Kuala Lumpur) graduated in 1996 from the Malaysian Institute of Art, where he majored in painting. He uses personal narrative and memory as a subjective space to explore the imaginative possibilities of painting and object-making. Chang held his first solo exhibition, Flora and Fauna in 2004, building on this series of autobiographical paintings and drawings to produce Flora and Fauna II in 2008 and Flora and Fauna III in 2009.

A new body of works made from postage stamps collected by the artist since childhood was shown in The World is Flat in 2011 in Singapore, and the title work earned Chang a place as finalist in the prestigious APB Signature Prize that year. This was followed

by The Immortal Beloved in 2013 in Kuala Lumpur, Body of Water in 2016 in Tokyo, and Second Life in Sapporo in 2017. Important international group participations have included the 3rd Fukuoka Asian Art Triennale (2005), Welcome to the Jungle (Yokohama Museum of Art & Contemporary Art Museum,

65

Kumamoto, 2013), Journey (Israel Museum, Jerusalem, 2014), and Open Sea (Musée d’Art Contemporain du Lyon, 2015).

I

sola Tong (Pasay City, Libra Fire Rabbit) is a Filipinx-Chinese artist, architect and babaylan, interested in queer and trans theories that cut across ethnography, biology, architecture, urbanism, history and technobiopolitics. She explores the interdependencies and intimacies of holobionts and their entanglement with history and the built environment. Her work spans across a variety of media portraying a divergence from anthropocentrism towards interconnected multiscalar agencies. She graduated cum laude at the University of Santo Tomas with a Bachelor of Science degree in Architecture. She also studied and worked in Osaka, Japan for four years. She has shown in Korea, Slovenia, Serbia and the United Kingdom. She currently teaches architectural design, theory, philosophy and history at the De La Salle – College of Saint Benilde School of Design and the Arts in Manila. She is currently a graduate student at the UC Santa Cruz, California.

J

on Chan Weiwen (b. 1982, Singapore) is a Singaporean painter who explores the dimensions between unsolicited real-time performances and their meditation and circulation as images, attenuating any parallels between these two domains. His works in this exhibition will draw inspiration from his interest in comics as well as real-time situations. He attained his Diploma

in Fine Art (Painting), Bachelor of Arts (First Class Honours) and Masters of Fine Arts in Lasalle College of the Arts Singapore, and has been awarded the Winston Oh Travel Award in both 2003 and 2007. He has also been a recipient of the JCCI Arts Awards in 2007.

K

entaro Hiroki (b. 1976, Osaka, Japan) currently resides and works in Bangkok, Thailand. Kentaro has been working on different projects for which he creates realistic copies of originals using pencil drawing. His work deals with the parameters of the value of objects, in the tradition of wabi-sabi, the traditional art of impermanence. His typical process begins with carefully looking at the condition of and around the original object and reproducing it through drawing, paying close attention to signs of the passage of time (e.g. mark, scratch, stain, damage). He then installs his pieces in specific manners to transform the space into a metaphysical room – with both his physical copies and the space they occupy making up a single conceptual piece. Each installation embodies ironical through silence.

Hiroki graduated with a BA in Fine Arts from Osaka Art University and subsequently took a Foundation Course from Central Saints Martin School of Design, London. He obtained his Postgraduate Diploma in Fine Arts from Goldsmiths College, University of London, in 2001, and an MA in Fine Arts from Malmö Art Academy, Sweden, in 2003. He has staged solo exhibitions in Bangkok (National Gallery of Thailand, 2016; Bangkok University Gallery, 2015 &

2006; and nospace gallery, 2007) and in Sweden (Gallery Mors Mössa, Göteborg, 2005; Peep Gallery, MA Exhibition Malmö Art Academy, Malmö, 2003; and Rosseum Center for contemporary Art, Malmö). He has also participated in numerous group shows in the United Kingdom, Norway, Germany, Sweden, Thailand, Japan, Korea, Singapore and Hong Kong, including the 2016 Singapore Biennale. His works are in the collections of Malmö Konstmuseum, Sweden, Osage Art Foundation, Hong Kong, and the Singapore Art Museum. He is currently an art lecturer at the School of Architecture and Design KMUTT, Bangkok, Thailand.

L

êna Bùi’s (b. 1985, in Danang, Vietnam) works are sometimes amusing anecdotes and other times in-depth articulations of the impact of rapid development on people’s relationship with nature. She reflects on ways that intangible aspects of life, such as faith, death and dreams influence behaviour and perception. She often relies on drawing and video but is open to whatever medium she perceives as appropriate to a work. Her work has been shown in a number of solo and group exhibitions at the Sharjah Art Foundation, UAE; Wesleyan University, USA; Les Rencontres Internationales Paris/Berlin; The Factory Contemporary Art Center, Vietnam; Carré d’Art-Musée d’Art Contemporain, France; and the Wellcome Collection, London. Bùi received a BA in East Asian Studies from Wesleyan University (2007). Since 2009 she has lived and worked in Saigon, Vietnam.

66

M

elati Suryodarmo (b. 1969, Solo, Indonesia) graduated from the Hochschule für Bildende Künste Braunscheweig, Germany. Her practice is informed by Butoh, dance and history, among others. Her work is the result of ongoing research in the movements of the body and its relationship to the self and the world. These are translated into photography, dance choreography, video and live performances. Suryodarmo has presented her works in locations all over the world for more than 20 years. Since 2007, she has been organizing performance art events and laboratories. She founded Studio Plesungan in 2012, a space for performance and performing arts.

N

oor Mahnun Mohamed (b.1964, Kelantan, Malaysia) studied at the Hochschule für Bildende Künste in Braunschweig, Germany and graduated with a Masters in Fine Art (1996). In 2000 she was the Malaysian artist-in-residence at Rimbun Dahan, Kuang, Selangor. She was awarded the Italian Government Scholarship in 2003 to study printmaking at the International School of Print and Graphic Il Bisonte, Florence, Italy. In 2005 she was recipient of the Australian High Commission Kuala Lumpur Visual Arts Residency at Gunnery Studio, Sydney, Australia. She was curator at Valentine Willie Fine Art (2003–2005) and Arts Manager of the Rimbun Dahan Art Residency programme (2006–2012) in Kuang, Selangor. She has taught Art Criticism and Professional Studies at

the Malaysian Institute of Art, and Visual Communication and Design courses at the Department of Architecture, Faculty of Built Environment & Science, University of Malaya, Kuala Lumpur. She was granted the Asian Public Intellectual Fellowship (2012– 2013), a programme funded by the Nippon Foundation Grant, which she spent in Japan to research printmaking. As a painter she has had several solo and group exhibitions, locally and abroad. Noor Mahnun is known for adapting an old technique of painting in a visual style that has been praised for its simplicity and meticulousness. Her work weaves subtle psychological narratives laced with a dark wit and emotional depth.

She is currently delving into botanical illustrations of indigenous plants in relating to the traditional arts and culture of her home state Kelantan, Malaysia.

O

rawan Arunrak (b.1985, Bangkok, Thailand) lives and works between Bangkok and Berlin. Her works are largely inspired by her everyday life. Using tools like pencils, pens, paper, but also photography and the internet, she creates works that take the forms of drawing, painting and installation. Her practice is aimed at engaging in dialogue with local inhabitants in an attempt to merge the space of art and nonart. Repeatedly crossing national, cultural and spiritual borders, Arunrak’s work has examined likeness and difference within and between varied locations in both Asia and Europe where she has lived in recent years, and based on relationships she has with these places.

ARTIST BIOGRAPHIES (CONT’)

P

huan Thai Meng (b. 1974, Batu Pahat, Johor; lives and works in Taipei) earned a Diploma in Fine Art from the Malaysian Institute of Art and is currently enrolled at the Graduate Institute of Trans- disciplinary Arts of Taipei National University of the Arts. His practice, encompassing paintings and installations, provides a running commentary on the state of the country and the absurdities of Malaysian politics. Phuan has exhibited locally in Malaysia (OUR ArtProjects, 2018; Ilham Gallery, 2016; National Art Gallery, 2007), as well as internationally in countries such as: Singapore (Institute of Contemporary Arts, 2018; Richard Koh Fine Art, 2015); Indonesia (Sangkring Art Space, 2016; Edwin’s Gallery, 2015); and Japan (Fukuoka Asian Art Museum, 2013; Yokohama Museum of Art, 2013). In addition, he has participated in the 7th Asia Pacific Triennial and won the Silver Award for 2018 UOB Painting of the Year’s Established Artist Category in Malaysia.

S

oe Yu Nwe (b.1989, Myanmar). After earning a MFA degree in Ceramics at the prestigious Rhode Island School of Design in 2015, Soe has been participating in numerous residencies in the United States and across Asia. Her experience of living cross-culturally has inspired her to reflect upon her own identity through making, conceiving it as a fluid, fragile and fragmented entity. Through transfiguration of her emotional landscape by poetically depicting nature and body in parts, she ponders the complexities of individual identity in this rapidly changing globalized

67

society. Soe’s work has been exhibited internationally. Her exhibitions include the 9th Asia Pacific Triennial of Contemporary Art (Australia), 2018 Dhaka Art Summit (Bangladesh), The New Taipei City Yingge Ceramic Museum (Taiwan), Yavuz Gallery (Singapore), ZieherSmith in Chelsea, New York (USA), and The National Gallery of Indonesia, Jakarta (Indonesia). Recently, Soe has become an invited member of IAC (International Academy of Ceramics) as the first member from Myanmar. Her work has been acquired by the Queensland Art Gallery & Gallery of Modern Art in Brisbane, Australia. Soe was named in Forbes 30 Under 30: Art & Style 2019.

T

ith Kanitha (b. 1987, Phnom Penh) is a cross-disciplinary artist working between the visual arts in sculpture, performance, and installation as well as in Cambodia’s independent film industry, as a director and artistic director. She holds a BA in Interior Design, Royal University of Fine Arts, Phnom Penh, Cambodia (2008).

Kanitha’s solo exhibitions include Instinct (SA SA BASSAC, Phnom Penh, 2018) and Companions (French Cultural Center, Phnom Penh, 2011). Select recent group exhibitions include; Le paysage après coup (Centre d’art contemporain Faux Mouvement, Metz, 2018), SUNSHOWER: Southeast Asian Art from 1980s to Today (Mori Art Museum, Tokyo, 2017), Today of Yesterday: The Return (Yamamoto Gendai, Tokyo, 2015), Rates of Exchange: Uncompared (Contemporary Art in Bangkok and Phnom Penh, H Gallery, Bangkok and SA SA BASSAC, Phnom Penh,

2014), and Phnom Penh Rescue Archaeology: Contemporary Art and Urban Change In Cambodia (IFA, Berlin and Stuttgart, Germany, 2013) and The Memory Workshop (Columbia University, NYC, 2013). Kanitha has been an artist-in-residence with; New Zero Art Space, Yangon, Myanmar, for the Gender Under Reflection, Southeast Asia Contemporary Art Exchange Program (2012), The Art Initiative Tokyo – Backer foundation at Yamamoto Gendai, Tokyo (2015), Bose Pacia Transparent Studio, New York City, for Season of Cambodia and FIELDS: An Itinerant Inquiry Across the Kingdom of Cambodia (2013), and FIELDS II: On Attachments and Unknowns, Phnom Penh (2017). She was nominated for the DAAD Berlin Residency (2014) and the Sovereign Asian Art Prize (2017). Kanitha was selected for the prestigious Rijksakademie residency program in 2019.

ACKNOWLEDGEMENT

A+ WORKS of ART, would like to thank the following individuals for their support and contribution to this publication and exhibition: Yeap Lam Yang Bogus Merchadise

68

A+ WORKS of ART d6 - G - 8, d6 Trade Centre 801 Jalan Sentul 51000 Kuala Lumpur Malaysia +60 18 333 3399 info@aplusart.asia www.aplusart.asia Facebook/Instagram @aplusart.asia

Copyright © 2021. A+ WORKS of ART, Agus Suwage, Chan Kok Hooi, Chang Fee Ming, Chang Yoong Chia, Isola Tong, Jon Chan, Kentaro Hiroki, Lêna Bùi, Melati Suryodarmo, Noor Mahnun Mohamed, Soe Yu Nwe, Orawan Arunrak, Phuan Thai Meng, and Tith Kanitha.

All rights reserved.

All articles and illustrations contained in this catalogue are subject to copyright law. Any use beyond the narrow limited defined by copyright law, and without the express of the publisher, is forbidden and will be prosecuted.

Front Cover Detail of Lêna Bùi, Unwritten (2021) Back Cover Detail of Chan Kok Hooi, The Spring in the Winter (2021)

A+ WORKS of ART is a contemporary art gallery based in Kuala Lumpur, with a geographic focus on Malaysia and Southeast Asia. Founded in 2017 by Joshua Lim, the gallery presents a wide range of contemporary practices, from painting to performance, drawing, sculpture, new media art, photography, video and installation. Its exhibitions have showcased diverse themes and approaches, including material experimentation and global conversations on social issues. Collaboration is key to the ethos of A+ WORKS of ART. Since its opening, the gallery has worked with artists, curators, writers, collectors, galleries and partners from within the region and beyond, and continues to look out for new collaborations. The gallery name is a play on striving for distinction but also on the idea that art is never without context and is always reaching to connect — it is always “plus” something else.

Artists Agus Suwage Chan Kok Hooi Chang Fee Ming Chang Yoong Chia Isola Tong Jon Chan Kentaro Hiroki Lêna Bùi Melati Suryodarmo Noor Mahnun Mohamed Soe Yu Nwe Orawan Arunrak Phuan Thai Meng Tith Kanitha Writer Denise Lai Photographer Damien Khoo Graphic Designer Kenta.Works