Spaces of Experimentation and Collaboration in Early 1990s Malaysian Art

Abstract

At the zenith of the Mahathir era, amidst the economic boom and rapid development of the early 1990s, Malaysian art exhibitions were charting a novel path in the arena of installation and performance art. This paper will closely examine three seminal installation art exhibitions, namely Sook Ching (1990), 2 Installations (1991), and Warbox Lalang Killing Tools (1994), where some of the artists involved chose to perform and/or collaborate with dancers and theatre makers, culminating in some of the earliest experiments with performance art in Malaysia. What sets them apart from other installation exhibitions of that period is their use of performance as a tool to confront, unsettle, and challenge audiences in institutional spaces, thereby opening up new possibilities for experimentation and risk-taking.

Setting the Stage

The date was 21 October 1994, and the venue was the Creative Centre at the Balai Seni Lukis Negara (BSLN) or National Art Gallery, along Jalan Sultan Hishamuddin in Kuala Lumpur. The date marked the opening of a three-man art exhibition, comprising young Malaysian artists Bayu Utomo Radjikin, Raja Shahriman, and Wong Hoy Cheong, and was menacingly titled Warbox Lalang Killing Tools. Even the exhibition catalogue was prickly: rough textured paper encased in a barbed wire folder that was able to draw blood if handled carelessly.

Yet as the sun waned in the distant horizon of Malaysia's capital, it was not the sharp artworks that jarred audiences but the gradually amassing clusters of (mostly) Malay and (mostly) male youth traversing the approach roads to the gallery. This was not your typical gallery opening crowd; they were a ragtag bunch united in dress by a common hue: black. Decked out in identifiably punk paraphernalia—well-worn T-shirts emblazoned with DIY silkscreened punk band monikers, punk symbols and slogans; faded black leather studded jackets; skinny ripped jeans; bovver boots; and the occasional Mohawk hairdo—these young Malaysians were not here to view an art exhibition but to witness performance of the opening act: homegrown Malaysian punk band, Carburetor Dung.

That night, the band literally rocked the grounds of the usually sedate BSLN, blasting ear-splitting punk music from speakers strategically positioned at the entrance of the Creative Centre wing of the building, facing outward. As the loud music reverberated into the Kuala Lumpur nightscape, more and more black-attired youth were drawn into its audible fold. Carburetor Dung fans were circumspect at first, unused to their new quasi-outdoorsy surroundings, but by the second set, the energy emanating from audiences was palpable and here and there, an enraptured few could be seen head-banging. In between sets, as band members moved freely in and out of the Creative Centre to take intermittent short breaks, their fans would wander into the space of the Creative Centre checking out the artworks by the three artists. Gallery visitors who were there for the artworks met and mingled with these youthful fans, with local punk music as the backdrop.

In a recent interview with Wong Hoy Cheong, he remarked that he had wanted to bring together two different groups of young people to the exhibition: the mainstream "high" art crowd comprising visual artists and gallery afficionados, and the alternative crowd of musicians and local punk music fans from the Kuala Lumpur underground music scene.¹ Despite inhabiting the same capital city, these two groups rarely had the opportunity to convene. The former may have heard of Carburetor Dung and listened to punk music, but the vast majority would not have attended live underground gigs in the seedier parts of Kuala Lumpur. That fateful opening night marked the confluence of two disparate groups in the unlikeliest of places: in an art gallery, and a public one at that.

This confluence of two seemingly different groups onto the grounds of Malaysia's National Art Gallery serves as a useful metaphor for what this paper aims to argue: that these early 1990s art exhibitions were charting a novel path in the Malaysian installation art scene by using live performances as a tool to physically confront and unsettle audiences in gallery spaces commonly used for quiet viewing or silent contemplation. This paper will closely examine three seminal exhibitions that took place from 1990 to 1994, namely Sook Ching (1990), 2 Installations (1991), and Warbox Lalang Killing Tools (1994). These exhibitions set the scene for what was still only burgeoning interest in installation art in Malaysia at the time,² but what made them trailblazers was how the artists involved chose to incorporate performance in their work, either as a participant and/or in collaboration with arts practitioners from the non-visual art world, thereby opening up new possibilities for experimentation and risk-taking.

The 1990s was similar with the 1970s in that both were marked by the interest of artists in engaging with multi- or interdisciplinary collaborations among various arts and events.³ The experimentation that happened in the context of the visual arts during the first half of the 1990s would not have been possible without the role of Five Arts Centre (FAC), in which the works of Wong Hoy Cheong (former member of FAC) and Marion D'Cruz (FAC co-founder and current member) will form part of this discussion.⁴

Since there are no publicly available video recordings of the performances linked to the three exhibitions mentioned above, the writers relied solely on exhibition catalogues and photographs from the artists and Five Arts Centre, as well as academic and non-academic publications about the exhibitions and those involved. To supplement the archival documents, interviews were also conducted with artist Wong Hoy Cheong, who was involved in all three exhibitions either as artist or curator; and Marion D'Cruz, whose involvement was as choreographer, performer, and producer, respectively.

Brief Historical Background

The exhibitions discussed in this paper are early Malaysian examples of the convergence of painting, video, movement, and sound/music in one live event, but they are not isolated instances. Instead, they can be construed as part of a trajectory that began in the late 1960s and early 1970s of Malaysian artists questioning the formalistic aspects of painting (two-dimensional) and sculpture (three-dimensional).

One of the first exhibitions to chafe against the artistic status quo of its time was Towards A Mystical Reality (1974), with artists Redza Piyadasa and Suleiman Esa proposing a new and alternative aesthetic for their generation. They did not see art as the mere representation and/or evolution of artistic style; instead, they questioned the definition of art itself by appropriating everyday objects as art objects. The two artists tried to unshackle themselves from Western art ideas by foregrounding what they considered to be a more Eastern concept of ephemerality in their work. Ephemerality or the idea of transience was being discussed as a subject matter for exhibitions by artists interested in producing artistic objects intended to last for only a short period of time. Towards A Mystical Reality could be seen as an early exhibition that highlighted the concept of ephemerality in an attempt to lay the foundation for time-based artworks; the series of captions for the objects and artifacts that were discarded or destroyed after the show attest to this. Building on Taoist/Zen philosophy, the artists wrote in their exhibition manifesto: "The Western artist's interest in the 'physicality' of things must surely account for his interest in 'form-oriented' approach that generally persists.… The Taoist or Zen tendency to view the object as an 'event' rather than as 'form' presupposes that objects exist within an interrelated field or continuum. Time in this case is a 'mental' time that cannot be measured for all measurements can only remain relative."⁵ This tendency is reflected as well in some of the installations discussed in this paper.

Installation art, as understood in today's terms, was largely absent from the 1970s Malaysian art scene and only began to slowly emerge in the late 1980s. Some of these early artworks were initially categorised as mixed media work and assemblages; it was only during the 1990s that the term 'installation art' was used. Some of these early works were site-specific and others were not. Besides the works of Tan Chin Kuan such as Blue Night 11—Tragic 2 (1989), which consists of several iron structures resembling the human body at different heights and sizes, other examples of artworks in the form of structures installed in a gallery space include Zulkifli Yusof's large-scale Dari Hitam ke Putih (1989), Power 1 (1991), and Immunity (1993).⁶ Despite obvious differences in political leadership, infrastructure development, and economic growth, in terms of artmaking, however, the 1990s was similar to the 1970s in one respect: a gradual but marked interest in multi- or interdisciplinary collaborations amongst visual artists and arts practitioners (see note 3).

The 1990s ushered in a period of greater exploration of and experimentation with new materials, media, and visual art languages, as well as novel outlooks of historical and cultural identity responses that ran parallel to socio-political changes at the time: evolving discourse with regards to national identity since the 1971 National Cultural Congress; the emphasis on decolonialisation during Mahathir's tenure as the fourth prime minister; and exhibitions and artworks that were produced under the premise of Malay and/or Islamic themes and aesthetics. Some observed that certain artistic explorations and experimentation that took place in the 1990s had attempted to break away from the existing artistic hierarchical order as the Malay-dominated state proceeded, aggressively, to reconstitute the public cultural landscape through the amplification of the symbolic presence of Malay culture and Islam.⁷ Such developments in the nation resulted in the urgency of certain artists to provide a counter-narrative to the status quo in their artmaking.⁸

In his curatorial text for 2 Installations, Wong Hoy Cheong remarked on the genesis of this shift during the 1990s:

the late 1980s took a turn when a group of young, locally educated artists began to speak with a different voice. Probably influenced by the resurgence of 'angst' in western neo-expressionism, as well as being roused by an embedded frustration with the art establishment and a progressively forbidding society, these artists made works impregnated with images of frustration, alienation and violence.⁹

Wong would later explore this theme of angst in an exhibition he curated and participated in titled, What About Converging Extremes? (1993). He selected artists who were "voices from the periphery, seeking to be heard, questioning the hegemony of the dominant ideology and cultures. These are the voices of urgency, of contradiction, reluctance and rebellion struggling to understand and present themselves".¹⁰ Wong was very interested in the voices of such artists, but he was also mindful and appreciative of the inherent contradictions of their fraught position: "The young artists want to say something strong and critical. But at the same time, are not willing to break away from the mainstream. Instead, they are drawn into the power dynamics. They want to be recognised as equals or as better artists by the institution. They are challenging the institution and are challenged by it."¹¹

This conundrum is perhaps the reality facing any artist who wishes to make incisive artworks that are also accepted for exhibition by the mainstream art galleries. This dilemma was all the more heightened in early 1990s urban Kuala Lumpur, which had more than its fair share of aspiring artists but comparatively fewer gallery spaces willing to exhibit works that were experimental in form and which contained controversial or edgy subject matter. In Kathy Rowland's detailed account of the development of the art ecosystem in 1990s Malaysia, during the second decade of Mahathir's reign as prime minister, she characterizes the capital city of KL as having a "kind of brash confidence" and "an atmosphere of possibility and opportunity".¹² The artworks for these exhibitions were created in a milieu where the art market was growing rapidly, as exemplified by an increase in the number of corporate funded and also private commercial art galleries such as Galeri PETRONAS, Maybank Gallery, TAKSU, GaleriWan, and Valentine Willie Fine Art. But what if an artist did not want to exhibit at a public gallery like the BSLN or a private commercial gallery? What could s/he create if there were few or no socio-political, or even aesthetic, constraints to hinder the creative process? What spatial configurations or aesthetic considerations would these two very different spaces necessitate or inspire?

Disrupting and Unsettling Spaces

From 1984 to 1998—during the height of the Mahathir era¹³—the BSLN was housed within a former colonial structure, the Hotel Majestic,¹⁴ built in 1932 and reputedly one of the great hotels of the city during the heyday of British colonialism.¹⁵ Any art exhibition at this location would be hard pressed to escape the visible traces of colonial history ensconced in its art deco architecture. Thus, it is not without irony that the presence of Carburetor Dung in that same space in 1994 symbolically conjured up a different trace of Britishness in its wake, not colonial but popular, and decidedly anti-establishment and anarchic in tone and form, namely: punk music. Joe Kidd, one of the founders of Carburetor Dung—also a writer and music reviewer—has made no bones of the fact that his band's punk music influences started out being solidly British, with the Sex Pistols being a catalyst for his own musical compositions.¹⁶

Not since poet Salleh Ben Joned publicly pissed on Malaysian visual artists Redza Piyadasa and Sulaiman Esa's manifesto for their Towards A Mystical Reality exhibition in 1974 has a rarefied space of art and culture been so defied and defiled.¹⁷ However, this is certainly not to suggest that Salleh's unscripted act of genital exposure is in any way comparable to Carburetor Dung's raucous performance at the BSLN. The former was a corporeal critique of an art exhibition from someone within the same arts community, whereas the latter was a gesture of inclusion—to invite the urban disenfranchised to celebrate their creative spirit in a space that had not accepted them before. The two differ in tenor and intent, but they do share one common characteristic: disruption. Whereas Salleh's disruption was in an individual capacity and less visible—privy only to those who saw him in the act or breathed in its residual odour—Carburetor Dung's performance was not only visible but also plainly audible from afar. Additionally, the band not only entertained the usual gallery audience but also brought their own: fans who dressed and behaved in a manner that did not meet with public approval.¹⁸

Contemporary audiences may not understand the consternation but for those well-versed in the zeitgeist, the 1990s was a time when the moral policing of urban youth, especially rock and punk musicians and their fans, was widespread thanks to state support for sanctions against targeted musicians.¹⁹ Against this backdrop, Wong Hoy Cheong's idea to invite Carburetor Dung to play two sets to officiate Warbox Lalang Killing Tools, rather than to fall back on the customary rounds of formal acknowledgements by gallery officials and speeches by bigwigs in the art world, is nothing short of rebellious.²⁰ Even though their performance may not have made its way into television sets but to everyone who attended the opening, Carburetor Dung's raucous performance has its place in the annals of the BSLN.

But it is not just this live mini punk concert—for which the gallery space had to be re-configured to allow for a type of performance it was never intended to host—that made Warbox Lalang Killing Tools such a significant exhibition in the context of 1990s Malaysian art. Various delicate negotiations had to be carried out with gallery administrators at the former National Art Gallery space on Jalan Sultan Hishamuddin to enable the transplanting of weeds (Lalang) into the garden area, and the placement of sharp and potentially injurious sculptures (Killing Tools) in the vicinity of the public (especially children) as part of installation artmaking.

The installation that most directly referenced an important event in Malaysian history was Wong's time-based Lalang (Figures 1 and 2), an art installation and performance art piece that spanned a few weeks, from the planting of the weed grass in the weeks prior to the exhibition, to the nine days of its destruction. The word lalang conveys meaning on multiple registers.²¹ On a literal level, lalang is a type of rhizomic weed grass with thorny edges, commonly found in Malaysia; on a political level, lalang conjures up memories of Operation Lalang, a 1987 Barisan Nasional government-led crackdown, which some historians consider to be one of the most egregious instances of human rights abuse in Malaysia. Using the then Internal Security Act, the police—under the orders of Mahathir himself—were ordered to arrest more than 100 Malaysians accused of raising 'sensitive' national issues that exacerbated racial tensions. Many of those detained without trial were social activists and political opponents of Mahathir, which led many to surmise that the crackdown was politically motivated. The publishing licences of four major news publications were also revoked.²²

The link between Lalang and Operation Lalang is clear and intended as Wong timed his art installation and performance to directly coincide with the seventh anniversary of Operation Lalang; in fact, the day he slashed and burnt the lalang that he had planted in the front lawn of the BSLN as part of

Figure 1.

Wong Hoy Cheong, Lalang research documentation materials and objects used during the performance, 1994 (Image courtesy of the artist).

Figure 2.

Wong Hoy Cheong, Lalang performance, 1994 (Image courtesy of the artist).

his performance was also the same day the Mahathir-led government began their arrests, seven years before. We see Wong's performance as a metaphorical re-enactment of the suppression of political dissent, with the lalang symbolically representing the insidious thorns in the side of the ruling government that had to be weeded out. The Lalang installation also comprised botanical illustrations drawn by the artist, different lalang specimens displayed in vitrines, and scientific documentation that Wong reproduced from his research into this coarse and hardy Malaysian weed or Imperata arundinacea (Figure 2). These forms of documentation are reminiscent of newspaper coverage of the people arrested by the police during Operation Lalang: their mugshots and little write-ups about their backgrounds and affiliations, like specimens of political opposition presented to the general public to be perused and dissected. It is no small matter that Wong chose such an installation artwork and performance to be presented in a public institution such as the National Art Gallery, which was located in the nation's capital, during the height of Mahathir's power. It was a reminder to audiences that their current prime minister was not just the harbinger of profits and progress for the people; he was also the chief architect of the dismantling of democratic institutions in the nation, ever willing to orchestrate operations, such as Operation Lalang, which caused his opponents to be imprisoned without due process of law.

While Wong's work is clearly overtly political, the artworks of Raja Shahriman and Bayu Utomo in the same exhibition, can be also read as something that chafed against the status quo, albeit in a more muted manner. For example, all of Raja Shahriman's dangerously sharp tools entirely capable of killing may not be explicitly about politics, but their presence next to Wong's work is certainly an oblique and symbolic reference to the tools of pain and torture wielded by the powerful. Within the gallery space, for his Warbox (1994) installation, Bayu constructed a large box out of unvarnished and unpainted plywood which audiences could walk into to view some of the artworks on display; despite having no locks, the box is an apt metaphor for containment, even imprisonment. Audiences to the exhibition were confronted with works that could make them feel trapped or claustrophobic, works that could poke their eyes out if they were not careful, and works that seemed out of place in an art gallery and that challenged them to reflect on Malaysia's recent history and the events that led to them.

The design and configuration of an exhibition space is often not something visual artists have to consider or even have control over, but for performing arts practitioners, spatial awareness and configurations can make or break a show. For Wong, the first time he had to grapple with working synergistically within a space was during the opening ceremony of the very first International Video Art Festival on 3 November 1990, when he premiered his installation and performance art piece titled Sook Ching as both visual artist and performer.²³ The performance was done in collaboration with Marion D'Cruz, a dancer-choreographer who championed experimentation and collaboration in her own work, and a small group of performers, some of whom were members of Five Arts Centre.

Sook Ching started out as a large oil painting (213 × 366 cm) (Figure 3), almost mural-like, and was meant to mark an extremely brutal and violent historical period and event. Wong had conducted extensive historical research

Figure 3.

Wong Hoy Cheong, Sook Ching (1989), oil on gunny sack, 213.0 × 366.0 cm. Collection of Fukuoka Asian Art Museum.

to create his painting, including interviewing survivors of the Japanese Occupation. One of the survivors was his father, whom he recorded on video. Although Wong did not start out intending to make a video documentary, he eventually did because "the completion of the painting left him dissatisfied as he felt that the medium was too limiting to represent the rich dimension of experiences that he had gathered".²⁴ Footage from his interviews were then used to create a 27-minute documentary of the same name, which also incorporated historical documents, stills from his painting, and snippets of a performance inspired by the painting. It must be noted that the performance was created much later as a supplement to the painting and video because despite the use of two different art forms or media to represent the historical event, Wong still felt the work lacked a sense of the "live and visceral aspect to the human body".²⁵ This lack gave him the idea to create a live performance to accompany the viewing of the painting and documentary (Figure 4).

As he was not a performer, Wong collaborated with five fellow arts practitioners to realize his idea: dancer-choreographer Marion D'Cruz and two members of her dance company, Anne James and Ivy Josiah; theatre practitioner Charlene Rajendran; and visual artist John Lai, who had no prior dance experience but coincidentally was taking dance classes with D'Cruz at the time. This collaboration was an opportunity for experimentation for all involved as each party was delving into an unfamiliar artistic medium. This was the first time Wong—a non-performer—would be performing with

Figure 4.

John Lai, Anne James, Ivy Josiah, Wong Hoy Cheong, and Charlene Rajendran in "Sook Ching" performance during the International Video Art Festival, 1990 (Image courtesy of the Five Arts Centre and the artist).

his own artwork as backdrop; for the others, it would be their first time devising a performance inspired by a painting and documentary. Together they rehearsed for two to three months, discussing what kind of performance they wanted to create, then trying out different movements and gestures of their own and playing off each other during rehearsals. D'Cruz started the process of improvisations during rehearsals by having the performers recall personal stories they had heard about the Japanese Occupation; they also watched Wong's video and looked to his painting for ideas for gestures and even sounds or words they could utter aloud. Wong recorded some of the rehearsals and short snippets of the footage were later edited into his video. In this way, painting, video, and movement worked synergistically together to tell a story about the Sook Ching.²⁶ D'Cruz recalls:

We made performance directly based on the painting and video, taking sounds, text, movements, poses and emotions from the video and painting. For every rehearsal we would unroll and put up the painting and play the video and improvise. I remember I used to say to the performers, 'When you don't know what to do, just copy a pose from the painting.' And that's exactly what they did.²⁷

We can argue that this is a moment where the blurring of artistic and aesthetic boundaries is enacted, even if not done in an entirely conscious manner. Without the painting and video, there would be no performance, and without the performance, the historical event would not come alive for audiences in a visceral manner. There was playful experimentation, a willingness to fail, a desire to create from instinct, "from the gut" as D'Cruz loves to say, because for her, the process of creating the performance was largely improvisational as there was no conscious planning of specific steps or movements. Performers moved in an organic and fluid fashion, buoyed by the sights and sounds generated by the painting and video. By watching each other, the performers also picked up cues from each other's movements, gestures, and utterances, and responded to them as they saw fit.²⁸ For Wong, the performance ended up being rather confrontational, with the performers gesturing accusatorily at audiences or shouting words at them. This visual, aural, and performative strategy was designed to mirror the tensions during the Japanese Occupation.²⁹ As such, Sook Ching can be seen as an interesting exploration and experimentation by the (visual) artist as the multimedia installation work converges the language of the visual and performing arts through the means of video and performance itself when the series of movements were done alongside both the paintings and the video, resulting in a performance that incorporated the visual.³⁰

What started as an experiment for Sook Ching became a seminal moment for both Wong and D'Cruz because it was the start of more collaborations between them. More than that, it also enabled them to consider different access points and trajectories for their own work in the visual arts and dance, respectively. For D'Cruz, the Sook Ching collaboration gave her an inkling of what it would be like to work with non-dancers and even non-performers; by working with visual artists instead of dancers, she did not feel the need to slip into her usual role as choreographer because the nature of the improvisations went beyond conventional dance techniques. There was a randomness to their improvisations that was exciting and ultimately liberating. For a choreographer, this meant she could be less rigid about her creative choices because she was less dictatorial in her approach to the choreography.³¹ For Wong, performing in his own exhibition was a means for him to "experiment with theatrical interventions in the visual arts.".³² He was not interested in theatre as an art form per se, but was more invested in the performative aspect of theatre: its corporeality and the use of the human body to inhabit physical spaces and by so doing, infuse a static piece of art with dynamic, live, and unpredictable possibilities. Performance art was a new area of exploration for Wong, as yet untapped and full of possibilities.

Wong's interest in performativity was ignited when he began teaching performance art in the Malaysian Institute of Art (MIA) in the early 1990s. MIA, established in 1967, is one of the oldest art educational institutions in Malaysia.³³ It is located in Taman Melawati, an area within greater Kuala Lumpur that, in the 1990s, was seen as being exceedingly remote as there were no shopping malls, very few surrounding buildings, and underdeveloped roads and public transportation infrastructure. Since MIA was situated close to the National Zoo, visitors would joke that MIA was in the boondocks.³⁴ In addition to teaching, Wong took on the role of manager of galeriMIA, a non-profit exhibition space that was developed, operated, and fully funded by MIA on an annual budget. As the manager, Wong consciously set up the gallery as an alternative space for young artists to exhibit and experiment with new mediums and ideas. Wong was not just interested in performance art for art's sake but he wanted to infuse its potential for play, improvisation, and experimentation into art classrooms and to shake up Malaysian education as a whole.³⁵ Based on his interest in Paolo Freire's educational philosophy and pedagogy, which he had studied as part of his master's in education degree, Wong's focus was also to curate shows that could promote cultural exchanges among Asian artists, thereby expanding the possibilities of art education for students at MIA beyond their narrow enclave.

In 1991, a very short time after the premiere of Sook Ching at the BSLN, Wong curated a show at galeriMIA from 1–17 March, aptly titled 2 Installations. The two artists were MIA alumni Liew Kungyu—who was trained as a graphic designer but had experimented with a wide range of art forms and media, and had also collaborated with theatre and dance companies—and Raja Shahriman, who would later be part of the Warbox Lalang Killing Tools exhibition. The two created site-specific installations that would transform the gallery space from a white cube to two very different artistic sites, using unusual materials, including found objects. As curator, Wong explicitly wanted to foreground installation art in the exhibition and selected artists whom he felt were on the periphery of the art establishment. As Wong puts it in his essay for the exhibition catalogue: "They have something urgent to say even if not fully articulate as yet—to rebel against the dominant visual ideology; to exert their multi-disciplinary difference, their contemporary and changing values."³⁶

Liew Kungyu's Who Am I (Figures 5 and 6) is a site-specific installation that comprises three components: video footage taken before the work was installed, the physical installation itself, and a performance piece to accompany the installation. Liew wanted to create an artwork about prayer boards typically displayed in Malaysian Chinese home altars as part of the ritual

Figure 5.

Liew Kungyu's "Chinese Prayer Altars" performed during Alter Art, 1991 (Image courtesy of Five Arts Centre and the artist).

of ancestor worship or in small shrines erected by the side of roads, used to worship deities and ward off bad spirits in the area. He did not use new prayer boards but instead collected used and broken boards that had been abandoned or discarded. As a city dweller who frequently travelled around KL, Liew had begun noticing how more and more prayer boards were thrown carelessly along the side of roads or dumped illegally and indiscriminately. Such religious objects had to be disposed of properly and Liew was very critical of those who did not do so, and who disrespected their religious beliefs by such wilful carelessness.³⁷

But Liew did not want to just collect and display material objects for an exhibition; he also wanted audiences to imagine the life cycle of a prayer board: how it is used in a Chinese prayer ritual, where it typically resides in a Chinese home, and where it eventually ends up when it is no longer of use. This meant the boards would need to be animated in a space, to come alive to do its job as a prayer board, and the artist had to enable this liveliness through the design of the performance space, as well as the objects therein. As all prayer boards are red in colour—a colour that also dominates most Chinese altars set up in homes—Liew painted the walls of the exhibition/performance space bright red and filled them up with hung altar boards.

Figure 6.

Liew Kungyu's "Chinese Prayer Altars" during Alter Art, 1991 (Image courtesy of Five Arts Centre and the artist).

There were also multiple TV monitors placed around the gallery that screened footage of Liew's trips around KL to collect the altar boards. Viewers got a chance to see the boards in their original (usually damaged or in disrepair) condition at the various locations where Liew found them. Additionally, Liew also constructed prayer altars in the gallery, complete with joss sticks and other ritualistic prayer paraphernalia, lending the space a pseudo-religious aura.

For Malaysians who were familiar with Chinese prayer altars, the transformation of the gallery space from a white cube to a garish red room in disrepair was very discomfiting. Those who were there to witness an art exhibition found themselves confronted with what seemed to be a bizarre ritual space that also straddled the boundaries of private and public, sacred and profane. Malaysian audiences familiar with such ritualistic spaces did not know what to expect: should they behave as if they were in a temple or in an art gallery? They were uncomfortable and unsettled because the space provided clues and cues for behaviour that did not fit within a gallery space. Alternatively, those unfamiliar with Chinese cultural rituals and those who did not imbue the objects on display with any spiritual or supernatural significance, also felt discomfited by the space they were in. They expected an art gallery, a white cube with discernible artworks for viewing, but were greeted instead with blood-red walls upon which hung objects that were clearly not works of art in the usual sense. The floor was dusty and dirty; the TV monitors were screening what seemed to be live footage of altars sitting by roadsides, getting picked up, being moved around KL by a truck; there was a growing heap of what looked like broken discarded altar boards and trash. Liew's exhibition is titled Who am I?, but audiences would be remiss to not also ask, 'What is this?'

The feeling of foreboding and fear typically associated with ritualistic, religious objects was intensified during the performance piece that accompanied the exhibition. For their live performance event, Liew and two other non-dancers walked around the installation chanting, lighting joss sticks, and bowing to pray at the altars on display. They then picked up the altar boards, showed them to audiences, and yelled and cried out in different Chinese dialects as they threw the boards or smashed them to the ground. The loud cracking sounds of the breaking boards penetrated the entire gallery space, punctuated with piercing screams and blood-curdling yells that could make one's skin crawl from shock, fear, and unease. It was easy to imagine the sounds as coming from angry spirits, incensed at the destruction and desecration of the boards. Even after the performers stopped smashing and screaming, the entire gallery space reverberated with the echoes of their actions and vocalizations. Unsurprisingly, more than a few audience members were unhappy about or upset by the work. As Liew tells it:

Most Chinese were superstitious and angry about it (Who Am I). (And) when it was on display in MIA (Malaysia Institute of Art) most people were scared. And I don't blame them because I had that feeling as well. …There was a Chinese lady who came up to Hoy Cheong (the curator) and scolded him because she felt that this was not right. And there was a Muslim couple who refused to go into that space. …And my mother asked me whether I was questioning my father. Scolding him for doing this….³⁸

After a few performances over a few days, a growing heap of broken prayer altars began to accumulate in a corner of the gallery. The installation began to resemble the illegal dumping grounds where the discarded altar boards were first found; the boundaries between art and life began to blur. Even after the exhibition closed and all remnants of the installation were removed, superstitious audience members continued to wonder if the spirits of the boards were finally appeased or if they would make the space their indefinite home.³⁹

If Liew's installation-performance unsettled audiences because of its taboo subject matter—religion and religious rituals—and a discomfiting space, then Raja Shahriman's Bamboo and Glass (1991) (Figure 7) installation unnerved audiences with its potent visceral danger. Using sharpened bamboo poles and broken shards of glass, the artist constructed an installation that resembled a menacing 3D maze. The artwork was not originally designed as a performance space but instead was created to be an installation so dangerous, audiences were not allowed to enter. The entire gallery floor was covered with split and un-sanded bamboo poles, creating an uneven and rough surface to stand or walk on. Broken pieces of glass were randomly glued to different parts of this inhospitable bamboo flooring. Sharpened bamboo poles embedded with long nails were hung from makeshift rafters, some rigid and solid-looking, others moving ever so slightly when touched. In an interview with the curator, Raja Shahriman explained that his work was inspired by the raw emotion of aggression, suffocation, anger, frustration, and impotence that he had felt at that time.⁴⁰

Figure 7.

Raja Shahriman's "Bamboo & Glass" with performance by Marion D'Cruz during Alter Art, 1991 (Image courtesy of Five Arts Centre and the artist).

It is hard to imagine a space as forbidding as Raja Shahriman's installation being performed in, and in truth, the artist created the installation with no initial plan to have it be performed in. Marion D'Cruz, who happened to be the choreographer for Liew's Who Am I? in the same building, had seen the installation of the menacing space and playfully floated the idea of performing in it. The artist liked the idea so much, he promptly invited her to do so, and being no stranger to provocation in her own work, D'Cruz agreed.⁴¹ Unlike a typical installation that requires the audience to navigate the installed space, Bamboo and Glass was so hazardous that hardly anyone dared to venture in. Warning signs also made it clear that there were invisible shards of glass ever ready to draw blood. As such, D'Cruz's performance within the space served as a vicarious vehicle for audiences; she would be the conduit for their immersion into the work. As the artwork was not custom installed to serve as a space for her to perform in, D'Cruz admits that she dared not improvise too much during the actual performance, for fear of injuring herself. In fact, during a dress rehearsal, she had cut one of her toes on a sharp glass fragment and as a result, she focused on using small movements in her performance instead of large ones. Her carefully calibrated and precise movements in the installation were beautiful to behold as D'Cruz managed to look serene and at ease even though danger was omnipresent; audiences, in turn, were simultaneously afraid for her well-being and adrenalin-charged from watching her navigate such a treacherous space. According to the exhibition catalogue text, D'Cruz's performance of carefully choreographed movements reflects and reveals "how society behaves—everyone is constantly nudging their way through danger in search of something that is more attractive".⁴²

Despite galeriMIA being located in what was deemed a remote part of KL at the time, 2 Installations managed to garner a sizeable audience, mostly made up of art students and artists in the vicinity, as well as those curious to experience something that challenged their artistic sensibilities, caused them a degree of unease, and blurred the boundaries between art, life, and reality. The collaborations between the artists and performers proved fruitful as they engendered a convivial spirit of trust and openness that helped to nurture a willingness for further risk-taking and experimentation. In her essay about her impetus to work with non-dancers in contemporary dance, Marion D'Cruz cites her collaboration with Wong, Liew, and Raja Shahriman as being the catalyst for her own praxis in the decades to come:

What was energizing for me as a choreographer was the artistic collaboration where I was working with the concept and ideas of someone else. What was empowering was creating performance with and for the artist and others who have never performed before.… The coming together of various artists with strong concepts with which to collaborate and experiment led to a sharing of ideas, greater challenges, and the pushing of boundaries. This process, I believe, resulted in work that was distinctly exciting in form and content and profoundly meaningful for participant and viewer. …new spaces—physical spaces, intellectual spaces, spiritual spaces and sensory spaces—were opened up.⁴³

Conclusion

Whilst collaborations between visual artists and dancers or theatre practitioners are nothing new, the reality is that visual artists often take direction from the director of the performance, creating to specifications the sets or backdrops against which performers dance or act. In short, visual artists support a production rather than participate in it. They are not entirely free to improvise or to evolve their creations without first consulting with the director because to do so would be to interrupt the flow of the rest of the production or to disrupt what has already been planned or rehearsed. From our discussion of the three exhibitions thus far, Sook Ching, 2 Installations, and Warbox Lalang Killing Tools clearly do not fit this mould of collaboration. Both visual artists and performers work together in a more fluid and organic manner and artists even take on the role of performer in some instances. Whenever possible, a non-hierarchical and more horizontal and dialogic relationship between the artists and performers is allowed to develop. Even if visual artists and musicians do not directly collaborate—as in the case of Carburetor Dung being invited to perform but not asked to integrate reference to the artworks in their set—both groups of creatives are given the space and room to make art the way they see fit. There is an implicit respect for each other's work and the level of involvement expected is less explicitly demarcated. As D'Cruz so aptly puts it, "No collaborations are 'equal'. Nothing in life is. What matters is that participants were involved in a profound experience of sharing, learning, negotiating and expanding their creativity."⁴⁴

During a time when the economy was booming and artists were encouraged to make art for a rapidly expanding art market driven by largely commercial interests, the artists discussed in this paper were not really motivated to tap into these new channels of profit-making. Instead, they made installation-cum-performance artworks which did not sell well or at all. Some of the physical works may have been collected by museums but only in so far as they have historical value, and not necessarily commercial worth. The performances that were part of the exhibitions live on in the memories of those who witnessed their display, as their recordings are not available for viewing or sale, and some performances were likely never recorded. At a time when art was being valued, packaged, and sold, the artworks discussed in this paper resisted being turned into marketable goods. What were valued were the friendships that were forged during the collaborative process and the experiments that were undertaken without a clear sense of the outcomes. The extent of the impact of Sook Ching (1990), 2 Installations (1991), and Warbox Lalang Killing Tools (1994) may be hard to ascertain but those who witnessed, wrote, and talked about these shows will remember how the gallery spaces they inhabited were transformed, disturbed, and unsettled. Only those who were present to witness their staging would be able to attest to their visual, aural, and spatial potency.