The exhibition Proximities begins and ends with the Malay boy. It attempts to locate a familiar figure in art history, one that has been relegated to the background and implicitly reduced. In a bid to invoke his presence through creative work, this figure is humanized and engaged with critical interest. The exhibition focuses on a new video work that trails a critical inquiry into the trope and how “charged potentials” from a concerted, reductive force can be translated as generative discourse on representation.

In 2020, I embarked on a series of artworks that trailed the Malay boy trope found in a painting by Cheong Soo Pieng. As a “creative intervention”, I looked at the Malay-masculine subtype of Mat Motor (which refers to Malay men with motorcycles) as an “unseen” visual inspiration. I was encouraged to pursue the boy again after another encounter. While I initially thought this was an uncanny coincidence — where the same boy (who happens to be bare-bottomed) exists in two separate artworks by the master artist, Independent researcher Tan Yong Jun informed me of the boy’s “presence” in other additional paintings. For this exhibition, Yong Jun further contributes in his essay “A Genealogy of the Malay Boy”.

In the resultant video work, we will witness a few things. Firstly, there are several male characters. They mostly “play” their “authentic” selves in scenes that were significantly inspired by their respective Instagram contents. Authenticity here does not mean truth, but the free rein to become. While the work may not be directed or conceptualized by the characters in its entirety, the source of its making is significantly attributable to them. In some sense, this is a somewhat nuanced methodology in creative work where social media mediates the researched interactions.

One of the characters, Elfi, describes his Instagram “performances” as “shiok sendiri”. The Malay slang term refers to being fully immersed in an activity. I interpreted this as an embodiment of agency through spontaneous and lived choreography. As a professional traditional Malay dancer with a motorcycle, Elfi is no stranger to performance. The motorcycle often acts as a stand for his camera when he dances in public locations. This is evident in his Instagram videos.

In one scene, Elfi seemingly moves on his own accord, choreographing his presence. While this may look like the artist’s conceptual orchestration, it is primarily inspired by the performer’s routine. As a symbolic and creative gesture of “freeing” the Malay boy (from the paintings), Elfi represents the agency to move through choreography. The video work weaves various scenes as visual ruminations of the Malay boy.

I would like to think of my relationship with Cheong’s artworks as one that is complicated. I am both compelled and conflicted by the depiction of the Malay boy trope. In fact, I think they possess a transformative quality if we trail one iteration to another. They reverberate with a kind of plurality when seen as a whole. But through keen and critical eyes, the Malay boy also represents invisibility and hypervisibility. His many forms have been instrumentalized with evident ambivalence. He exists not to represent himself but utilized as a kind of proxy based on the vagaries of supposed demand and experimental play.

I sometimes feel like the Malay boy is a friend of a particular season or need.

Zulkhairi Zulkiflee (b.1991) is an artist-curator committed to a practice centered on Malayness and its social ontology. He creates lens-based artworks that see Malayness through the racialized Malay male body and its relation to local and global contexts. Previous exhibitions include The Body as a Dream, Art Agenda SEA, Singapore (2021); 10th France + Singapore Photographic Arts Award, Alliance Francaise, Singapore (2020); Stories We Tell To Scare Ourselves With, MOCA, Taipei (2019); and The Direction I Rub One Matters, Grey Projects, Singapore (2018). He is the recipient of the Chow and Lin mentorship, Objectifs’ inaugural Curator Open Call (2019), and the IMPART Award (2020) Curator Category.