https://proximities.cargo.site Proximities by Zulkhairi Zulkiflee Fri, 21 Jan 2022 07:08:19 +0000 https://proximities.cargo.site en https://proximities.cargo.site/Artist-s-Preface Tue, 04 Jan 2022 07:46:58 +0000 Proximities by Zulkhairi Zulkiflee https://proximities.cargo.site/Artist-s-Preface ARTIST’S PREFACE by Zulkhairi Zulkiflee 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. ︎︎︎ HOMEPAGE ABOUT ︎︎︎ https://proximities.cargo.site/About Tue, 04 Jan 2022 08:29:02 +0000 Proximities by Zulkhairi Zulkiflee https://proximities.cargo.site/About ABOUT THE EXHIBITION: PROXIMITIES <img width="4200" height="2800" width_o="4200" height_o="2800" data-src="https://freight.cargo.site/t/original/i/ef709c82d017403bb5650deacfc19e084d3fc0b39d4a39769acca155af63c670/Copy-of-_A_R9470.jpg" data-mid="130695042" border="0" src="https://freight.cargo.site/w/1000/i/ef709c82d017403bb5650deacfc19e084d3fc0b39d4a39769acca155af63c670/Copy-of-_A_R9470.jpg" /> <img width="4200" height="2800" width_o="4200" height_o="2800" data-src="https://freight.cargo.site/t/original/i/7bef6645d5eca48becd3756367171b1e37130fc8875ba4058163e90fcc600c75/Copy-of-_A_R9498.jpg" data-mid="130695043" border="0" src="https://freight.cargo.site/w/1000/i/7bef6645d5eca48becd3756367171b1e37130fc8875ba4058163e90fcc600c75/Copy-of-_A_R9498.jpg" /> <img width="4200" height="2800" width_o="4200" height_o="2800" data-src="https://freight.cargo.site/t/original/i/55ed9fd43bd734f5c407e8a1acab9a4ac9b1fdf9cc6e1202bec19b4844f0b668/Copy-of-_A_R9468.jpg" data-mid="130695041" border="0" src="https://freight.cargo.site/w/1000/i/55ed9fd43bd734f5c407e8a1acab9a4ac9b1fdf9cc6e1202bec19b4844f0b668/Copy-of-_A_R9468.jpg" /> Proximities is the first solo exhibition by Singaporean artist-curator Zulkhairi Zulkiflee. This debut exhibition at Objectifs focuses on a new video work surrounding Malay masculinities and their plural representation. At the beginning of 2020, artist-curator Zulkhairi Zulkiflee focused on the trope of the Malay Boy found in the works of Singaporean artist Cheong Soo Pieng. An indirect extension that included a visual study of colonial postcards depicting the implicit relationship of boy and crocodile, and personal photographs of his father in the eighties, Zulkhairi's consistent interest in images and visuality is rigorously anchored by the Malay male body. Here, his works circulate key themes like representation, racialized masculinities, and Malay male identity formations. In the many Malay boy(s) of Cheong’s multiple yet elusive renditions, Zulkhairi attempts to locate the Malay male in art history while unpacking underlying systems of power that have shaped and naturalized understanding of difference. When exorcised from the framings of art history - one informed by overlapping lenses of pioneer artists and their Western predecessors, the Malay boy now stands as a figure (re)molded by contemporary currents and various intercessors. Against such discourses, the exhibition primarily focuses on a video that foregrounds Malay masculinities and their plural representations — intersecting wide-ranging sources from art history to personal meditations. OBJECTIFS CENTRE FOR PHOTOGRAPHY AND FILM Established in 2003, Objectifs is a visual arts space in Singapore that is dedicated to film and photography.&nbsp; Objectifs aims to cultivate original voices in visual storytelling, and to inspire and broaden perspectives through the power of images. The centre does this by presenting a year round programme of exhibitions, screenings, workshops, talks, mentorships and residencies, aimed at fostering dialogue about visual culture, and advancing the practice and appreciation of photography and film. SINGAPORE ART WEEK 2022 As Singapore’s signature visual arts season, Singapore Art Week (SAW) represents the unity and pride of a diverse and vibrant arts community. In its 10th edition, SAW 2022 will be a celebration of the Singapore visual arts in its decade of growth - in the practices of Singapore artists, in the formats of presentation and in the spaces these will inhabit. SAW 2022 will run from 14 January to 23 January, with over 130 art events across the island and online, featuring new works, transnational collaborations, and virtual art experiences. Audiences all over the world can access and discover the exciting art in Singapore’s arts and cultural institutions and beyond, or engage in enriching discussions, talks, public art walks and tours. A catalyst of creativity, SAW 2022 continues to be a spotlight, gathering and launchpad for the arts community in Singapore. SAW 2022, a celebration of Singapore’s vibrant arts landscape, is a joint initiative by the National Arts Council (NAC) and the Singapore Tourism Board (STB). This edition is presented in conjunction with #NAC30, as NAC commemorates 30 years of Singapore’s arts scene with the larger arts community. ︎︎︎ HOMEPAGE PROGRAMMES&nbsp;︎︎︎ https://proximities.cargo.site/Programmes Tue, 04 Jan 2022 09:14:41 +0000 Proximities by Zulkhairi Zulkiflee https://proximities.cargo.site/Programmes VIDEO: PROXIMITIES Proximities focuses on the trope of the Malay Boy found in the works of Singaporean artist Cheong Soo Pieng (b. 1917-1983). The film attempts to locate the Malay male in art history while unpacking underlying systems of power that have shaped and naturalized understanding of difference. ESSAYS Noorshidah Ibrahim&nbsp; ︎ The Politics of Difference in Cheong Soo Pieng’s “Malay Boy with Bird” Tan Yong Jun ︎ The Genealogy of the Malay Boy Nissa Abdurazzak ︎ Provider, Protector, Leader Echoing the concept of “proximities”, the artist invited three writers to respond to the exhibition from varying thought lenses. Their contributions trail an inquiry on art-historical representations, the figurative trope, and personal perspectives of masculinities.&nbsp; <img width="4200" height="2800" width_o="4200" height_o="2800" data-src="https://freight.cargo.site/t/original/i/e8ad69449dc3b7aa9fabf2d813d2afc614f45c88ad263bdc1b7a6b435566c6d2/_A_R9497.jpg" data-mid="134599487" border="0" src="https://freight.cargo.site/w/1000/i/e8ad69449dc3b7aa9fabf2d813d2afc614f45c88ad263bdc1b7a6b435566c6d2/_A_R9497.jpg" />Physical copies of Proximities’ booklet (with essays) can be purchased at Objectifs for S$10. ARTIST’S TALK&nbsp; with Noorshidah Ibrahim FILM &amp; VIDEO ART PROGRAMME A selection of videos themed upon Malay masculinities is brought together to reveal both tensions and parallels as part of the exhibition. The video works represent coordinates of Malay male representations and their proximities to each other. Here, they function as ‘artistic accompaniments’ for the artist through his practice. <img width="2000" height="1123" width_o="2000" height_o="1123" data-src="https://freight.cargo.site/t/original/i/be998c15c6fb620408cc6d00a05690832becb29422e067201fc3a7e8a55b456c/Screenshot-2020-07-25-at-1.17.34-PM-1.jpg" data-mid="129495456" border="0" alt="(PREMIERS 12 JAN) Rizman Putra (Singapore), Sontol Al Loyo, The Legend, 2006, 18:35. Courtesy of the artist." data-caption="(PREMIERS 12 JAN) Rizman Putra (Singapore), Sontol Al Loyo, The Legend, 2006, 18:35. Courtesy of the artist." src="https://freight.cargo.site/w/1000/i/be998c15c6fb620408cc6d00a05690832becb29422e067201fc3a7e8a55b456c/Screenshot-2020-07-25-at-1.17.34-PM-1.jpg" /> <img width="800" height="530" width_o="800" height_o="530" data-src="https://freight.cargo.site/t/original/i/d0ec3442f36840985b7afefb1f41c1bca5dec7feeb12c9f7ddee7e2ac0944d77/443856972-2a0b3b98c5ec21f4e9bb78be1fd3c624f8688120ff86c0fe4aa11edff44a47eb-d.jpg" data-mid="129495452" border="0" alt="(PREMIERS 15 JAN) Adi Yadoni (Singapore), Reflections Of The Misunderstood Mat Rockers, 2002, 56:20. Courtesy of the artist." data-caption="(PREMIERS 15 JAN) Adi Yadoni (Singapore), Reflections Of The Misunderstood Mat Rockers, 2002, 56:20. Courtesy of the artist." src="https://freight.cargo.site/w/800/i/d0ec3442f36840985b7afefb1f41c1bca5dec7feeb12c9f7ddee7e2ac0944d77/443856972-2a0b3b98c5ec21f4e9bb78be1fd3c624f8688120ff86c0fe4aa11edff44a47eb-d.jpg" /> <img width="640" height="398" width_o="640" height_o="398" data-src="https://freight.cargo.site/t/original/i/d779321dd581c41580554afe5dd2768d9a11b66376cc53cd950a0c1e2461ed10/17510536.png" data-mid="129495451" border="0" alt="(PREMIERS 18 JAN) Izat Arif (Malaysia), Ini Amaran Penghabisan, 2012, 00:42. Courtesy of the artist." data-caption="(PREMIERS 18 JAN) Izat Arif (Malaysia), Ini Amaran Penghabisan, 2012, 00:42. Courtesy of the artist." src="https://freight.cargo.site/w/640/i/d779321dd581c41580554afe5dd2768d9a11b66376cc53cd950a0c1e2461ed10/17510536.png" /> <img width="890" height="501" width_o="890" height_o="501" data-src="https://freight.cargo.site/t/original/i/f7778188e3d531521f7afe3cd789c797176b9e1417ade727a962f267e4a894b7/cover-Qt0zf1Oc7RNqbi6tNHhuUxE0V6MVhE1f.jpeg" data-mid="129495453" border="0" alt="(PREMIERS 21 JAN) Yusri Sapari (Singapore), Trailer boys, 2018, 20:00. Courtesy of the Artist." data-caption="(PREMIERS 21 JAN) Yusri Sapari (Singapore), Trailer boys, 2018, 20:00. Courtesy of the Artist." src="https://freight.cargo.site/w/890/i/f7778188e3d531521f7afe3cd789c797176b9e1417ade727a962f267e4a894b7/cover-Qt0zf1Oc7RNqbi6tNHhuUxE0V6MVhE1f.jpeg" /> <img width="2100" height="1181" width_o="2100" height_o="1181" data-src="https://freight.cargo.site/t/original/i/d6f84f3d3a5e28167c5a3d1a0fdf33f1c3a0f08909a8a63aa9aa84f5fca28530/PC_TMOS_1.jpg" data-mid="129776848" border="0" alt="(PREMIERS 24 JAN) Phil Collins (United Kingdom), the meaning of style, 2011, 16mm film transferred to HD video. Colour, sound; 4:50. Courtesy Shady Lane Productions, Berlin." data-caption="(PREMIERS 24 JAN) Phil Collins (United Kingdom), the meaning of style, 2011, 16mm film transferred to HD video. Colour, sound; 4:50. Courtesy Shady Lane Productions, Berlin." src="https://freight.cargo.site/w/1000/i/d6f84f3d3a5e28167c5a3d1a0fdf33f1c3a0f08909a8a63aa9aa84f5fca28530/PC_TMOS_1.jpg" /> SCHEDULE 12&nbsp;– 18 January&nbsp; ︎ Sontol Al Loyo, The Legend, 2006, 18:35,by Rizman Putra (Singapore) 15 – 21 January ︎ Reflections Of The Misunderstood Mat Rockers, 2002, 56:20, by Adi Yadoni (Singapore)&nbsp; 18 – 24 January ︎ Ini Amaran Penghabisan, 2012, 00:42,by Izat Arif (Malaysia) 21 – 27 January ︎ Trailer boys, 2018, 20:00,by Yusri Sapari (Singapore) 24 – 30 January ︎ the meaning of style, 2011, 4:50,by Phil Collins (United Kingdom) ︎︎︎ HOMEPAGE VISIT&nbsp;︎︎︎ https://proximities.cargo.site/Essay-Noorshidah-Ibrahim Tue, 04 Jan 2022 10:37:08 +0000 Proximities by Zulkhairi Zulkiflee https://proximities.cargo.site/Essay-Noorshidah-Ibrahim The Politics of Difference in Cheong Soo Pieng’s “Malay Boy with Bird” by Noorshidah Ibrahim Where considerations of paintings by first-generation Nanyang artists are concerned, there has always been an overt tendency to prioritise their formal, stylistic and aesthetic qualities over socio-historical context. These works have been eulogized for their supposed merging of Eastern and Western aesthetic traditions till this day. When historical context does make an appearance, it functions as mere backdrop to artistic production and often takes the form of a chronology of dates allowing the artists’ background, aesthetic training, and any changes to their aesthetic styles to be charted. All the while, critical and at times problematic connections between the works and the conditions that prevailed around the period of their production were seldom made.[1]&nbsp;One need not look hard to see that these Nanyang works rely very heavily on signifiers — representations of native bodies, with all the markings associated with them — as subject matter to convey a distinct regional identity. Central to all these works is the notion of identity, that of the migrant Chinese artists’ and their native subjects’, and the issue of representation. The complexities that surround both concepts hint at an interplay of multiplehistories and hence the need to shift away from an iconographic reading of these works. At the same time, given that an artwork does not simply illustrate ideology but is itself constitutive of ideology in that it actively produces meaning, it would be useful to look at the “process” behind the work: what is being done with the image and what it is doing for its users. This essay is an attempt at examining that very “process” in Cheong Soo Pieng’s “Malay Boy with Bird”. The work “Malay Boy with Bird”, created in 1953, depict the figure of a Malay boy holding an empty bird cage. Clad in a red t-shirt with a ‘songkok’ on his head, the Malay boy is naked from the waist down. However, as he has his back towards us viewers, his male genitals are hidden from our view. What is prominently visible instead is his bare round bottom. A bird perched on the boy’s left shoulder holds his attention while another rests on the rung of a ladder. A partially hidden coconut tree can be seen in the background. The painting is replete with signs that both locate the place and identify the race of the subject. The ‘songkok’ worn by the Malay boy, for instance, identifies him as a Malay Muslim person, and this aspect of his identity (race and religion) ties his body down to a rural landscape of the kampung, with the other supporting rural marker being the coconut tree in the background.[2] The bird cage in the painting references the activity of bird rearing which was a popular male pursuit.[3]&nbsp;The work carries with it the hallmark of the Nanyang style which is essentially the confluence of Eastern and Western aesthetic traditions. In the work, the Eastern aspect of the confluence can be seen in the depiction of local subject matter through the figure of the Malay boy alongside other accompanying local markers, while the use of oil paint on board points to the work’s Western aesthetic influence. At the same time, the visible brush strokes, the bold, black outlines and vibrant, contrasting colours point to the artist’s affinity with the avant garde.[4] Yet, even bearing all of the above technicalities in mind, there are aspects of the work that are simply confronting and make for a strange visual experience. The blue of the boy’s skin is a disconcerting element. While it does make the figure stand out amidst the sea of green, yellow and red, the subject still comes across as strange and alien because of it. Cheong Soo Pieng had in fact applied the same stylistic consideration of using vibrant and unnatural colours on the skin of some of the native women he painted too.[5] While nothing screams ‘avant garde’ as loud as the imposition of the modern onto the primitive, the pairing of unnatural colours with the native body, has the visual effect of making the sitters and the work look particularly exotic. The unnatural colour of the skin on the boy’s bare and visible posterior also makes his semi-naked condition the most eye-catching aspect of the painting — the blue hue of the posterior, even when juxtaposed right next to the brilliant red of the boy’s t-shirt does not make it any less prominent. On the one hand, it can be said that the boy’s bare bottom clues us in on his lower class background, but it also insinuates his backwardness.[6] The strange manner in which he is represented raises the questions of what is real and what is constructed in the work and more importantly it demonstrates that although the artist may not have control over how the work is perceived by viewers, he has control over what he chose to portray and how he chose to portray his subjects.[7] Proponents of the Nanyang style see these artists’ Western art training as anchoring their artistic practice and ideologies to modernism. This, alongside the claim of them being one with the Southeast Asian region negate any possibility of these artists misrepresenting their native subjects and even came to symbolize multiculturalism in Singapore.[8] This artist-as-hero complex denies the artists’ shifting identities as Chinese migrants which became compounded during the 50s and 60s when open assertions of attachment to China became politically suspect. The fact remains that these artists’ formative years were in fact spent in China. Cheong Soo Pieng, the artist behind “Malay Boy with Bird” relocated to Singapore only in 1946 after a brief stint in Hong Kong.[9] When exactly he became localized and felt Malayan or Singaporean is anybody’s guess, the point here being that his outlook towards the region and its natives would have in one way or another been shaped by some, if not all of the prevailing Chinese ideologies that he grew up with.[10] The most significant of these ideologies was the minority/majority discourse in which the politics of difference comes into play in forming one’s identity.[11] In other words, the artist’s identity only becomes apparent next to a non-Chinese. The strangeness and differences seen on the Malay boy is essentially about how his backwardness and primitivity show up the artist’s modernity and civility.[12] As far as genres go, representations of the native male body in Nanyang paintings are less common than those of native women. This has a lot to do with the popularity of and hence demand for portrayals of native female body by the patrons at the time who were comprised of the expatriate community and the local elites of Malayan society. The male subject in “Malay Boy with Bird” is unique as he is also not an adult, but a child. However, in aesthetic conventions, children occupy feminine spaces due to their inability to participate fully in society because of their young age, and hence dependent on the mother figure. Even though the boy in this work is not portrayed with a mother figure[13], his pose: back turned with his posterior visible to viewers highlights the ‘absence’ of the penis, the marker of male masculinity and power. This lack can be read as a form of disempowerment, because it rendered him as a passive subject closer to the feminine than to the masculine. In addition, the Malay culture has long been feminized for its supposed association with undesirable traits like thriftlessness and the hatred of hard work, as opposed to Chinese traits which was “credited with the masculine spirit of enterprise, industry and frugality”.[14] As masculinity is ideologically positioned in opposition to femininity, this places the Malay boy in an inferior position to Cheong Soo Pieng’s powerful one as the Chinese male artist who also controls the former’s representation, and is reflective of the hierarchal systems of gender relations in which subordinate masculinities, as exemplified by the figure of the Malay boy who despite being male, is relegated to the bottom of the gender hierarchy. [15] The manner in which the Malay boy is depicted shows how dangerous representations can be on some levels, as it entails the loss of immediacy on the part of the sitters who are often represented by others and for others. That the Malay boy has no say over his representation also demonstrates the unequal balance of power between the artist and his subject. The problematics of representation while universal, become especially pronounced in the Nanyang works when they are considered in light of the artists’ evolving identity at the time and the politics of the period under which the work was created. Essentially, “Malay Boy with Bird” calls attention to differences between the migrant Chinese artist and his native subject. The Malay boy, by virtue of his skin colour, his ‘songkok’, his rural setting, his semi-naked state, and the absence of his penis, is endowed with subordinate status within the hierarchy of hegemonic masculinity. His body with all its primitive markers becomes the site through which Cheong Soo Pieng negotiates, reconstructs and stabilizes his evolving Chinese identity. [1] Kevin Chua brilliantly criticizes this watered-down practice of art history in Singapore. Kevin Chua, “When was Modernism? A Historiography of Singapore Art”, Charting Thoughts: Essays on Art in Southeast Asia, eds Low Sze Wee and Patrick D. Flores (Singapore: National Gallery of Singapore, 2017), 22-23. [2] In nearly every one of these Nanyang works that features the native body, the native figure is tied to either the kampung and agrarian life or the boat and a seafaring life. [3] The birdcage and its reference to the activity of bird rearing has been mentioned by at least one art writer of Cheong Soo Pieng’s works to be a “common sight in rural Malay homes”, thereby framing the exclusivity of the activity to a particular community — the Malay community. However, my research has revealed the activity of bird rearing to not be exceptional to the Malay community alone. It has been an activity that cut across communities and class since the 19th century. Due to this, I prefer to see the bird cage more as a marker of gender rather than of race. See also Neo Pei En Phedra, “Songbird Rearing: Community and Tradition”, Muse SG, No. 41, Vol 13, Issue 1, eds Norsaleen Salleh,&nbsp; Stefanie Tham, Nicholas Yeo, (Singapore: National Heritage Board), 31. [4] Cheong Soo Pieng received training in Western art in China. [5] Look to the following works by Cheong Soo Pieng to make the comparison: ‘Dancers’, oil on canvas, c. 1953; ‘Iban Girls’, oil on canvas, 1953; ‘Bali Girls’, oil on canvas, 1954. [6] For the purpose of comparison, another painting with the visible posterior of a male child that springs to mind is Tay Kok Wee’s ‘Picking’, that is on display in National Gallery of Singapore. A Chinese toddler with his back towards the viewers and his bare posterior peeking out from under his t-shirt is depicted among the bystanders to themain scene. The bare bottom of the Chinese toddler is clearly an indicator of his lower-class status — the work is a social realist work highlighting the plight of the working class. However, his younger age compared to the older-looking Malay boy and the fact that the Chinese toddler forms part of the background as opposed to the Malay boy the central subject of Cheong Soo Pieng’s painting makes the latter’s manner of representing the Malay boy even more bewildering. [7] In my MA thesis, I gave evidence that the 4 pioneer Nanyang artists (Liu Kang, Cheong Soo Pieng, Chen Chong Swee and Chen Wen Hsi) has taken liberties with their portrayal of Baliness women so as to reconstruct the women’s image in order to fit the popular stereotype. See Noorshidah Ibrahim, The Chinese Male Gaze and representation of Balinese Women in the Works of Liu Kang, Cheong Soo Pieng, Chen Chong Swee and Chen Wen Hsi, (MA Thesis, Lasalle College of Arts, 2018), 19-20. [8] The Nanyang artists’ words were always taken at face value and they were never thoroughly questioned. See Kevin Chua, “When was Modernism? A Historiography of Singapore Art”, in Charting Thoughts: Essays on Art in Southeast Asia, Eds Low Sze Wee and Patrick D. Flores, Singapore: National Gallery of Singapore, 2017, pp 22-34. For these artists’ claims to being one with the region, see T. K. Sabapathy, “Bali, Almost Re-visited,” in Reminiscence of Singapore’s Pioneer Art Masters: Liu Kang, Cheong Soo Pieng, Chen Chong Swee, Chen Wen Hsi (Singapore: Singapore Mint, 1994), unpaginated. [9] The ultimate dream of the majority within the general migrant community then was to return to the land of their origin. See Lee Su Yin, British Policy and the Chinese in Singapore, 1939 to 1955, The Public Service Career of Tan Chin Tuan (Singapore: Talisman Publishing Pte Ltd, 2011). [10] Trying to determine when localization takes place among migrants is a futile exercise given the complexity of identity. Some scholars have pointed out that while localization do generally proceed from one generation to the next, change is not necessarily linear. See Shelly Chan, “The Case for Diaspore: A Temporal Approach to the Chinese Experience”, in The Journal of Asian Studies, Vol 74, No. 1 (February 2015), 120-121. [11] Dru C. Gladney is among a group of academics who turn to Critical Race Theory and Whiteness Studies for methodological and theoretical guidance in approaching the question of Han identity. Relying on certain concepts, this group of scholars have shown that to the Han their self-conceptualization becomes apparent in their mind only in relation to a non-Han. This becomes highly relevant when considering the question of identity among the Nanyang artists. See Dru C. Gladney, “Representing Nationality in China: Refiguring Majority / Minority Identities”, in The Journal of Asian Studies, Vol 53, No 1. (February 1994), 93. [12] In my MA thesis, I suggest that the native bodies, through their primitive markers and difference, become a site for these migrant Chinese artists to stabilize their evolving identity. See Noorshidah Ibrahim, The Chinese Male Gaze and representation of Balinese Women in the Works of Liu Kang, Cheong Soo Pieng, Chen Chong Swee and Chen Wen Hsi, (MA Thesis, Lasalle College of Arts, 2018), 19-20. [13] Sherry B. Ortner, “Is Female to Male as Nature is to Culture?”, in Woman, Culture, and Society, eds M. Z. Rosaldo and L. Lamphere, (Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press), pp 76-77. [14] Shelly Chan, “The Case for Diaspore: A Temporal Approach to the Chinese Experience”, in The Journal of Asian Studies, Vol 74, No. 1 (February 2015), 119. [15] Narayanan Ganapathy and Lavanya Balachandran, “Racialized masculinities: A Gendered Response to Marginalization among Malay Boys in Singapore”, in Australian and New Zealand Journal of Criminology, Vol. 52, no. 1 (2019): 95. Noorshidah Ibrahim is a visual art educator and freelance art writer who periodically contributes to local and international digital art magazines. Her current research interest revolves around the notion of identity in pre- and post- independence art of Singapore and Malaysia. ︎︎︎ BACK TO PROGRAMMES READ NEXT ESSAY ︎︎︎ https://proximities.cargo.site/Essay-Tan-Yong-Jun Tue, 04 Jan 2022 14:47:43 +0000 Proximities by Zulkhairi Zulkiflee https://proximities.cargo.site/Essay-Tan-Yong-Jun The Genealogy of the Malay Boy by Tan Yong Jun This is not an essay about Cheong Soo Pieng per se, but about one of his pictorial motifs and our interactions with it. Naturally, the artist cannot be disassociated from this exploration and, indeed, we need to hold him complicit in our act of viewing. Our focus for now however will not be on the artist but on the life one of his motifs took on, escaping the control of its creator. It is important to keep in mind that artists do not have a monopoly over the meaning of an artwork. Though the artist’s intention is important, it is not paramount. Art can be perceived and understood even when disassociated from its context. The perception of the viewer and whatever context they bring to the experience intertwines with the artists’ attempts at expressing their ideas, comingling to form meaning. Many suppositions in this essay may not be true to Soo Pieng’s intents, but they explore how one may come to interact with his art and form meanings from these encounters. In a way, this method is essential in studying Soo Pieng; he left us with scant writings and quotations, so the only way we may approach his motives and intents is through necessarily misrepresentative means. The critique of canonical figures is often uncomfortable, especially when many value systems are entrenched within the perpetration of certain narratives. Soo Pieng is no different. However, I feel that the greatest disservice we can do to an artist is to flatten their practice with a hagiographic approach. Soo Pieng is not a masterpiece machine. He does not turn out flawless paintings one after another which are aesthetically and ideologically without fault. He is a thinking artist, with his own baggage and impulses, a product of his time. He explores his environment and attempts to resolve the tension and contradictions he perceives within through aesthetic means, though naturally falling prey to human limitations and unable to fully reconcile life and art. To me, the idea of a fallible Soo Pieng is much more valuable than an unassailable icon, and as such critique is both helpful and necessary. Capturing motifs Any investigation into Cheong Soo Pieng’s subject matter and motifs requires the foregrounding of his sketches. Sketches were the basis of Soo Pieng’s artmaking, a ‘dictionary of images’ which he worked into more formal paintings, as Seah Tzi-Yan put it. This can sometimes take place over a long period of time; sketches completed in the 1950s were regularly reprised in paintings of the 1980s. Contrasted with the harshness and violence that often emanates from the camera lens at this time, especially when directed by an elite Chinese émigré with primitivist motives, the sketch mediated between reality and the artist’s (often romanticized) eye. For Soo Pieng, the subject matter was expressed instinctively and immediately in aesthetic languages, and in a way depersonalized and made a motif or symbol for the artist’s later use. This is opposed to working from a photograph, where an artist is confronted by the photographed individual whenever the photographic print is used as a visual aid, dehumanized on every occasion their captured image is transferred onto canvas or paper. Soo Pieng’s ‘dictionary’ was thus compiled in a way that was an aesthetic reaction to his environment rather than a realistic record. In the political climate of the 1950s-60s, this meant that his sketching practice was a concerted effort at locating and forming symbols that were expedient to his painting conditions. Soo Pieng participated in three major exhibitions in this period—the 1951 joint exhibition of Malayan paintings, the 1953 joint exhibition of Balinese paintings, and the 1956 solo exhibition. All three were held at the British Council Gallery, and thus directly linked to the colonial administration’s ‘Malayanisation’ programme. It is no surprise, then, that Soo Pieng’s sketchbooks were populated primarily with the peoples the administration preferred will make up the post-colonial state.And yet, despite the cosmopolitanism depicted within the sketchbooks, the Chinese, Europeans, and to a lesser extent the Indians that populated Soo Pieng’s world rarely gets transferred onto his paintings. Soo Pieng’s aesthetic eye is widely cast, but when he settles on subjects to use in formal paintings, it seems that he was much more interested in the idea of Southeast Asian nativism and indigeneity, expressed through the brown skins of the Malays, Borneans, and Balinese. In this, his practice converges with many other artists of his generation. Soo Pieng’s sketches of were evidently ideologically based, forming aesthetic motifs that he, as an artist rooting himself in geopolitical Malaya, would use in his imagining of a regional culture, a culture he is now implicating himself within. At this point, the Malay Boy enters the picture. The Malay Boy What is referred to as the ‘Malay Boy’ in this essay was identified by Zulkhairi Zulkiflee in a series of works that include Malay Boy (Posterior) (After Cheong Soo Pieng), 2020, a response to Soo Pieng’s painting&nbsp;Malay Boy with Bird<img width="788" height="1024" width_o="788" height_o="1024" data-src="https://freight.cargo.site/t/original/i/4b6da5811694676a6c47e7caf24848360c7176629a611501a67cf9d8860224a9/desktop_Cheong_Soo_Pieng-_Malay_Boy_with_Bird-_1953-_Oil_on_Canvas-_110_x_80_x_7_cm__Image_courtesy_of_STPI__ce8a54f9.png" data-mid="129500238" border="0" src="https://freight.cargo.site/w/788/i/4b6da5811694676a6c47e7caf24848360c7176629a611501a67cf9d8860224a9/desktop_Cheong_Soo_Pieng-_Malay_Boy_with_Bird-_1953-_Oil_on_Canvas-_110_x_80_x_7_cm__Image_courtesy_of_STPI__ce8a54f9.png" />, 1953 (fig.1). The titular Boy was presented by Cheong in a bizarre manner—blue-skinned, in a red T-shirt but bare-bottomed, sporting a long and side-parted fringe. The symbol of the Boy’s ethnic identity rests on a songkok. The pivoting posture of the Malay Boy is especially intriguing. He seems at first to face us, who possess a full view of his bare bottoms, but is actually glancing back towards two mynahs, one on his shoulder and another looking directly at his bared bottom. A slight smile suggests that he is either oblivious to or nonchalant about our presence, and corners us into the position of being voyeurs. He is at once readily legible to us as Malay but also entirely surreal. Malay Boy with Bird<img width="788" height="1024" width_o="788" height_o="1024" data-src="https://freight.cargo.site/t/original/i/4b6da5811694676a6c47e7caf24848360c7176629a611501a67cf9d8860224a9/desktop_Cheong_Soo_Pieng-_Malay_Boy_with_Bird-_1953-_Oil_on_Canvas-_110_x_80_x_7_cm__Image_courtesy_of_STPI__ce8a54f9.png" data-mid="129500238" border="0" src="https://freight.cargo.site/w/788/i/4b6da5811694676a6c47e7caf24848360c7176629a611501a67cf9d8860224a9/desktop_Cheong_Soo_Pieng-_Malay_Boy_with_Bird-_1953-_Oil_on_Canvas-_110_x_80_x_7_cm__Image_courtesy_of_STPI__ce8a54f9.png" /> is iconic of Soo Pieng’s early oeuvre and was a painting I had always known about. I was only spurred to further investigate the motif when Zulkhairi pointed out to me a woodcut, Fruitseller, 1954 (fig.2). If we just look at the Malay Boy paintings individually, the Malay Boy, as a local/native-themed motif developed in the 1950s for Soo Pieng and other Nanyang artists to make sense of their own émigré sense of self, would only stand out as a rather peculiar motif within Soo Pieng’s oeuvre.&nbsp;But when he is contextualised within Soo Pieng’s body of work and with a genealogy of his appearances made clear, we find the Malay Boy’s presence and recurrence emphatically strange.Fruitseller is not one of Soo Pieng’s more pictorially successful works. It is, in a way, a pastiche of various motifs, including the batik-clad woman hidden by an umbrella. Its value to this discussion lies in how Soo Pieng reused the Malay Boy in a totally different image. Still bare-bottomed, still wearing a songkok, still craning and rotating his neck, the Malay Boy now studies a piece of fruit rather than the unnervingly sentient mynahs. He is caught between three points of gazes, the fruitseller, the dog, and the audience. Within view of others, his bare bottom is particularly stark, especially since the relative sense of scale proves the Malay Boy to be at least a teenager, if not a young adult. If Malay Boy with Bird implies a voyeuristic audience, then Fruitseller presents communal visual assault. The Malay Boy, sans smile, looks to be somewhat aware of his position as a visual object. <img width="1532" height="862" width_o="1532" height_o="862" data-src="https://freight.cargo.site/t/original/i/77e957a7a305bcfc319adede8cbb8a0f357d44f54a5249dbb18b146a1afd36a2/classroom-3-copy.jpg" data-mid="129500340" border="0" alt="Fig.2. Stills from Proximities depicting Fruitseller by Cheong Soo Pieng found in a classroom." data-caption="Fig.2. Stills from Proximities depicting Fruitseller by Cheong Soo Pieng found in a classroom." src="https://freight.cargo.site/w/1000/i/77e957a7a305bcfc319adede8cbb8a0f357d44f54a5249dbb18b146a1afd36a2/classroom-3-copy.jpg" /> It is within Soo Pieng modus operandi to first capture a scene that perked his interest with a sketch before formalising the subject matter—now a symbol more than an identifiable person—into elements within his paintings. My thoughts thus naturally turned toward his sketchbooks for the excavation of the root image, the initial impression Soo Pieng had of the Malay Boy. This proved futile and, at least for now, we have to be content in positing the probable existence of a sketch executed around 1951, when Soo Pieng was preparing for the exhibition of Malayan subjects, and that the sketch was probably of a bare-bottomed Malay Boy. A further look into the published and printer matter of that time turned out to be extremely fruitful. The Malay Boy reappears, twice, in Soo Pieng’s first solo show in Singapore (figs.3 &amp; 4). Their appearance within print matter published by Soo Pieng himself is particularly informative because we can be sure that the titles were given, or at least approved, by the artist. The related publications are both entitled Cheong Soo Pieng (both 1956, Straits Art Commercial Company), one in the form of an artbook with essays, and one as an exhibition brochure with prices. In the book, the painting (fig.3) whose pixelated image seems to give the date of 1951 was named Boy in English and 巫童 (Wutong—Malay Boy) in Chinese. The 1956 painting (fig.4) was more interesting in being named Bird &amp; Boy / 巫人与鸟 (Wuren yu Niao—Malay Person with Bird) in the book and Bird at Rest / 巫人与鸟 in the catalogue, a subtle but intriguing inconsistency. <img width="787" height="636" width_o="787" height_o="636" data-src="https://freight.cargo.site/t/original/i/310e3c57211e6a986039cc30dc949041c0ab3d08d40cdb6a83dd8ea6bbb54048/3_4.png" data-mid="129500573" border="0" alt="(Left) Fig.3. Cheong Soo Pieng, Boy/巫童, 195(1?), oil on unidentified surface. (Right) Fig.4. Cheong Soo Pieng, Bird &amp; Boy/Bird at Rest/巫人与鸟, 1956, oil on unidentified surface. Scanned images by writer from Cheong Soo Pieng (1956)." data-caption="(Left) Fig.3. Cheong Soo Pieng, Boy/巫童, 195(1?), oil on unidentified surface. (Right) Fig.4. Cheong Soo Pieng, Bird &amp; Boy/Bird at Rest/巫人与鸟, 1956, oil on unidentified surface. Scanned images by writer from Cheong Soo Pieng (1956)." src="https://freight.cargo.site/w/787/i/310e3c57211e6a986039cc30dc949041c0ab3d08d40cdb6a83dd8ea6bbb54048/3_4.png" /> Since Soo Pieng was not a fluent English speaker and conversed mainly in Hokkien, and since it is the English title that differed for fig.4, it is reasonable to posit that Soo Pieng first titled his paintings in Chinese before translating it to English, with help or not. It is thus the Chinese title that probably holds more clues into thinking about the artist’s intention. In both paintings, the Chinese title emphasises the Malay Boy’s race while the English titles removes this qualifier. Given that the exhibition was held in the British Council Gallery, one cannot help but ruminate on the impact these titles had on an Anglophone/-philic audience. Was the erasure of the racial descriptor because it was self-evident? Unsanitary? Or perhaps just an arbitrary human mistake? There seems to be little consistency in the translating conventions if there indeed was something totally superfluous or offensive in the racial descriptor to the paintings’ consumers, given that ‘Malay’ appeared in other titles. Was it perhaps some quality specific to the Malay Boy paintings that impelled the translators to drop the racial qualifier, maybe the burning gaze that directly confronts the viewer? I do not pretend to have a resolution to this problem, and indeed it may very well be a problem I have imagined. Looking at these paintings in 2021, however, when we have become acutely aware of the explicit and visible process of ‘othering’ embedded within Soo Pieng’s practice, these omissions are indisputably incongruous and curious, an irresistible wormhole to be encountered when interrogating Soo Pieng’s representation of a Malay subject. Disassociated from Soo Pieng as a person, we rely on his titles (though often posthumously attached) for clues to his painterly intentions. Boy features the Malay Boy much as we have previously encountered him, turning back with a songkok, bared bottom, and a mynah on his shoulder. As we can only encounter him through a black and white reproduction, one is left to wonder whether he is blue or brown. My sense is that Soo Pieng’s featuring of ‘othered’ skin tones as red, black, or (extremely unusually) blue are rare and only surfaced in a short timeframe, and as such I am inclined to believe the Malay Boy is brown in this painting (and perhaps therefore allowing the racial descriptor to be removed from the title). As opposed to the other iterations of the Malay Boy, who turn toward you but with pupils directed elsewhere, the Malay Boy here stares directly at you. His mouth is hidden by his shoulder, which removes the sense of indifference he exudes in the other paintings. The Malay Boy, along with the mynah perched at the same level, returns your gaze with intent and force, as if daring you to take a prolonged look at his bared bottom. A basket of phallic forms (bananas?) is positioned right at his hip, accentuating the corporeality of his body and the parts clothed and bared. In Boy, the Malay Boy seems to leap out of the artist’s control and, with Soo Pieng’s relatively realist depiction, confront the viewer the way a real person would. As we look into the Malay Boy’s eyes, we become unsettled and acutely aware of our voyeuristic and invasive gaze, perpetrated through canvases and boards. Bird and Boy/Bird at Rest elicits none of these intense reactions. His image is respectable, benign, even tepid, a perfectly aestheticized subject matter. For first time, we get to see the Malay Boy fully clothed (though we do not preclude other yet uncovered Malay Boy paintings). He squats and opens a coconut, and we see musculature on his calves in place of an impastoed bottom. On his shoulder, ‘resting’ but about to take flight, is the ubiquitous mynah. Here we notice the most peculiar element of this otherwise relatively sanitised and decorative painting—the Malay Boy’s pupils are painted to take up two-thirds of the eye, pointed towards the Boy’s right, across his shoulder. The illusory effect is that the Malay Boy is, physiologically speaking, looking at the mynah, and yet it is hard for us to believe that he is not indeed gazing back at his audience. Is this Mona Lisa-like effect simply the artist’s sleight of hand, or perhaps a reflection of our psychological profile? Do we require the subjects of our paintings, especially when their depersonalised functions are to serve as motifs and symbols, to be inert, crystallised, and passive? And is it our fundamental uneasiness in this fragile truce, this relationship between gazer and gazee, that we instinctively react to any hints of a transgression when the subject turns his eyes back onto his audience? Another point of curiosity emerged in my search for the Malay Boy. Amidst the generic titles of Malay Woman, Malay Family, Malay Life, etc. in the 1956 catalogue, there is an Ahmad/亚末 (Mandarin: Yamo; Hokkien: A-muat). Who is this Ahmad, so singular that Soo Pieng found it necessary to name him within an exhibition that names no other? Might he be Boy (fig.3), pictured in the book but not in the catalogue? It certainly is possible, though I instinctively resisted that rather logical conclusion. And so, I searched further, and found peeking from within Soo Pieng’s photo albums another Malay Boy (fig.5)<img width="1280" height="1041" width_o="1280" height_o="1041" data-src="https://freight.cargo.site/t/original/i/8606b631de6c87d3fc8c7daaf385a2ae1c74c4c716d8ac7837f4a3b322e2f991/RC-S20-CSP2.1-34_o5.jpg" data-mid="129500779" border="0" src="https://freight.cargo.site/w/1000/i/8606b631de6c87d3fc8c7daaf385a2ae1c74c4c716d8ac7837f4a3b322e2f991/RC-S20-CSP2.1-34_o5.jpg" />. Might he be the elusive Ahmad? This photo was inserted alongside many other photos of artworks produced in the first half of the 1950s, a significant number of which were exhibited in 1956. It is entirely possible that this painting featured in the same exhibition, and thus could plausibly be the painting that bore the now-disembodied title Ahmad/亚末. The subject matter certainly fits the title. Sarong-clad and bare-chested, this Malay Boy inverts the sartorial elements we have previously encountered into an image that is logically sound. Holding a coconut with exaggerated hands, he looks at us and smiles, without a sense of subversion, tension, or surreality, simply acknowledging our confelicitous presence as he is about to enjoy his treat. The birds, pigeons rather than mynahs, are perched on stands and baskets without an unsettling sense of sentience and does not participate in our gaze. The scene is cubistically treated and, most probably, with a fauvist colour sensibility, a modernist depiction of a realist if romanticised Malayan scene. Going back to the conspicuously absent sketch, we would expect an initial recording of a scene to be the closest to reality, captured on paper with some aesthetic interventions but nothing too surreal. If we accept fig.5 to be an iteration of the Malay Boy rather than an entirely separate subject, then it must be the closest interpretation of the sketch that we are able to access. And no wonder this image, closest to reality, poses the least amount of challenge to the viewer. The Malay Boy takes on an active role, inviting you to witness his snacking and (perhaps) to sketch him. The gaze is met by equals. Is this Ahmad? It certainly makes sense that Soo Pieng, sketching components of the novel Malayan life around him, might have known this Boy that would feature soheavily in his practice by name. We do not get many instances of a name being attached to a Soo Pieng portrait and, when there is one, it is almost always of the elite milieu of Christina Loke or Khoan Sullivan. Zulkhairi raised the point that Ahmad may be a generic term used to refer to Malays at that time, much like the John of Roti John. It certainly is possible, but with my understanding of Soo Pieng, Ahmad is a name, and the Malay Boy, before being trans-(/dis)figured and transposed, was probably Ahmad. Behind the Easel I have, of course been speaking about the Malay Boy as if he placed himself in these various settings. What about the artist, who positioned and presented him thus? Why did Soo Pieng find it necessary to capture the image of a Malay boy and invert his dress, divert his gaze, and pervert his identity? The first question to address is what sort of function the Malay Boy had in Soo Pieng’s paintings. Much (but perhaps still not enough) have been said about the Nanyang painters’ inheritance of Gauguin’s gaze via Le Mayeur, wherein the depiction of indigeneity was an act of ‘othering’, a concerted attempt at differentiating via the painted image between two groups of people living in a certain region. Soo Pieng’s figural paintings, though it cannot be simply characterized in this manner, certainly demonstrate these impulses, with layers of sexualization, primitivism, and cosmopolitanism varnishing his canvas. Was the Malay Boy just another of Soo Pieng’s many brown-skinned subjects, or a motif with its specific set of particularities? The mind immediately veers towards his Balinese and Bornean (specifically Dayak) Boys. Many of these boys were sketched with a bared bottom, but this was usually with the full nudity that signified juvenile innocence, a symbol diametric to the civility of their painters. Moreover, many of these Boys were part of a group of subjects that has often been broadly identified as ‘mother and child’. Why this pairing so intrigued Soo Pieng is a question for another study, but it stands to reason that the Malay Boy was not simply a subset of a group that included these other Boys. (There is a series of works featuring two Malay boys playing with a bird, and I have considered them separately.) Should the Malay Boy be grouped together with Soo Pieng’s bare-breasted female figures, then? This comparison seems more convincing and logical but is still found wanting. It has now been widely accepted that the painting of Southeast Asian female nudes by Nanyang painters was a symbolically violent act of representation that erects a power relationship between painter and subject. This argument holds its ground despite the common defence that it is merely the bodily form that was being formalistically studied; we see neither a proliferation of Chinese female nudes nor Southeast Asian male nudes in Nanyang art. Might we understand the Malay Boy’s bizarre and deliberate form of nudity as another form of native emasculation, a modernist Chinese émigré painter’s symbolic subjugation of a juvenile and innocent indigene? While this is a temptingly neat and tidy conclusion, it does not fit within the reality of Soo Pieng’s practice. For all the endemic faults of Soo Pieng’s generation, Soo Pieng was indeed an artist with genuine curiosity, granularity, and introspection in his observations of Southeast Asia, even as they were co-existent with less desirable impulses. His sketched records of customs and artefacts of both the touristic and everyday varieties display broader and greater sensitivity and parity as compared to other artists of the period, particularly when he focuses on the many forms of art that were then commonly known as ‘applied’—batik, boatmaking, rattan weaving, etc. In a late piece of writing (Sinchew Jit Poh, 1981) we see proof that Soo Pieng’s curiosity did develop into a degree of reflexivity, as he called for indigenous applied arts to become an integral part of ‘true’ Nanyang art. It seems unreasonable, if we accept this reading of Soo Pieng’s painterly character, for him to that deliberately emasculate and violate the Malay Boy, as symbol for the community Soo Pieng was a guest in. The conclusion must be that there can be no conclusion as this point. We cannot reconcile Soo Pieng’s demonstrated sensitivity and willingness to engage with Southeast Asian cultures and peoples with the calculated and pointed pictorial violence that wrecked the Malay Boy. Ultimately, we are unable to fully understand the significance of the Malay Boy to Soo Pieng’s oeuvre and sense of self. As disclaimed, our intrigues into Soo Pieng’s paintings are severely hampered by a lack of primary material to work on. Perhaps this is the crux of the matter—our perceptions of the Malay Boy, as valid and reasonable as they are, are uncoloured by the artist’s stated motives, and are therefore perceived at a remove from the artist’s intention. Behind the Frame Soo Pieng’s oil paintings of his last decade revelled in decorative beauty—their atmosphere baroque, their appearances byzantine. Earlier motifs and subjects were ‘revisited’, in T. K. Sabapathy’s words, and given new meanings, reflecting both Soo Pieng’s personal development and his collectors’ expectations. Amid this flurry of gold paint and elongated limbs, the Malay Boy makes a final appearance, just a few years before Soo Pieng’s death (fig.6).<img width="631" height="742" width_o="631" height_o="742" data-src="https://freight.cargo.site/t/original/i/b20122070fca9c9b2085f46f8877a5b7fb3a9444dcc7ed52f764e95dadeaf2d0/CheongSooPiengMalayBoyAndBird.jpg" data-mid="129512488" border="0" src="https://freight.cargo.site/w/631/i/b20122070fca9c9b2085f46f8877a5b7fb3a9444dcc7ed52f764e95dadeaf2d0/CheongSooPiengMalayBoyAndBird.jpg" /> The (relative) naturalism of the Malay Boy here is starkly contrasted with the Balinese Women of the same period, who had long since been disassociated from their individual identities under layers of aesthetic manipulation. Sporting the iconic songkok that presses down his fringe, this Malay Boy is surely the same person (Ahmad?) we have encountered decades ago. His pigeon now rests on his palm and entertains him, while he sits on a banana leaf, fully clothed. Fleshed out with chiaroscuro, the Malay Boy does not turn nor acknowledge the audience, gazing intently at the pigeon instead. This is the Malay Boy at his most unconfrontational and therefore unoffensive, expediating our consumption of his image without resisting the sterilisation of his identity. In the 1950s, when Soo Pieng’s art was most steeped in political meanings, his expressions of the Malay Boy were desirable because they showed the ability of émigré and indigenous Malayans to adopt modernist modes, whether in aesthetics or politics. These Malay Boys served the mental construction of the post-colonial state, and in some ways the position of the Chinese émigrés within it. His intense gazes were not merely emitted but returned, directly addressing his audience, daring them to acknowledge the full validity of his being. This bite has receded by the mid-1970s. Soo Pieng was now an artist in the fullest meaning, serving an art market and cultural community that he had been instrumental in fostering. His paintings were no longer shown in colonial-inflected exhibition spaces but in local-run galleries and museums. His audiences were newly confident Singaporeans, making fortunes in tandem with the state’s economic policies and spending some of it on cultural trophies. What better symbol of a state and its elites’ self-confidence than a local artist painting local subjects that could transact at high prices? Soo Pieng’s audience at the later part of his career did not require the Malay Boy to question, confront, or interrogate them. The image was there to serve the high priests of the commercial state, who counted both the painter and his subject as full members. Once the Malay Boy had been made legible to the Republic, the tension and contradictions embedded within him subsides and he settles on a banana leaf to admires his companion in leisure, his image given over fully to his new admirers. It is at this point when Soo Pieng’s story ends, as he dies from heart failure in 1983. But the Malay Boy survives Soo Pieng and continues to interact with a new generation of viewers. In 2022, when the politics of identity has never been more acutely felt, we ask how our individual genealogies and histories entwine with the Malay Boy’s as we meet his gaze. Each of us brings different life experiences to our perception of the Malay Boy, and indeed Zulkhairi’s intervention complicates the narrative with a much-needed point of view—that of a person with an identity congruent to the depicted subject. How will he look at the Malay Boy? How will he acknowledge the Malay Boy’s gaze and return it? How will his interactions differ from ours, whoever we may be? Looking back at the painter with the Malay Boy as his avatar, Zulkhairi opens a new chapter in our understanding of Nanyang art, and the artists implicated with this narrative.Fig.1. Cheong Soo Pieng, Malay Boy with Bird, 1953, oil on board. Courtesy of respective sources with the sole purpose of research and review.Fig.5. Cheong Soo Pieng, unknown title, 1954, oil on unidentified surface. Courtesy of respective sources with the sole purpose of research and review.Fig.6. Cheong Soo Pieng, Malay Boy with Bird, undated (c.1981), treated ink on canvas. Courtesy of respective sources with the sole purpose of research and review. Tan Yong Jun is a freelance researcher, curator, and writer. His interest lies in cultural history, spatiality, and the relationship between aesthetics and identity. He is particularly interested in the Chinese diasporic aspects of these topics. He has curated exhibitions such as Tonalities: The Ink Works of Cheong Soo Pieng (2021) and worked on collaborations with public institutions to shed further light on Singapore’s cultural richness and diversity. ︎︎︎ BACK TO PROGRAMMES READ NEXT ESSAY ︎︎︎ https://proximities.cargo.site/Essay-Nissa-Abdurazzak Tue, 04 Jan 2022 15:10:28 +0000 Proximities by Zulkhairi Zulkiflee https://proximities.cargo.site/Essay-Nissa-Abdurazzak Provider, Protector, Leader by Nissa Abdurazzak Zulkhairi Zulkiflee (ZZ) Hello Nissa, I approached you previously to loosely talk about the exhibition and how I think it’s significant to inflect discussions about men and masculinities with “feminist” perspectives—or at least, to expand such discourses by involving women. In hindsight, the exhibition title Proximities consider people as coordinates where everyone is different but interconnected. Basically, I’m thinking of how meaning can only be derived based on relations; with masculinity, we must consider femininity. Nissa Abdurazzak&nbsp; (NA) Recognising the interconnectedness of our relations is truly the essence here. Our society has progressed incrementally away from a pernicious patriarchal attitude with due thanks to all the energy, passion and physical work that has been put forth by past generations of change-makers (activists or not) and their supporters. It’s a ripple effect that transcends time and generations, and to recognise that the energy of this ripple is passed along through these coordinates of human experience is to be aware of our existence and individual impact on humanity. In a similar vein, this understanding of our own individual existence and the effect we have on the external world applies equally introspectively - on how our acceptance of our internal selves (that has undeniably carried forward with it traits of the masculine and the feminine from the people in our proximities) affect our individuality holistically. ZZ I hope to capture the “reverberations” of the above and inflect (even if slightly) the project via the written supplement which you have (laboriously) worked on. While it does not directly ruminate on the trope of the Malay boy, there’s a sense of “visioning” to your contribution. And by this, I mean the inclusion of your perspectives as a woman and the relations you have with men. I feel, amongst others, the “Malay boy” as a marker of “innocence” (which were popularly harnessed by “master painters” as a potent symbol) also embodies a kind of incipience. This “boy” (or even the “boy” in a man!) can either progress to inherit patriarchal thought structures or unlearn such enduring inheritance. Hence, your perspective is significant to enable such movement forward. NA Just like how the “boy” may progressively choose (consciously or unconsciously) to either internalise or unlearn such patriarchal thought structures - which will undeniably transform the ripples he causes - one wonders how the men from our past generations were also just mere boys who was subject to the same calibrated systems. That truly was the perspective and intention which I actively adjusted to align to in setting the tone of this essay. It was the strength of compassion, an often regarded feminine trait, which I hope to shine through to the reader and set a motion to introspect in kindness within. Growing up, although encouraged to pursue and work towards our goals, my father had never overtly pressured any of his four daughters to attain worldly achievements. As a matter of fact, the only emphasis he ever stressed on was to uphold religious and familial values above all else. Aishah Alhadad criticised in her essay, It’s Still Family First, that despite the progressive way of life our local Malay and Muslim women has benefited in this modern time, traditionalist attitudes and expectations on women that persists within the community actually “add burdens onto women”.[1] This rings particularly true from a religious standpoint in which Alhadad highlighted lectures delivered by the community’s religious leaders in 1987, organised by Young Muslim Women’s Association, which placed great responsibilities upon the women to be the sole bearer of harmony and balance in her family. The point highlighted by Alhadad is further echoed by PM Lee Hsien Loong in his virtual speech at the Closing Session of the Conversations on Singapore Women’s Development held on 18 September 2021, indicating a common grievance experienced by women across the population that despite the improvement of women’s status in our society, “societal attitudes [have] not fully modernised” as the burden of domestic responsibilities tend to “rest heavy on women”.[2] Given the traditionalist viewpoint prevalent in the local religious community, I suspect in hindsight that my father’s lack of expectations on his daughters was his way to relief us off the supposed burden modern society inherently placed on collective women.Indeed, the social dynamic of a Muslim household often observes a pattern of male dominance as influenced through generations of cultural exchanges and religious teachings. This dynamic is not uncommon within the Muslim communities in Singapore. From a young age, men are groomed and taught to fulfil duties as the figurehead of a household, leading and guiding the path for their female kin. This ingrained respect for the patriarch, or its next-in-line, tends to translate to male children being granted more independence and autonomy in deciding their own life choices compared to the female counterpart—a liberty that overrides even the hierarchy of age so often emphasised in Asian values. My father’s mentality, as does many traditionalist Muslim males in the Singapore Malay-speaking communities, is that the main responsibilities for women are first and foremost to care for the household. Any other achievements are supplementary. This notion is heavily riddled with an idealised form of masculinity associated with bread-winning which has passed down, internalised, and normalised through generations in various cultures and religious teachings. Male children were thought to deserve more opportunities than the female counterparts, as they were expected to be a provider, a protector, and a leader for their family and community alike. In reality, this gender-policing of what being a man should entail often subjects men to perpetuate biases (and to some extent, enact unjustified acts of violence) upon its ‘other’, which in this case is the feminine quality. Often in families that uphold traditionalist Muslim ideals, the female attire becomes a topic of huge contention between daughters and their family. The internal debate between abiding rigidly to religious and traditionalist values, against the modernist viewpoints developed from being in an intercultural environment of schools and social settings, is one that many daughters from similar backgrounds to mine often struggle with. It is part of the Islamic faith and practise for women to cover their body and hair for modesty. However, the influence and social ideologies from external communities that may not adopt such beliefs may shape the viewpoint of new generations to deviate from the ways of their predecessors. Furthermore, the flowing news one would encounter on crimes against women further perpetuates behaviours of benevolent sexism and justifies body-policing of women to protect them against the luring and lustful gaze of preying men.Given the rampant case of victim-blaming in assault cases as the default attitude society tend to have towards women, the benevolent Muslim male uphold an excellent reason for shielding their kin from such predatory behaviour in society in the name of protection. However, to what extent is the policing of female bodies and attire truly a noble pursuit? The Muslim community in Singapore was recently stirred by the exposé of a blasphemous online-polling site which sexualises and insinuate violent harassment towards local female asatizah (religious teachers).[3] The most daunting revelation is the fact that that a large participant of the poll were allegedly male undergraduate students on the path to becoming religious teachers themselves. Beyond community outrage, the news provoked the question of mutual respect, objectification of women, sexual abuse, and victim blaming tendencies within the community. These religious female figureheads preached and practices modesty, yet their modesty was not enough to safeguard them from becoming victims to sexual harassments from no less than the Muslim male community whom the community entrusted to safeguard the honour of their women. An often-forgotten footnote is that the societal freedom granted to men since generations past comes with an expectation to uphold responsibilities over their family and community alike. In establishing their masculine dominance over time, the benevolent men confused their communal responsibility to provide, safeguard, and to guide as a right to police women in the guise of protection and care. While the merits to uphold religious values and integrity is in itself a service to their faith, the irony in seizing control over women’s actions and perpetuating victim-blaming mentality by the benevolent men, undeniably grant others the green light to objectify women. Another concern with religious ideals that is led by patriarchal propensities is that it elevates the status of masculinity while equating it to the male gender, thus tipping the power balance between the male and the female. This idealised form of male masculinity in religious and cultural doctrine not only oppresses those who do not embody such traits, but paradoxically it also shackles and places unattainable expectation on male members of the community themselves. These venerated traits of men as the altruistic provider, protector and leader to their kin perpetuates the notion that the worth of a male individual in society is measured against their ability in fulfilling those duties. However, the harmful psychological pressure that may be experienced by males in the pursuit of living up to such ideals is often overlooked. Furthermore, it perpetuates discrimination against those who deviate against such masculine standards. In 2017, a study conducted in collaboration between AWARE and Ngee Ann Polytechnic’s Diploma in Psychology Studies programme found 97% of the male student participants of the survey have experienced a form of gender policing, or perpetuated violence against other boys they considered to be effeminate.[4] The result of this survey suggests that its participants, which comes from various backgrounds, equally experienced pressure to fit into a typecast of supposed masculine behaviour perceived by society. This pressure is no different in the context of the Malay-speaking Muslim community in Singapore. Traditionalist masculine expectations on men and the internalised power dynamic against femininity has often blinded men from assessing the world through a holistic lens beyond rationality, devoid of emotional and intuitive reasoning. This is particularly true when it comes to dealing with internal emotional struggles. Emotional traits are generally associated with the feminine and, in traditionalist notion of masculinity, often considered to be a sign of weakness. Perceiving certain traits as a form of weakness provides grounds of justification for the need of feminine to be taken care of by the masculine. To accept embodied feminine traits as a rejection against masculinity causes immense pressure on men to uphold and perform traditionalists expectations of their role. Socio-economic struggles such as rising living cost, widening income gap, and fluctuating job market places heavy burden for the men who are expected to be the financial provider and supporter. This burden may be in the form of extensive labour as well as mental health issues deriving from stress and anxiety. Shunning emotional quality in men as a non-masculine deviant, often left men to be handicapped in caring for their mental well-being, as such emotional struggles are intertwined with perception of weakness that should not be experienced by the masculine protector. Religion preaches that God created all men as equal. I believe this equality extends far beyond the man-made distinction of class, cultural, religious and racial differences, but also inwardly between the feminine and masculine virtues within our individual selves. The perception of power differences may be a motivation for those bestowed with privileges to want to provide, protect and lead the weak. However, it also is a reason for domination and conquest. If men truly are equal, then traits of masculinity and femininity embodied by each gender are neither a strength nor weakness, but rather a unique set of defining qualities of each individual. By blindly accepting traditionalist beliefs of masculine male dominance, we are further placing emphasis on the stereotype of femininity (in both women and men) as a weaker being to be dominated. Internalising an acceptance towards balance is the path that the world as a society should progress towards. Women should be encouraged to take on traits that are considered masculine and achieve independence, just as equally as men should embrace feminine traits to be in tune with their emotional needs and accepts vulnerability. It is not a riot against traditionalist religious values, but a modern adaptation to the changing times. It is time for femininity to be embraced as our loving provider, emotional protector and passionate leader. [1] Alhadad, Aishah. 2018. “It’s Still Family First.” In Growing Up Perempuan, by AWARE, 98. Singapore: AWARE. [2] PM Lee Hsien Loong. 2021. “PM Lee Hsien Loong’s speech at the Closing Session of the Conversation on Singapore Women’s Development”, Sep 18. Accessed 15 Oct 2021. https://www.pmo.gov.sg/Newsroom/pm-lee-conversations-on-singapore-womensdevelopment [3] Abdullah, Ahmad Zhaki. 2021. Police investigating online poll sexualising female religious teachers. May 27. Accessed Oct 15, 2021. https://www.channelnewsasia.com/singapore/poll-sexualise-female-religious-teachersustazah-halimah-police-1417841 [4] AWARE. 2017. A dialogue on masculinity, violence and gender norms. Jul 14. Accessed Oct15, 2021. https://www.aware.org.sg/2017/07/a-dialogue-on-masculinity-violence-andgender-norms/ Nissa Abdurazzak is an arts professional who has diverse experience in the commercial, non-profit, and institutional art sector, with a focus on visual art in Southeast Asia. She completed her post-graduate in Museum Studies at Birkbeck, University of London and received several accreditation from Sotheby’s Institute of Art London. Nissa has been a professional in the Singapore visual art scene since 2019. ︎︎︎ BACK TO PROGRAMMES READ NEXT ESSAY ︎︎︎ https://proximities.cargo.site/Film-Rizman-Putra Tue, 04 Jan 2022 15:33:25 +0000 Proximities by Zulkhairi Zulkiflee https://proximities.cargo.site/Film-Rizman-Putra Sontol Al Loyo, The Legend (2006) by Rizman Putra <img width="2000" height="1123" width_o="2000" height_o="1123" data-src="https://freight.cargo.site/t/original/i/be998c15c6fb620408cc6d00a05690832becb29422e067201fc3a7e8a55b456c/Screenshot-2020-07-25-at-1.17.34-PM-1.jpg" data-mid="130640404" border="0" src="https://freight.cargo.site/w/1000/i/be998c15c6fb620408cc6d00a05690832becb29422e067201fc3a7e8a55b456c/Screenshot-2020-07-25-at-1.17.34-PM-1.jpg" /> Rizman Putra’s Sontol Al Loyo, The Legend (2006), follows Sontol Al Loyo, a fictitious superstar performed by the artist himself. A sequence of performances is put up by this idol character as he rotates through different personas to match a range of musical genres. From folk music to heavy metal, the archetype of these genres hint at a larger representation of the simplified idea of a Malay man. The title is a play on words – the Indonesian colloquial word, Sontoloyo, means ‘stupid’. While meant to be a humorous parody, the work undoubtedly brings forth darker issues about moulding ourselves in an attempt to gain social acceptance, questioning how much of our appearance truly reflect our inner selves. The line between society and the individual thus becomes blurred on the social surface of our skin. Rizman Putra graduated with Master of Arts (Fine Arts) from LASALLE College of the Arts in 2007, and has been actively straddling between performance, visual arts and music for the last decade. In 2005, Rizman was one of the four artists selected for the President’s Young Talents Exhibition, and was part of the Fukuoka Triennale. In the same year, the now dissolved arts collective he co-founded,&nbsp; Kill Your Television (KYTV), was awarded the Japanese Chamber of Commerce &amp; Industry (JCCI) Singapore Foundation Arts Award. Rizman has performed locally and internationally, and at the inaugural Singapore Biennale 2006. Rizman is one half of the retro futurist electronic duo, NADA, and is currently an Associate Artist with Cake Theatrical Productions. ︎︎︎ BACK TO PROGRAMMES NEXT FILM&nbsp;︎︎︎ https://proximities.cargo.site/Film-Adi-Yadoni Sat, 15 Jan 2022 03:12:40 +0000 Proximities by Zulkhairi Zulkiflee https://proximities.cargo.site/Film-Adi-Yadoni Reflections Of The Misunderstood Mat Rockers (2002) by Adi Yadoni <img width="800" height="530" width_o="800" height_o="530" data-src="https://freight.cargo.site/t/original/i/d0ec3442f36840985b7afefb1f41c1bca5dec7feeb12c9f7ddee7e2ac0944d77/443856972-2a0b3b98c5ec21f4e9bb78be1fd3c624f8688120ff86c0fe4aa11edff44a47eb-d.jpg" data-mid="131031190" border="0" src="https://freight.cargo.site/w/800/i/d0ec3442f36840985b7afefb1f41c1bca5dec7feeb12c9f7ddee7e2ac0944d77/443856972-2a0b3b98c5ec21f4e9bb78be1fd3c624f8688120ff86c0fe4aa11edff44a47eb-d.jpg" /> Adi Yadoni’s Reflections of the Misunderstood Mat Rockers was the first documentary on the local metal music scene which featured the ‘Mat Rock’ – a colloquial term for men synonymous with Rock music. In a series of interviews with fellow Mat Rockers, this documentary reframes typical stereotypes associated with these groups of men. Through various responses, it highlights the increasing respectability of Mat Rockers in Singapore, attesting to the tremendous resilience of this subculture. Adi Yadoni studied fine art at LASALLE College of the Arts, Singapore and University Of Western Sydney, Australia. He is an artist that is comfortable in various mediums with the IBM Art Award and Philip Morris Art Award among his accolades. His works has graced many exhibition spaces locally and internationally. As Filmmaker, his work ranges from Narrative Films, Documentaries to Music Videos. His critically acclaimed documentary film ‘Reflections of the Misunderstood Mat Rockers’ was the first Singaporean documentary to be selected into the main programme of the 15th Singapore International Film Festival in 2002. The film has travelled to many film festivals in Asia and Europe. Adi lives and works in Singapore. ︎︎︎ BACK TO PROGRAMMES NEXT FILM&nbsp;︎︎︎ https://proximities.cargo.site/Film-Izat-Arif Tue, 18 Jan 2022 08:05:13 +0000 Proximities by Zulkhairi Zulkiflee https://proximities.cargo.site/Film-Izat-Arif Ini Amaran Penghabisan (2012)&nbsp; by Izat Arif (Malaysia) <img width="640" height="398" width_o="640" height_o="398" data-src="https://freight.cargo.site/t/original/i/d779321dd581c41580554afe5dd2768d9a11b66376cc53cd950a0c1e2461ed10/17510536.png" data-mid="131331658" border="0" src="https://freight.cargo.site/w/640/i/d779321dd581c41580554afe5dd2768d9a11b66376cc53cd950a0c1e2461ed10/17510536.png" /> Ini Amaran Penghabisan follows a student living his university life in London. The visuals of this video are synced with a dialogue from an audio clip found in the 1968 Malaysian film ‘Anak Bapak’ (Father’s Son). This audio clip reveals a scene in the film where a company owner accuses Salleh, his assistant, for executing a dishonorable deed against the company.&nbsp;The artist highlights the common scrutiny any Malay individual faces from the community having lived overseas for a prolonged period of time or subscribing to Western ideals. More often than not, they are subjected to being questioned about their loyalty to the country. The choice of the character, Salleh, is intentional. Mat ‘Salleh’ in Malay also refers to ‘white man’, a term used to address the colonial settlers in the past. Izat Arif (b. 1986), is a visual artist based in Kuala Lumpur, Malaysia. He completed his BA in Drawing at Camberwell College of Art in 2012. His works include drawings, objects, videos and installations that center around highlighting the contradictions and inconsistencies in contemporary sociopolitical contexts through role-play and popular culture. ︎︎︎ BACK TO PROGRAMMES NEXT FILM&nbsp;︎︎︎ https://proximities.cargo.site/Film-Yusri-Sapari Fri, 21 Jan 2022 07:08:19 +0000 Proximities by Zulkhairi Zulkiflee https://proximities.cargo.site/Film-Yusri-Sapari Trailer Boys (2018)&nbsp; by Yusri Sapari (Singapore) <img width="890" height="501" width_o="890" height_o="501" data-src="https://freight.cargo.site/t/original/i/f7778188e3d531521f7afe3cd789c797176b9e1417ade727a962f267e4a894b7/cover-Qt0zf1Oc7RNqbi6tNHhuUxE0V6MVhE1f.jpeg" data-mid="131840409" border="0" src="https://freight.cargo.site/w/890/i/f7778188e3d531521f7afe3cd789c797176b9e1417ade727a962f267e4a894b7/cover-Qt0zf1Oc7RNqbi6tNHhuUxE0V6MVhE1f.jpeg" /> Trailer Boys trails the journey of Irfan, a key member of Abam2 Trailer Singapura, a community of heavy vehicle drivers from Singapore. We see these drivers crisscross the island delivering goods, navigating the tricky challenges of their daily tasks. Spending long hours on the road, often alone in their vehicles, the Abam2 group provides a sense of community and support for these drivers. In an economically-driven and competitive country such as Singapore, the film explores how young truck drivers like Irfan find ways to navigate and live life in ways honorable. Yusri Shaggy Sapari is a digital video artist from Singapore. He started his journey recording his grandmother and TV shows on his audiocassette tape recorder as a child. Shaggy runs Paradise Pictures and works as a multimedia artist for theatre performances. Shaggy's documentary "Trailer Boys", about young truck drivers from Singapore, premiered in 2018 as part of Freedom Film Festival in Petaling Jaya. It became part of the Official Selection for Singapore Shorts 2019 and is nomintaed for National Youth Film Awards in 2019. It also went on to win the Audience Choice Award for Viddsee's Juree Awards in 2019. In 2020, Trailer Boys became an Official Selection at the Cambodia International Film Festival. ︎︎︎ BACK TO PROGRAMMES NEXT FILM&nbsp;︎︎︎