Jejak Langkah: Review
by Carmen Nge


On a recent visit to the National Art Gallery, Kuala Lumpur, I found myself faced with two choices: to walk under the bright pink archway that loudly welcomed me to the Malaysian Art NOW show or to leave my imprint on the malleable grey walkway that invited me to view the Jejak Langkah exhibition.

From my initial observation, the two entrances highlight the discontinuities within the artistic landscape of Malaysia. The first is indicative of the commercialization of art whereby shockingly bright colors symbolize the power of advertising and the value of surface over substance. The second signals a different compulsion, one that is seemingly more earthy and humble: an invitation to the public to be a part of the works on display, to leave an imprint of their footsteps behind. Perhaps this gesture is inspired by Chong Siew Ying’s A Moment in Time, one of the pieces in the Jejak Langkah show that is a time- and site-specific collection of the footprints of people entering and exiting Central Market.

Jejak Langkah, or Footsteps, is an art exhibition that claims to be collaborative because it brings together the creative efforts and practices of seven artists from different backgrounds with dissimilar attitudes and opinions about art. From the childhood motifs of Yusof Majid’s sea-inspired works to the film-derivative oil triptych of Eric Chan, this exhibition, is, however, anything but collaborative. The works on view do not appear to be the result of dialogue or collaboration between the artists, instead, the exhibition is marked by a high level of individualistic expressivity.

The theme of the show gives the artists license to create work that prey on their own idiosyncrasies and preoccupations. Ivan Lam’s mixed media Footprints convey a sense of foreboding and personal confusion; dark black clouds hang over the silhouettes of two children like ominous child-drawn, angry squiggles. Alternatively, Circa—an assemblage of cut-out pictures and text, repeating images and alphabets—exude incoherence and disjunctions. The artist’s statement asserts Ivan’s retreat into the realm of the personal and the contemplative; this may explain why this writer found it difficult to extrapolate meaning from the pieces. They were too mired in the personal and as such, inaccessible.

Azliza Ayob’s work—drawing on the elemental artifacts of childhood: storybooks and fairytales—is anchored by and tethered to a sense of the world seen through the eyes of children. Azliza believes that her installation, which draws on popular images and objects linked to childhood such as dolls, scrapbooks, and kid-sized chairs and tables, evoke memories for parents and adults and enables them to engage in an internal dialogue with themselves.

Due to the interactive aspect of her work, Azliza’s piece is the only one that parallels the clay walkway at the entrance because it engages on a physical as well as visual level. Yet the introspection it invites is still rooted in the personal; we are asked to use the artist’s memories from childhood to investigate our own but this exploration does not encourage us to contextualize our world-view. The personal becomes the universal: we were all children once and hence, we can all relate to this common experience. But the experience of childhood is at once uniquely individualistic and also uniquely social. And it is the social dimension of childhood that gets glaringly elided in Azliza’s work.

Yusof Majid’s pieces have very similar tendencies even though their medium (painting) is quite different. Homeless, Bus In My Soup and The Daisy Chain have a naïve visual quality about them because they almost look like something a child would paint but in the gallery space, they are defamiliarized. We may recognize the work from our own childlike experimentations but here, they are estranged from us—no longer intimate. The blue sea and sky that form an unbroken line of color is an ambiguous backdrop that decontextualizes the human figures in the work; the images may be a reflection of Yusof’s own childhood but they are not rooted in a time or place. It is this sense of being from everywhere and yet nowhere that inflects most of the pieces in this exhibition.

The artworks for the show are purportedly anchored by a sense of journey and the passing of time but in my view, they are imbued with a deeper sense of fixity and nostalgia than movement and kineticism. While it is true that the artists themselves are world travelers, having studied, lived and worked in countries such as England, Australia, Singapore and France, their work do not necessarily capture this sense of travel and multiple-localities.

The triptych by Eric Chan, for instance, negates the energy of movement by undercutting the idea of moving pictures with the more static image of the photographic form. Entitled Final Take, the work is an oil-based simulation of a film still, divided into 3 parts and curiously divorced from the usual narrative propulsion of film. The figure of a woman, cut up into 3 circular frames, is mise en scene gone awry; it is a physically impossible feat for a woman to be thusly proportioned. But how might this relate to journeying is anyone’s guess. The dismemberment of the female starlet—posing with her pouty lips and a bared right shoulder—almost seems like a cruel artistic joke culled from any number of Hollywood flicks, rather than from the 1950s black and white Malay and Chinese films that are the artist’s current interest.

In contrast, the digital video by Zulkifli Zakaria (more widely known as Joe Kidd of the underground punk scene) is a pastiche of stills strung together into a raw but not entirely discordant narrative format. The video is animated and quirky, juxtaposing musical references with sly social commentary. “We are all the same” is a line from one of the frames but this is not necessarily seen as a good thing. Or is it? Does homogeneity mean boring, cookie cutter, dispensable or does it signal a common purpose, a united front, a strong alliance of like minds?

Yee I-Lann’s work grapples with this question to some degree, though not by intention or design. In Topography of the Sole I, II and III, she extends the tension between the personal and the universal that is a strong undercurrent in the exhibition. Her photographs of the soles of anonymous feet are shot through with intimations of the personal—these are, after all, the feet of 3 different individuals—but because we do not recognize one another by our footprints, feet alone cannot establish the identities of their owners.

But what is identity anyway, the artist seems to ask. Is it our race, our nationality, our gender? Or is it about where we have been, how far we have traveled, and the extent of our mobility—our past, our future, our class? The variations in color, texture, size and shape of the feet are, however, too few; as a result, the particularities of each pair of feet are overshadowed by their general qualities.

Could it be, at the end of the day, we are all the same?

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This review was published in the Merdeka (August) 2004 issue of Options2, The Edge