The last couple of months had seen Zai Kuning living in Chiang Mai, even traveling to the northernmost towns of Thailand near Myanmar.
It’s in these areas of defined geopolitical boundaries, ironically, where people’s identities and national allegiances not only become fluid but, sadly, non-existent. It’s where so-called stateless people, people regarded with suspicion or as outsiders by both sides, live.
A number of things took place: The Singaporean artist temporarily lost his passport, and for five days he literally became one of them – stateless; he was also told by one of these stateless folks: “We accept ourselves, it’s others who reject us”; and he created art.
The idea of the outsider creating something in the midst of an environment that shuns his very presence informs Zai Kuning’s latest show From Lorong Gambas to Ninmanhaemin.
The title lends itself to a sense of journey, of sweeping nostalgia (Lorong Gambas, of course, was where The Artists Village all began, and Ninmanhaemin is where he ended up right now).
But it is more about being swept aside.
Zai has previously done work dealing with nomadic peoples. His show last year, for instance, was titled Immigrant, and his 2010 theatre collaboration with spell#7, Epic Poem Of Malaya, touched on the orang laut. But even these critical works conjured a hint of that romantic notion of the “nomad”.
From Lorong Gambas had none of that. This, as Zai said, was about “artists being pushed aside frequently.” Of respected artists being treated with disrespect, of the difficulties of being creative in a rapidly changing country. The nomad-artist in Singapore doesn’t have the luxury of seafaring. He or she is drowning in concrete.
Today’s one-day show (and not an exhibition, he insisted) consisted of an installation, drawings for sale, and a stirring talk.
At the centre of the Goodman Arts Centre gallery was an installation assembled from objects Zai gathered from what was left of sculptor and Cultural Medallion recipient Han Sai Por’s studio/garden at Portsdown Road, after it was dug up to make way for the area’s redevelopment. A heartbreaking moment for Zai who saw it lovingly cultivated for five years.
Han was not the only one affected – Zai himself had to leave. And after being unable to find the right place suited for his practice, found himself in Chiang Mai.
The drawings themselves were a result of that trip. Freed from economic constraints of practicing art in Singapore, of problems with studio space, of the mental claustrophobia of the city, his jellyfish-like blobs and tentacles done on paperbark reflect all these — even down to the fact that the size of his works depended purely on whatever size was available in the paper factory.
The telling thing however, is that he recounts all this not with an air of triumph at being able to walk away from all that to create his work, but with a slight hint of, perhaps, shame, as others continue to persist in Singapore despite all these difficulties.
He decried the treatment of his “teachers” and friends like Tang Da Wu, Chng Seok Tin, Han Sai Por and Lee Wen – with the exception of Tang, all Cultural Medallion recipients who don’t get as much support and recognition as they ought to (compared, he said, to how Japan supports its Living National Treasures).
After being enamoured by the slick works at Art Stage Singapore, tickled by the intrigues and bickering, or overwhelmed by the crass commercialised side of contemporary art, From Lorong Gambas to Ninmanhaemin and the stories that led to it was a much-needed reminder of that other side of the local arts scene.
It begs so many questions. What does it mean when a respected artist is driven from Singapore, by among other reasons, economic forces? What does it mean when an artist, who by now should have gotten a Cultural Medallion and deserves to have his very own retrospective, has to set up a guerilla-type one-day show for the purpose of selling his drawings at a max $500 simply because he doesn’t have enough to sustain his practice?
But most importantly, what pushes an artist to throw his hands up in the air and say “I give up”?
(UPDATE: Seems like the one-day only fundraising show will be getting an extension this weekend — it’ll be at The Substation on Feb 4, 4pm to 8pm, and at Your Mother Galler, 91A Hindoo Road, on Feb 5, 5pm to 10pm.)
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