Zai Kuning, "Adoi Mak Yong! Nak pergi mana?", 2009

Zai Kuning Exhibition

Opening: Thursday, 16th April 2009, 7.00pm

Jendela (Visual Arts Space), Esplanade (Singapore)

17 Apr – 31 May (Fri – Sun)

11am – 8.30pm Mon – Fri and 10am – 8.30pm Sat, Sun and public holidays

Zai Kuning’s practice is multidisciplinary, producing works ranging from drawing, painting, sculpture, installation, to film, music, dance, poetry and writing. His works are remarkable in their weighty simplicity. In A Tree in a Room (2004) at Sculpture Square, audiences were confronted with a large tree trunk that overwhelmed the Chapel Gallery space with its presence. Lying on its side upon the floor, the cut made across its middle at the sawmill from which it was obtained stitched together by wire – the visceral stitches at once poignant and hopeful. His works may be read as open dialogues with his audiences, whether inscribed in music, dance performances, films, drawings or discussions. A work that began in 1999 involves his documentation of his experiences of the Riau Archipelago, its history and people, in particular the Mak Yong, a local performance of folk theatre argued to have been developed by the Orang Laut. His film on the Mak Yong was screened at the Asian Film Symposium in Singapore in 2004 and was presented at the 3^rd Fukuoka Asian Art Triennale.

Having spent much time with the Orang Laut in Riau, this exhibition of new works comprising drawings and stories explores the form of narrative, less in terms of a chronology of events than a chronicle of being. One of these stories may be read in the form of a large book at the gallery hand-written by Lin Shiyun. “It is a story compiled and written by me since 2000 when I began my sojourns in the Riau Archipelago in search of the Orang Laut. It is in a way complete, and I hope to print it and direct a performance of the work in the future.”

The fictional monologue drawn from the people he has met in Riau offers up a collection of memories that also registers theirs, and perhaps our, experiences of disorientation and detachment. Spoken from a first-person perspective, it is a story of a man who marries a sea gypsy in the 1950s, and after Singapore’s independence becomes ‘naturalised’ and suddenly from being a nomad traveling freely around the islands of his historical forebears, is no long a sea gypsy. Instead, he is separated from his ‘home’ by the borders of nation states as the Orang Laut of today are no longer in Singapore, rather they are in Bintan, Batam, Lingga, Daik and Singkep.

The simplicity and intuitive nature of Zai’s expression in his work reflects his relationship with the Orang Laut that may be understood in the way he describes how came to meet with the sea gypsies and to live amongst them, “it happened when I came across an Orang Laut community settled at a river mouth, safe from the wind and rain. I asked the chief if I could rest nearby where they had just settled down, and he said it was okay. That night they came to my boat and we drank and talked. There we shared so many stories, like sand trickling through my fingers… And that’s how we know each other.”

The lyrcism of Zai’s stories lies in his ability to tell not only the events, the people and their places, but in the manner in which he weaves these moments transforming them not just into an account but into memories – a complexity of words, images, scents and sounds that becomes what is experienced and becomes a part of the listener as well. In conversation, he talks about the art of letter writing, of its resemblance to story telling, and how it is a lost practice in today’s technologically speeded-up state of email and texting.

Like his stories, this new series of drawings that are also included in the exhibition, in Chinese and Japanese inks and pigments, produced in large format, captures his thoughts on the lives of the nomadic people he has met, and their manner of communication through signs that serve as mnemonic devices of history, experiences and knowledge. For the artist, drawing or mark-making is a human activity, and a necessary one, he says, “for me drawing and marking is not an attempt at ownership. Even the act of erasing creates a mark. Marking is connected with one’s own memory of things around and what’s become lost in it. The Orang Laut mark their environment with a stone, tree, string, wood, oil or paint et cetera, and it is only they themselves who know what it means. In nature, river mouths change their appearances rather abruptly due to mangrove growth and water or sea-levels. But the stone, sand and tree will remain where they used to be. These are the places that may not necessarily be home but are the rivers which they have visited since birth.”

And as for the poetic title “Some came with their soul in a bottle and left with their hearts under their soles”, he remains enigmatically inscrutable, its answer may be gleaned from another subject on life’s search or journey, “don’t be surprised someday after traveling far away, that all you get to know is yourself,” suggesting perhaps that what one may be looking for in the distance, might just already be right here.

http://www.esplanade.com/whats_on/programme_info/some_came_with_their_soul/index.jsp

© June Yap, Independent Curator,  Singapore, 2009