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The Star Online: Lifestyle: Arts & Fashion

Posted: 02 Oct 2011 01:15 AM PDT

A sculptor imbues his bronze works with shared values and his own faith.

COSMIC Mambo, Amin Gulgee's latest exhibition of bronzes at Wei Ling Contemporary in Kuala Lumpur, firmly places this acclaimed Pakistani sculptor within the territorial purview of a Malaysian modern art movement.

Following his expansive 2009 survey exhibition at Galeri Petronas, KL, and two earlier solo outings at Wei Ling Gallery, Amin is seen as less of a visiting artist but more and more as one of our own. He has attained his richly deserved artistic presence in the region through successful shows, finding relevance through signature works with dramatic aesthetics and meaningful content.

It seems that his sculptures, steeped in overt spirituality and contemporary philosophies, and inspired by a synergy of "Hindu mythology, Buddhist asceticism and Islamic calligraphy" under an umbrella of the artist's own Sufi faith, inspires us all.

Perhaps his inclusive approach in the appropriation of philosophies ranging from the Vedas to cutting-age string theory strikes a chord with our own aspirations for unity through diversity.

Amin seems to subscribe to the marriage of a common system of values all humanity shares as central to the meanings in his works. A common system of values that we, the viewer, are privy to, when we interpret the meanings within his art.

Whether relying on the manipulations of the perfect roundels of the humble chapati; the revitalizing properties of the leaf in the new Char installations; the realistic masks of babies in his Sun-Dried wreaths, totems or garlands, and always, the return to the sacred word in his calligraphic masterpieces ... God is Great, God is Great, God is Great ... the sculptor continues to search and find and misplace the underlying spirituality that drives the nature of man.

And again – that appeals to us all.

And, of course, there is his rich aesthetic sensibility.

The sculptor's prowess in manipulating bronze, in constructing structures in a Brancusian state of precarious balance while specifically merging a rich abstract quality with strong symbolic allusions always culminates in forms of great purity.

With Cosmic Mambo, this purity is best expressed in his geometric Folded Chapatis or the heart-wrenching baby heads in Wreath – organic rings and towers of severed baby heads that are as beautiful as they are sad and horrifying.

The wonderfully titled Cosmic Chapati – expressed in perfect circular forms perched on their tiniest bases – boasts this purity, only to be then surpassed by the Folded Chapatis. These pieces, geometric reinventions of the humble circle, folded in states of delicate balance are sometimes dangerously poised on their points and then just as easily refolded by the artist in the Four Quarter versions to become benign and delicate – where there was a threathening volatility, now there is a state of grace.

Then the artist immediately reinvents the circles again, folding them to give us the gravity-defying complex arrangement of Four Quarter Chapatis that, inspite of their intricate folds, boast the same harmonious dignity of the single cosmic original.

When working towards an exhibition, Amin has never been confined or contained by a single series of works or themes. Cosmic Mambo boasts an eclectic mix of bodies of work – the Chapatis are the added, new dimension. He, of course, includes reinventions of his favourite suspects, the realistic hand and face portraits and his khat works.

Where the figurative works are concerned, from their earliest manifestations, Amin used body parts – wired hands and facial masks (eventually self-portraits) as part of larger flora-fauna dominated works decorated with coloured glass.

These elements were especially recurrent in earlier works like Climbing and in his Body & Soul exhibition. In comparison, there is an almost single-minded austerity in the new memorial day type Wreaths of the current Sun-Dried Heads series.

As usual Amin is obsessed with the graceful, precarious balance that marks his gravity defying sculptures. These bronzes, dense with beautifully sculptured babies heads – unapologetically titled Sun-Dried Heads – are contradictory in many ways.

They are at once heavy yet light despite their monumental scale. They defy gravity and refuse to topple. The heads are at once grotesque and decapitated and then they are fragrant and delicate, like purple or blood red hydrangeas. Their constant is that they are always a reminder of human frailty and the world we live in.

But almost as a hopeful gesture, as a gentle reprieve, Amin includes his Spider Sketches. This extension of his signature calligraphic series takes a new organic stance, boasting a complex weave of line and curve to convey a richness of movement that in turn may philosophically refer to the relevance and evolution of faith.

And finally the spectacular Char Bagh installation. Inspired by the Islamic tradition of architecture and metalwork, this new work alone is worth the visit. It claims and owns the space it lives in. A field of 64 copper leaves (perhaps tea) configured in four corners dissected by a cross pathway, Char Bagh is book-ended at the top and bottom by mirrors, creating the illusion of never-ending depth in the reflections.

Made in collaboration with Malaysian architect Lim Cho-Wei, the work is beautifully designed. The narrow path where the audience enters into it seems like a precarious ledge that one can literally drop off into the abyss.

In creating these various states of gravity, Amin gives us a view of the world – none of it literal; some of it allegorical, vaguely autobiographical, deeply spiritual; skilfully turned in bronze but always heart-wrenchingly felt.

Augustine Brancusi, the patriarch of modern sculpture, described ways of making and seeing thus: "What is real is not the external form but the essence of things ... It is impossible for anyone to express anything essentially real by imitating its exterior surface."

Amin Gulgee always manages to find that essence of things in his sculptures. Combined with his deep love for form and material the results are nothing short of breathtaking. Far from tipping over, they literally defy gravity.

Cosmic Mambo is on till Oct 10 at Wei Ling Contemporary, G212/G213A, Ground Floor, The Gardens mall, Mid Valley City, Kuala Lumpur. For enquiries, call 03-2260 1106.

One country, three facets

Posted: 02 Oct 2011 01:01 AM PDT

Visitors to the World Images exhibition in Paris get different views of Malaysia, as seen through the lens of our home-grown photographers.

THREE Malaysian photographers are currently showing their work at Photoquai 2011, the third biennale of the World Images exhibition in Paris, alongside 43 photographers from 28 other countries.

Minstrel Kuik, Pang Khee Teik and Tan Chee Hon were flown out to the French capital by the Quai Branly Museum for the Sept 12 opening, graced by France's Minister of Culture Frédéric Mitterand.

Curated by Françoise Huguier, who is herself a photographer, filmmaker and explorer, the exhibition features about 400 photographs from Africa, South America and the Caribbean, Asia, India, Oceania, Russia and Belarus.

Like in the previous years, the photographs are reproduced on a large scale and exhibited in an outdoor area along Quai Branly across the road from the museum.

Works by five photographers, including Kuik, are on show in the lush labyrinthine garden within the museum grounds. Hélène Fulgence, its director of exhibitions and cultural productions, said the "noise of the world" channelled by Huguier along Quai Branly has "opened floodgates that transcend styles, cultures and categories".

Huguier and her team are also woking in tandem with 10 other exhibition spaces as partners of Photoquai 2011. These include the Eiffel Tower, where one photograph per photographer has been selected to be mounted on the first level of this iconic monument.

Extraordinary fragments

Minstrel Kuik's ongoing project on display at Photoquai, called Mer.rily, Mer.rily, Mer.rily, Mer.rily, is one she started in 2006 by photographing slices of everyday life in Malaysia. Her subjects are ordinary, but her images are anything but.

Kuik, 35, spent 12 years overseas, first to obtain a BA in fine arts from Taiwan. After graduating in 2006 with a master's degree from Arles School of Photography in France, she reurned home and used her sense of alienation from her roots to fuel her photographic vision.

"In Malaysia we don't speak so much about culture. Food is at the heart of our concerns. It has become a kind of cultural landmark to me," she said in Paris, at the opening of the exhibiton.

She bases her work on the snapshots she takes of her family, her hometown Pantai Remis (in Perak), and the area she now lives in. Her images have a contemplative air to them, and some of them, when viewed together, are diary-like.

However, Kuik's view of the world she sees speaks in other ways to those who view them. As French semiotician Roland Barthes said of the photograph, "(It is) more insidious, more penetrating than likeness; the photograph sometimes makes what we never see in a real face appear before us."

Barthes also said that in another's photograph we sometimes see a fragment of oneself or a relative, which comes from some ancestor. Who cannot identify with and feel for Kuik's photograph of an electric slowcooker on her university dormitory counter or the wires of red kitsch electric candles on a Chinese altar?

Her other images of everyday life are more disturbing: a dismembered Barbie doll lying next to a spiky slice of durian; a dead grasshopper with half its body crushed and oozing. Check out minstrelkuik.blogspot.com.

No fencing in art

Pang Khee Teik, from Kuala Lumpur, is certainly a modern Renaissance man. Not only an accomplished if idiosyncratic photographer, he is also artistic director of the contemporary art centre, Annexe Gallery (in KL), former editor-in-chief of online arts and culture magazine Kakiseni.com, as well as an actor in theatre and independent films.

In his set of photographs which caught the eye of Photoquai curators for South-East Asia, Gille Massot and Wubin Zhuang, Pang combines his work as a gay activist with his ability to tell a story with his lens.

In the work called Repent Or Die! he has created four different filmic narratives, told in four frames, of situations where a homosexual refuses to recant.

In most of the photographic narratives, they are "killed off" with a pair of pink scissors. In one, the "Censor", portrayed by Pang himself, is unceremoniously kicked off the frame by four men dressed like the Village People, singing Y-M-C-A!

Pang, 37, said the style of each of the narratives was inspired by either a director he admired or was a tribute to a filmmaker he likes.

One narrative featuring actor/performer Edwin Sumun is coloured in the garish hues of a Pedro Almodovar film. Another series is a tribute to a Malaysian creative genius and filmmaker, the late Yasmin Ahmad.

Pang explained that he was inspired to take these photographs after the Malaysian Censorship Board decided to conditionally permit the depiction of homosexual and transsexual characters on film.

"In early 2010 the board announced that such characters would be permitted in local films, as long as they were seen to repent. Otherwise, they should meet the usual legal fate of imprisonment or death.

"In my photographs, I parody the way the board treats artists. People who think they can fence art in get it all wrong; art happens well beyond the fence."

At the opening, Mitterand commented that he liked the satirical humour of Pang's images and then jokingly asked if he should repent.

The photographer's witty comeback – "You should repent for all the good things you haven't done" – was captured by the French television cameras and Pang has been mentioned by at least five French and European online magazines since.

Shooting 'accidents'

Tan Chee Hon, who cites Henri Cartier-Bresson and André Kertesz as his influences, snapped all his Nostalgia photographs on show at the exhibition using an old Yashica Mat-124G which he got from a friend who'd bought it from a second-hand shop in China.

He calls them "snapshots" and tries to capture what Cartier-Bresson calls "the decisive moment". Despite his apparent modesty and lack of fluency in English, Tan eruditely quotes the French Marxist Jean Baudrillard by describing his work thus: "My photos are not thematic; neither very sophisticated nor overly technical."

And therein their beauty, especially the photograph of a bright red dress hanging on a tree branch in the foreground, with a group of performers in the background dressed in various hues of red and burgundy. The sun filters through dark greenish-blue foliage and casts an out-of-focus sheen over his subjects.

Tan, 36, said the lens on his Yashica is faulty and this made the outcome of his efforts unpredictable, but he liked the effect it had on his photographs. He was one of the few who shot on film for Photoquai.

He also uses expired film for his photos, which not only makes for more unpredictable results but is costly to develop too. (Expired film taints the batch of chemicals used to develop it and cannot be used to develop any more film.)

A graduate of the Kuala Lumpur College of Art in 1997, this painter/photographer also works part-time as an art teacher. His work was published weekly in the daily China Press from 1999 to 2001 and he has been exhibiting since 1996 in Japan, China, around South-East Asia and at home.

Johor-born Tan loves documenting KL, where his walks through the city every morning has resulted in a body of work which documents its heartbeat.

"I don't shoot with big topics in mind. I just shoot. KL is a strange and funny place. Little 'accidents' happen every day. If you miss something today, it will be gone tomorrow," he said.

Photoquai 2011 (photoquai.fr) is on show at the Musée du Quai Branly along the banks of the Seine until Nov 11.

46 Photographers Exhibit 46 Photographs – Photoquai is at the first floor of the Eiffel Tower (tour-eiffel.fr), from 9am to 11pm daily.

Kredit: www.thestar.com.my

Ahad, 2 Oktober 2011