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Origin (landscape I)
2010
Oil, acrylic, newspaper, magazine, colored sand and
adhesive on canvas
30.5 x 30.5 cm (7 panels)
Exhibited in Young Malaysian Artists - New Object(ion), Galeri Petronas, KL, Malaysia, 2010

This sculptural “anti-painting” mixes Reduction Art, exotic colors, the great humility of Arte Povera, arts and crafts technique and Geometric Abstraction to create an allusion to the naively optimistic view of the country’s future that often lingering in the minds of clever young Malaysians. I was inspired by Dan Flavin’s series "monuments" for V. Tatlin (1964), Anish Kapoor’s mysterious free-standing sculptures 1000 Names, Boetti’s crafty works, Dato Syed Ahmad Jamal monumental paintings and Piyadasa’s The great Malaysian Landscape (1972). Each square is a little self-contained universe, though self-sustainable, it interacts with the squares around it and even with the ones further away.  A square is nameless while in clusters I would call them “tribes”.

The oil paint that alludes to the classical “easel painting” tradition is veiled by a velvety layer of store-bought colored-sand. The craft material is chosen as a body to allude to the innocence of creativity and the simplicity of material because when I was a child, I would always “play” sand-art when my mother would bring me to the local mall. The craft activity would keep me occupied with a visual game where I could train my eyes and color sense.

I want to destroy the "romantic" notion of pushing paint on canvas and bring a reality closer to home. The color of the paint and the texture of the brush-stroke are pointless, useless and invisible, but the sticky/adhesive quality of the paint is taken advantage of, and it is turned into a form of glue that binds the sand to the canvas. The irregular, organic, chaotic surfaces on the canvas that are crated from paper-pulp are meant to juxtapose evidently with the geometric structure of the whole piece. The order of the composition. The texture, which is the “landscape” mentioned in the title, implies a cerebral landscape, not paddy fields or secondary-forests, but a socio-political landscape created by media and petty news contained in printed newspaper. I crushed these propaganda, gossip, commercial catalogues, celeb news leaflets and printed advertisement in my hands with the aid of water and throw the mashed-up masses onto the square canvases thus creating ridges and canyons for the eyes to roam wild.

This is the first work in the series and serves as a model for later works which I want to explore the visual possibilities with using different canvas sizes and shapes, varying thickness of paper-pulp, different colors of the colored-sand and diverse hanging orientations.