Curated by T.K. Sabapathy, this inaugural show at ADM gallery at Nanyang Technological University is well worth the hike if you are in Singapore. A rare opportunity to visit/revisit important works by Jim Supangkat, Tang Da Wu, Redza Piyadasa, Cheo Chai Hiang, Nindityo Adipurnomo, Brenda Fajardo, Zai Kuning, Nur Hanim Khairuddin, Bayu Utomo Radjikin, Amanda Heng, Ho Tzu Nyen, among others. TKS explores the connections and tensions between these many powerful artistic statements with characteristic sharpness. Intersecting Histories runs to 24 November 2012. The accompanying publication is due out soon.

(BY)

Bayu with Shahnim Safian, Co-Director of MARS at the opening of Transit A4/soft launch of MARS

A very big congratulations to MARS (Malaysian Art Archive and Research Support), which was launched  at HOM over the weekend. Initiated by Bayu Utomo Radjikin and Nur Hanim Khairuddin, MARS is planned as a “nonprofit research support center that compiles, preserves, and archives mainly printed materials related to Malaysian visual and fine arts intended for the consumption of researchers, students, and interested parties” (HOM website). The fundraising exhibition Transit A4 at HOM brought together 77 Malaysian artists and this made for a raucous launch crowd. It’s the beginning of something beautiful!

MARS site in Ampang

SEARCH Library - W.I.P.

Meanwhile, back at the RogueArt ranch, our more modest SEARCH Library is slowly taking shape – made up of our own collection of SEA publications and the loan of regional titles from the VK Collection, we hope to have it open by appointment by December. It’s very exciting to be part of a wider push for better research, documentation and access, and we look forward to linking up with MARS and other regional resource sites in the near future.

(BY)

We thought we’d spice things up a little here and invite Simon Soon to be our first ever guest blogger for RogueArt! Writer, curator Mr. Soon (or “Bapak Segera” as he is fondly known in Indonesia) is currently pursuing his PHD at University of Sydney and is researching the developments of Southeast Asian art during the 1950s to the 1970s. Without further a due, I hand you over to Mr. Simon Soon (AO):

Fankids posing for pictures "buat kenang-kenangan" in front of exhibition entrance.

An Indonesian art history defining event doesn’t happen every day, month or year. I therefore consider myself very lucky to be able to catch the first ever Raden Saleh exhibition organised in this part of the world. ‘Raden Saleh and the Beginning of Modern Painting in Indonesia’, curated by Werner Kraus was according to Pak Werner 25 years (on and off) in the making. It brings together around forty works by the 19th century Javanese painter, many of them normally stashed away in private collections, to provide us viewing public with the rare opportunity to study a diverse range of works from landscapes to drawing manuals, portraits to his famous attempt at history painting. Judging by the numbers who turned up, the Indonesian public of all age groups were responding enthusiastically to the show. The rush, however, could also be attributed to the unfortunate fact that the exhibition would only be up for two short weeks from 3 – 17 June 2012 at the Galeri Nasional Indonesia in Jakarta.

Dutch Winter Landscape, 1834, Oil on canvas, Private Collection

Hunting Party Attacked by Tiger, 1847, Oil on canvas, Private Collection

Meeting in the Forest, 1848, Oil on canvas, Private Collection

Lying in Waiting, 1849, Oil on canvas, Private Collection

As an artist who continuously sought to reinvent himself, Raden Saleh took on many guises (at times as the European dandy, at others the Javanese prince) to his advantage as he moved within Europe’s high society. This comes through in his art. Take The Arrest of Diponegoro, Portrait of a Javanese Couple and Portrait of Raden Ayu Muning Kasari as comparison: all three works were painted in 1857 yet demonstrate significant versatility in terms of style, content and intent. They suggest that Raden Saleh’s painterly verve was very much a reflection of his shape shifting personality, one that was never wholly committed to a particular cultural identity and was always hybrid.

The Arrest of Prince Diponegoro, 1857, Oil on canvas, Public Collection

Portrait of Raden Ayu Muning Kasari, 1857, Oil on canvas, Private Collection

Portrait of a Javanese Couple, 1857, Oil on canvas, Private Collection

The weekend of 9 – 10 June also brought together academics from a range of different disciplines in a symposium ‘On Hybrid Times: Developments in Javanese Society and the Arts in the Late 19th Century’. The lectures offered a window into 19th century Java and touches on a wonderfully diverse range of subjects, such as colonial furniture, lithographs of the East Indies, iconography in 19th century Southeast Asian paintings, aesthetic debates in early Javanese printed media, as well as other art historical gems which sought to explain the complexities of Raden Saleh as an artistic figure, his artworks and his legacy. On a lighter note, there was also an attempt to capture the ethos of Raden Saleh as a debonaire in a tribute fashion show inspired by the artist, who was known in his day to design his own clothes! (SS)

Sheets from Raden Saleh's Drawing Manuals, 1867

The largest painting in this exhibiton, Arab Horseman Attacked by a Lion, 1870, Oil on canvas, Public Collection.

For more pictures of the exhibition, please visit IndoArtNow here.

Please come visit this exhibition at Langgeng Art Foundation if you are in Yogyakarta for the Jogja Biennale!

[SEA] TERRITORIES OF THE REAL AND UNREAL:
Photographic practices in contemporary Southeast Asian Art
Curated by Adeline Ooi and Beverly Yong

OPENING
Sunday, 27 November, 7.30 PM
Exhibition continues until 21 January 2012.

ARTISTS
Amanda Heng (SG), Angki Purbandono (ID)
Davy Linggar (ID), Gina Osterloh (PH/US)
Isa Lorenzo (PH), Ismail Hashim (MY)
Julia Sarisetiati (ID), Kornkrit Jianpinidnan (TH)
Lena Cobangbang (PH), Manit Sriwanichpoom (TH)
Paul Kadarisman (ID), Poklong Anading (PH)
Steve Tirona (PH), Wimo Ambala Bayang (ID)
Yee I-Lann (MY), Zhao Renhui (SG)

[SEA] TALKS SERIES
A day of talks will be held on
Saturday, 10 December 2011, 10AM – 5.30PM
Guided tour: Adeline Ooi, Beverly Yong;
Speakers: Patricia Levasseur de la Motte, Zhuang Wubin
[for registered participants]

For more info, or to register for the guided tour and talks,
 please contact Ms. Mala at +6281215500083 or info[at]langgengfoundation.org

SUPPORTED BY

RogueArt

WITH THANKS TO
Muzium & Galeri Tuanku Fauziah, Universiti Sains Malaysia
Silverlens Foundation, Philippines

Mr Hermanto, Garis Art Space, Indonesia
Pakhruddin & Fatimah Sulaiman

LANGGENG ART FOUNDATION
Jl. Suryodiningratan 37, 
Yogyakarta 55131, 
Indonesia

Open daily 11:00 AM – 07:00 PM

Click here for more information, or visit Langgeng Art Foundation’s website.

The Singaporeans have certainly been laying the art on. Just two months on from Art Stage, we tramped down for the year’s second art blockbuster event, the slightly delayed Singapore Biennale, and a good seven or eight shows on the side.

By all accounts, SB2011 is less of a spectacle than its predecessors – no art statements running across City Hall in bright lights, no colourful containers brightening the urban shoreline. It shies well away from big beautiful themes like 2006’s Belief, and 2008’s Wonder. This year’s Biennale, themed “Open House”, is decidedly interior in its conceptual and physical architecture.

(Broadsheet’s 40th anniversary edition gives a good preview, including a lengthy interview with Artistic Director Matthew Ngui and Curators Russell Storer and Trevor Smith: http://www.cacsa.org.au.)

Less can be more, though, and, not expecting wow (there was simply not very much build-up to the event), I really enjoyed the Biennale as an experience. I found myself getting into works I didn’t expect to like, and that there was just about enough time to cover the 63 works over a day and a bit (ideally two though) without reeling over from too much information. The curatorial emphasis on process over subject, object and in a number of cases, presentation, I think worked on me, ranging through sometimes vastly different approaches from space to space, room to room, dark corner to dark corner (of the National Museum) – the question marks and surprises, as much as the resonances did force you to engage and explore. I particularly liked the Old Kallang Airport site – moving through the succession of rooms in the East and West blocks like changing levels of a video game, or the hide-and-seek of the main building. There was an Alice-in-Wonderland effect, you were tiny among the giant rolls of Michael Beutler’s Pipeline Field, or in Sheela Gowda’s magnified bathroom of horror, but god-like peering into the unrealised utopias of Michael Lee’s Office Architect. Rafael Lozano-Hemmer’s Frequency and Volume: Relational Architecture 9 was a big hit with visitors as our bodies tuned into radio channels tracking the large shadows we cast on the wall.

Michael Beutler, Pipeline Field

Sheela Gowda

Rafael Lozano-Hemmer, Frequency and Volume: Relational Architecture 9

There was a definite sense of nakedness and exposure, sometimes as a challenge, sometimes as an act of trust or intimacy, sometimes conspiratorial. There were relatively few works that were all dressed up and ready to go for the ball. For Rumah Sulaiman Belakang Kedai Ah Guat, Shooshie Sulaiman relocated the structures of two sites of personal significance– in Titiwangsa KL and Malacca, to SAM’s 8Q building, and they contextualise a video of a conversation with Ah Guat, and drawings and collages from over the span of her practice, creating a layered reading of artistic process, space, and memory through an excavation of the personal.

Shooshie Sulaiman, Rumah Sulaiman Belakang Kedai Ah Guat

Confession, identity-construction and voyeurism seemed to play a big part in the curatorial conversation, from Ruang Rupa’s hilarious and touching fantasy lives of Singaporeans to Ise’s grocery-shopping adventures with local families to Jill Magid’s Evidence Locker to the poster-child of the Biennale, Candice Breitz’s Factum which compares interviews with identical twins and a set of triplets. I particularly enjoyed Tala Mandani’s tiny animated vignettes of clumsy men doing violence to themselves, and Simon Fujiwara’s extraordinary manifold reconstruction of Hotel Mumber using eroticism as an intriguing entry-point.

Ruang Rupa, Singapura Fiction

I was surprised by the amount of sex (as parody: Tracy Moffat, Ming Wong) and violence (to inanimate structures – Lisi Raskin’s muscled reconfiguration of the mezzanine floor of Kallang West Block, Mike Nelson tearing up walls and pedestals, Superflex drowning McDonalds). I found I quite liked the violence bit.

Mike Nelson

Other personal favourites which linger in my mind are Tiffany Chung’s poetic landscape installation Floating into the Future from a Distant Past, and earlier mappings of Vietnam, and Phil Collins’ wonderful music video The Meaning of Style, carving new spaces for imagining our third-world realities.

Tiffany Chung, Floating into the Future from a Distant Past

It’s worth catching the Biennale (to 15 May 2011) if you’re in this part of the world – not so much as a great new album of contemporary art, but certainly an inspiring and interesting playlist which can help to make us think more deeply about what some artists today are trying to get at.

For a “greatest hits” of Southeast Asian contemporary art, you can also catch Negotiating Home, History and Nation: Two Decades of Contemporary Art from Southeast Asia, 1991 – 2010 at SAM (to 26 June 2011). Do also make an effort to visit Camping and Tramping Through the Colonial Archive: The Museum in Malaya at NUS Museum, a wonderful exploration, both as an exhibition and a publication, or what curator Shabbir Hussain Mustafa describes as an “exhibitionary complex”, of the evolution of the museum in Malaya. Tap into some fantastic archival material including letters and recorded conversations on Malayan exhibitions in London in the 1920s, the genesis of the Raffles Museum, and the Asian Art Museum at University Malaya and their collections, Asian art objects from the NUS Museum and Asian Civilisations Museum collections, natural history artefacts from the Raffles Museum of Biodiversity Research (NUS) Collection, Dr Ivan Polunin’s remarkable Singapore film archive and the eclectic collection and paintings of artist and healer Mohammad din Mohammad, for new ways of seeing old ways of seeing.

Mella Jaarsma at SAM

Camping and Tramping Through the Colonial Archive: The Museum in Malaya

Bernando Pacquing, Untitled at ICA’s “Roberto Chabet : Complete & Unabridged”

I hit Manila with my skates on and headed straight to silverlens gallery for back-to-back openings last night. Who’s showing? Three of Manila’s hottest 30-something boys: Poklong Anading + Gary-Ross Pastrana at silverlens and Mariano Ching across the bridge at SLab.

2011 marks my 10th anniversary with Manila. I first set foot in this city in January 2001 and didn’t think I would survive my first 24 hours! Well here I am 10 years on and grateful for the experiences this city has given me. What is even more special is the people I’ve gotten to know along the way, friends and collaborators in the art community who make Manila feel very much like my second home.

Over the past 10 years, Poklong, Gary and Mariano have emerged from the black hole that is DIY territory and have become stars in their own right. As their art practice continue to mature, each artist has stayed true to his own path of interests and concerns and consistently challenged audience with works that are thought-provoking, witty and often humourous. Between Signs is a two-man show for Poklong and Gary, two old friends who have exhibited together in group shows across Manila and beyond. Sparse, minimal and slightly off-kilter – particularly in the Pinoy context where more is always more, this show may come across as “nothing much is happening” to those who are unaccustomed to the artists’ unique brand of aesthetics. Works in this exhibition feel as though “they just happen to be there”, featuring objects such as clear tape, breadcrumbs, a folio of dust, a ball of chocolate and a green tea and ube (purple yam) cake and a slab of concrete, literally, among others. The point of the exhibition is to blur the distinction between “who made what” and highlight the dialogue between works made by two friends who share similar concerns or “maps” but are moving along different journeys.

Fallen Map (by Poklong Anading) in the picture below is the kindred spirit of the First Attempt at Social Sculpture or Breaking the Fourth Wall (by Gary-Ross Pastrana) in that they both represent fragments from the urban landscape. For Fallen Map, Poklong went around the Metro and collected pieces of broken pavement and painted the flat side with colorful patterns derived from rags. Meanwhile, Gary’s edible concrete cake is made to look like a part of the gallery floor.

Image below :The concrete cake is actually a green tea ube cake, delicious despite its unappetizing appearance.

Across the bridge at SLab, Mariano Ching’s  Even Bad Days Are Good tells us that beauty can be found in the grotesque, the ugly and the details. The show presents a series of portraits of Chewbacca-meets-Elephant Man type characters on canvas and a set of miniature landscapes etched and carved onto shaped wooden blocks. Mariano’s touch on wood is exquisite, combining intricately detailed rendering of fantastical seascapes and junkyard scenes with carved textures on the wood’s surface. This series of work shows off the artist’s fine draftsmanship and keen understanding and appreciation for wood gained from his Japanese training in printmaking during his year in Kyoto in 2004.

Opening night at SLab. The happy couple, Yasmin Sison (left) and Mariano Ching (right) with Isa Lorenzo (centre),  co-owner of silverlens gallery.

For more information and images of Poklong, Gary and Mariano’s work, please visit silverlens gallery’s website here and SLab’s website here (AO)

The launch of WORKING and Tara Sosrowardoyo’s exhibition was a success!  A BIG THANK YOU to everyone who made it to Zinc Art Space last Saturday evening! Tara’s works look fantastic in the space, we love it so much we thought we’d share images of the exhibition with you.

Click here for more pictures of the opening event. And here to read a short article about the project in New Straits Times Life & Style section on Sunday, 10.10.10

Join on us on the 2nd of October to celebrate the launch of the publication WORKING, an artists initiated project in association with RogueArt. Spearheaded by Ahmad Zakii Anwar and Jalaini Abu Hassan, WORKING is the principal outcome of the WORK project which began in 2009. Some of you may recall attending the WORK exhibition held earlier in January 2010 at No. 19 Jalan Berangan? (For those who would like to find out more about the exhibition, click here if you are curious)

WORKING focuses on the creative processes of 10 leading Malaysian artists and their relationship with their respective working environments through a series of interviews and photographic documentation. The publication is a modest attempt to uncover each artist’s methodology, to try to make sense of what is often considered a wordless and emotional creative process.

An exhibition entitled 10 Malaysian Artists: Portraits from the WORK Project by Tara Sosrowardoyo will also be presented in conjunction with the book launch. Tara was invited to be the “eyes” of the project, to capture each artist’s portraits which will form the key entries of WORKING. Over a period of two months in 2009, this regionally acclaimed photographer travelled around the Klang Valley, up north to Kuala Kangsar, down south to Melaka and Johor Bahru, spending time with the artists and familiarising himself with their environments.

The exhibition is the result of this two-month shoot. A number of images from this exhibition can be found in WORKING while others are the photographer’s own selection of unpublished images from his sessions with the artists.

The artists for the WORK project are: Ahmad Fuad Osman, Ahmad Shukri Mohamed, Ahmad Zakii Anwar, Chong Siew Ying, Hamir Soib, Jalaini Abu Hassan, Kow Leong Kiang, Raja Shahriman Raja Aziddin, Ramlan Abdullah and Yee I-Lann.

WORKING launch + 10 Malaysian Artists: Portraits from the WORK Project by Tara Sosrowardoyo

will be held at Zinc Art Space
Lot 61, Jalan Maarof, Bangsar, Kuala Lumpur

on 2nd October at 8pm

The exhibition will run from 2 to 12 October 2010
RSVP contact@rogueart.asia +60 16 266 7413 www.rogueart.asia

With thanks to ZINC

Opening hours Monday – Saturday 12pm – 7pm Sundays & Public Holidays open by appointment info@zinc.com.my +6 03 22825388 www.zinc.com.my

The Orang Besar Series: Empires of Privateers and their Glorious Ventures

The exhibition we’ve all been waiting for is now around the corner! RogueArt are very excited to be a part of Yee I-Lann: Boogeyman, in collaboration with Valentine Willie Fine Art. The exhibition opens at MAP. KL this Thursday 16th September – Malaysia Day. It’s been a glorious venture working with Yee I-Lann on this show, which brings together new works in batik, photomedia and pewter as well as key works from the past three years. See our Exhibitions page for more details.

Selamat Hari Raya Aidilfitri to all our Muslim friends, and Selamat Hari Malaysia to all Malaysians!

(BY)

Colour, Shape, Quantity, Scale at 15 Jln Mesui

A little late, and we’re rather sad the show is already down, but we’d like to give our 3 thumbs up to Liew Kwai Fei’s exhibition at 15 Jalan Mesui. A sharp clean breath of air, and we loved the way it worked in the unapologetically gritty space. Read more on arteri.