A Life Beyond Boundaries (The Geography of Belonging): Artists in Focus Series

Defined as ‘the official right to belong to a particular country’, how is nationality ascribed? Is nationality a tangible concept and, if so, how can it be represented? How does a flag, a map or an icon of political hegemony symbolize one’s own nationality? Or are heirlooms, traditions and cultural identity similarly significant expressions of the nation?

A large group exhibition, A Life Beyond Boundaries (The Geography of Belonging) emerges as a way to discuss, through visual art, national belonging in the context of Southeast Asia. Embracing a comparative approach to the region, the exhibition invites 14 artists of different generations to consider the conceptions of identity and belonging beyond straightforward geographical perspectives, but from the artists’ subjectivities, premised in their personal observations on the meaning of nationality—as an individual or as a community.

Widjaja uses a technique dye-sublimation print on fabric for the work titled ‘A cry a voice and a word that shall echo’. The work considers the contemporary legacy of the 1955 Bandung Conference, at a time of geopolitical tension between two major powers and a pandemic induced questioning of synchronised, global cooperation. The Conference’s final communique culminated in a ten-point “Declaration on promotion of world peace and cooperation”. Adopted by all 29 delegates—majority newly-formed nations in Asia and Africa—the ten principles were hopeful assertions for a world in crisis during the Cold War. The title of the work is drawn from Indonesian President Sukarno’s opening address at the Bandung Conference, where he quoted Henry Wadsworth Longfellow’s poetic ode to a patriot who tipped the victory in the American Independence War through his midnight ride to warn of approaching enemy troops (A cry of defiance and not of fear / A voice in the darkness, a knock at the door / And a word that shall echo forevermore). Working with the notion of flags as coded dreams and declarations, the artist encoded the artwork title, and the Bandung Conference’s ten principles, into the flag graphics by transposing the Morse Code sounds to colours of differing wavelengths that were sampled from the 120 national flags of the Non-Aligned Movement; formulating an encoding system and a visual language that recurs in his practice.

“To speak is easy. To act is hard. To understand is hardest. Once one understands, action is easy” 

The Indonesian President Sukarno quoted from “one of Asia’s greatest sons” – likely to be founding father of modern China Sun Yat-sen who, in turn appeared to have adapted a Goethean quote. The transcontinental echo across epochs led the artist to ponder upon the time-space of history; to urgently resonate in the present, a hopeful collective cry from the past. Through analogue techniques that include lens inversion, Widjaja reframes and refocuses the press photographs of Bandung Conference into moving images. Embedded in the video is sonification of the words “a cry / a voice / and a word / that shall echo” that were drawn from a poem by Henry Wadsworth Longfellow that Sukarno also quoted in his address. The artist worked with digitally manipulated gamelan (a traditional metallophone musical instrument in Indonesia) sounds and a custom algorithm to create the soundtrack. The video is generative in the tradition of Eno’s ambient music. An algorithmic composition that plays different every time, and (almost) infinitely.

Explore more for his work in the video ‘Artist in Focus’

Bounpaul Phothyzan

The contemporary artist from Laos is an emerging artist whose practice centres on Land art, installation art and video art. He graduated from the Institute of Fine Arts (previously known as Faculty of Fine Art) in 2007, and was awarded a scholarship to undertake a Master’s degree in Visual Art at Mahasarakham University in Thailand.

In this exhibition, Sasmita shows ‘Timur Merah Project VI’ (2021). It’s from the ongoing Timur Merah (East is Red) project,  she traces Balinese historical narratives through literary sources and images of mythology to reconstruct marginalised, female-focused journeys of life. Furthermore, the artist adopts the traditional Kamasan painting technique, typical of Bali and historically executed by men, to create large installations and works that reframe the patriarchal Balinese culture by adding ubiquitous female figures representing life and nature.

In the works featured in the exhibition, the artist focuses on the representations of the under- middle- and upperworlds in Balinese beliefs. To do so she incorporates narratives of the Sanskrit epic Mahābhārata by taking inspiration from the famous Kamasan frescos in the Kerta Gosa Palace in Bali, which tell the story of Bima in Heaven and Hell. Built in the 17th century, the palace was the residence of the high king of Bali. Part of the palace was a court of justice, in which the citizens were judged and sentenced. In the works, Sasmita adapts the geometrical forms and shapes of the murals, replacing the characters of the paintings with female figures as symbols of nature and human anatomy, to address cultural identity from the perspective of social marginalisation.

Explore more for her work in the video ‘Artist in Focus’

Haffendi Anuar

The Malaysian artist, his current work looks at the kain pelikat, a type of colourful plaid tubular transnational ‘male-skirt’ usually worn domestically and sometimes as an informal labour uniform in parts of the global south. Oriented in relation to his childhood memories of encountering and being enveloped by the fabric, his research and exploration into the iconography of the garment encompasses personal family photos, archival photographs, images from social media and the Internet and looks into the fabric’s origin, social utilization, visual patterns and formal structure. From the materials gathered, he would reimagine the fabric as constructions for hammocks, cradles and nets, working in a process that incorporates collage, painting and sewing.

Recent exhibitions include Midday Stanza (solo), Richard Koh Fine Art, Singapore (2019), Elephant Utopia (solo), Art Taipei (2015), The Foot Beneath the Flower (group), Nanyang Tech University ADM Gallery, Singapore (2020), For the Few and the Many (2-person), Beers London, London (2019) and ‘head, heap, heat,’ Institute of Contemporary Arts, Singapore (2018).

In these series of works is in collaboration with Richard Koh Fine Art. For the work ‘Site I – III’. He uses traditional clothing –  the kain pelikat, and other textiles that are associated with Malaysian and border Southeast Asian cultures , as a way to dismantle and reconstruct new meanings of belonging.

“I have been using textile (kain pelikat, felt, canvas, rice sacks and denim) and was fascinated by the versatility of the material and its potential to activate space. I have been painting and dyeing the pieces and connecting them via sewing techniques and would think of them as both paintings and sculptures. Process-wise, I would layer the fabrics, slit into them, make holes, and let them drape from a ceiling structure, working with the materials’ weight, density and gravity. Sewing also has become a method of connecting as well as drawing. I think of them as pieces of architecture, like building a house. I have always been captivated by wooden homes in urban centres in Southeast Asia, in most cities you would be able to find them, at times sandwiched in between glitzy skyscrapers. They are to me urgently economical and appear handmade and haphazard, but there is always a kind of logic to their structure and how pieces seem to fit to one another harmoniously.”

“My work explores how we construct an understanding of a territory from afar. Since 2017, I have been working on a long-term project titled My Land, in which I grant myself an absolute power to create a world according to my rules. This project contains drawings, sculptures and writings that represent maps, artifacts and tales of an imagined territory. This territory does not correspond to any known culture in human history. It has its own systems of logic, language, and metrology that are functional only within themselves. I consider the project as a thought experiment of a phenomenal environment in which the personal experience of any viewer is stripped away. He or she must completely abandon his or her own invalid cultural legacy in order to navigate the environment.”

‘My Land’ is designed to have four different “entrances”- four starting points to experience the territory. The most common “entrance” is to begin with the keymap [mothermap], which represents the whole territory with the universe around it. According to the map, the territory is stuck between day and night, outside of our perception of time. The map is divided by an 8×8 grid, thus having 64 space units. Each unit then leads to a separate map, which has its own space units, and so on. The project continues to develop according to this procedure. As the project grows, [mothermap] is remade accordingly. I construct the framework of all entrances in this way, making the whole project under infinite revisions and expansion.”

Explore more for his work in the video ‘Artist in Focus’

Explore more for their work in the video ‘Artist in Focus’

Ly Hoàng Ly