September 13, 2003

Samina Choonarasusses out the three visiting foreign artists from Malaysia, England and India

Perhaps the best thing about meeting travelling artists is that they teach you something about guarding space for yourself, the creative space needed to express a private sorrow, or sensual humour, or even political angst. These breathing spaces are becoming fewer each day with the art market taking off in a big way and art becoming increasingly institutionalized.

Three mandarin artists floating in between these interstices are in Karachi for an artists’ residency organized by the Indus Valley School of Arts, the British Council, and Khoj artist’s workshop in New Delhi. Twenty-four-year-old Liew Kwai Fei from Malaysia is the youngest of the lot, a Fine Arts graduate in painting from Kuala Lumpur; 28-year-old Gordon Cheung is Chinese-British and studied painting at the Royal College of Arts in London, and Hema Upadhyay, is a thirty-something, Sindhi-speaking painter who trained in Baroda but now lives and exhibits her work in Bombay.

So how do artists survive in Malaysia, I ask Fei, who has just closed his first solo show in Kuala Lumpur before flying out to Karachi. He tells me about a house jointly rented by twenty artists who have baptized their studio Rumah Air Panas, or “Hothouse”, where they exhibit their own and other people’s works. RAP recently organized an Artist’s Survival Workshop to groom fresh graduates for the real world. As for his own survival, Fei says with a smile, “I don’t expect to be paid for my freedom.”

Fei was trained in pen and ink drawings and his work takes equally from Chinese calligraphy and 17th century Japanese comic art. His early works were larger than life portraits as mildly grotesque send-ups, but Fei soon tired of the joke and started exploring the abstractions of the line. In his recent show, the line has softened, the scale reduced to a more intimate one, and his gently absurd figurines become more eroticized as corpuscular orifices seeking pleasure. ‘Perhaps a reference to phallocentric consumerism of present times’, I suggest, but Fei denies it.

“I want my art to be about simple things. I don’t want my art to be noisy, full of many things,” he adds.

Gordon Cheung, meanwhile, has academic complexity coursing through his veins with seven years spent at the Royal College of Arts. He makes these idyllic landscapes, deserts, oases, and beach fronds to a large scale that dissolve into quite another reality as you approach them. The picture plane is intensely collaged by thin strips of stock listings from the Financial Times, the “techno-sublime”, as Gordon calls it, thereby inferring that our sense of reality or landscape, is largely a fiction collaged by numerical strength that rules the world, or, as Gordon puts it, “... a datascape created by the collective cries of buy or sell which determine whether they become pioneering summits or plummeting chasms.”

Gordon says he can work by helping to open up opportunities for other people, mostly young Fine Arts graduates. He recently curated a widely inclusive exhibition of works by over 150 young artists in a derelict school building just before the developers claimed it as real estate.

“In my last workshop in Paris, I wasn’t able to do new work because, I think, it was just too close to, or maybe not far away from London, where I live. But coming to Pakistan has been an experience different from anything I have known earlier and it is likely to have an effect on my work in times to come,” says Gordon. “For one, I may be able to move closer to Buddhist art, to my eastern roots, in a sense.”

For Hema, coming to Karachi has been an emotionally wrought experience because her parents once lived in Saddar before partition riots forced them to move. “But we are not partition generation and I feel completely at home here,” she adds.

Hema works in both painting and on site-specific installations. In her large canvases, she uses oils collaged with her own photographs because, she says, the urban landscape is largely collage with miniaturized human figures. Why Hema does not paint the body is because, according to her, “Painting distorts the figure which is the only real thing in the urban landscape.”

Her installations, ironically, are more emotional and not purged of autobiographical solipsism. In an earlier artist’s workshop in verdant Mysore, Hema “wrote” a letter to her parents that was literally planted in the earth. Hema dug out the script of a very ordinary, non-intellectual letter meant for her family and then sowed fast growing seeds in them. By the time the residency came to an end, the letter had grown green leaves and her parents were moved to see it reproduced in the local papers as a review of the art workshop because Hema never writes home. The letter was all that it was not. It was absence spelt out.

“My work is not feminist, although some people read it as such. Of course, I am talking from the position of being woman,” adds Hema.

Although it has been great to meet these veteran art travellers with an outreach programme meant for major art educational institutions in Karachi and Lahore, it remains to be seen if they have been able to generate anything more than art activity and have responded with work done in cramped quarters through crowded days.

The Vasl show opened September 10 at V.M. Art Gallery, Karachi. The two Pakistani artists included in this workshop are Roohi Ahmed from the IVSAA, Karachi, and Afshaar Malik from the NCA, Lahore.