Monday, December 05, 2005
VMAG Interview
I was interviewed for an article in a local lifestyle magazine called VMAG. The article is out in this month's (DEC 2005) issue, but is translated into Mandarin. Thought I'd post up the full, unedited English version for my beloved round-eyes and other English-worded peoples. It is rather long. The interview was conducted over email by Chai Chang Hwang, a local artist and critic. I found his questions to be very intelligent and a long way away from the usual facile crap that is asked. So here it is, happy reading.
1. AS A FINE ART GRADUATE MAJORING IN SCULPTURE, YOUR CREATIVE EXPRESSIONS DOES NOT FRAME ON ‘MAKING 3-DIMENSIONAL OBJECTS’. FURTHER MORE, IT IS EXPANDING TO AN EXPLORATION ON SPACE AND INSTALLATION. WOULD YOU LIKE TO SHARE SOME OF YOUR THOUGHTS ON THAT?
The most common question people ask me when they find out I’m an artist is : ‘what is your medium?’. I always answer by saying ‘I majored in sculpture’. I hesitate to say ‘I am a sculptor’ because people tend to assume that I spend my days with a hammer and chisel, like Michelangelo.
On the other hand, I don’t want to be known as an ‘installation artist’ either. I think the best way to describe what I do is that, unlike a painter, I work and think in 3-dimensions. There is no difference for me between what is sculpture and what is installation. They share the same type of language.
I feel that a lot of installations made these days are not really installations. They are only objects hung in space. Installation is not about filling up space, it is about using space, interacting with it, exploring it. There is a relationship with the ceiling, floor and walls, as well as the objects placed there. And don’t forget the audience! A good installation will allow these elements to speak to each other. That is what makes a work come alive. Otherwise it becomes nothing more than objects hung on walls or placed on the floor.
When making an installation, I think that ‘site’ is very important, i.e. where the work is placed. Even if you have only a room with four walls, there will always be a way to make the four walls talk to each other. I try to never take my walls and floors for granted! Even cracks in the concrete might suggest a different way to install/create work. When I am stuck (artist’s block), I like to bring my work to a completely different site—maybe the garden, the beach or even in the toilet, just to see how it changes in a different environment.
2. WHAT DO YOU THINK ON THE PROCESS OF TRANFORMATION OF AN ARTIST’S IDEAS INTO A FORM OF AN ART WORK, OR EVEN THE MEDIUM? HOW DOES IT HAPPEN? IN OTHER WORDS, WHAT ARE THE FACTORS YOU PROBABLY WILL CONSIDER BETWEEN THE RELATIONSHIP OF THE CONTENT AND FORM?
The most valuable lesson I learnt in art school can be summarized in one word, which is ‘play’. I think that a lot of artists these days feel the pressure to be ‘conceptual’, which often means that you start with an idea and you want to make work to communicate that idea. This often results in something that I call ‘building-the-wall-syndrome’.
What I mean by that is, let’s say you have a perfect concept/idea. It is so perfect and logical that is like a complete wall. So you make the wall. Afterwards this wall is exactly like your idea. It is perfect but it is also quite boring because you have not allowed the process of making the wall to affect you.
The process of making something is incredibly important in my work. I like starting out with something and not knowing how it is going to turn out. It is the risk that makes an artwork alive, because you challenge yourself to go beyond your initial idea. As an artist, I know it is very difficult for us to throw away our ideas, even though they aren’t working!
3. TO RESPOND TO QUESTION ABOVE, PLEASE TAKE ONE (OR MORE) OF YOUR WORKS AS AN EXAMPLE.
For my graduation work, I started with a plastic monkey that I found in a junk shop. I liked it very much but didn’t know why. I decided to make a mould of it, so that I could make many of them. I found that I had to chop up the monkey into different parts to make the mould possible. So I had a mould of each body part, which I cast separately out of clay, and later put each part back together to form the monkey again. This process of taking something apart and putting it back together became a central idea in the work.
If I had waited to come up with a perfect concept about the plastic monkey I would never have got anywhere! So if you keep your mind open to the possibilities, the process of making your work will always suggest new and fresh ideas. If you hold on rigidly to your ideas, there is the danger of it ending up making sense only to yourself and no one else. That is the worse kind of art!
So as an artist, I try to be playful, but in a serious way.
4. VIEWING YOUR PREVIOUS ART PRACTICES, ONE WOULD EASILY NOTICE THAT YOUR CREATIONS ARE SUCH A MULTIPLICITY OF IDEAS AND INTENTIONS. HOWEVER, WHAT ISSUE (OR AREA, OR AESTHETIC PROBLEM) HAS BECOME YOUR MAIN CONCERN?
I would say that there has been a very common theme running through most of my works and that is a question of ‘place’ or ‘location’. I was born in Kuala Lumpur but studied and lived for a few years in Australia. Being in a new environment forces you to re-examine yourself and your values. There is a quote from a poem by a Filipino film-maker, Nick Deocampo, that I like very much. It is : ‘in your absence, I learn to look at you more closely’.
I am interested in how people are shaped by the place that they are in. When people say ‘my country’, are they claiming that they own the country or that the country owns them? I believe that it’s a little bit of both. So what happens when you leave a place behind you? Do you bring a part of it with you? When I was overseas, sometimes my mind would fall into wondering ‘what if I never see my home again?’. Just the thought would make my heart ache. And yet there are thousands, millions of people all over the world who, because of political, social or economic reasons are forced to leave their homelands. Somehow they find a way to survive in a new land, new environment. How do you hold on your humanity in a refugee camp, for example? I think that what makes us human is our memories, language, history. This is what we carry with us no matter where we are forced to be, and this is my interest and my passion.
I try to think of my art as a large ‘site’, a territory into which people can enter and explore. I am not interested in making art about MY identity, MY country or MY politics, but more towards how exploring my own identity and environment can lead to a deeper understanding of how we work as human beings.
5. FROM THE STATEMENT AS ABOVE, ONE WILL NOTICE YOUR INTENTION TOWARDS ART MAKING. I.E. ‘PLAYFUL, BUT IN A SERIOUS WAY OF EXPLORATION’. AND YET, YOU SEEM STRONGLY STRESSED ON THE ‘LIVELINESS’ OF ARTWORK. WHAT DOES IT INDICATE, IN THE CONTEXT OF AESTHETICS?
Sorry, I don’t really understand this question
6. WHEN YOU MENTION THAT ‘THERE HAS BEEN A VERY COMMON THEME, THAT IS A QUESTION OF PLACE, OR LOCATION’, I THOUGHT THAT IS REGARDING HOW THE PHYSICAL SPACE (OR SOCIAL REALITY) SHAPPED YOUR IDENTITY - AS ‘MALAYSIAN’, COLLECTIVELY. QUITE THE CONTRARY, YOU FOLLOWED BY POINTING OUT ‘ENVIROMENT CAN LEAD TO A DEEPER UNDERSTANDING OF HOW WE WORK AS HUMAN BEINGS’.
IS IT YOUR STRATEGY TO MAKE YOURSELF ‘DE-POLITICIZED’?
I do not think it is possible these days to be ‘de-politicized’, and certainly do not use it as a strategy in my artwork. I do not wish to be an artist who makes work about ‘issues’, because there is always the danger of becoming like a lecturer or a teacher to your audience. And what right has an artist to lecture his/her audience? I am not really interested in the making art about the politics of nations, because I am not a politician. But I am interested in the politics of the human condition, the politics of the individual’s role and responsibility as a member of society. The politics of language, the politics of the body, history, memory.
Politics is about power. A lot of people these days (including myself) feel so helpless when they hear about what’s going on in the world and the country (war, environmental destruction, etc). They think that this is politics: G8 summit, APEC, Weapons of Mass Destruction, Kyoto Protocol, etc. But they don’t realize that just by being alive, you have political power. Why? How? Because you have language. Because you have your body. The body is an incredible thing that we take for granted. It has the ability to touch, smell, feel, see, hear and taste. And then the brain has the ability to process these senses into thoughts and emotions. And then you have language (that most wonderful of things) to communicate all these thoughts and emotions! In my work I try to remind people of the potential of their own bodies and minds. I do not want to tell them what to think. Take Hoy Cheong’s work for example. I think his most successful works are those that ask the audience to complete it (e.g. text tiles, tapestry of justice, etc). In tapestry of justice, the gesture of adding your thumbprint is a symbolic one. This tapestry won’t actually change the ISA policy, but it reminds the audience that we all have a role to play. Sometimes I think that the role of art is not to change the world, but to remind us that we have the potential to do it.
7. CURRENTLY, YOU HAVE ‘RECREATED’ YOUR INSTALLATION PIECE ‘RISE, RISE, RISE’ AT VALENTINE WILLIE FINE ART. THOSE UNFIRED CLAY TEXT SUCH AS ‘MY BODY’, ‘MY CULTURE’, ‘MY COUNTRY’ ETC ON FLOOR STUCK WITH JOSS STICKS, NOT MERELY CONTAINED THE IMAGINATION OF PERSONAL IDENTITY, BUT, IMPLCATED A CONCERN TO SEEK FOR A ‘UNIVERSALISM’ KIND OF VALUE. CORRECT ME IF I AM WRONG!
Yes, I think that one of the tensions in ‘rise, rise, rise’ is between that of personal and ‘universal’ identities. Is it possible that what is mine can also be yours? I am not searching for ‘universalism’, i.e. a way to unite all of us as human beings. Rather I wished to highlight the perpetual tension between personal desires and community desires. When a person says ‘my country’, they are claiming an ownership of the country. But in return the country also claims an ownership of you. That is a tension that will always go back and forth. If I can understand why I must call my country ‘my country’, then maybe I can understand why other people must call their country ‘their country’. I am not trying to find solutions, but new ways of understanding desire.
8. AS I KNOW, THE WORK WAS FIRST SHOWN AT MELBOURNE, AUSTRALIA. WHAT HAD MADE ME CURIOUS WAS THE REACTION OF RECIPIENT FROM ABROAD TO LOCAL. (I.E. WHAT YOU SAID, ‘AND DON’T FORGET THE AUDIENCE!’) DID THEY SHARE ANY RESPONSES IN COMMON, OR SPECIFICALLY?
A lot of people in Australia do not really know the significance of joss sticks. Hence they were quick to see the work as ‘religious’ or ‘spiritual’. They thought it was very beautiful, calming, etc. But here, I think more people saw the piece as being about loss and desire. When you light joss sticks at home or in a temple, it is as an offering, to pray for personal peace and hope, and also to pray for the dead. To me this work has always been about desire, because the joss sticks are never to be lit. The smoke will never rise, bringing your hopes to the sky. Instead they stay on the ground. But we will always hope! And there is always the potential for fulfillment, which is indicated in the smell of the joss sticks that fills the gallery. And it is this potential that keeps us going, to pass each day. One major difference in presentation was that in Australia, when listing my materials, I had to say ‘clay and prayer incense’. But here I used instead ‘clay and joss sticks’.
9. CAN YOU DISCUSS A LITTLE BIT FURTHER ABOUT ‘DESIRES’?
I grew up in Buddhist family, so I went through all the rituals - like putting joss sticks, offering food, going to the temple, etc. I never really knew what it meant to be a Buddhist. But when I went overseas, there were no temples and no altars, so I began to learn more about Buddhism in a very personal way, without direct influence from family or (to a lesser extent) society.
The Buddha teaches us that our worldly desires or attachments are the reason for the suffering that we endure as human beings. I realize this, yet I constantly feel like I cannot let go of my desires. I always have attachments, like to my friends, my lovers, my family, my dogs, my pet fish, my favorite nasi lemak stall, my favorite brand of shoes, my favorite artists and my own art career.
But I would like to stress that my work IS NOT ABOUT BUDDHISM. I seek to understand how desires make the world go round – how it creates love and war, how it compels us to make the most humane sacrifices or the most disgusting acts of hate. My work IS NOT ABOUT SHOWING HOW TO LET GO OF DESIRES. I am very far from that stage and I do not know if I will ever reach that stage in my lifetime. My work is more about trying to understand.
I feel that although we might not speak the same language, or come from the same background, our desires can be quite universal and can be a way of understanding each other. For example, everyone wants to live, to survive. Everyone has a different idea of HOW to live or to survive, but the desire is pretty much the same.
When someone makes an act of violence against you, for example putting a bomb in your house, you feel as though they are not a human being, just as they do not see you as a human being. But we must still try to understand them as human beings, as human beings with desires. If not we will become worse than animals, worse than ghosts.
10. I THINK WE CAN’T KEEP THIS CONVERSATION ON GOING, BY EXCLUDED YOUR RECENT FIRST SOLO EXHIBITION ‘BOATS & BRIDGES’. IN THIS CASE, YOU SEEM TO BE PROVIDING AND EXTENDING A LOT OF ‘PERSONAL DESIRES’ (SUCH AS MEMORIES, COMMENTS, HOPES, MEANINGS ETC), BY THE USE OF METAPHORICAL LANGUAGE. DO YOU THINK THE WORKS RECEIVED A WELL RESPONSE? (IN PARTICULAR, AMONG THE LOCAL AUDIENCES)
In general, I have to say that I am quite happy with the response I got for my first solo exhibition.
Many of my friends who have not seen my work before came to the opening, as well as my mum and dad. I heard this response many times : ‘Sharon, I don’t know what it all means, but I think it’s very cool!’ I guess I don’t really know how I feel about that, since I hope that my work provokes thought in people.
It is quite important to me that people don’t have to know me, in order to understand my work. Maybe it’s not so much that I want them to understand what I am trying to say, but I just want them to get something, anything at all, from my art. Whether it is a feeling of wonder, calmness, imagination or even confusion, as long as the audience has brought something home with them after seeing my show, then I’m happy.
I think a lot of people saw this show as about ‘coming home’ or ‘balik kampung’ after studying overseas. Yes, that was a part of it, but it was not really about my personal transformation. It was more about how we experience a place with our body and our mind, so when you are in-between places then you become more aware of your body and your mind.
11. WHAT ARE YOUR ‘DESIRES’ AND ‘DREAMS’ THAT YOU ARE PROBABLY PINNING ON MALAYSIA’S CONTEMPORARY ART COMMUNITY? (EDUCATION, CRITICISM, INSTITUTION ETC.)
I would like to see more people (artists, galleries, institutions) doing constructive things for themselves, the art community and in the end, society. I think that there has been a very long period of analysis and criticism about what is lacking in our art scene. I think that it is now time for us to start to move away from that, time for action.
By ‘action’, people might think that I mean something very radical, like throwing eggs in front of parliament building, or something like that. But that is not what I mean. I think artists can act by taking their art seriously, making good art that is professional and thoughtful. It doesn’t have to be political! I don’t believe you have to be an ‘artivist’ in order to be relevant. I think gallerists can act by searching out and building up young artists, instead of focusing too heavily on putting up high-profile shows of established artists. I think art writers and art critics can act by making constructive criticism, by realizing that their role goes beyond just calling something very good or very bad.
Identifying what needs to be done is very important. But doing what needs to be done is also very important. This is what I hope to do in my role as an artist.
1. AS A FINE ART GRADUATE MAJORING IN SCULPTURE, YOUR CREATIVE EXPRESSIONS DOES NOT FRAME ON ‘MAKING 3-DIMENSIONAL OBJECTS’. FURTHER MORE, IT IS EXPANDING TO AN EXPLORATION ON SPACE AND INSTALLATION. WOULD YOU LIKE TO SHARE SOME OF YOUR THOUGHTS ON THAT?
The most common question people ask me when they find out I’m an artist is : ‘what is your medium?’. I always answer by saying ‘I majored in sculpture’. I hesitate to say ‘I am a sculptor’ because people tend to assume that I spend my days with a hammer and chisel, like Michelangelo.
On the other hand, I don’t want to be known as an ‘installation artist’ either. I think the best way to describe what I do is that, unlike a painter, I work and think in 3-dimensions. There is no difference for me between what is sculpture and what is installation. They share the same type of language.
I feel that a lot of installations made these days are not really installations. They are only objects hung in space. Installation is not about filling up space, it is about using space, interacting with it, exploring it. There is a relationship with the ceiling, floor and walls, as well as the objects placed there. And don’t forget the audience! A good installation will allow these elements to speak to each other. That is what makes a work come alive. Otherwise it becomes nothing more than objects hung on walls or placed on the floor.
When making an installation, I think that ‘site’ is very important, i.e. where the work is placed. Even if you have only a room with four walls, there will always be a way to make the four walls talk to each other. I try to never take my walls and floors for granted! Even cracks in the concrete might suggest a different way to install/create work. When I am stuck (artist’s block), I like to bring my work to a completely different site—maybe the garden, the beach or even in the toilet, just to see how it changes in a different environment.
2. WHAT DO YOU THINK ON THE PROCESS OF TRANFORMATION OF AN ARTIST’S IDEAS INTO A FORM OF AN ART WORK, OR EVEN THE MEDIUM? HOW DOES IT HAPPEN? IN OTHER WORDS, WHAT ARE THE FACTORS YOU PROBABLY WILL CONSIDER BETWEEN THE RELATIONSHIP OF THE CONTENT AND FORM?
The most valuable lesson I learnt in art school can be summarized in one word, which is ‘play’. I think that a lot of artists these days feel the pressure to be ‘conceptual’, which often means that you start with an idea and you want to make work to communicate that idea. This often results in something that I call ‘building-the-wall-syndrome’.
What I mean by that is, let’s say you have a perfect concept/idea. It is so perfect and logical that is like a complete wall. So you make the wall. Afterwards this wall is exactly like your idea. It is perfect but it is also quite boring because you have not allowed the process of making the wall to affect you.
The process of making something is incredibly important in my work. I like starting out with something and not knowing how it is going to turn out. It is the risk that makes an artwork alive, because you challenge yourself to go beyond your initial idea. As an artist, I know it is very difficult for us to throw away our ideas, even though they aren’t working!
3. TO RESPOND TO QUESTION ABOVE, PLEASE TAKE ONE (OR MORE) OF YOUR WORKS AS AN EXAMPLE.
For my graduation work, I started with a plastic monkey that I found in a junk shop. I liked it very much but didn’t know why. I decided to make a mould of it, so that I could make many of them. I found that I had to chop up the monkey into different parts to make the mould possible. So I had a mould of each body part, which I cast separately out of clay, and later put each part back together to form the monkey again. This process of taking something apart and putting it back together became a central idea in the work.
If I had waited to come up with a perfect concept about the plastic monkey I would never have got anywhere! So if you keep your mind open to the possibilities, the process of making your work will always suggest new and fresh ideas. If you hold on rigidly to your ideas, there is the danger of it ending up making sense only to yourself and no one else. That is the worse kind of art!
So as an artist, I try to be playful, but in a serious way.
4. VIEWING YOUR PREVIOUS ART PRACTICES, ONE WOULD EASILY NOTICE THAT YOUR CREATIONS ARE SUCH A MULTIPLICITY OF IDEAS AND INTENTIONS. HOWEVER, WHAT ISSUE (OR AREA, OR AESTHETIC PROBLEM) HAS BECOME YOUR MAIN CONCERN?
I would say that there has been a very common theme running through most of my works and that is a question of ‘place’ or ‘location’. I was born in Kuala Lumpur but studied and lived for a few years in Australia. Being in a new environment forces you to re-examine yourself and your values. There is a quote from a poem by a Filipino film-maker, Nick Deocampo, that I like very much. It is : ‘in your absence, I learn to look at you more closely’.
I am interested in how people are shaped by the place that they are in. When people say ‘my country’, are they claiming that they own the country or that the country owns them? I believe that it’s a little bit of both. So what happens when you leave a place behind you? Do you bring a part of it with you? When I was overseas, sometimes my mind would fall into wondering ‘what if I never see my home again?’. Just the thought would make my heart ache. And yet there are thousands, millions of people all over the world who, because of political, social or economic reasons are forced to leave their homelands. Somehow they find a way to survive in a new land, new environment. How do you hold on your humanity in a refugee camp, for example? I think that what makes us human is our memories, language, history. This is what we carry with us no matter where we are forced to be, and this is my interest and my passion.
I try to think of my art as a large ‘site’, a territory into which people can enter and explore. I am not interested in making art about MY identity, MY country or MY politics, but more towards how exploring my own identity and environment can lead to a deeper understanding of how we work as human beings.
5. FROM THE STATEMENT AS ABOVE, ONE WILL NOTICE YOUR INTENTION TOWARDS ART MAKING. I.E. ‘PLAYFUL, BUT IN A SERIOUS WAY OF EXPLORATION’. AND YET, YOU SEEM STRONGLY STRESSED ON THE ‘LIVELINESS’ OF ARTWORK. WHAT DOES IT INDICATE, IN THE CONTEXT OF AESTHETICS?
Sorry, I don’t really understand this question
6. WHEN YOU MENTION THAT ‘THERE HAS BEEN A VERY COMMON THEME, THAT IS A QUESTION OF PLACE, OR LOCATION’, I THOUGHT THAT IS REGARDING HOW THE PHYSICAL SPACE (OR SOCIAL REALITY) SHAPPED YOUR IDENTITY - AS ‘MALAYSIAN’, COLLECTIVELY. QUITE THE CONTRARY, YOU FOLLOWED BY POINTING OUT ‘ENVIROMENT CAN LEAD TO A DEEPER UNDERSTANDING OF HOW WE WORK AS HUMAN BEINGS’.
IS IT YOUR STRATEGY TO MAKE YOURSELF ‘DE-POLITICIZED’?
I do not think it is possible these days to be ‘de-politicized’, and certainly do not use it as a strategy in my artwork. I do not wish to be an artist who makes work about ‘issues’, because there is always the danger of becoming like a lecturer or a teacher to your audience. And what right has an artist to lecture his/her audience? I am not really interested in the making art about the politics of nations, because I am not a politician. But I am interested in the politics of the human condition, the politics of the individual’s role and responsibility as a member of society. The politics of language, the politics of the body, history, memory.
Politics is about power. A lot of people these days (including myself) feel so helpless when they hear about what’s going on in the world and the country (war, environmental destruction, etc). They think that this is politics: G8 summit, APEC, Weapons of Mass Destruction, Kyoto Protocol, etc. But they don’t realize that just by being alive, you have political power. Why? How? Because you have language. Because you have your body. The body is an incredible thing that we take for granted. It has the ability to touch, smell, feel, see, hear and taste. And then the brain has the ability to process these senses into thoughts and emotions. And then you have language (that most wonderful of things) to communicate all these thoughts and emotions! In my work I try to remind people of the potential of their own bodies and minds. I do not want to tell them what to think. Take Hoy Cheong’s work for example. I think his most successful works are those that ask the audience to complete it (e.g. text tiles, tapestry of justice, etc). In tapestry of justice, the gesture of adding your thumbprint is a symbolic one. This tapestry won’t actually change the ISA policy, but it reminds the audience that we all have a role to play. Sometimes I think that the role of art is not to change the world, but to remind us that we have the potential to do it.
7. CURRENTLY, YOU HAVE ‘RECREATED’ YOUR INSTALLATION PIECE ‘RISE, RISE, RISE’ AT VALENTINE WILLIE FINE ART. THOSE UNFIRED CLAY TEXT SUCH AS ‘MY BODY’, ‘MY CULTURE’, ‘MY COUNTRY’ ETC ON FLOOR STUCK WITH JOSS STICKS, NOT MERELY CONTAINED THE IMAGINATION OF PERSONAL IDENTITY, BUT, IMPLCATED A CONCERN TO SEEK FOR A ‘UNIVERSALISM’ KIND OF VALUE. CORRECT ME IF I AM WRONG!
Yes, I think that one of the tensions in ‘rise, rise, rise’ is between that of personal and ‘universal’ identities. Is it possible that what is mine can also be yours? I am not searching for ‘universalism’, i.e. a way to unite all of us as human beings. Rather I wished to highlight the perpetual tension between personal desires and community desires. When a person says ‘my country’, they are claiming an ownership of the country. But in return the country also claims an ownership of you. That is a tension that will always go back and forth. If I can understand why I must call my country ‘my country’, then maybe I can understand why other people must call their country ‘their country’. I am not trying to find solutions, but new ways of understanding desire.
8. AS I KNOW, THE WORK WAS FIRST SHOWN AT MELBOURNE, AUSTRALIA. WHAT HAD MADE ME CURIOUS WAS THE REACTION OF RECIPIENT FROM ABROAD TO LOCAL. (I.E. WHAT YOU SAID, ‘AND DON’T FORGET THE AUDIENCE!’) DID THEY SHARE ANY RESPONSES IN COMMON, OR SPECIFICALLY?
A lot of people in Australia do not really know the significance of joss sticks. Hence they were quick to see the work as ‘religious’ or ‘spiritual’. They thought it was very beautiful, calming, etc. But here, I think more people saw the piece as being about loss and desire. When you light joss sticks at home or in a temple, it is as an offering, to pray for personal peace and hope, and also to pray for the dead. To me this work has always been about desire, because the joss sticks are never to be lit. The smoke will never rise, bringing your hopes to the sky. Instead they stay on the ground. But we will always hope! And there is always the potential for fulfillment, which is indicated in the smell of the joss sticks that fills the gallery. And it is this potential that keeps us going, to pass each day. One major difference in presentation was that in Australia, when listing my materials, I had to say ‘clay and prayer incense’. But here I used instead ‘clay and joss sticks’.
9. CAN YOU DISCUSS A LITTLE BIT FURTHER ABOUT ‘DESIRES’?
I grew up in Buddhist family, so I went through all the rituals - like putting joss sticks, offering food, going to the temple, etc. I never really knew what it meant to be a Buddhist. But when I went overseas, there were no temples and no altars, so I began to learn more about Buddhism in a very personal way, without direct influence from family or (to a lesser extent) society.
The Buddha teaches us that our worldly desires or attachments are the reason for the suffering that we endure as human beings. I realize this, yet I constantly feel like I cannot let go of my desires. I always have attachments, like to my friends, my lovers, my family, my dogs, my pet fish, my favorite nasi lemak stall, my favorite brand of shoes, my favorite artists and my own art career.
But I would like to stress that my work IS NOT ABOUT BUDDHISM. I seek to understand how desires make the world go round – how it creates love and war, how it compels us to make the most humane sacrifices or the most disgusting acts of hate. My work IS NOT ABOUT SHOWING HOW TO LET GO OF DESIRES. I am very far from that stage and I do not know if I will ever reach that stage in my lifetime. My work is more about trying to understand.
I feel that although we might not speak the same language, or come from the same background, our desires can be quite universal and can be a way of understanding each other. For example, everyone wants to live, to survive. Everyone has a different idea of HOW to live or to survive, but the desire is pretty much the same.
When someone makes an act of violence against you, for example putting a bomb in your house, you feel as though they are not a human being, just as they do not see you as a human being. But we must still try to understand them as human beings, as human beings with desires. If not we will become worse than animals, worse than ghosts.
10. I THINK WE CAN’T KEEP THIS CONVERSATION ON GOING, BY EXCLUDED YOUR RECENT FIRST SOLO EXHIBITION ‘BOATS & BRIDGES’. IN THIS CASE, YOU SEEM TO BE PROVIDING AND EXTENDING A LOT OF ‘PERSONAL DESIRES’ (SUCH AS MEMORIES, COMMENTS, HOPES, MEANINGS ETC), BY THE USE OF METAPHORICAL LANGUAGE. DO YOU THINK THE WORKS RECEIVED A WELL RESPONSE? (IN PARTICULAR, AMONG THE LOCAL AUDIENCES)
In general, I have to say that I am quite happy with the response I got for my first solo exhibition.
Many of my friends who have not seen my work before came to the opening, as well as my mum and dad. I heard this response many times : ‘Sharon, I don’t know what it all means, but I think it’s very cool!’ I guess I don’t really know how I feel about that, since I hope that my work provokes thought in people.
It is quite important to me that people don’t have to know me, in order to understand my work. Maybe it’s not so much that I want them to understand what I am trying to say, but I just want them to get something, anything at all, from my art. Whether it is a feeling of wonder, calmness, imagination or even confusion, as long as the audience has brought something home with them after seeing my show, then I’m happy.
I think a lot of people saw this show as about ‘coming home’ or ‘balik kampung’ after studying overseas. Yes, that was a part of it, but it was not really about my personal transformation. It was more about how we experience a place with our body and our mind, so when you are in-between places then you become more aware of your body and your mind.
11. WHAT ARE YOUR ‘DESIRES’ AND ‘DREAMS’ THAT YOU ARE PROBABLY PINNING ON MALAYSIA’S CONTEMPORARY ART COMMUNITY? (EDUCATION, CRITICISM, INSTITUTION ETC.)
I would like to see more people (artists, galleries, institutions) doing constructive things for themselves, the art community and in the end, society. I think that there has been a very long period of analysis and criticism about what is lacking in our art scene. I think that it is now time for us to start to move away from that, time for action.
By ‘action’, people might think that I mean something very radical, like throwing eggs in front of parliament building, or something like that. But that is not what I mean. I think artists can act by taking their art seriously, making good art that is professional and thoughtful. It doesn’t have to be political! I don’t believe you have to be an ‘artivist’ in order to be relevant. I think gallerists can act by searching out and building up young artists, instead of focusing too heavily on putting up high-profile shows of established artists. I think art writers and art critics can act by making constructive criticism, by realizing that their role goes beyond just calling something very good or very bad.
Identifying what needs to be done is very important. But doing what needs to be done is also very important. This is what I hope to do in my role as an artist.
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