Conversations with Hieng

by Lim Sheau Yun and Ong Kar Jin

Tanjong Sepat, artist Ong Hieng Fuong’s hometown in southern Selangor, is organised by three main roads: Jalan Pasar, Jalan Sekolah and Jalan Tepi Laut. It is a place forged out of economy, where all you need is a market, a school, and a road beside the ocean. A small fishing settlement that became a New Village during the period of the Emergency, Tanjong Sepat is one of those soporific Chinese towns where rain and sun beat down in equal measure, where you marry the girl down the road, where a concrete “lovers” bridge is the closest approximation of a tourist attraction. The nearest urban centres, Klang and Kuala Lumpur, are a 1.5-hour drive away on a good day, but there are more bad days than good ones.

Hieng, as he is known, grew up outside the metropolis, acutely aware of his dislocation. Although he grew up in a seaside town, he hardly goes to the beach; it is the cacophany that speaks to him, even though he often grumbles that “KL is too messy.” Bukit Bintang (2022), rendered in lurid poster colour, pictures the shopping district of Kuala Lumpur, crammed with cars, pedestrians, towers abandoned, towers under construction, and towering monuments to capitalism. A black man in dreadlocks stares from a billboard. KELUARGA MALAYSIA, reads a sign in a minor in-road, just diagonally across a plastic Winter Wonderland installation. Signs clamour: PAVILOON, STARHOLE, fahrenhigh 88, Give a Little Sex COACK. The city is speed, action, grime. In the midst of the frenetic movement of his subjects, Hieng stands still, camera in hand. A blood-red sun looms.

For Hieng, the hellish, the fantastic, and the whimsical dwell in the day-to-day. In Di Rumah Sakit (2020), Hieng’s vision of an overwhelmed field hospital at the height of the pandemic, the quaint takes a decisive turn towards the grotesque. In the dead-center position of the altar, animal-headed officials of Taoist hell preside over the souls of the near-dying. With no self-consciousness about their masks for bras or distended bellies, these demon-faced patients exist in a continuous stream of consumption, eyes glued to the content generated on smartphones while being IV-dripped with Maggi and Mamee. Some patients are the ones who end up being consumed: “chee cheong fun,” a rice-noodle dish that literally translates to “pig’s intestine noodles” is recast in the literal, with a dollar-sign-branded doctor gleefully picking up a man’s intestines with chopsticks. Di Rumah Sakit is not a withering attack on the failures of the healthcare system; Hieng avoids a slavishness to didactic messaging. Instead, the work transforms satirical observation into a vision of the purgatorial soup of consumerist obsession, a samsara of bureaucracy and capitalism.

This is not complex political critique. His persona is far closer to that of the observing uncle eyeing the goings-on around at the corner kopitiam than the refined television pundit or the 1990s conceptual artist; it seems like happenstance and a facility for drawing instead of words allowed his studies to manifest as art rather than rant. In his work, people are rendered as characters in a type, exaggerated caricatures formed in the vernacular of parody, dirty jokes, and cultural references. His humour is that trademark brand of Malaysian jocularity: sometimes crude, often linguistic, and always sardonic. While his work is politically informed, it is so only in the most general of senses — he is less interested in the specific machinations of who has and who has not than in the experience of the everyman, where asides about inflammatory politics and inflationary economies are traded like currency in giving shape to the vague category of “the rakyat.”

When we visited Hieng in Tanjong Sepat on a public holiday Monday — clocking in at a 2-hour drive from Kuala Lumpur, it was an alright day — he took a day off art-making to show us around. Now a student at the Central Academy of Fine Arts in Beijing, Hieng lived in that ultimate Asian city of cities, the centre of the future, before being forced back to Tanjong Sepat due to the pandemic. The dislocation, for Hieng, was even more stark and in 2020 he began to turn his eye to the world around him. That day, I was sketching on the street, Hieng’s debut solo exhibition, is the product of his unplanned two-year return — the initial aversion, the reluctant capitulation, and ultimate preoccupation. As we go around the neighbourhood, Hieng points out the locations and characters that animate his work: the shrine where he saw two aunties arguing, the house at the end of the road where there are always kids running around. The act of observing, of recording, is akin to a ritual for him. “Making art is like eating. It is a part of the rhythm of existing,” he intones. “I am not trying to capture a moment in time; I have no real attachment to these memories. I think of them instead as conversations. I’m not so good at talking, see, and I speak to moments this way.”

For someone big on conversations, Hieng is rather reserved in his demeanour. But he is polite, courteous, and chivalrous to a tee. He tries to pay for lunch, then for our prawn biscuits, then the single-origin Tanjong Sepat chocolate we buy to bring home. He calls his mother to ask her to call up the bao place that looks closed and sits in the front seat of the car to direct us around town. Despite his fascination with the new, he is unabashedly old school. Similarly, his approach to art is staunchly traditional; his sensibility is that of an apprentice who seeks to hone their skills in a sagely master’s workshop. In Hieng’s practice, detail is fundamental to the making of good art. Even in his earliest works as a student at Dasein, there is a painstaking amount of granularity, laden with layers of in-jokes, symbols, and witty observation.

Di Pasar (2021) is made in the descriptive details, each carve of his knife against the woodblock taking away only the barest of material. Even his pictures of small towns are infected with the messy malady of the urban. Di Pasar’s cast of characters is compacted so tightly that one’s gaze must navigate through it as one might weave through crowds at an actual wet market; as in life, the gems are often surreptitiously tucked away in corners. There are the humans: the hypermasculine butcher donning a Winnie the Pooh T-shirt, the visor-sporting auntie clutching her copy of Sinchew Daily, the fishmonger thrusting his aquatic wares upwards like a sky-piercing magic sword, the RELA member giving some serious side-eye to a smoking man. Then there are strange non-humans, accrued objects that sustain existence, and everything in between: the chimera chickens with misshapen human faces, the Maggi packet, the dog chomping down on a pig’s head, the 4D lottery tickets, the Ikan Baru Naik sign (itself a joke about what BN stands for). On the cusp of being overwhelming, Di Pasar is grounded by diagonal lines of faces across the paper, axes foreshortened in perspective for the eye to meander. Everywhere one looks, there is something to dissect, or at the very least, to slightly chuckle at. It is not merely one snapshot of a visit to the market, but an amalgamation of many small moments condensed into one work, a Best Hits playlist produced with the finest hand. The sun is here transformed into a black dot against the paper, a dark void at the end of the eye line standing in contrast to the fine lines of the rest of the work.

Conversations are lived through with others: to truly speak to another, one must subject yourself to being known. Hieng understands this deeply. That day, I was sketching on the street (2021), the work from which the exhibition takes its title, features a self-portrait amidst the bustle of Kuala Lumpur’s Chinatown. Pencil and notebook in hand, cigarette between his lips, Hieng looks out not to the scene but directly at us, the viewer. We are the invisible correspondents in the project of art, or any project of making a mark; implicated in the flick of a wood carving knife, the gentle arc of a brushstroke, the sun, the sun.

— Lim Sheau Yun and Ong Kar Jin