EXHIBITION ESSAY
Holes: Three installations by Alvin Lau, Tep York, and W. Rajaie
10 June – 2 July 2023
holes
curatorial statement
by Ellen Lee
i.
The exhibition is titled Holes because I wanted to make people think of a void that is circular. I wanted to make people think of a circular void because of the many circles present in this exhibition: from the interlocking circles in Alvin’s work, to the CCTV with a blacked-out eye in Tep’s, and the holes in W. Rajaie’s congkak board.
Besides that, the title can remain in ambiguity because there exist so many types of holes: wormholes, black holes, rabbit holes, assholes. The material of W. Rajaie’s work emerged from an asshole after passing through various channels in the animal body, starting with the initial consumption through the mouth hole. Rabbit holes and wormholes are suggestive of subterranean networks and invisible, linking pathways; to “fall down the rabbit hole” is a phrase used to describe the inter-linked and addictive possibilities of exploring a niche interest on the Internet. There also exist, supposedly, bottomless holes, into which you can fall and fall without end, and sinkholes and wormholes. You can also dig a hole for yourself by getting yourself deeper and deeper into an intractable situation, before you realise you've been falling the entire time.
The primary way to access a hole is by burrowing into darkness. The idea of holes suggests an unseen network of underground channels and invisible, furtive movement. Distant rumblings, creatures that move about in the dark.
ii.
lubang
A hole could be an entrance. Encountering the right hole could open up an entire subterranean network beneath the surface of things, a world beneath the world you thought you knew. The Malay term for it is “cari lubang”, which means “finding an in”, finding the right guy who will open the doors for you and let you into the network. It’s the entrance through which an outsider transforms into an insider.
None of the artists can quite be said to have had a conventional artistic journey. W. Rajaie (the “W.” stands for “Weng”) is the youngest and the only one with formal training, having recently completed his Master’s in Fine Art at the MARA Institute of Technology (UiTM). But he made his mark long before getting the credentials, via not art but fashion. In his early 20s, he shot up in the Kuala Lumpur creative scene with his custom-made wearable pieces inspired by military and punk aesthetics, crafted by surgically collaging parts of different secondhand clothes together to make a mutant, Tetsuo-like thing that fused person with clothing towards optimum functionality. In 2019, he collaborated with Ayu by Tarik jeans to produce a runway look for their KL Fashion Week showcase, a shirt that unfurled like a parachute into a utility bag as the model walked down the runway. Since completing his Master’s last year, he has slowly started participating in group shows, showing large, layered, dense soil paintings and exploring with other crude materials, including tar. He is a material thinker, enjoying the exploration and study of his chosen material until he has a full grasp on its properties and possibilities, and it becomes malleable to his command.
Among the three, Alvin is the most credentialed, having shown with galleries all around Malaysia. Yet he had no formal training in photography; he was a college drop-out who chose and pursued his path of photography entirely on his own. He is a proud advocate of public transport and walking, and his photographs are crafted through long, circuitous, and often sidewalk-less walks around the city. Without any formal training, he has managed to take himself places and craft photographs that are unlike any commercial photography in Malaysia, nor do they follow the conventions of most “street photography”. His photographs look composed but also natural, urban and populous but also specific. Rather than follow, he wanted to see things for himself.
Like Alvin, Tep York has no formal background in art but, like W. Rajaie, neither was his journey into art a straightforward one. He made his name in the Kuala Lumpur scene first as a skateboarder, skate filmer, and founder of skate brand QUIT KL; since 2022, he has begun building an art practice and showing in group exhibitions. Art is one among many avenues for him to flex his creative muscles; the genre or discipline seems less important than manifesting the visions that rattle around in his brain. In the field of art, he is inspired by Marcel Duchamp and the conceptual art movement, and most of his artistic output is site-specific and audience-oriented. He enjoys bringing readymade objects into spaces where they “shouldn’t” belong, especially commercial spaces, and watching the reactions they garner from different audience demographics.
iii.
rabbit holes
What compels people from different backgrounds to be drawn towards art and art-making? This was the fascination that motivated the exhibition and its selection of artists. How do people of different backgrounds come to understand and qualify art, and how and why do they come to define themselves as an artist, or to claim what they do as “art”?
The answer doesn’t lie in credentials or educational background. The main thing that all three artists have in common is that they’re natives of Kuala Lumpur.
They’re able to face the disorder and ugliness of the Kuala Lumpur streets and find, within all that, a promise of something that can be transformed into art. I’m interested in that movement from the irrational and scattered and dismal into a higher plane of ideas and beauty. How do you turn garbage and shit into art? It seems like if you can figure this out, you’d be able to survive in a city like Kuala Lumpur. The same grime and disorder that could make a more tender-hearted person depressed by city living becomes the very thing that opens up horizons of creativity for others. The proximity to the industrial centre, and to the nearest hardware store, makes everything possible.
All the installations in Holes have the texture of the city imprinted on them through the use of industrial and waste materials. The glitch in the CRT monitor and the dusty cloud of spray paint on the ceiling in Untitled (2023) by Tep York finds a textural resonance in the coarse consistency of hardened cow dung in The Guts (2023) by W. Rajaie. Running your finger around the latter work’s holes, you feel the coarseness of the material as something that could scratch you if not handled with care, and you’re amazed to realise that you’re fingering excrement. The Fragments of Jalan Ipoh and Jalan Sentul by Alvin Lau also foregrounds urban grit through the use of soil splatters, rocks used as mechanisms for propping up the work, and the grainy quality of the black and white photographs which resembles the grain of Tep’s CRT monitor.
The current art practices of the three selected artists are similar to the types of art that have come to be associated with the cross-disciplinary legacies of figures like Virgil Abloh and Demna Gvasalia, or showcased on curated Instagram pages like ____studio, work2day and postcontemporary_: art that eludes categorisation through its combination of industrial workmanship and readymades with their exalted presentation in places where they don’t typically “belong”, like a white cube gallery or a runway in Paris. (Incidentally, perhaps the feminine corollary of this is the current interest in traditional crafts like weaving, embroidery, quilting, basketry, etc.)
Discovering Instagram pages like these are like falling down a rabbit hole. Once you start seeing that it’s possible to, for instance, dig up the floor of a gallery and present a gigantic hole as a work of art, as Urs Fischer did in 2007, maybe you’d never be able to turn back. Taking a trip to one’s local hardware store and finding all the tools that man has created for all sorts of purposes (to discover that such purposes and activities even exist) is another rabbit hole. It’s clear to me that a desire persists among contemporary artists in Malaysia to create installation and site-specific art: just recall how many large-scale pieces were submitted for the 2022 ILHAM Art Show open call. Artists want to make and show works that take up space; artists are enamoured with mechanical and industrial processes, and the urban grime of Kuala Lumpur is actually a greater influence on artists than they let on. Many of them try to couch their fascination with the matter of the city within obligatory remarks about the evil of modern industry and urban development, but I see what they’re doing. Yet seldom does such art get exhibited in Kuala Lumpur.
The exhibition is meant as a kind of antidote to that. It brings installations and urban grit into the white cube space in recognition of the joy and ingenuity that such forms bring to young artists in the city.
Finally, the appearance of the exhibition booklet was also inspired by industrial aesthetics, but the idea for it was directly lifted from the wire folders crafted for the exhibition catalogues of War Box, Lalang, Killing Tools, an exhibition (also with a three-man line-up) that took place at the National Art Gallery in 1994 featuring Raja Shahriman, Wong Hoy Cheong, and Bayu Utomo Radjikin. Aside from size, the only other difference between War Box’s wire folder and the one for Holes is that this one has its edges trimmed; after all, the present exhibition doesn’t have the subversive political content of the former (at least not overtly). The sub-title for Holes, “Three installations…”, was inspired by the exhibition 2 Installations by Liew Kung Yu and Raja Shahriman, also curated by Wong Hoy Cheong, in 1991. The title inspired me by its grungy, taciturn simplicity that seemed to align with both the orderliness of the gallery space and the no-bullshit attitude of the rebel.
iv.
loopholes
This exhibition was an easy one to organise because each of the artists staked out their own “territory”. Alvin chose the rightmost wall of the gallery, the one hidden from immediate view if you’re peering in from the outside. Specifically, he wanted to create a piece that obscured the wall behind it, or rather re-create a wall in front of a wall, which echoes the sentiments in the photographs he’s chosen to feature. One of the photographs shows a wall of garbage blocking a wall of trees, and another shows a mysterious hole-entrance in the side of a highway that is surrounded by multiple overlapping layers of obstructions.
Alvin describes the making of his work as like digging a deeper hole for himself. He produces the work in a relaxed manner, in between other jobs, but each time he returns to develop the work, he imagines the act as like burrowing deeper into something that might get him stuck. Maybe it’s relevant that his favourite film director seems to be Christopher Nolan.
Like Nolan’s mise en abymes and plots within plots, Alvin’s recent work has been engaged with the idea of adding layers upon something and spiralling deeper into a hole of self-referential meaning (what the kids call being “meta”). Fragments Across Jalan Sentul and Jalan Ipoh (2023) features two photographs, both duplicated in two different formats—as an image transfer and as a sticker—which convey two different textures. More texture is created through the addition of spray-painted gestures, random drawings, soil splatters, and distressed treatment on the prints and on the plywood. What ends up being displayed in the gallery is a mixed media photographic collage, or a realist painting, that resembles a piece of wall on any anonymous back alley street in Kuala Lumpur.
As if not content merely to photograph the detritus of the streets, Alvin’s practice has moved towards re-creating the detritus of the streets or transforming his photographs of urban detritus into urban detritus. That explains the many instances of wheat paste and guerrilla posting that he’s used to present his photographs throughout the years. He’s the photographer that wants to shrug off photography’s commercial blandness by becoming an artist and the artist that wants to shrug off commercial art’s elitism by becoming a vandal. With each new work that he creates, he pushes further the idea of representation and challenges photography’s claim on the real.
.
Alvin’s screen echoes the screen at the opposite end of the room, Tep York’s CRT monitor, which has been externally corrupted by the spraying of the CCTV installed above it.
Tep chose the corner because in Malay superstition the corner is supposedly where ghosts and demons reside. His installation of a vandalised CCTV and, consequently, a corrupted television screen can be taken as a technological ghost, a black screen of static. If we saw this in a hardware shop or jewellery store we might think of it as faulty stock or evidence of a crime, but when it is brought into the loaded, formal space of the art gallery it suddenly becomes a trigger for all sorts of significations. It is this sudden transformation, merely by virtue of putting something where it doesn’t “belong”, that fascinates Tep and, I think, many young people today, especially since Maurizio Cattelan unveiled Comedian at Art Basel Miami in 2019. Such works, which tend to be categorised as conceptual art, provoke circular thinking about the role of the gallery and the art world: do these found or readymade objects have an innate significance making them worthy of contemplation, or is it merely the act of putting them in a gallery that transfers them this significance? And if the latter is so, then is the space of the art gallery more valuable than the artworks that pass through its walls? The work is also reminiscent of Nam June Paik’s TV Buddha, in which the artist placed a Buddha statue in front of a television streaming a live feed of the Buddha’s face “watching” itself, as recorded by a video camera placed behind the television. Like the TV Buddha, Tep York’s work, a cyclops blinded by Nobody, cannot answer for its own existence; it can only contemplate itself in blind, silent static.
Or it’s a joke, it’s daylight robbery, it’s like being punched, the CCTV is a black eye and it doesn’t mean anything at all. Or maybe the artist himself is a ghost and the television is his manifested presence in the corner: to all the people watching him and anticipating his next moves, he has sprayed out their eyes, blocking their vision. He cannot be monitored. This angle would be an interesting analogy for Tep’s career, which began in the world of professional skateboarding in his 20s and has since, with age, metamorphosed into a multi-disciplinary career spanning fashion, art, marketing, and video-making. There’s the relentless spirit of finding a way, cari lubang, like a skateboarder establishing a path for tricks where others would just see concrete. Though no longer a skateboarder, the attitude of his works carries the same elements of riskiness, daring, and an uncanny disregard for the law.
.
For the aforementioned 1991 exhibition, 2 Installations by Liew Kung Yu and Raja Shahriman at the Malaysian Institute of Art, the latter apparently wanted to create “an installation so dangerous, audiences were not allowed to enter.” He lined the floor and walls of a room with sharpened bamboo sticks and stuck shards of broken glass into the bamboo. Now, Weng has created an interactive object that might be too repellent for people to handle, with The Guts (2023), a congkak board crafted out of dried cow dung. And just as how the dancer Marion D’Cruz nevertheless saw the prohibition of Raja Shahriman’s Bamboo and Glass as an invitation to choreograph a dangerous dance, there is something about Weng’s work and its transformation of shit into art that invites viewers into play. Not just in the material sense, but also in the intellectual sense by playing with your mind, luring you into seriously considering the creative possibilities of cow dung.
Congkak is a traditional game that is fast-paced and requires quick calculations. While playing, a player always has to calculate their next move in order to figure out which “village”/kampung to take from in order to benefit them the most. Weng’s congkak board is an exaggerated 15 feet in length, thus making it more inconvenient to play, and he has removed the “house”/rumah at both ends of the congkak board where players are supposed to collect their pieces. He has created a long, unplayable—and therefore useless—board that, even if it was functional, would be inconvenient to play; on top of all this, it is also made out of cow dung. Imagine the game, if you were to play it. Since the houses have been removed, the game would have no result. The players would be stuck moving the faecal marbles around the board endlessly, and they would have to break the cross-legged decorum of the game to stand up and practically run across the 15-feet board to “dump” the marbles fast enough around each other. The anxiety of the game ought to be endless when played on Weng’s board, but a layer of hesitation prevents you from getting fully immersed and handling these dung pieces too energetically.
Faeces is a material that Weng has wanted to work with for a while. The idea of shit is interesting, because it is a repulsive, repellent material—it keeps people away. In Weng’s previous material explorations, the material he’s chosen has merely been unconventional for art-making—they are raw and crude, such as soil and tar. And if one must hurdle over a certain level of credulity in order to accept a soil or tar painting as art, then what’s the level for accepting faeces? The work is a challenge to conventions of commercial aesthetic sensibility. Faeces keep people away, it is hostile. The unusual length of the congkak board and the way it obstructs people’s paths are also reminiscent of another hostile piece of art: Richard Serra’s Tilted Arc, a public sculpture installed across the length of a plaza in Manhattan that forced pedestrians to divert their paths to walk around it. And if we return to our initial premise of a circular void, now here is one void that expels rather than invites entry—one void where the processes are unknown, where we only get to see the final product, as opposed to other holes which are ways of entering into hidden processes—that one unique, expulsive, circular void being obviously the asshole.
v.
glory hole
Working on this show has led to a deeper and more nuanced understanding of art-making in the contemporary era, especially among young artists. The traditional criteria that are consulted when evaluating an artwork don’t seem as stable as once thought. Creativity and ingenuity spring from anywhere and an artist’s path is often meandering, as they move through the networks of creative scenes and disciplines, hustling for inspiration in a place like Kuala Lumpur.
As the works are crafted for the site of The Back Room, the site in turn moulds itself to welcome the works. The name of the gallery acquires some degree of strangeness. Hey, you want to see something really weird? Follow me to the back room.
It is this sense of strange possibility that the exhibition hopes to convey, from Weng’s use of outré materials, Alvin’s deliberate vandalism of his own work, to Tep’s anonymous presentation. The holes here are a void to fall into, but they promise the hope of landing into a network of understanding.