EXHIBITION ESSAY
Story Time: A solo exhibition by Minstrel Kuik
2 – 23 September 2023
Minstrel Kuik: Story Time
by Samuel Lee
“That old co-ordination of the soul, the eye, and the hand,” says Walter Benjamin, “is that of the artisan which we encounter wherever the art of storytelling is at home.”[1] It is apt that the artisan and storyteller are both implicated in Benjamin’s observation, for the interconnection between affect, visuality, and gesture governs not only the art of storytelling, but the storytelling we do about art. In other words, what we say about the practice of artmaking, and how we say it. Such a provocation arises in Minstrel Kuik’s new body of work, Story Time, which is not only a “retelling” of Greco-Roman myths relating to Medusa and the Gorgons, but an extended meditation on the artistic imagination and the mechanics, indeed even of the phenomenology, of artmaking. Across 22 graphite and colour pencil drawings on paper, the series establishes a relationship between the facility of the hand, the observational powers of the eye, and the capacity for sensuousness and feeling by returning to the medium of paper, one more at home in the humanist cabinets of prints and drawings than in the institutional spaces of the exhibition gallery. Echoing Benjamin, Story Time has an artisanal quality to it: for the series, Kuik developed a new technique of shading and colouring, involving a careful, almost obsessive, application of graphite layers scrabbled tightly over underdrawings worked through in colour pencil. This process allowed her to create a range of effects, from a gauzy, diaphanous transparency to a hard-edged, jewel-toned illumination. According to Kuik, there is a special incandescence to the pictures that result from the mixing of colour pigments with graphite, “like light is trapped inside.”[2]
By limiting the range of colours to hues of violet, pink, lavender, and grey, Kuik makes a direct citation of Georgia O’Keeffe’s Petunia No. 2, the American artist’s early experimentation with close ups and scale (Kuik herself tacked a smaller postcard reproduction of the painting above her drawing desk for reference). To arrive at such visualisations, O’Keeffe worked with optical lenses and photography, exploiting the camera’s ability to both represent as well as distort the visual field.[3] Kuik, who studied photography in Arles in the early 2000s, has likewise always been canny about the practice of image making. While projects such as Mer.rily, Mer.rily, Mer.rily, Mer.rily, Part 1 (2008–12) and the Kuala Lumpur Trilogy (2007/2017) evoke the style of “snapshot” photography to document everyday realities, the artist’s interventions in the process of making the pictures point towards the slipperiness of memory and identity.[4] There is a sense that the act of pushing and pulling at the surface of an image, warping our own sensation of its objectivity along with our memory of time past, is ultimately a manual process, if not in actuality, then in effect.
The fascination with surface is elaborated further throughout the drawings in Story Time, in which two-dimensional planes twist, fold, overlap, and transform into three-dimensional objects with complex topologies. Kuik’s Medusa is an assemblage of such surfaces, from the ruffles of fabric to knotted ponytails, overlapping each other in abundant heaps. She appears to have metabolised the signifiers of femininity, turning them into appendages and regenerating these as certain amphibians do their limbs. These labyrinthian designs could just as well reference Borgesian stories about infinitesimal paths and libraries, for their visual complexities are also suggestive of the symbolic complexities of Medusa’s afterlives in literature and art, particularly those of the multiplicity of narratives and images implicating her in everything from the “monstrous feminine” of cultural criticism to the iconic plaque fronting the fashion house of Versace.[5] Like the numerous snakes that take the place of Medusa’s hair (or in Kuik’s Story Time, the serpent-like ponytails and wigs standing in for the body of the monster), stories about Medusa have crowded out her voice to the point where she has turned into a figure that exceeds legibility in spite of her enduring timelessness.
According to Kuik, the work leading up to Story Time came about as a “turning point” in her practice earlier in 2022.[6] Eschewing the monumentality of her paintings, photographic installations, and textile-and-wood assemblages, the artist went back to the decidedly more modest format of paper and colour pencil, intimating too that the work is “not contemporary.”[7] It is a remark that gives one pause to consider its self-designated untimeliness, or out-of-time character. On the one hand, the series appears at first glance to be a stylistic and thematic departure from Kuik’s previous bodies of work, which have circled around themes of nation, society, and personal biography. The colour pencil drawings of Story Time also depart from the tone of seriousness that inheres in a medium like photography, which through its indexical relation to the external world can never quite shake off its perceived proximity to empirical reality and the claims to realism—economic, social, political, and so on—that attend to it. In this way, the medium of colour pencil allows Kuik to adopt an entirely different tone, one that transforms the politics of art into a vibrant phenomenology of artmaking. Playful, enigmatic, and arch, her picture-making and titling in this series is reminiscent of something like Philip Guston’s “return to figuration” in 1970, when the painter moved away from abstraction towards cartoon-like depictions disguising sinister and politically charged situations. Guston’s flight from abstraction and embrace of the figurative was described by one critic as a “reflexive movement . . . towards recognition.”[8] Kuik’s interest in putting aside (if only for a moment) the ongoing predicaments of contemporary life, getting closer to the psychic and archaic source materials of the artistic imagination, does just that: vying for the possibility that the artistic consciousness might be singled out and rescued from a swirl of debris. It is tempting to continue finding parallels between Kuik’s disavowal of the contemporary and Guston’s exit from abstract expressionism, but the primary lesson is that these pivotal moments, transformative to a style as they may seem, are pursued in response to an identification, or premonition, of deep-rooted aesthetic stakes.
Others such as Zhuang Wubin have described Kuik’s practice as “chameleon-like,” transforming and adapting her approach and methods to reflect her diverse artistic and intellectual experiences between Pantai Remis, Taipei, Versailles, Arles, and Kajang in Selangor.[9] In this view, the artist appears to be a kind of urban innovator, a sponge-like agent absorbing a multicultural and multilingual globality in order to produce bodies of works in dialogue with an international art world. While the pragmatic stakes of artmaking might shape political and aesthetic choices, I am inclined to disagree with a solely biographical explanation for what is essentially a metaphysical question posed by Kuik: What stories do we tell ourselves about our art?
Her primary concern is that our stories about art tend to fall into the trap of repeating prevailing discourses of the day, which dictate our experience the world by “fitting all the unknowns into classified boxes and destined objectives, and as a consequence, destroying the possibilities for a personal future yet to be realised.”[10] This is a condition that she likens to being trapped in Plato’s Cave, forever bound to the realm of shadow representations, and foreclosing the possibility of reaching something more truthful. (The drawings “Medusa’s Cave”, “The Age of Crystal”, and “A Love Object” are perhaps different versions of the proverbial cave.) It is a condition that subjugates the artistic imagination to a state of subservience to received ideas. Conversely, it is only when the artist identifies the sites of struggle that the possibility of an emancipation might arise. Taking cues from Hélène Cixous’s foundational essay of 1975 “The Laugh of the Medusa,” Kuik embodies in her art the concept of a feminine writing, in which
[h]er libido is cosmic, just as her unconscious is worldwide. Her writing can only keep going, without ever inscribing or discerning contours, daring to make these vertiginous crossing of the other(s) ephemeral and passionate sojourns in him, her, them, whom she inhabits long enough to look at from the point closest to their unconscious from the moment they awaken, to love them at the point closest to their drives […] [11]
It is a mode of artmaking that is all-encompassing, all-feeling. Phenomenologically speaking, it apprehends the world as “an ensemble of my body’s routes,” a folding together of the visible and the invisible.[12] It encounters boundaries in order to dissolve them for posterity, and it delights in doing the work to awaken new subjectivities, new circuitries, new consciousnesses.
To this end, the tactics to be practised in everyday life that Kuik proposes are deceptively simple. Pattern identification, lateral thinking, deep feeling, and an openness to improvision were central to the development of Story Time, and continue to be instruments of perception vital to the artistic imagination. Expressions of this mode of creation might be located in the gesture of line-making, which Kuik renders as oscillating bodies carving out three-dimensional space from flat surfaces, in drawings such as “The Abduction of Mermaid”, “A Pirate’s Tale” and “The Gravity of Image”. The curvatures and flow of these lines follow a larger set of intuitions, felt by the artist in the instant of the artmaking process. Furthermore, the transformation of line into plane is a nod to the idea of the fold, which Gilles Deleuze explicates in examining Leibniz’s mathematical and philosophical world of the Baroque. The latter radiates itself “everywhere, at all times, in the thousand folds of garments that tend to become one with their respective wearers, to exceed their attitudes, to overcome their bodily contradictions, and to make their heads look like those of swimmers bobbing in the waves.”[13] With that reference (and indeed the title references to a maritime or oceanic world of mermaids and pirates), Kuik’s pictorial systems contain the implication that something has been liberated from its hold. That is to say, the motives central to these pictures have surpassed their original frame of action to expand out into a larger, continuous unity of artistic inquiry.
This is a kind of artmaking that conceives of the unknown as the ground-zero of creation, for it transforms the tyranny of the blank page into an open forum for investigating the nascency of the image. Minimising preconceived ideas, concepts, or messages in each drawing in the series, Kuik told herself “to just draw if [she started] to see something emerging from the dark.”[14] The notion of working in the dark, then waiting, is another reminder of the photographic darkroom, in which the development of the image appears gradually over time, bestowing upon it the status of magic. The drawings also teach the viewer similar habits of attention, or enrapturement. Repetition and distortion turn recognisable objects into ambiguous spectres: velvet bowties transform into men, shells twist and turn into ruffles, eggs simultaneously resemble openings, lacunae, and holes. Forms that we think we recognise at first are all called into question; the experience is very redolent of cloud gazing.
While writing this piece, I receive a picture from the artist. It is an image of pink, slightly ruched fabrics scrunched up in heap, photographed against a plain background. In the centre of the pile, a lighter pink swatch spills out over a darker one, which collapses into itself to make three discernible folds down a vertical axis marked by shadows. It is accompanied by a question: “Do you see half of a face?” It is an exercise in perceptiveness, certainly. But it is a reminder that looking is an activity that is done together—that life, as with art, is constellated by such small acts of mutual recognition.
— SAMUEL LEE
(Kuala Lumpur, Lisbon, and Singapore. August 2023.)
NOTES
Walter Benjamin, “The Storyteller: Reflections on the Works of Nikolai Leskov,” in Illuminations, ed. Hannah Arendt (New York: Harcourt, Brace & World, 1968), 108.
Minstrel Kuik, correspondence with the author, April 10, 2023.
Lisa Mintz Messinger, “Georgia O’Keeffe,” The Metropolitan Museum of Art Bulletin XLII, no. 2 (1984): 19.
Wubin Zhuang, Photography in Southeast Asia: A Survey (Singapore: NUS Press, 2016), 41; Alison Eggleton, “She Who Has No Self,” in Minstrel Kuik: She Who Has No Self (Horsham, Victoria: Horsham Regional Art Gallery, 2020), 19; Denise Lai, “Open House,” in Minstrel Kuik: Memory Games for a House in Motion (Kuala Lumpur: Richard Koh Fine Art, 2021), 6–28.
Occupying multiple positions, including rebel, victim, temptress, and object of fear, Medusa has been mentioned since the time of writers such as Hesiod, Ovid, and Lucan, represented as a figure for “public virtues and private terrors: eloquence, fame, and admiration; stupor, erotic temptation, and the confusion of genders.” Marjorie Garber and Nancy J. Vickers, “Introduction,” in The Medusa Reader, ed. Marjorie Garber and Nancy J. Vickers (New York: Routledge, 2003), 3.
Kuik, correspondence with the author, April 17, 2023.
Kuik, correspondence with the author, April 7, 2023.
Kenneth Baker, quoted in Magdalena Dabrowski, The Drawings of Philip Guston, ed. James Leggio (New York: The Museum of Modern Art, 1988), 45.
Zhuang, Photography in Southeast Asia: A Survey, 41.
Kuik, correspondence with the author, April 17, 2023.
Hélène Cixous, “The Laugh of the Medusa,” Signs: Journal of Women in Culture and Society 1, no. 4 (1976): 889, https://doi.org/10.1086/493306.
Merleau-Ponty, The Visible and the Invisible (Evanston: Northwestern University Press, 1968), 247.
Gilles Deleuze, The Fold: Leibniz and the Baroque, trans. Tom Conley (London: Athlone, 1993), 121.
Kuik, correspondence with the author, April 17, 2023.
About the Writer
Samuel Lee (b. 1992) is a poet and art historian based in Singapore. His debut collection, A Field Guide to Supermarkets in Singapore (Ten-Year Series/Math Paper Press, 2016), was the winner of the 2018 Singapore Literature Prize. His work has appeared in Antennae: the Journal of Nature in Visual Culture, Cordite Poetry Review, Yale Literary Magazine, UnFree Verse (Ethos Books, 2017), and 11 x 9: Collaborative Poetry from the Philippines and Singapore (Math Paper Press, 2019), and elsewhere.