In collaboration with Rismilliana Wijayanti, Octo Cornelius, Prihatmoko Moki, Wicked Music People, Wkshps Design Studio
In the history of colonial encounters, moments of conflict also allowed for cross-boundary learning. Using principally 'found digital objects' - songs, images, stories, poems that are currently available freely in the public domain - The Tyger and the Navigator stages a historical epic on 18th-century cultural encounters in the Malay World. The protagonists in this epic are two figures locked in combat but also in embrace. The Navigator charts the sea and makes the world known for the purpose of surplus accumulation through a new system of extraction and exchange, in the belief that free intercourse will ultimately confer upon humanity both truth and freedom. Meanwhile, the Tyger is the unruly spirit of dissent, an open-source language of resistance for those displaced and marginalised.
The artwork takes the form of a sekolah gambar, a picture school, which historically is used to describe the 'museum'. In the 21st century, however, it more closely resembles an image board. An overwhelming amount of historical documents exist on the internet today, they float across the world wide web, often unattended to as digital debris. Through assembling some of them on the image board, the artist to explore hidden connections amongst historical materials. When assembled together anew, they are given a new context and a new story. The technique is both a nod to 20th-century modernist collage as well as our contemporary culture of post-internet mash-up and cloud-computing.
This pattern of thinking can also be traced back to history, in an early modern form of Malay poem called, the Syair. Contrary to popular opinion, the syair is not so much a 'classical' literary genre. It emerges as a literary form sometime in the 17th century with a rhyming scheme that suggests the interconnected nature of all things and phenomena. It is as if, the Malay language took acid. The Tyger and the Navigator plays with such possibility, re-centering imagination in a process of adaptive reuse of historical materials. It allows the artist to create an atlas of memory and tell a story about the durabilities of our past in our present-day lives.
The Tyger and The Navigator was first commissioned for a group exhibition ‘An Opera for Animals’ curated by Cosmin Costinas and Claire Shea. The exhibition ran from 23 March – 2 June 2019 at Para Site Hong Kong. The exhibition then traveled to Rockbund Art Museum, Shanghai, from 22 June – 25 August 2019 with Cosmin Costinas, Hsieh Feng-Rong, Billy Tang, and Claire Shea as curators.
Simon Soon is a senior lecturer at the Visual Art Program, Cultural Centre, University of Malaya in Kuala Lumpur. He researches across 19th-20th century modern and contemporary art and architecture in the Malay archipelago. Simon is co-editor of Narratives of Malaysian Vol. 4 (2019) and a member of the editorial collective of the journal Southeast of Now: Directions in Contemporary and Modern Art in Asia, published by NUS Press. He is also a team member of Malaysia Design Archive (www.malaysiadesignarchive.org) and co-edits a blog O for Other (wwww.oforother.malaysiadesignarchive.org). He is also the co-host of the BFM Night School, a weekly radio program focusing on the arts and humanities. Occasionally, he also curates and makes art. Having only exhibited his works overseas, this is his first time exhibiting in Malaysia and is also his first solo exhibition.
The booklet of this exhibition was designed by Jun Kit, and it is one of the most beautiful booklet that draws on the aesthetics of early 20th century Malay printed books. The booklet is for sale or you can download it here.