EXHIBITION ESSAY
Kenyalang Circus: A solo exhibition by Marcos Kueh
4—19 February 2023
Third World High
by Lim Sheau Yun, 19 January 2023
Witness the eight woven postcards on view by Sarawakian artist Marcos Kueh. Presenting the authentic exotic, Kenyalang Circus serves us tradition remade in a culture of neoliberal icons.
Working in the spirit of re-appropriation, Marcos applies the maximalist logic of capitalism and self-exotification to simultaneously advertise and satirise. Woven Postcard #04: Burung Melodie Rezeki features the Kenyalang (“hornbill” in Sarawak Malay), that icon of icons which has become a metonymy for the state: hornbills are a popular tourist attraction and the symbol that adorns both the Sarawak coat of arms and the logo for Visit Sarawak. A central figure in blood red depicts Sengalang Burong, the deity of war and omens. Hornbills serve as intermediaries between Sengalang Burong and the human world: here, Marcos depicts Sengalang Burong with the head and feathers of a hornbill and four arms covered in ceremonial tattoos, as if in dance. The complex system of augury represented by Sengalang Burong is brought in thematic contrast with capitalist excess. Advertisements, billboards, and signs rendered in baby blue and bubble-gum pink recede as background, while “Burung Melodie Rezeki” (roughly translated to “Bird of Melodic Livelihood”) is rendered in neon-diner-1960s-Americana text. A ring of text frames the entire composition, reading “Kenyalang Circus” in both English/Malay and Chinese. It is a beautiful cornucopia revelling in self-aware excess, demonstrating how culture has been remade for the nation-state and the capitalist global order.
The ideas behind Kenyalang Circus, like the motifs Marcos uses in the works, are recycled. Kenyalang Circus began as a graphic design project first published on Malaysia Design Archive’s blog, O For Other, three years ago. Having shifted the locus of his belonging to the Netherlands, where Marcos has resided for the past four years, first as a student and then as an artist, Kenyalang Circus has become the recurring motif to which he has returned, an anchor to which he’s tethered his identity. Having traded the pixel of Illustrator for the grid of a warp-weft weave structure, Marcos’s renewed Kenyalang Circus series is far more politically ambiguous. The textile pieces still retain their graphic roots: Marcos’s compositional logic follows that of the poster, each with a bounding frame, declarative text, and a figure in the centre of the composition. Instead of the boundless possibility of RGB space, however, the colours on fabric are limited to the interaction between a selection of yarn colours: the woven postcards of Kenyalang Circus each consist of only eight colours, carefully combined. Polyester yarn, a derivative product of petroleum, lends the works their lurid shine.
Crucially, Kenyalang Circus is not a romantic reclamation of the past: the series’ allure is that it engages with capitalism as both an aesthetic and a mode of production. In Southeast Asia, weaving is associated with tradition: the image of an old woman in a longhouse and a backstrap loom is a rebuke of colonialism, industrialisation, and mass production. Yet Marcos’s works are all woven on industrial jacquard looms, which were first developed during the Industrial Revolution and made the contemporary industry of fast fashion possible. Jacquard machines are controlled by a sequence of punched cards, essentially a binary code of 0s and 1s. Contemporary industrial looms, like the ones Marcos uses, are completely digital: people like Marcos are known as “textile programmers.” The work of making contemporary textiles is a project of the head, not the hand. To make intricate pieces like the ones we see on view, the programmer needs to develop a closeness with the machine, to understand not only its logic but also its tempers and tendencies. Machines have feelings too.
Still, there is an old-fashioned utopianism associated with weaving, a harkening to craft practices and its surrounding communities. It is perhaps for this reason that textiles are having a cultural moment: from Yee I-Lann’s large-scale tikars in Borneo Heart to historical exhibitions such as John Ang’s Splendours of the Malay World and Singapore’s Asian Civilisation Museum’s Batik Kita. Textiles hold the promise of enacting the decolonial project, to, in the words of academic Walter Mignolo, “delink the overall structure of knowledge [from colonialism] to engage in an epistemic reconstitution.” In other words, textiles are a field of reclamation, where one can begin to affirm modes of knowledge practice denied by the dominance of colonial form. If decoloniality posits that another world is possible, then textile practices remind us there is another way for this world to be built, one that does not use the tools inherited by the Enlightenment and the Renaissance. In the words of Audre Lorde: “The master’s tools will never dismantle the master’s house. They may allow us temporarily to beat him at his own game, but they will never enable us to bring about genuine change.” The end goal is liberation.
Marcos’s work occupies a murkier space in its relationship to the decolonial project. Unlike other artists whose works were produced in Southeast Asia for a Southeast Asian art market, the woven works of Kenyalang Circus were developed for a necessarily Western gaze in the Netherlands. Kenyalang Circus neatly packages Marcos’s categories of identity – diasporic, Borneo, global South (between the lines for a white reader: oppressed, other, ethnic credibility) – into product. There is socio-economic capital to be gained from making one’s “motherland” consumable and legible. In Marcos’s words, he is trying to “exoticise [himself] before a white person does.” In doing so, Kenyalang Circus plays into the age-old formulation between West and Other, where the Savage stands as the alter-ego to the civilised West. “THIRD WORLD HIGH,” reads Woven Postcard #02: Bumi Kenyalang, unsettling yet thrilling.
Art inevitably exists in a landscape of commerce: perhaps all one can do is watch how the works play out in the circus of the art market. Marcos speaks of his work in the Netherlands in the spirit of performance: now collected by major Dutch institutions such as the Voorlinden and the Stedelijk, Marcos is interested in how collectors and institutions will treat his work, whether they will choose to show it, and how audiences will react to its placement in white, colonial cultural institutions. I imagine his work akin to ritual objects collected by anthropological collections, like the kenyalang ritual objects now held in the collections of UCLA’s Fowler Museum, the Metropolitan Museum in New York, and the infamous British Museum. Endowing the image of the global, these objects are material representations of the existence of the Elsewhere, reifying the position of the West as accumulative collector and centre of knowledge. Marcos here acts as both travel agent and profiteer, a subject-matter expert whose conjured objects speak from and for the global South, consulted for the purposes of inclusion and diversity. Kenyalang Circus depends on a necessary emotional closeness between the artist and an idea of home, but also a necessary geographical distance between the artist and the location of home. His is not quite a project of liberation, but one of staying with the trouble.
If home is to be kept at a distance, what then can we make of the works’ journey back home? Kenyalang Circus’s colourful excessiveness, tribal motifs, and stance on decolonial politics might be a rarity in the Netherlands, but it is not so unfamiliar in the cacophony of post-colonial attitudes in contemporary Malaysian art. These are recognisable symbols, even though they remain at a distance: Kuala Lumpur is closer to Borneo than the Netherlands, yet the centre of the nation-state exerts a colonial gaze all the same. And certainly, the categories of identity become more granular as one approaches home: Chinese, Kuching versus indigenous, rural. Outside the locus of North Atlantic institutional power, Marcos’s work is less diss track than pantomime, a bemusing in-joke for audiences already in the know. These are inauthentic works for a postmodern present, yet their visual clarity remains potent all the same.
“[The anthropologist] does not know what to aim at. His favorite model has disappeared or, when found, refuses to pose as expected. The fieldworker examines his tools and finds his camera inadequate. Most importantly, his very field of vision now seems blurred. Yet he needs to come back home with a picture. It’s pouring rain out there, and the mosquitos are starting to bite. In desperation, the baffled anthropologist burns his notes to create a moment of light, moves his face against the flame, closes his eyes and, hands grasping the camera, takes a picture of himself.”
—Michel-Rolph Trouillot, Global Transformations: Anthropology and the Modern World (2003), 24.
— LIM SHEAU YUN, 19 January 2023