One country, three facets

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Visitors to the World Images exhibition in Paris get different views of Malaysia, as seen through the lens of our home-grown photographers.

THREE Malaysian photographers are currently showing their work at Photoquai 2011, the third biennale of the World Images exhibition in Paris, alongside 43 photographers from 28 other countries.

Minstrel Kuik, Pang Khee Teik and Tan Chee Hon were flown out to the French capital by the Quai Branly Museum for the Sept 12 opening, graced by France’s Minister of Culture Frédéric Mitterand.

Curated by Françoise Huguier, who is herself a photographer, filmmaker and explorer, the exhibition features about 400 photographs from Africa, South America and the Caribbean, Asia, India, Oceania, Russia and Belarus.

Two photographs from the Nostalgia series by Tan Chee Hon, who aspires to capture ‘the decisive moment’.

Like in the previous years, the photographs are reproduced on a large scale and exhibited in an outdoor area along Quai Branly across the road from the museum.

Works by five photographers, including Kuik, are on show in the lush labyrinthine garden within the museum grounds. Hélène Fulgence, its director of exhibitions and cultural productions, said the “noise of the world” channelled by Huguier along Quai Branly has “opened floodgates that transcend styles, cultures and categories”.

Huguier and her team are also woking in tandem with 10 other exhibition spaces as partners of Photoquai 2011. These include the Eiffel Tower, where one photograph per photographer has been selected to be mounted on the first level of this iconic monument.

Extraordinary fragments

Minstrel Kuik’s ongoing project on display at Photoquai, called Mer.rily, Mer.rily, Mer.rily, Mer.rily, is one she started in 2006 by photographing slices of everyday life in Malaysia. Her subjects are ordinary, but her images are anything but.

Kuik, 35, spent 12 years overseas, first to obtain a BA in fine arts from Taiwan. After graduating in 2006 with a master’s degree from Arles School of Photography in France, she reurned home and used her sense of alienation from her roots to fuel her photographic vision.

“In Malaysia we don’t speak so much about culture. Food is at the heart of our concerns. It has become a kind of cultural landmark to me,” she said in Paris, at the opening of the exhibiton.

She bases her work on the snapshots she takes of her family, her hometown Pantai Remis (in Perak), and the area she now lives in. Her images have a contemplative air to them, and some of them, when viewed together, are diary-like.

However, Kuik’s view of the world she sees speaks in other ways to those who view them. As French semiotician Roland Barthes said of the photograph, “(It is) more insidious, more penetrating than likeness; the photograph sometimes makes what we never see in a real face appear before us.”

Barthes also said that in another’s photograph we sometimes see a fragment of oneself or a relative, which comes from some ancestor. Who cannot identify with and feel for Kuik’s photograph of an electric slowcooker on her university dormitory counter or the wires of red kitsch electric candles on a Chinese altar?

Her other images of everyday life are more disturbing: a dismembered Barbie doll lying next to a spiky slice of durian; a dead grasshopper with half its body crushed and oozing. Check out minstrelkuik.blogspot.com.

No fencing in art

Pang Khee Teik, from Kuala Lumpur, is certainly a modern Renaissance man. Not only an accomplished if idiosyncratic photographer, he is also artistic director of the contemporary art centre, Annexe Gallery (in KL), former editor-in-chief of online arts and culture magazine Kakiseni.com, as well as an actor in theatre and independent films.

In his set of photographs which caught the eye of Photoquai curators for South-East Asia, Gille Massot and Wubin Zhuang, Pang combines his work as a gay activist with his ability to tell a story with his lens.

In the work called Repent Or Die! he has created four different filmic narratives, told in four frames, of situations where a homosexual refuses to recant.

In most of the photographic narratives, they are “killed off” with a pair of pink scissors. In one, the “Censor”, portrayed by Pang himself, is unceremoniously kicked off the frame by four men dressed like the Village People, singing Y-M-C-A!

Pang, 37, said the style of each of the narratives was inspired by either a director he admired or was a tribute to a filmmaker he likes.

One narrative featuring actor/performer Edwin Sumun is coloured in the garish hues of a Pedro Almodovar film. Another series is a tribute to a Malaysian creative genius and filmmaker, the late Yasmin Ahmad.

Pang explained that he was inspired to take these photographs after the Malaysian Censorship Board decided to conditionally permit the depiction of homosexual and transsexual characters on film.

“In early 2010 the board announced that such characters would be permitted in local films, as long as they were seen to repent. Otherwise, they should meet the usual legal fate of imprisonment or death.

“In my photographs, I parody the way the board treats artists. People who think they can fence art in get it all wrong; art happens well beyond the fence.”

At the opening, Mitterand commented that he liked the satirical humour of Pang’s images and then jokingly asked if he should repent.

The photographer’s witty comeback – “You should repent for all the good things you haven’t done” – was captured by the French television cameras and Pang has been mentioned by at least five French and European online magazines since.

Shooting ‘accidents’

Tan Chee Hon, who cites Henri Cartier-Bresson and André Kertesz as his influences, snapped all his Nostalgia photographs on show at the exhibition using an old Yashica Mat-124G which he got from a friend who’d bought it from a second-hand shop in China.

He calls them “snapshots” and tries to capture what Cartier-Bresson calls “the decisive moment”. Despite his apparent modesty and lack of fluency in English, Tan eruditely quotes the French Marxist Jean Baudrillard by describing his work thus: “My photos are not thematic; neither very sophisticated nor overly technical.”

And therein their beauty, especially the photograph of a bright red dress hanging on a tree branch in the foreground, with a group of performers in the background dressed in various hues of red and burgundy. The sun filters through dark greenish-blue foliage and casts an out-of-focus sheen over his subjects.

Tan, 36, said the lens on his Yashica is faulty and this made the outcome of his efforts unpredictable, but he liked the effect it had on his photographs. He was one of the few who shot on film for Photoquai.

He also uses expired film for his photos, which not only makes for more unpredictable results but is costly to develop too. (Expired film taints the batch of chemicals used to develop it and cannot be used to develop any more film.)

A graduate of the Kuala Lumpur College of Art in 1997, this painter/photographer also works part-time as an art teacher. His work was published weekly in the daily China Press from 1999 to 2001 and he has been exhibiting since 1996 in Japan, China, around South-East Asia and at home.

Johor-born Tan loves documenting KL, where his walks through the city every morning has resulted in a body of work which documents its heartbeat.

“I don’t shoot with big topics in mind. I just shoot. KL is a strange and funny place. Little ‘accidents’ happen every day. If you miss something today, it will be gone tomorrow,” he said.