Come Together
by Gina Fairley

The opener on the Beatles iconic 1969 album Abbey Road, “Come Together”, captured the mindset of the day. The world was divided as US President Nixon announced his ‘Vietnamization’ program at the height of anti war demonstrations, the United Kingdom deployed troops into Northern Ireland, New York’s Stonewall riots marked the beginning of the modern gay rights era and Malaysia was grappling with its own racial divisions with its 13 May Incident. There was a sense of a changing tide, perhaps immortalised by Neil Armstrong’s first steps on the moon that same year, and the album’s cover of the ‘Fab Four’ striding a cross walk in central London captured a universal spirit of youthful determination.

While 2009 is a generation on from 1969, its metaphor of bounding new frontiers and forcing change has a currency, in a small way, with the redefining of contemporary Malaysian art of recent years.  This vibrant sense of stepping beyond the past and searching for fresh and relevant expressions is easily cited in the work of artists Fauzul Yusri, Justin Lim, Samsudin Wahab and Wong Chee Meng - artists who are part of a generation charting their own success on the regional stage.

One might wonder, then, what connects this Fab Four? Looking across the breath of this exhibition it is easy to track how the more tradition role of kampong narrative has moved beyond storytelling to a complex layering of ideas and associations that probe the status quo and power structures that make up our contemporary world. It is mature painting despite its enviable youthful success, keenly alert and, foremost, is relaxed in its individuality.

Take for example the complex layered images of Justin Lim’s painting “The Revolution will not be televised” (2009) and Samsudin Wahab’s “Mirror” (2009). Both explore contemporary definitions of control, as Lim asks, “What does one need to control in order to be in control?” While these paintings appear to be laced with political tonality, they are more the musing of a curious intellect than the prophication of an ideology.

Lim borrows his title “The revolution will not be televised” from Gil Scott-Heron’s poem and song of the same name. In our 21st century world we are skeptical about the power of the media to control, manipulate and to influence perception, portrayed by Lim as a TV-headed-muscle-clad-avatar, a quasi puppeteer to people – who are ‘chained to the box’ – and are characterized as a monkey and an ass for their heard like mentality. Ripe with symbology, Lim intentionally overloads his images like propaganda itself. We see it again with his aeroplane series suturing a Christ-like pose with classic warplanes in a curiosity for religion’s ability to govern mankind. Across this suite of paintings, Lim’s figures emerge from a backdrop of Disney characters, missiles, Jesus with outstretched arms and the Statue of Liberty with the casual shuffle of a doodle, and in doing so, brings our collective value system into question.

This same energized random play of marks packaging gesture with memory is key to the work of Fauzul Yusri.  In these new paintings he dissects elemental human behavior and our automaton responses, as he says ‘…man like a monkey, girl like a dog, man like a chicken and everything else that resembles its animal counterpart.”  It is not a derogative position Fauzul takes, but rather a reminder of our most primal connection with our surroundings and, in doing so, questions what is instinctive and what is nurtured in contemporary society.

Fauzul’s paintings have a loose irreverence and layering that has become characteristic to the structure of his images, forms floating in space with playful disconnection and irregularity.  In some ways, it is a similar spatial tension to Lim’s paintings where the background and foreground become quite striated. Add Wong Chee Meng into the mix, and it illustrates the level of sophistication in the construction of painting as a medium among this generation of Malaysian artists.

Chee Meng’s paintings are enlivened with surface bounce or a kind of visual acceleration as their abstracted forms flutter between layers seemingly out of register. Take a step closer and faces emerge from their depths connecting with the viewer. Just as Lim and Fauzul have done in their own individual styles, Chee Meng in his distinctive palette also splits the picture plane splintering perspective between foreground and background. Take the painting “1 Language” (2009), for example, where a face emerges from a random candy-coloured grid of bands. It captures the uninhibited expression of youth, music blasting through the painting, hands in a sign of love and void of nurtured self-censorship we impose upon our adult lives encourage by a society’s blanketed sensitivities. Language becomes obsolete. It is this level of revelation - a truth that lies beneath the surface - that is operating across this exhibition and the work of its four artists. 

With a similar passion for a personal vocabulary of iconography as Lim, Fauzul and Chee Meng, is the work of Samsudin Wahab. It is an easy leap to his aforementioned painting “Mirror”, a double self-portrait where the winner and loser are the same. As he says, “Both of them have been controlled by another power that is bigger than them…a global conspiracy that controls politics, power and judgment.” While Samsudin places himself here on this jester’s stage using his characteristic circus-like imagery, it is not a personal tale but one that speaks a global language.

It is more obviously captured in the title of his painting "Novus Ordo Seclorum" (2009), Latin for New Order of the Ages. Lifting the Great Seal of the United States, first designed in 1782 and printed on the back of the American dollar bill since 1935 it also appears on the coat of arms of the Yale School of Management. Often mistranslated as "New World Order", Samsudin plays off our contemporary casualness and lack of responsibility in translation. In this painting he stages a puppet show of a bullfight, where two bulls replace the traditional match between matador and animal. As in “Mirror”, the protagonist is in conflict with itself and comments on the senseless outcome of global conflict in our ‘new world order’.

I am also drawn to the more subtle connect Samsudin makes to the true translation of this title - the ‘new order of ages’ with the collapse of the American economic system. It is very considered painting and comfortably oscillates between local and global issues. 

It goes back to that notion of ‘Come Together’ to empower thought. These paintings here become communicators not in a traditional sense, rather they offer the freedom of abstraction and disassociation.  They allow the view to pick up upon ideas and yet weave there own understanding through these visual exposés. Fauzul’s words perhaps best captures this “I see from my own view, sometime serious, sometime like a game, sometime just scribbles, sometimes like a kid, and that is how my expression comes through in my work.”

Where Abbey Road marked the conclusion of The Beatles in many ways, the stride of these four young artists is directly to the future.