MSAC presents the major solo exhibition Fluid World by international artist Yee I-Lann, in partnership with Malaysian gallery Valentine Willie Fine Art in Kuala Lumpur.
Yee I-Lann has spoken of her work as a means of probing and interpreting her myriad fields of interest, with threads of inquiry ranging from the impact of political structures, collective and individual experience; the cultural nexus of the Southeast Asian archipelago’s seas; as well as Malaysia’s communal memory. In Fluid World Yee I-Lann specifically explores the interwoven concerns around notions of historical trade, social hierarchy, piracy and resistance through her new works in photomedia and photo-mediated batik from The Orang Besar Series, which was first shown in 2010 along with earlier work that explores her lament for shifting and changing landscapes as well as reflections on Malaysia’s national consciousness.
The literal translation of “orang besar” is “big person”, a common term dating back centuries and used throughout the Southeast Asian archipelago to denote a person of elite socio-political-economic standing in a community. The Orang Besar series illustrates the social structure of the orang besar, the body politic, and how this continues to be a major character in the region’s political and economic nature in modern society, created after a lengthy period of experimentation and research. By reinterpreting the batik medium Yee I-Lann contributes a hybrid technique characteristically saturated with intertextual meaning and multi-layered cultural and historical iconography.
In addition to The Orang Besar Series, Yee I-Lann will be presenting earlier works from her practice including an installation version of Malaysiana (2002), a stylistic collection of found studio photography that becomes a kitsch and alternative archive to cultural heritage. Whilst Malaysiana explores a revisioning of a type of national nostalgia her Kinabalu Series (2007) focuses on the specificity of the state of Sabah in East Malaysia on the island of Borneo which is also I-Lann’s birthplace. The Kinabalu Series attempts to draw parallels and metaphors within Sabah’s ecological diverse and culturally rich, but rapidly changing landscape, to address ideas of inheritance, memory and identity.
Yee I-Lann received her BA in Visual Arts from the University of South Australia, Adelaide in 1992. She has exhibited in the Third Asia-Pacific Triennial, Queensland Art Gallery (1999), Contemporary Commonwealth, National Gallery of Victoria, Australia (2006), Thermocline of Art: New Asian Waves, ZKM Museum of Contemporary Art, Germany (2007), New Nature, Govett-Brewster Art Gallery, New Zealand (2007) and the 2009 Fukuoka Asian Art Triennale, Japan. Also a production designer for feature films, she straddles the South China Sea spending time between her hometown in Kota Kinabalu and Kuala Lumpur.
