Malaysian artist Yee I-Lann has spoken of her work as a means of probing and interpreting her myriad fields of interest. These threads of inquiry range 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 I-Lann explores the interwoven concerns around notions of historical trade, social hierarchy, piracy and resistance in her latest body of work the Orang Besar series. This theatre of Southeast Asia is then set against the backdrop of her earlier practice in the Kinabalu series and Malaysiana Installation that examines particular and hybrid notions of culture.
I-Lann's practice articulates a long realised conclusion that solely addressing the cultural make up of the specific nation-states of Southeast Asia is an untenable lens for reaching into the socio-historical psyche of the region. This may have stemmed from the marginality and constructedness of modern Malaysia and Singapore. Buffeted by larger countries with a seemingly much more confident assertion of their national and historical identities, Malaysia and Singapore seem newly-minted. Thailand, Indonesia, the Philippines, Vietnam, all have a sense of historical destiny that has been more successfully moulded into a language of national aspiration. Whereas, the multi-cultural realities of a federated Malaysia and the Chinese immigrant community that makes up the majority of Singapore germinated a pocket stream of awareness that its immediate borders are never as fixed or as certain as we imagine them to be. For less than a century ago, the world of its denizens and the traffic of its cultures, like the buffaloes that wade across the dark waters in A Rousing Account of Migration in the Language of the Sea, weaved a different pattern of migration and mobility.
Therefore one of the most important statements made in her recent works is a cartographical exercise. In her piece Fluid World, the erased land mass creates a relief that places the sea at the center of its narrative. Instead of thinking of oceans as dividing bodies of water, they are seen as conduits of traffic. The world of the Orang Besar is not found on dry land but on the waterways that brought different cultures, ideas and economies into contact. The Orang Besar series first presented in her 2010 Kuala Lumpur, solo show Boogeyman, can be seen as a culmination of the artist's long-held fascination with the socio-political history of Southeast Asia, its shifting borders, maritime traffic, shared heritage and political structures. But like the dark grey clouds that loom across the seascapes where much of her acrobatic seafarers are set in, the series mark a turn towards a darker and more ominous narrative compared to Yee I-lann's previous digital photographs.
The term ‘boogeyman' describes a mythical monster in popular imagination, a shapeless creature that jumps out of the closet at night to frighten little children. One popular argument for the origin of the term associates it with the 'Bugis-Man', a mercenary group of sea warriors of Bugis ethnic origin who roamed local seas raiding foreign trade ships during the early years of European trade in Southeast Asia. The work Empire of Privateers and Their Glorious Ventures illustrates their seafaring careers as privateers of the nobles or Orang Besar. They were swords for hire so to speak, a resistance force available to combat against European incursion and disruption of local trade network.
The Orang Besar series casts the modern democratic processes of a country in light of its traditional power structure. 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. I-Lann’s series illustrates the social structure of this specific group, its body politic, and how it continues to be a major character in the region’s political and economic nature in modern society. The Orang Besar as the big person (also interchangeable with the term Orang Kaya or the rich man) stood as the mediating agent between the apex (represented by the Sultan) and the common man. The measure of his influence or power was not an account of his worldly wealth, but by the number of persons dependent on him. This control over a sizeable population gave him a prized labour force through which he may realise various undertakings and sought a political base or leverage against the competitive intrigues of the court.
This traditional system of measuring political power in terms of headcounts flavors today’s democracy in the region. Looking at the unstable clusters of human pyramid that narrates Kain Panjang with Parasitic Kepala, one draws parallel between the huddled formation and the kind of volatile and shaky alliances that spill over into today’s politics of patronage. The question of patronage is something that reverberates strongly in Malaysian culture today and I-Lann’s kitschy homage/satire of this culture plays out in the YB series, tightly cropped photographs of flower brooches that are normally pinned onto the shirt of important politicians who attend a particular event in the capacity of a VIP. The florid and arabesque portraits of different plant lives seem to suggest an organic representation of excesses. There is an element of ostentation and camp in these photos when viewed in the context of how patronage has continued to exist in Malaysian society.
But what makes the Orang Besar series a remarkable leap from the vocabulary of Yee I-Lann’s previous exploration of digital photograph is her ability to combine the former with batik. As a textile tradition commonly associated to the region, the batik medium carries a potentially subaltern agency. Because batik production is traditionally recognised as a women’s craft, this inscription lends a female commentary that is able to throw into relief the negotiation of power from an alternative vantage point. More importantly, this method of storytelling draws upon the narrativity of batik, which is seldom acknowledged or recognised. Popular assumption that visual pattern of the batik is solely ornamental fails to acknowledge the coded vocabulary that batik carries. Traditionally, each motif symbolises specific events in Javanese courtly life – war, birth, marriage, and death. Though we also find how in its modern usage, such as the badminton racket became a motif to commemorate Malaysia’s victory in the Thomas Cup, how batik documents our modernity.
It is also through the batik’s very materiality, its measurement of length that I-Lann is able to rechart her horizon in sartorial terms. Curator Beverly Yong identified, in an article for PhotoArtAsia magazine in 2008, the genesis of the horizon to I-Lann's Malaysiana series. In these works, the artist collected studio portraits from the archive of a photo studio and arranged them according to typologies that celebrated various rites of passages in Malaysia. Presented as the Malaysiana Installation in this exhibition, the cultural and social significance of studio photography as reflective of a particular period in Malaysian popular history is reactivated as what I-Lann calls a ‘social billboard of ourselves’. This assembly of photographs overwhelms by sheer number and anonymity. It draws apart the curtain of nostalgia, inviting us to dwell on its sepia-tinted surface, the cloths of the sitters and the backdrops that provide a collective bind. In this theatre of sentimentality and repetition, we also find ourselves speaking across the gulf of time to recover the ever present and haunting question about Malaysian identity. Moreover, the grid-like effect of her arrangement achieved a kind of uniformity in the way the backdrop, the linoleum floor and the baseboard connect and unify all these different studio portraits, transforming seemingly private moments, into a national narrative. This continuity weaves a horizontal connection among the individual photographs, absorbing and collapsing the particular into the universal.
I-Lann was then able to fully explore the concept of the horizon during her residency in South Australia, returning to produce the Horizon series, which chronicles the Malaysian dream of the then popular slogan Vision 2020 of former Prime Minister Mahathir Mohammad against the vast expanse of the Australian landscape. This was followed by an alternative account to the Malaysian and Filipino narrative of their territories through the staging of Sulu region’s socio-cultural drama in her sequel, Sulu Stories. The Orang Besar series takes off from her more recent development of the horizon beginning with the Kinabalu series made in 2007, included in this exhibition. Mount Kinabalu, the highest mountain in Southeast Asia, stands as a fixture in the dramatically changing environment around it. In all three photographic works, which comprise the series, the mountain looms over its subjects – a legendary female deity (Huminodun), a family portrait (Anak Negeri) and a dystopic vision of the Malaysian state (Kopivosian). Each of these photographs form a horizon belt that surrounds the mountain, offering in this instance a paralactic view of her homeland as well as revising her previous notion of the horizon as an infinite lateral spread.
This act of encircling, further developed in I-Lann’s use of batik in Orang Besar, also indexes the body politics that come to play within her photographic tableau. As an article of fashion, it wraps around the body enveloping the wearer within its narrative. It seems that in this instance that the spatial coordinates through which the horizon has been utilised in I-Lann’s practice is atomised onto a level that is sartorially personal.
Yee I-Lann’s body of research, her photo media and photo mediated batik present a ‘fluid’ construct of the region through multiple strategies of visual presentation layered with historical research and symbolism. Fluid World in turn presents a multi-textual interpretation marking the converging histories of Southeast Asia as well as its sites of resistance and change. Mediated by shifting time, identities and a need to reactivate forgotten histories I-Lann prompts us to not only remember the past but the cyclical nature of humanity, social constructs and the manipulation of power and control that continue to unfold today.
◎This is an abridged version of an essay that appeared in C-Arts Volume 16, 2010 which has been granted republishing rights by both the author and magazine.
