Can't keep up with recent developments...busy week, even with regular 1 pm wake-up time and sauntering over for Teh Tarek and Kopi at our favourite Indian Mamak stall every morning.

Did a trace on old school-mate Azril Hisham Abdul Aziz and finally fingered him on a tech-news article in the online Star...had a visual to go too, and knew that unmistakable mug even with graying hairline immediately. So we met last Sunday at a banana leaf restaurant in Bangsar, and he brought down the whole gang...seven of them!, most with wife and kid/kids in tow.

Azril works as an IT specialist at IBM, lives in Ampang, National Geographhic enthusiast and cup-winning accapellist at the office. After scouting home entertainment systems with the rest of the guys drove us down to Cyberjaya + Putrajaya, new federal government city complex...even more Start Trek than Star Trek...more on that later.

Meanwhile, Tess made new friends night I was laid up with air-con induced chills on Jalan Alor...Nanni and Peter, local architects (well, Peter's from New York but he's gone native) so we have even more best new friends in the big city. Nanni's a whirlwind of energy and activity and woman of many talents...design, architecture, theatre, dance, running programs for under-privileged kids. Peter's a Teh Tarek junky who paints and loves KL and her ways and haunts the Wetlands near Putrajaya on daily excursions.

Through Nanni and Peter, also getting to know Ari, IT guy with big visions, Arislan, here with his family from Chechnya (by way of Turkey and Georgia), and Hisham, notorious local film- and mischief-maker (in and out of several jails for activist work and general political out-spokenness) as well as prospective room-mate.

So our phone gone from near-slumber last week to continual text-messaging relays all this week. Tonight, booty-shaking and crowd-watching, who-knows-where in KL.

Alright, Tessa's breathing hard into her Natonal Geographic...gotta run

- Kajin

Um, something strange happening here...kicking off mystery Frenchman's cupboard photos...

Tessa's new kick and another reason not to leave KL...asam laksa on Jalan Alor

View from our room at Bintang Guest House, near a street that never sleeps

Ma Ma - Grandmother Lim Siew Chee - in Cheras


Crazy art decor store near the hostel...Neptune rides KL street

Jalan Alor inflated superhero balconey garden stylee

Tessa's new kick and another reason not to leave KL...asam laksa on Jalan Alor

Tessa's new kick and another reason not to leave KL...asam laksa on Jalan Alor

View from our room at Bintang Guest House, near a street that never sleeps

Ma Ma - Grandmother Lim Siew Chee - in Cheras


Crazy art decor store near the hostel...Neptune rides KL street

ON THE WAY ART EXHIBITION

Wednesday night at Seksan's artspace in Bangsar Baru...8 young artists working at Gudang presenting paintings, installation, video, performance.

Seksan is a landscape architect who splits this lovely space as an office/contremporary art venue. Everything open...the whole space breathes...Tess fell in love with the outdoor showers. There's fish in the pond, cacti squatting in caged grid enclosures, hardly a closed wall to be found.

Food + drink was late and the crowd ambled hesitantly till makan came. Seksan is a very zen guy - long hair, drawstring loose trousers, shooting pics the whole time. Has an amazing retreat just 50 mins out of KL...check his work (and the retreat) at:

• Seksan Design


• Serendah Country Retreat

Fairuz's (Po-oi's) bottle installation

Seksan's gallery

Intan's performance, chewing and spitting an enormous amount of betel nut pigment onto cloth


Entrance to Seksan's gallery

Tessa hanging with Fuad Osman, member of the Matahati group

Gudang

Hamir's gigantic jet-fighter in the entrance

Gudang's side garden

'Pilihan' ('Choices') by Hamir Soib...photo doesn't do any justice to its scale and colour

Po-oi and Hamir fibre-glassing in the studio

Another Hamir Soib painting

Taziman, one of the resident artists from Yogyakarta, Indonesia, preparing for Wednesday's show




Fighting (beta) fish in the gazebo

Yesterday was a day of miracles.
For the last three days, my cruel stomach has been violently rejecting all of my gentle peace offerings, but now...
I Can Eat Again... and
my unwilling fast was broken in the most pleasant way... among new friends.. with sotong (squid) and siam (cochles) and tom yam soup.
We met our new friends at Gudang ( Warehouse ), the most brilliant and beautiful of art making/showing/sharing spaces. Kajin will post pictures and explain more patiently, but it feels like the beginning of an incredible journey. We passed the afternoon and most the night, among crooked tail lap-cats, meeting a passionate and inspiring gang of artists intent on making art the way they want, on their own.
My computer patience has run out.. All My Love.. Tess
Also crickets here sound nothing like the soft whistle I remember. They sound like pieces of hard wood knocking-talking together.

Caught a cold the night we went dancing...Zouk's was a bust...an alien spacecraft biomorph plunked down on Jalan Ampang and stuffed to the gills with trendies. We took one look at what was more like a sea rather than a line of desperate nightclubbers and gave it a pass, ending up in a nearby club what played terrible slick RnB and jock-strap hip hop all night to a bevy of 15 year-olds. This cold set in from chills induced by mopping up the floor in my own sweat in top-cranked air-con...what to do when you need to shake a leg and your blood hasn't thinned yet?

But the best thing so far, as Tess was saying, was taking the Putra line down to Petaling Jaya yesterday afternoon and striking up fast friendships with a group of artists based in or around KL. Gudang (bahasa translated as 'warehouse') is a huge hangar-like space at the end of a dirt road, run by an enterprising young painter called Hamir Soib. We were picked up by car; as you drive into front-end of the space, a gigantic (about 20 x 50 ft) black and white painting of a fighter jet surreally looms out of the darkness. Hamir came out to greet us and gave us a quick tour...it's an independently-run, self-funded studio/artspace which he built from scratch...the back-side is a production studio where a group of men and women were busy coiling wire, painting, fibre-glassing and building a variety of pieces for a show coming up this Wednesday.

Drank kopi in the garden in a gazebo where a pair of red-blue fighting fish folded and unfolded their luxuriant fins in algae-rimmed vases stuffed with flowers, chickens scratching some tossed-out detritus nearby, and our host gave us the run-down of his operation.

Hamir is 36 and part of a long-established collective of five called MataHati (bhsa: 'eye-heart'), sporting the requisite long locks and goatee that tag artists here as independents (meaning no-necktie jobs or formal observations). Gudang is not quite a gallery...more of an open space where anyone can drop in out of the blue, scope the digs and works-in-pogress or ogle one of Hamir's gigantic mural-sized extravaganzas. The motivation was to open an alternative to KL's fairly traditional commercial galleries and to excite MY's just-beginning-to-hum burgeoning contemporary scene. Refreshingly free of bullshit and dogma and formalities and totally independent...a space Tessa and I have been dreaming about for some time. The Gudang folk are really more like a family, and the philosophy there is elastic enough to allow both individual and communal expressions to foster in an atmosphere full of amazingly good will and support

The rest of the afternoon was engaged in a repeat show-and-tell as various Gudang folk would wander into the kitchen and check the portfolio I was hawking on my laptop. Then checking out everyone else's work (all on CD these days), drinking tea/coffee and squashing lots of butts underfoot in the process. Hamir called his buddy Fuad, also a member of the MataHati crew, and we learned about the buzzing Yogyakarta scene and other groups in the country, music, film and so on...impassioned art geek talk. Really couldn't have imagined meeting a more open and generous collection of individuals. Anyway, the upshoot is the beginning of some very beautiful long friendships and opportunities to produce new work here, as they've extended invitations to Tess and myself to do a month-long residency (probably towards the early part of September).

And things move fast here, partly because the network is small, also because of the almost complete lack of formality within the arts scene...so, a little unbelievably, I might be going to Ipoh next month to talk about my work at one of the centres. All while explaining that I'm a completely unexhibited artist and very short of playing the role of any sort of cultural ambassador

Our host very kindly treated us to dinner, then back to the space where we talked some more to the accompaniment of booming, sort of lowing cattle-type sounds (actually tiny frogs) before hitching a ride back to KL.

For more on Gudang, check out their website:

• Gudang

- Kajin

Posting beneath misting air-con fans at a Starbucks (I know, I know, but it's the closest wireless spot in Bukit Bintang) in the Golden Triangle, a tangled matrix of electronics hawkers, food stalls, foot reflexology parlours and the occasional pimp sidling up J. B. Bintang street. Started this blog so as not to repeat myself in the steady stream of e-mails I've finally started answering after recovering from a 32-hour stop-over flight through Sri Lanka, sweltering heat and work-fatigue from our month in the UK.

So friends/family, check up here occasionally for picture postings and news and semi-hysterical ramblings about how amazing the food is...Tess has gone to the Lake Gardens to scope orchids and exotic birds, and I'm supposed to be completing this job (the 'working' vacation continues) for Kasan and Camilla before the fact of finally having no outstanding obligations sinks in...then we're probably off to Melaka, then Johore Baru to see family and score some proper seafood, then back to KL to pick up Klachinsky, then probably Pulau Pinang or Langkawi or one of the islands off Mersing and probably my first string of hangovers on a blur of white beaches in MY...

Didn't take too long to get used to KL though this city --- already amply large in childhood's eye --- has gotten MASSIVE...I keep thinking of an ex-girlfriend I didn't know too well who started suddenly making a huge wad of money and developing a smorgasbord of unfamiliar physical landmarks and beauty spots (many still being implanted overnight) while packing on a lot of lateral and vertical weight in the process. KL is eating and spitting herself out at a rate that's hard to imagine, so much so it's proved impossible to get a grasp of any cardinal points, never mind her sprawling topology criss-crossed by LRT lines and causeways and pollution and dust.

Oh yeah, and she loves shopping, though her gadgets are not quite as bargain-basement as we'd innocently imagined (our brief stint in the UK, factoring currency conversion and the cost of breathing in Englyndde [even with free rent] has already stripped our pecuniary circumstances by a good half, so we've been hawkishly eyeing our pocket-books...a trying thing considering the constantly beckoning spectre of Jalan Alor and its pasar malam [night market] delights nearby).

There's a burgeoning independent music scene we're just starting to clue in about, and in a couple days we're going to explore Petaling Jaya and a number of interesting looking art venues. Tonight, God permitting (Tess has struck a case of the runs), we're going to see how un-fashionable we are at Zouk's, one of the jumpin' nightclubs located who knows where...maybe we can up our quotient somewhat by name-dropping a couple of Canadian bands, as the coolbies've already clued in to the Arcade Fire and such.

Will post some pictures soon as I get my new battery charged (I think my former was nicked out of a side-pocket while we were waiting to cross at a traffic light)...if I haven't already written you, I'll try soon, as it's a toss-up how things'll be once we leave the capital city (most internet cafe's dribble -56k connections with fugitive keyboards)...

Soon...

K

The Gohs in Gravesend

Tess at Lake Gardens, KL




Central Market...Pasar Seni