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:
- Kajin
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:
- Kajin
posted by Kajin 'Jah Goink' Goh at 5:14 PM
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