Sunday May 14, 2006
Inside outside
Borders and border crossing have inspired the works in Fourth World. VERONICA SHUNMUGAM speaks to promising artist Sharon Chin.
IN recent weeks, images of massive street protests in the United States against harsher immigration laws flooded the international news channels on our television screens.
In one interview, an obviously educated, middle-class white American woman was seen coldly telling a Hispanic protester that she didn’t think that disadvantaged foreigners had a “right” to want a better future for themselves and their children in the United States.
Her unemphatic reply was a sharp reminder of how the world seems to be taking on a new sort of bipolar order; one made up of “haves” on the “inside” beefing up their borders, and the “have-nots” clamouring for entry from the “outside”.
What could have made the American woman so decidedly uncaring about would-be immigrants? What must it be like for people trying to cross borders, legally or illegally, with hopes for a better life? How and why are borders set up, and what is it like to be caught in the middle?
These are some of the questions that Sharon Chin tackles at her solo exhibition entitled Fourth World in the foyer of the Australian High Commission Kuala Lumpur.
KL-born Chin, 26, has been grappling with these themes since her student days at the Elam School of Fine Arts, Auckland, New Zealand (2001) and the Victorian College of the Arts, Melbourne, Australia (2002–03).
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Sharon Chin standing in the middle of Mare Clausum( Closed Seas). – Photo by ONG SOON HIN |
“My central themes, however, are transition and being in between,” says Chin, who took six months to plan how to express her ideas for Fourth World.
The starting point of the show is Mare Clausum (Closed Seas), a huge installation work that hangs over the foyer of the high commission.
Made mainly from sail-shaped pieces of green scaffolding mesh held in mid-air with rope used in building construction, the work came from Chin’s admitted obsession “with the whole idea of getting away and the getaway”. The work was set up by Chin’s artist pals from the art group Rumah Air Panas.
Indeed, the work does call to mind a ship’s sails and voyages. The use of construction material we see as part of new buildings bring to mind the idea of transition.
On the other hand, Mare Clausum also makes one think of the potential and permanence that we in rapidly developing cities tend to attach to a building in construction (the ones not built near or on nature reserves, of course).
In an earlier interview, Chin said she often felt that KL would buckle under the weight of never-ending construction.
Then, there is the whole discourse between the mesh sails set-up and the officious foyer of the high commission, now further beefed up with stricter security procedures after post-9-11 threats and scares.
Regular visitors to the high commission’s art exhibitions (held at the foyer for more than 20 years) would be hard pressed to remember another artwork that has so transformed the look and feel of the foyer.
Visitors might also ponder the contrast between Australia’s stringent requirements for anyone and anything entering its borders, and an artwork that tries to balance security concerns with the human need to aspire for something better.
As a counter, Chin offers Mare Liberum (Open Sea). Using construction material again to reflect transition, she has used blobs of reinforced concrete to represent the open sea. At the high commission, the “blobs” have been placed along a narrow tiled verandah that is beside the foyer and separated from the main building by a glass wall. Drying out after some rain, the blobs’ layers take on gradations of grey and look like islands as viewed from a plane.
“I wanted to use this glassed verandah of the high commission because it’s neither outside nor inside. So, the space emphasises the concept of what it is to be on the inside and the outside.
“I also wanted to reflect the issues about gaining entry and (disadvantaged folks) being able to meet entry requirements in the first place. And, of course, there are the themes of transition and distance,” Chin explains.
To restore a human “face” to the shoreline, usually seen as a liability in immigration security, Chin has created Paper Shores I-VII and Plastic Shores I-VII. The former features framed fabrics dipped in seawater mixed with dye while the latter is made of perspex over which seawater and cement were repeatedly poured.
The shoreline as a border is melted down into the more inviting idea of a beach and memories.
In the Paper Shores series, Chin captures a student-day memory of when her Aussie mates surfed a cold grey-blue sea while she watched from the shore, wrapped in an orange blanket.
“I meant for the blues and greys to symbolise the seas and the beach, and the orange and reds to represent the blanket I wore that cold day,” she says, adding that the seawater used in the works were collected from Port Dickson, the nearest beach to the suburbs of Taman Tun Dr Ismail where she now lives.
Chin also alludes to international relations and the impact on people’s lives through her Sailor’s Knots Series comprising ten framed knots and accompanying texts.
Interestingly, the knots are wound from seawater-soaked pieces of paper, each of which features sentences from writings (on international relations) such as Three Poems and their translation by Goenawan Mohamed (the poems are Expatriate, Dongeng Sebelum Tidur/Bedtime Story and Portret Taman Untuk Allen Ginsburg/Picture of a City Park for Allen Ginsburg) published by the Lontar Foundation in 2004.
Each knot is accompanied by a hand-written, ink description of the knot from passages taken from Knots, Splices and Rope Works by A. Hyatt Verill (1947).
Already this promising young artist has praises from a well-known art critic and another art writer, not to mention several visitors.
n ‘Fourth World’ is on until May 15 at the Australian High Com-mission at No. 6, Jalan Yap Kwan Seng, Kuala Lumpur. For further details, call 03-2146 5549 or go to 4ourthworld.blogspot.com.
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