Editorial
#MalaysiaYangMuda is a weekly series of short interviews with our friends and movers of politics, arts, and culture who continuously make Malaysia and its people livelier.
This week, together with as our thirteenth guest is Sau Bin Yap – an artist, curator and educator based in Malaysia. Sau Bin received numerous awards, most notably the Bakat Muda Sezaman by the Balai Seni Negara, Malaysia in 2000 and 2002. Apart from that, he is also an active member of Rumah Air Panas (R.A.P), an arts collective in Kuala Lumpur experimenting with conceptual installation, mapping and research-based curatorial engagement. Here, we asked him of the most ‘dangerous’ things that we can possibly curate here in Malaysia, negotiating his individual and collective arts practices with R.A.P and, last but not least, curation as a methodology to perceive the world around us.
Photo by Isabel Yap
MM: Malaysia Muda / SB: Sau Bin
MM: What might be the most dangerous things, objects, events, ideas to curate in Malaysia? How do you want to play around in conceptualizing the curation if you are to do it?
SB: This is interesting. I am intrigued by why this is asked and the motivation to do so. Perhaps it could point towards certain exploratory and transgressive aspects of curatorial practice and how it can be unsettling to the perception of dominant discourse and values, be it in the art-related or social-cultural contexts.
It is easy to think something ‘dangerous’ would be inciting extreme responses that would put the curation and those involved at risk. We could also ask dangerous to who, what, from what perspective, and why? It would be straight forward to say anything that is perceived as threatening to the sensitivity of dominant values and hegemony discourse is considered ‘dangerous’ by the status-quo. But it is also the diverse emergent values and practices which are more at risk than the dominant ones, as it reveals a contestation of values between the status-quo and the peripheries. I understand this as a tyranny of dogmatism in every aspect, metaphysical, ontological or epistemological, and is thus reflected on a social-cultural level.
And, I think for artistic and curatorial approach – lacking inter/multi/transdisciplinary knowledge and scopes delimit our imagination and diverse engagement. That could be dangerous to the arts if we would continue to curate in such a manner. That which is most ‘dangerous’ to curate is our ignorance and when we do not realize it.
I think we can learn a lot from poetry, literature or games, yes the one we play. A manner of being and allowing speculative and fictitiously playful. Exploring alternate world and scenario with a humorous deviation would be interesting, like a certain genre of science-fiction which allows us to imagine a different utopia or dystopia!
I wonder if the idea of a utopian/dystopian kitchen or cooking project which explore food consumption and food security and future issue vis-à-vis culinary and (cultural) identity politics would fly? Art object or project as (in)edible artifice – and perhaps assaulting our sense and sensibilities on many levels.
MM: Reading through previous interviews of Rumah Air Panas, a collective of multi-disciplinary artists, there are two main objectives of the collective’s formation – to promote dialogue between arts practitioners and bringing the public to art. How do you observe both objectives transpire after more than twenty years of existence? And how does it develop and strategize your practice as a curator, artist, and researcher along the way?
SB: The various members of Rumah Air Panas (R.A.P) are considerably active in the art and cultural scene, being involved in art-making, production, and curatorial projects, education and writing, etc. Maybe that would be indicative of the continuation of practice and engagement. I like to think that we are still propagating the idea of certain criticality in our practice, on the social level or epistemological and philosophical aspect. As an individual or in collaboration with others, as it should not be limited to within the collective itself. The RAP members, past and current ones, are a pretty sharing and caring bunch of people!
I have gained a lot of my curatorial experience from working with my peers in R.A.P., alongside the discussions we had concerning artistic practice. This experience informed and further propagates me to consider not just the layer of social-cultural content, but a project which probes the language of art and the exhibitionary complex, the dynamic of institutional spaces and context of experience and conferment of art or otherwise. Or perhaps reverting to probing the prospect of curation, and if there is such a need to dissociate from artistic framing.
In terms of my own investigation in art-making, I am intrigued by the process of meaning-making and perception, especially in relation to the destabilizing flux of time, narrative or agency to the (in)balance or disequilibrium facilitating within the space, site, context and other possible undercurrents, which might not be realized or reckoned by the current audience, readership but perhaps another temporal-spatial context.
MM: To curate is to have a certain narrative, certain sense, certain aesthetics of how things have shifted, and affected the way we look and perceive the world around us. What goes in the sensitive process of curation if we are to position it as an emerging practice; a post-discipline if we may?
SB: I see the process of curation as a ‘space’ of intervention and ‘provocation’, with other types of spaces: a physical or virtual site of exhibition or project; a geographical and historical landscape and site; a social, cultural or political institution vis-à-vis the subjectivities of artistic as much as audience agency.
Yes, we need to acknowledge our prejudices and preferences, but perhaps also allow ourselves to feel discomfort at times, to intuit other possible crisis. It is ideal to seek a sense of eliciting and drawing out new ideas, refreshed perspective, or a return to a liminal state, albeit how fleeting it might be – to probe that unknown or unknowable.
For me, that sort of unsettling moment is vital and necessary for artistic engagement and experience – as much as in the pre/post or transdisciplinary sense. Would this emerging practice of curation as ‘post-disciplinary’ knowledge be reabsorbed or become part of the expansive field of artistic discourse? I think to deliberately, or arbitrarily flipping the curatorial as a meaningful production, and production of meanings which is a contestation of such, might remind oneself the delicate and fragile position we hold, and not be too unbending with it, to allow it (the art, the curation, the perception or experience of such) and ourselves to flourish.
Of all the possible meanings!