We are made of tears

This is one of the awesome pieces of art that I saw in an exhibition in Kuala Lumpur this past weekend. This piece is called Tears from the Sky by Tita Rubi. The beautiful construction of the cloak, made from tiny Perspex beads which look like tears, the way the light shone through it, made it seem at once forbidding, like a faceless monk, but also inviting. You kind of want to crawl inside that space there, to feel protected by the light.

The cloak fills and dominates the space, but each element that goes to make it up is tiny and delicate. For me each of these tiny elements is like a piece of our minds, ourselves.

If you look closely at the space inside the cloak you can just about make out a kind of foetus shaped blob. This is actually a larger copy of the smaller tear-like beads that make up the cloak, each one filled with a foetus shaped red blob.

When we are born we are tiny and delicate, but as we grow we fill out. Our minds grow as well. The way our minds fill out and grow depends on our reactions to the world around us; do we cry tears of joy or pain, fear or excitement, loss or hope? Some people react to what they go through by retreating and becoming small; others by inflating and confidently staking their claim in the world; others are somewhere in between. Our cloaks, our selves, are constructed out of these reactions.

A sheltering love

This patchwork tent represents a time in the artist’s past, when his mother used to sew his and his siblings’ schoolbags out of scraps of material, because she could not afford to buy new bags. At the time he used to feel embarrassed by these bags, because other kids would have branded schoolbags. Now however he recognises the work that went into making these bags, as well as the love. The piece is called Monument for My Mother, by Htien Lin.

I found this piece hopeful. It shows that even if we react in a negative way to an event at the time, if we reflect on it we can come to see it in an entirely different way and in that sense we can change ourselves, who we are. From being someone who rejected his mother's care, the artist turned into someone who absolutely appreciates what she did for him.

I liked how the patchwork builds a sheltering tent. Like the cloak of the earlier work, it seems to represent how small elements come together to build one big whole – in this case again it is something sheltering, but it has more of an emphasis on love I think as the sheltering force, rather than the cloak piece which seemed to focus more on suffering as a means of building the cloak of tears.

A mind blown

Another piece that I really enjoyed took up an entire room. It was a layout of small mostly A4 pieces of paper with black and white images on them. These seemed quite random, and juxtaposed odd things together. It's The Mapping of Wayang Kertas by M Alzan M Latib.

It's like this mind has been blown and the component parts flung out across the walls. Now we see clearly laid out the inner self, the person that we construct over time. Through the strange juxtaposition of images that the artist presents, we also get an idea of how what we carry around in our minds is not necessarily an accurate representation of the world around us.

We take in facts, but our minds then twist those to make them suit our own interpretation, which can be far from accurate. The meaning we take from the world does not actually come from the world but is projected onto it by our minds. We take in what the world gives us but the meaning we give it depends on us.

This is the opposite idea I guess to what I took from the cloak piece earlier, which seemed to imply that we were made up of our reactions to experiences, in quite a passive way perhaps. I like the idea that we are not passive beings in this process of ‘creating’ ourselves. This means though that we have to be careful in the way we construct ourselves and take some responsibility for the person we end up as.

Just like the artist who initially rejected the care and love that went into his mum’s sewing of the schoolbags, we too should continually assess and reassess the attitude we take to things, what we believe and what we reject, as we grow.

Feel your past

This piece struck me quite strongly as I turned the corner of the gallery to be confronted with it. It's called Between Worlds by Indonesian artist Nasirun. If you look very closely (it’s hard to see in the photos I have taken) you see that each glass bottle has a puppet inside it. These are traditional Indonesian puppets, from a form of shadow puppetry called Wayang Kulit.

It looks quite stunning in the dim light; but when you get close and see the science-y nature of the bottles that make it up, I felt a sense of disconnection.

Somehow we don’t see science and art as compatible, it’s like when we bring science into it we lose the ambiguity or the beauty of the art. When you analyse something too much you lose the sense of wonder. So I think this is why I felt detached from this piece when I got close up to it. It was an uncomfortable feeling. The traditional puppets inside the bottles really appealed to me. I felt like I wanted to see them closer, to get them out of the bottles and hold them, touch them, see how they really are.

This piece seemed to me to be maybe about how in looking at the past we do so quite analytically; we lose some connection to it. We need to hold that connection, to see it personally, as a thread that connects us personally here in the present to the past; to make the past real to us. Otherwise it is like we are looking at the past through a screen. As with watching events on a TV screen, there is a sense of detachment.

And the same can happen with our own pasts. We're all a mixture of our past experiences. Getting older is often seen as a process of contraction, where our horizons narrow, we become less active, less able. But I prefer to see it as a continuing process of expansion, as we constantly add new experiences to our 'selves', constructing and expanding ourselves at every single point of our lives.

If our lives narrow it's because we put our earlier experiences behind a screen, on display maybe, but we forget how to feel them. At the same time we stop adding new experiences. We tread the same wheel of routine every day, we reduce our inner life to the nuts and bolts of getting through the day, and we lose contact with that youthful urge to explore and understand, and the passionate way we used to feel and believe.

Untouchables

These thoughts were in my mind as I came across these next pieces: Orang Asam Keping and Orang Ikan Masin by Samsudin Wahab. They are two human shaped figures, this time constructed from objects with a distinct and not totally pleasant smell, in the one case dried fish, in the other dried tamarind.

I appreciated the skill of the artist in creating these figures from small objects that would otherwise be discarded, but it left me feeling sad. The poses of the figures, the one sitting lonely on a bench, head sagging downwards, the other peering around the corner as if afraid to join in with life, left me feeling that these figures were not happy.

For me these figures were literally dried up. They had not kept the spark of life alive in themselves, and now they sat, sad and sidelined, as life passed them by. The choice of the artist to use elements with a strong smell increases this sense of detachment. For how long will someone tolerate sitting in that empty space next to the figure constructed of dried fish before the smell drives them away? I think these figures have withered because they forgot how to feel, they have lost touch with themselves. They have rejected life, even if not consciously, and in turn will be rejected by it.

Like all the pieces that I have shown, this one is made up of smaller elements. But unlike the cloak and the tent, for example, what is constructed is not something protective or sheltering, but something that ultimately repels us.

This exhibition was really intriguing. The more I think about it the more new ideas occur. It had that magical combination of pieces that are beautiful to look at but also provoke thought.

If we blew our own minds open what would we find? What are the elements that we have absorbed and used to construct ourselves?

^{All photos by @freewheel}