Haseena joins Mit Jai-Inn last Saturday as one of his guest audience for his 12 hour long social performance. These are notes and impressions from her participation. We know that different people got very different experiences out of it, other readers who attended the show, do share your thoughts with us too! – Ed.

Visitors to Mit’s Open day got to tear a piece of canvas to bring home as souvenir.

12 Mit-ings
Mit Jai-Inn
VWFA Project Room, KL
Saturday 9 May 12 noon – 12 midnight

Having run away from home at the age nine, to lose himself in a world of vivid color and too many dawns spent with his knees kissing the ground in prayer, Mit Jai Inn is a big believer of karma. He believes in one’s deeds being core to having shaped the past, the present and a reason to base the future upon. This chakra of cause and effect has never failed him, he believes and those who walk in and out of his life bring about exchangeable energies to draw from. There are no coincidences in life, says the man who choose to marry his poetess wife five minutes into having met her.

He speaks of choices and how the ones we make are never the ones we must, but almost always the ones we need. He believes his grandfather, an artist who painted the Buddha image all his life, influenced his decision to become a painter. It is ingrained in him, he states, in his blood in his soul in the very formations of his existence.

A life of constant manic chaos, of escalated living, Mit was kicked out of six different universities mostly due to his lack of attendance and has never actually graduated. At sixteen he wanted to be a writer, but wrote poorly despite constantly working on it. He eventually gave it up in a decision to solely create visual art. Living in Europe in the 80s, his brand of art with its peculiar choice of color was an anomaly. He tells me he had a million trillion friends, all of whom would leave with him. Pack up and move from place to place every three months, living in empty spaces and falling asleep under open skies. Art was never a reason for the trading of material wealth and he preferred objects of daily necessity in exchange for his creations. Fortune telling, the other pinnacle of his youth long buried under the tissues of time, he practice with an accuracy that he recounts would scare those upon whom his readings were done.

A truly Southeast Asian collaborative drawing in the making. From left: Zahirah (Singapore), Haseen (Singapore), Christina (the Philippines), Mit (Thailand), Liew Kwai Fei (Malaysia)

He holds my hands in his and reads my fortune. His hands are the color of burnt honey and press on mine to create vivid lines of mystical truths. These are the things he tells me: I am ambitious and have been an entity entirely independent of my parents since age ten. I am passionate and have parallel lines indicating great growing success throughout life. I will be happier with age; I will never find a home and will never remain in the same place for sheer restlessness. I love too much and too hard and wholly, recklessly and madly and without restraints. I am a girl with laughter like the dance of water sprites but my soul is heavy and my sadness will spread to places I will be unable to heal. I have too much hurt borne from the ones who created me and will forever carefully distribute it to all the other mortal webbings of my life. This will be useless, he tells me somberly. I shall never be able to give it all away and need to be more open to all that is foreign to my own world or it will sink me in deeper into dark things I am told to be very afraid of. I am strong, amoral, violent and fierce and have angels around me, to protect me and guide me, he tells me in genuine earnest. I am of the fifth gender; neither male nor female. I am the elevated state of being, fluid and with ability to love a mortal or an immortal forever. I am too sensitive to live and am in possession of ethereal beauty. I will never be able to be rid entirely of my need to be alone or my silenced hysteria of loneliness. I will always be compelled to do as I wish, setting me far from the perimeters of those who exist while I do.

Closing my palm into a fist, he tells me the next lover I am on my back for shall be the one that lasts.

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Haseena Abdul Majid is on a 2-month internship with ARTERI. She is an impoverished English Lit final year undergraduate at NTU, a part time piercer, a sometimes drummer and Chief Editor of Godspeed Magazine: http://www.facebook.com/group.php?gid=58484376954&ref=ts

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