Nor Azizan Rahman Paiman: Malaysia-365 days of 2008
Wei-Ling Gallery
11 May – 29 May 2009

Paiman’s Malaysia – 365 days of 2008 reminded me of two things. More apparent is the similar exercise of highlighting quotes by prominent figures in the Malaysian political landscape found in Amir Muhammad’s Politicians Say The Darndest Things series. Less obvious is a meditative methodology of approaching drawing as a daily assignment I remember from Kamin Lertchaiprasert’s Sitting series, a now common language in contemporary art that has achieved varying degrees of succcess.

Unlike Amir’s fallback on irony and Kamin’s reliance on spiritual transcendentalism, Paiman’s calendrical portrait of Malaysia is weighed by the political reality that have shaped how we, who are living in Malaysia, come to understand 2008. As a stretch of time in which we witness the country’s democratic struggle achieved some promising result, we also witnessed the political debacles that ensued from what appears to be, at times and for the first time in many years, episodes of compellingly liberating political contestation.

Paiman’s drawing installation begins with the discipline of a daily exercise, routinely selecting a verbatim from a published mainstream media source that would best represent the political development of the day. He then types them on the entry page of the appropriate date from an Islamic diary and pairs them with a doodle of his mutant comic figures that are largely devoid of any political commentary.

Each page then reads on three different registers. There’s the Islamic prayer that heads  and ends each page, framing the day with an invocation requesting for the removal of all the obstacles we may face as well as a excerpted homily from one of the Prophet Muhammad’s disciples.

Then there’s the chosen quote and the illustration. Factoring all these things on a piece of paper create a concentrated visual and information field where different signifiers compete for attention and different readings. This confluence is perhaps the strongest aspect of the show and introduces a layered response to the temporal development of Malaysian politics without the need to resort to didacticism.

What appears to be the exhibition main weakness is the installation of the show as a whole. The layout is confusing and the arrangement of works, though chronological, failed to suggest a temporal passage through which we can engage with a linear history. This setback is however redeemed by the questions that the individual works raised.

One is drawn to question about the nature of the illustrations themselves. Are they a creative act of experimentation that develop in tandem with the social history of a country? Are they autonomous from context? Are their non-commitment to address directly social issues a form of self-censorship? What is the relationship between the text and the image, when they diverge at the point in which meaning and non-meaning is communicated?

A practice that is based on daily examination is in many ways a contemplative process. It’s interesting to see how Paiman’s choice of an Islamic diary as a foundational structure for this series suggests at the socio-cultural implication of recognising Islam as the country’s official religion. Is this an inescapable and inevitable framework from which our discourses must ultimately reflect? Given that Malaysia is still by and large a multi-cultural country, in what capacity does Islam play, as an official religion, in the course of constructing multi-ethnic multi-religious identity as a nation?

These questions though not resolved are underscored in the tension where these contradictory registers co-exist on a single sheet of paper, suggesting perhaps that all creative act must to some extent address our present day conundrum. Is this true?

(SS)