by ARTERI

We want to thank readers for checking into ARTERI. It’s been a great first week for us and the blog. Me and Simon are very excited with the enthusiastic response, in fact the other day we were saying to each other that it’s worth waking up for in the morning!

Both of us are away for the weekend, so posting will be light. We have alot planned, including:

Following our post on Penang Toy Museum, I thought I’d share with you legendary director Hayao Miyazaki’s (Spirited Away, Princess Mononoke) ‘manifesto’ for the Ghibli Museum in Mitaka, Japan.

His vision is so simple: ‘put together as if it were a film’, yet profound: ‘a museum that makes you feel more enriched when you leave than when you entered!’. If our museums were guided by such ideas, maybe they would seem more like places for the living than the dead. In fact, alot of the following would apply well to curating art exhibitions, IMHO.

Official Ghibli Museum site here.

by ARTERI

Between Generations: Redza Piyadasa and Vincent Leong

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Exhibition opening and party pics for Bambang Toko’s Titian Muhibah: Serumpun, Senada, Seirama. Celebrating Malaysia-Indonesia relations with Malay retro rock and bad fashion sense.

by ARTERI

Peter Barton Harold Harris, seminal founder of the Wednesday Art Group (WAG) in 1952, passed away on 14 March 2009. The Wednesday Art Group counted amongst its members Patrick Ng Kah Onn, Dzulkifli Buyong, Cheong Lai Tong as well as Syed Ahmad Jamal, who are modern art pioneers in Malaya.

by Jun Kit

These are a selection of old and more recent prints I found featuring my mother, with the exception of one image.

In case you missed it, here is the podcast version of the interview between Valentine Willie (Founder and Director of Valentine Willie Fine Art*) and Patrick Michael on the Money Wise segment of Business FM 89.9. I think it aired in early Feb of this year.

It’s an accessible, down-to-earth introduction on the hows and whys of investing in art in Malaysia. He makes particularly pertinent comments about the realities of our small market, compared to those of Indonesia and the Philippines. You also get the backstory on the origins of his unique name.

by SHARON CHIN

When I was in Penang last year, I stumbled across the Toy Museum along Tanjung Bungah Road. My first reaction was: whoaaaaa. It remains one of the strangest, most fascinating places I’ve ever been in.

The Museum itself is a shop lot of about 650 sq ft, located beside Copthorne Orchid Hotel. It feels suspiciously like an old night club with a bad ‘Pharaohs of Ancient Egypt’ theme: gilt fibreglass statues and fake hieroglyphs abound. Inside, rows and rows of shelves house over 100,000 figurines, collectibles, models and toys from a mind-boggling span of western popular culture. It was like walking into a dragon’s hoard, only instead of gold, this dragon preferred toys.

by Simon Soon

Lining up against the entrance corridor into the main exhibition space at Cemeti Art House, Yogyakarta, last December is an armed unit of five invisible standing figures, suggested through a skeletal furnishing of their martial disposition by the uniformity of their red helmets, strapped-on rifles and firmly planted boots. They allude to the ‘Lombok Chilli’, royal guards of the Yogya Sultanate who still plays a ceremonial role today, that protects, above all, a distinct sense of pride in the Javanese identity they represent.

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China, Hong Kong, Indonesia, Japan, Korea, Malaysia, Philippines, Singapore, Taiwan, Thailand, and Vietnam.

Yeap, these are the countries from which the Freeman Foundation will pick an artist per country as their next bunch of Asian Artist Fellows. Selected artists will travel to the Vermont Studio Center for a two month residency program, an excuse to get trashed and drunk with other fellow artists from all over the world!!!

by SHARON CHIN

Chuah Thean Teng passed away on 25 November 2008, just months before the opening of his retrospective at Balai. This makes the viewing of his works especially poignant, above and beyond the sense of nostalgia that runs throughout the show. I felt I was looking at a Malaysia I had never known: I can’t recognize myself in his scenes of pastoral kampung life, and the people he lovingly depicted at work, rest or play are strangers to me.

by Simon Soon

No one speaks of the quotidian in a more fluently surreal language than Apichatpong Weerasethakul. I always like the way he describes his films. In this new short film, specially commissioned for AnimateProjects as part of his new installation ‘Primitive’, he speaks of it as a portrait of home and projects a vision of a place that is both destructive and tender, painting a tableaux that vividly sticks to one’s imagination.

See No Evil, Hear No Evil, Speak No Evil by RANDY GLEDHILL

I have been back home for some time. When I first returned, I was in the throes of culture shock, sickness and delirium. After the holiday season, the dark wet cold Pacific Northwest winter lulled me a deep hibernation from which I am only now awakening. I have been sleeping as if hypnotized by a somnambulist.

by SHARON CHIN

The first time I heard about Beyond Pressure was when I met Moe Satt in February 2007, during his short residency at Rimbun Dahan. Over dinner one night, our language barriers smoothed over by beer and friendship, he told me about his idea for an international performance festival to be held in Yangon. I remember thinking that ‘Beyond Pressure’ would make a great tattoo, as well as an excellent toast when drinking. In fact that night we clinked our glasses several times to cries of ‘Beyond Pressure’.

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Application for Galeri Petronas’ annual artist residency program, currently in its second year, is closing on the 15 of March! This year’s program covers a fully-funded eight week residency to Selasar Sunaryo Arts Space, Bandung, Indonesia from 1 June to 31 July 2009.