Sunday November 7, 2010

Portrait of an artist

By AMY DE KANTER

Marvin Chan’s work is all about how we see and how we are seen.

AT the end of our interview, Marvin Chan shows me his latest body of work, much of which is currently being exhibited at his first solo show, Inconsequential Consequence of Hope, in Kuala Lumpur. Seeing the paintings gives me some quiet time, both to admire Chan’s work and to reflect upon what we talked about.

The paintings are portraits of children, mosaics of differently-sized and angled triangles. Influenced very much by what he was telling me, I think about how people catch the light differently; we might all think we see things as they are, yet we all see something different. Especially things that live and change, like people.

Chan once painted a “self-portrait” made up of 10 faces – none of them his – of people who knew him in varying degrees and circumstances (one of them was his DVD seller).

Marvin Chan and his Inconsequential Consequence of Hope V (below).

“My identity depends on who calls my name,” he says. “When I was young, if my mother, elder sister or teacher called my name, it meant I was probably in trouble. But if it is my wife or one of my sisters now, it’s for a different reason.”

Who we are depends as much on time as on who perceives us. “Twenty years ago, I was a sweet little boy. Ten years after that, I was a monster. And 10 years after that, someone else.”

Chan has always painted portraits but was unsatisfied with his earliest work as he felt they only captured the surface of who his subjects were. “I felt I was just a scribe. I asked myself, how do I become the author of my painting?”

Something that comes across very strongly about Chan and his work is his connection to his subjects. He does not so much show me his paintings as introduce them to me.

“This is a dancer friend of mine,” he says as we look at a couple of canvases. There is fondness in his voice when he talks about her and how comfortable she was with posing for him. Then he shows me some paintings of a good friend who was going through a difficult time and his voice changes.

These were all paintings he did years ago, but as we progressed to more recent work, I started getting a sense of his subjects even if he said nothing about them.

Earlier this year, he produced a particularly interesting series while in an art residency programme at the Vermont Studio Center in the United States. He made portraits using material mainly discarded by the centre’s kitchen. There were interesting collages of words from food labels, mostly on or in cardboard boxes.

The personality of each portrait snapped cleverly together with one sentence or story from Marvin as he described his subjects. He painted one woman inside a box, describing her as “closed up”, while I drew my own conclusion about a person who had no portrait, but was depicted by an egg box with the words “Handle with care” left intact. I burst out laughing when he showed me a flattened cardboard box with a mouth painted on one part and a nose on another and told me that that particular guy “is really abstract”.

Being painted (as it were) into a corner works very well for this artist. It kicks his brain into high creative gear.

Chan’s Inconsequential Consequence of Hope started with a serendipitous accident. He and his wife had decided to try and have children, a decision that raised all sorts of questions about responsibility, among them, “Am I good enough as a printing block for my child as a printing surface?”

Chan was working on the portrait of a child on a huge canvas when, “I just had to look out of the window...” and his glasses fell off. He could no longer see the whole canvas at once, only what he could put his face close to. He started concentrating on individual shapes, triangles to be precise, one at a time.

He made more portraits in similar fashion, though in each new one he pushed his technique a little further.

“I worked at not finishing,” he says, showing me a painting of a girl in which the triangles do not reach the corners of the canvas. “To make (the viewer) more conscious of the triangles. The effect is that the head becomes ethereal, dissolving into the white that surrounds it.”

The subjects of this series were a joy to talk about – it felt like we were comparing notes on actual children. There is a wonderful portrait of a little boy with a cheeky smile. Small thin triangles wrinkle his nose and scrunch up his face. In another portrait a girl’s eyes seem to glisten with tears and in yet another one, the child looks out of the canvas with a gentle, compassionate expression as if she were looking into your soul.

They all look out of the canvas; at his show, they are arranged on the walls such that they seem to be looking in through the windows of a dollhouse, observing us as we look up at them.

‘Inconsequential Consequence of Hope’ is on until Nov 19 at Wei-Ling Gallery (No. 8, Jalan Scott, Brickfields, Kuala Lumpur). Call 03-2260 1106 or e-mail weiling@weiling-gallery.com for more information.