Sunday April 10, 2011

The medium’s message

Review by OOI KOK CHUEN

The gargantuan paintings in this exhibition are certainly eye-catching but look beyond their size and you will see the intriguing ideas behind their creation.

TOGETHER ALONE
Until April 29 Wei-Ling Contemporary, The Gardens, KL

IVAN Lam has a fixation with size in his art, and his latest solo exhibition, Together Alone, continues that exploration. And just as the exhibition’s title is a paradox, so is his art, which contains a host of variables and is full of subtle ironies, innuendos and contradictions, and which captures the detached aura of inanimate objects.

This exhibition continues another exploration: Lam takes a second bite at the Nippon commercial paint medium with colour play appropriating the role of acrylic. This time, he uses the flourish of a resin coating as finale and as an integral part of the painting to give a summary gloss as well as a protective varnish.

His first full-scale show using house paint, held at Wei–Ling Gallery in 2009, was called Panaroma and comprised nine works (with some displayed on outdoor billboards). It marked a coming out party after exploring and experimenting for a few years with the mannerisms of this type of paint, a process that included an informal apprenticeship at a spray-painting car workshop.

Together Alone comprises five works, measuring either 198cm x 244cm or 197cm x 335cm, and entitled Everything I’ve Ever Known, I Am Giving Back To You; For A Lark, I Will Eat A Crow; I Called But You Were Engaged; I Will Sink To The Bottom With You; and Target and Deer: You Are Being Missed, Dear.

Some of the works are of a singular image, for instance, of a (seated) Guan Yin (Avalokitesvara) surveying the sea, a fawn in an ambiguous space, or a gaggle of obnoxious crows – 3D, yes, but with the deadpan and banal porcelain-like polish of a Chirico or even a Rockwell.

The dual-image displays elicit uncertain and varying responses, at once personal and, at the same time, universal. The dichotomy of the goddess of mercy, Guan Yin, with both male and female apotheosis in mythology, is set against a phallic-like communication tower on a centrifugal pattern.

Then there’s the brittle-looking deer oblivious to the large target behind it. Or the “cutouts” of a murder of crows – they scavenge together for food but are set off with a nice backdrop, against a batik arabesque opposite. And what about the missiles of commercial airliners arranged in a rubric inwards and outwards, sparked by nightmarish visions of the 2001 9/11 terrorist attacks in New York, perhaps?

Lam calls the works “Guernica-sized”, referring to Picasso’s 349cm x 776cm work depicting a 1937 bombing during the Spanish Civil War: “Scale has always been a big thing in my work. With the singular (subject) so big, it encompasses you. You are engulfed by the colour field. Everything is amplified.

“You need distance to view it, and yet, there in such a large-scale work, you can still keep things intimate. For example, if you were to do 10 strokes on the canvas, you can count them, but when you step backwards, you may see all the 10 strokes merged as one.”

The far-and-near visual impact is like that of Impressionist paintings.

Also, it’s a strenuous task, the constant climbing up and down the step-ladder, to switch paints and to clean the brushes; going back and forth to view and re-view each work, each process. That is why Lam keeps himself tip-toe fit, by running every day as if preparing for a marathon, just to be able to rise to the challenge and the rigours of big-format paintings, and so that he can put in his four hours of painting daily whenever possible.

At 60cm x 240cm, the Panorama works of 2009 were not so energy-sapping. Furthermore, the Together Alone paintings on board-backed canvas, with the resin coating, can weigh up to 30kg!

Lam concedes that the gluey resin coat does take away the “hump and bumps and drips” of brush strokes without sacrificing the details when viewed up-close. He adds that the image takes on the clarity of the picture on a full HD TV, in effect.

While the “place-ness”, or location, is obvious in the Panorama works, whether it’s a picture of a workshop or a restaurant, the subject/object in the Together Alone works floats or is set against ambiguous static patterns, with the colour field and optical art play fused with lyrical abstraction.

During the interim of the two exhibitions, Lam says that Nippon Paint came up with a wider repertoire of colours.

“I haven’t repeated the colours I chose five years ago. With more than 3,000 to choose from now compared with acrylic, which has fewer than 100 colours, there are more colours than I will ever need, and I can enjoy their fluidity. It’s now harmless with a nice lemon scent, bacteria-free and environmentally friendly, too,” he coos.

It’s more time-saving and the choice is clearer, and “while I may not exactly know the colours that I want, I know the colours that I don’t want”, Lam says, explaining why he’s enamoured of these paints.

Another reason for using these paints, especially for the scale he is working in, is sheer economics.

“Imagine how many acrylic tubes I would have to use up to cover the vast areas! The Nippon paint is perfectly mixed for flat areas. That is to say, if I were to run out of a certain kind of red, I can still get back exactly the same colour, even 10 years later, instead of having to manually mix the colours to get it, and maybe getting only 70% to 80% of the duplication.

“The paint manufacturers use the NCS (national colour system), which is an international code and standard.”

On the question of durability, Lam says he does his own experiments with the paint, subjecting certain paintings to extremities of humidity, sunlight, dampness (room constantly closed off), dust (open windows) and even bird droppings in the “climate room” of his studio. After seven years, so far, so good; though it must be pointed out that these “stress test” works have been varnished.

As he moves from subject to subject and medium to medium, you might think Lam lacks a style of his own; however, it is the daring he shows in mixing it up and trying different concepts, processes and scales with multi-hued and multi-layered meanings that is actually his signature.

“I still enjoy painting but given the chance to do something wild, I can become something other than Ivan Lam. I don’t have to be locked down by signature,” he says.

There are times that he plumbs different terrain, denying the “I, the Leonardo” artistic ego, and for the expediency of process and for a lark, doing something surprising like an installation of thousands of die-cast miniature cars dipped in acid, or the minefield of hundreds of mousetraps set upon unsuspecting passers-by (Transformations, Sculpture Square, Singapore).

Otherwise, Lam is usually preoccupied with the formal aspects of his works as he brings his subjects to fruition.

For all the ever-developing skills that go into each process, Lam’s works are very idea-driven, the thought behind the painting being key rather than the process or medium, which are just means to an end. “The message is the most important thing. Medium has to be second,” he says.

“I want to do things that I don’t know, at which I could be a novice and a student all over again and where I can learn new skills. What’s the point of holding the brush any more when you know what you are doing in and out?” he says.

Though he claims that the kind of art he does is usually difficult to recoup in terms of invested capital, a Nippon paint on canvas and board work called 3 Buses (I Kept My End Of The Bargain, How About You?), fetched HK$120,000 (RM48,000) at a Christie’s Hong Kong auction in May 2008.

That is certainly a far cry from Lam’s very first solo exhibition in 1999 that was quite distinctly a flop, with not even one work sold. It was a blow to the young man who had returned to Malaysia the year before after 13 years in the United States, where he had received a Bachelor of Fine Arts from the Maine College of Art, worked as an artist and come to think of himself as quite the “hot potato”!

But Lam didn’t lose heart after that outing, as his kind of art – in that instance, lightboxes with silkscreen transfers – was still new then.

He bounced into reckoning in true style when his work, Symphony Of Our Children, was picked as the Juror’s Choice in the Malaysian component of the 2003 Philip Morris Asean Art Awards.

How he developed from a fine printmaker to a reasonably skilful artist some 13 to 15 years later, to paint with great credence figures, objects and abstracts, was celebrated with a top-of-the-mountain shout in a career-defining exhibition called After All These Years, also at Wei-Ling Gallery, in 2007.

In 2006, he earned his Masters in International Contemporary Art and Design Practice at the University of East London.

And in between all of that, Lam, not yet 36 today, has also kept his instincts sharp by teaching and being rejuvenated by the fresh minds and spirits of his students, first at the Limkokwing Institute of Technology, where he studied in his younger days and where he taught for 12 years, and now, at Universiti College Sedaya International where he teaches animation programming.

Wherever he goes from here in his life, this is an artist to keep an eye on, for he loves exploration and will surely keep venturing into interesting territory.

“I want to take people on a long journey, not to the same destination over and over again, which a lot of artists are fond of doing. I don’t want to take them on a journey and leave them in one place for 20 years,” he says.

Labels do not sit easily on Ivan Lam, for his art is couched very much in the present and the infinite.

‘Together Again’ is on exhibit at Wei-Ling Contemporary@The Gardens (Lot G213-213A, Ground Floor), Kuala Lumpur, until April 29. Go to weiling-gallery.com for more information.