“It’s been five years of exploration, sweat, elation, rejection and fulfilment. It’s like I went through the whole Shaolin Kung Fu training without learning any fancy moves, just sweeping the dojo, washing dishes or waxing the floor,
…only to realize that my master (myself) didn’t make me do it for the sake of
torturing me - he made me more resilient. He taught me to surrender my ego of knowing and to start from nothing. Only now I feel free.
Only now I feel like I am painting.”
– Ivan Lam, 2009
Ivan Lam describes a kind of cathartic alchemy. His near obsessive gestation of rehearsed colours, brushstrokes and spatial tensions over a five year period has arrived at images so complete – free as he describes – they are an elixir to those who encounter them.
Aptly titled Panorama, this exhibition takes Lam’s 2007 landmark show, After all these years and expands it to a broader vision that sits outside definitions of physical or psychological space. Just as a panorama traditionally transmutes visual reality with its unrealistic optical expanse and warp, Lam’s latest paintings are able to transport the viewer to a different dimension using triggers that are recognisable – ‘photo-real’ – and yet in them, reality is slowly unraveled, undermined by the artist’s decisions. It is intelligent painting at its best.
Take the painting The urgency of inside looking out (2009) as example, an image of a happenchance Chinese restaurant. It is unmistakable in its representation as ‘Chinese’ based on our collective knowledge and cultural branding the text central to the painting offers. Lam, however, deliberately works against such stereotypes painting the restaurant pregnant with emptiness; void of the noise and clutter we expect of this local narrative. He has deliberately chosen to paint a Halal restaurant and by assigning us – the viewer - as the only person ‘inside’ this scene from our very viewpoint, we stand testament to this silent cultural helix. Is it real… photo-real or has reality been thwarted by Lam’s hyper-saturated palette, fractured brushstrokes and ‘unreal’ perspective?
Standing in front of this painting it becomes increasingly apparent it is as layered as the image’s internal reflections. Lam explains, “When we are inside we are being judged by our outside, our cover, never the content”. The position that we take in viewing the world that surrounds us is an important one in the way we navigate our own sense of identity, cultural framing, political and environment concerns - our social consciousness. Across this suite of paintings Lam uses a distinctive viewpoint positioning his audience emersed within his banal narratives, looking through and into these scenes. It is a subtle confrontation perhaps underlined by the sheer scale or presence that these paintings command.
Speaking with Lam he explained: “It’s like I set up the stage for the viewer to be the protagonist…” He continued, “They have been seen before somewhere. They will make up the stories. I just gave them the stage to do so. And because it’s panoramic, automatically the viewer will perceive movement. It gives a very reel-like feel…like a movie or moving image.”
Best illustrated by the painting Waiting for a better future, hoping for a better life (2009) one physically moves across this image of a crowded airport lounge reading it from left to right like a cinema still. I am reminded of Samuel Beckett’s 1948 play Waiting for Godot, the story of two men waiting for another, perhaps God, who never arrives. It is perhaps a hint to Lam’s wry questioning of the absence of meaning within contemporary society and our compulsion to construct value systems aimed at enlightening us or feeding our aspiration. As Beckett points out, it was not the arrival of the mysterious Godot that was the revelation, rather the wait itself.
In the most abstract sense it captures our impossibility, as human beings, to see the complete picture. Lam alludes to these musing suturing three digital images to achieve the impossible viewpoint for this painting. Its warped perspective plays off our skewed expectations in contemporary life: a terminal for low cost air travel the ultimate melting pot of a society and its mobility, both from a physically and philosophical position.
There is very little interaction between this lethargic group, rendered anonymous, single units, coded and disjointed, paralleling perhaps another reality as Malaysia tolerates its internal divisions. For this writer, it is a deceptive loss of clarity that is underlined by Lam’s fractured brushstrokes, almost digitised in blips as the scene’s ‘photo-reality’ becomes over-worked like a pirate video. It offers a sense of air in the constriction of the packed crowd. One wonders if Lam similarly offers hope through the two children anchored at each side of the painting looking out in expectation, eyes cast with unencumbered dreams.
These kinds of ‘constructed realities’ ricochet across this exhibition like an anthology of short stories sliding between fiction and documentary where Lam invites the viewer to become the storyteller. They are no longer voyeuristic glimpses through Lam’s absorbed personal chronicles of the past and bring a new freedom and a new involvement with the work. What is fascinating is this suite of paintings ability to transport audiences through their displaced familiarity. Essentially, these images could be anywhere, nowhere, everywhere and for that very reason they connect.
Despite being surrounded by people and the bump and grind of contemporary social relationships - whether it be an airport lounge or a blue public bus in commuter traffic - collective space becomes neutral to the point of impending negativity. That notion of populated vacancy is a curious contemporary phenomenon and one few artists tackle. While Lam’s airport lounge is a crowd scene, in many ways it is as empty as the painting There is no certainty within the wheel of life(2009) with its melancholic title. It is a very perceptive connectivity that Lam draws across this exhibition.
This painting picks up from Lam’s last two works from his precursor exhibition, Home (We are finally Home) (2007) and Heaven (Heaven can’t wait) (2007) with their turgid dusk skies and linear silhouettes. However, it arrives at a fresh resolve. Lam tones down the expressive energy of his brush, finding a balanced ground between the weight of the stroke and blocked colour. Tensions are held in greater balance; they are more refined.
To explain a little further, characteristic to this suite of paintings the viewpoint is consistently unsettling. In There is no certainty within the wheel of life (2009) it is thrown off balance as the carnival ground fence lilts to the right, forcing the carousel out of frame. Slightly off-centre the Ferris wheel emanates a halo-like light with almost religious fervour. Where are the children…their laughter? The painting is blanketed in the glow of nostalgia like a faded memory bleached of colour. While Lam explains this painting was made in response to the invasion of Gaza by Israeli forces, its tone is unmistakably one of lost innocence and ideals, a kind of sorrow that we bring to the image as individuals regardless of the artist’s foundation for the image.
In the same way that a Ferris wheel triggers laughter, innocence and loss, the painting The machine that walks this earth (2009) has a familiarity that is equally universal and one equated with aggregated doom. This machine that clears the land in the name of development comes at an environmental cost. The landscape lies barren in its wake. As Laurence Fishbourne cajoles in the 1999 film The Matrix, “Welcome to the desert of the real world”. Globalisation is not all grand.
Unlike Lam’s Ferris wheel, however, this machine sits central to this narrative in a plea for balance. It is an extremely active painting despite its static subject, pushing and pulling our eye between foreground and the background. Furthermore, the machine is anchored out of frame making its presence as expansive as its natural horizontal stretch. It is a visual and metaphorical power play and, as a painting, is far more complex than its simple pictorial.
It dredges a similar nostalgia for me as the Ferris wheel does for Lam, pointing to the land artists of the late 1960s and the tensions and balances with the land found in their art making. I refer to writer David Campany’s comments about American Robert Smithson: “His was an art which might engage the natural in an intimate, physical way but only to bring us closer to a disclosure of our always unstable, always mediated relation to it. This was an important realisation – an understanding of nature would require a reflection on the nature of understanding.” 1. Lam offers that same kind of springboard to understanding through this suite of paintings. It is not prescriptive. It is not derisive.
It is perhaps best captured in the painting 3 buses (I kept my end of the bargain how about you?) (2009) which, upon first glance, sits as an anomaly to the others in this exhibition. However despite its jarring diptych, one is eased by its familiarity. The ubiquitous blue bus used by workers across Malaysia and the equally iconic ‘spots paintings’ made famous by British artist Damien Hirst. While Lam is not appropriating Hirst’s dots - rather calling on his own history as a printmaker and the kind of colour-pot coding of his palette and previous series CMYK - to recall Campany’s words these comfortable hooks ‘brings us closer to a disclosure’ or understanding. By that I mean this painting oscillates between local iconography and international contemporary art vernacular. It is an extremely erudite image.
Hirst’s spot paintings and screenprints were all about ‘factory-style’ fabrication and authorship. The ‘blue bus’ offers a similar racial-class coding. Lam refers to this painting as a ‘time capsule’; an earlier version was painted in 2007. The mental agility to visually articulate change between paintings over the two-year period further parallels the kind of anatomical breaking down of an image Lam refers to though his ‘dot colour code’. Furthermore, this time-slide also speaks to me as an art writer, scanning across art scenes, of Lam’s awareness of the kind of local/global dynamics that drive current contemporary art practice. I cannot help but return to Lam’s opening analogy of Shaolin Kung Fu training where focusing on the detail inevitably arrives at a resolved understanding and accomplishment of the whole.
Panorama expands our understanding of painting, of Ivan Lam’s painting. Scanning across this exhibition one feels like they are standing on a threshold, invited to jump into a pool of memories or to sit back like a drive-in cinema with its expansive frame and allow the images to wash over them without expectation. Lam’s paintings unleash reality and it is exhilarating.
1. David Campany: “Survey”, introductory essay Art and Photography, published by Phaidon 2003, pg. 39
Comments by Ivan Lam in email interview with the writer, July 2009