1993 APT1 Conference : Identity, tradition and change

CONTEMPORARY ART AND CULTURAL IDENTITY, SESSION 1 Redza Piyadasa I will show you some slides. I think the statement that a picture speaks a thousand words I think is very true. I will spend less time talking but I will make a point and show you examples of work. It is very difficult to get this through in 20 minutes - a story of a whole nation's search for identity in twenty minutes, but we will try. First of all, let me start, can we show the first slide. For those Australians who may not know where South East Asia is I have provided a map. For those Australians who do not know where Malaysia is, it is that long thing that is hanging from Thailand downwards and if then you cross over there is the largest island in the world that is supposedly an island, you are supposed to be a continent, that is supposed to be one of the largest islands in the world called Borneo. The northern tip you have Saba and Suwat, two states so you will find Malaysian reality is made up of two realities, one the Malay peninsula and the other that is referred to as East Malaysia. You will see very fast that the cultural realities are quite different. East Malaysia is basically indigenous Malay which is basically Muslim. Islam came in around the thirteenth century. The basis for Malaysian nationalism today, the nationalist state is founded on the underpinnings of a notion of Malaysian cultural identity and Malaysian religion which is Islam. So in the official make up of the country which has been propagated in schools and being taught, the history of Malaysia starts with the great Malaccan period around the fourteenth/fifteenth century when it was one of the great trading ports and Malacca emerged as a Muslin country so officially our history is about 150 years. We cross over, this is the island of Borneo, Suratacans. If you take the S....... history which is not the official history of the nation, the ..... cave in S........ is one of the oldest caves in South East Asia where the skulls of the homosapiens have been found. It is believed that ............... testing of certain artefacts found. The Malaysian history can really go back 50,000 years but that is not the official history. The arrival of the Chinese from the fifteenth century onwards initially to central then later under the British period during the nineteenth century, large numbers came in.