11th Asia Pacific Triennial of Contemporary Art

The Sin Lian Huat Boys Documentation 2021 / Digital prints on photographic paper / Six sheets: 59.4 x 84.1cm (each) / Courtesy: The artist As a repository for memory and a site for creation, the built environment plays a central role in the work of Harold Reagan Eswar, better known as Egn. Living and working in Kota Kinabalu, the seaside capital of the East Malaysian state of Sabah in northern Borneo, Egn was an early member of the influential Cracko Art Group (CAG) widely credited with invigorating the street art culture of Kota Kinabalu, to the extent that it is now a major mode of visual expression in the city and something of a tourist attraction. At the same time as working in the town planning office of City Hall, Egn produced satirical, cartoonish canvases and murals, organised exhibitions and explored different tactics for community participation. Inspired by recollections of a visit to Japan handwritten onto a map of Tokyo, Egn’s ‘spatial biographies’ unite the various aspects of his practice, using his architectural training to draw on the deep well of personal and collective memory that accumulates around specific structures, spaces and geographies. Dari Kali ke Durian Tunjung ( From Kali to Durian Tunjung ) 2021 is an AutoCAD drawing featuring architectural plans of Egn’s childhood homes, focusing on spaces associated with memories of formative moments, from the humorous to the traumatic. The work is divided in two: the upper half depicting Egn’s first home in Kampung Kali in the interior Keningau province, where 25 family members shared a single toilet; and the lower half presenting the home and neighbourhood to which Egn’s family relocated when his father found work in the oil fields of the urbanised island of Labuan. Each floorplan is surrounded by English- language labels, sprinkled with idiomatic Dusun and Malay terms explained in an alphabetised glossary, while QR codes locate spaces on maps and link to image banks. In the work, Egn recalls encounters with the ghosts and demons of his grandparents’ Chinese spirituality, his family’s gradual conversion to Islam described through the dwindling of the household pig sty, and the avocado tree whose fruit settled debts at the village sundry shop. The artist recalls youthful episodes of experimentation with the mechanics of sanitary plumbing, clandestine cigarettes, envying rich children whose bicycles had bells, and the gutter that served as the final resting place for shuttlecocks, balls and a rubber sandal. Amid the nostalgia are moments of darkness — domestic violence, suicide attempts and harrowing sexual abuse — expressed through the recollection of a child. After the intensely personal exercise of creating this work, Egn began inviting broader collaboration on his spatial biographies, beginning with 21 members of the teenage skateboard crew he grew up with in Keningau for The Sin Lin Haut Boys Documentation 2021. As with Egn’s own bittersweet reminiscences, the boys’ recollections provide a vivid account of the area’s transformation from village to housing estate, detailing makeshift skateparks, neighbourhood hangouts and encounters with local gangsters and police. Traumatic memories of gang violence and natural disasters occupy the same geography as fondly recalled cassette shops, a first kiss and ‘the best roti canai in Keningau’. Such is the density of experience that the anecdotes are colour-coded, with a shorthand developed to map everything from fights to boredom to parties, as seemingly innocuous events provide an insight into the kampung’s complex ethnography. In this work, and a new piece collecting memories of the urban centre of Kota Kinabalu, Egn engages in what he describes as ‘social data collecting’, accumulating individual experiences that occurred in parallel — and at times overlapped — to compose a memory bank of the shared spaces. They are collective histories from an outsider’s perspective, as concerned with informing the future as they are with mining the past. REUBENKEEHAN BORN 1980, KENINGAU, MALAYSIA LIVES+WORKS INKOTAKINABALU, MALAYSIA HAROLD ‘EGN’ ESWAR ARTISTS+PROJECTS ASIAPACIFICTRIENNIAL 86 — 87