The Second Asia-Pacific Triennial of Contemporary Art exhibition catalogue (APT2)

Wong Hoy Cheong was born in Penang. His father is a second generation immigrant from China with working-class roots who married into a well-off peranakan (fifth generation Straits Chinese) family. Settled mostly in Singapore, Penang and Melaka, the Chinese p~ranakan initially nurtured a hybrid Sino-Malay culture, but with the coming of the British to the Malay Peninsula in the late eighteenth century, they assumed Western cultural airs as well. However, Wong Hoy Cheong's uncles remained poor rubber tappers and persistently Chinese in their cultural behaviour. Of his childhood, Wong Hoy Cheong remembers the orally transmitted family mythology of oppression suffered at the hands of the Japanese during the Pacific War. Wong Hoy Cheong has often assumed the stance of the coldly objective marginal man in his works. In no small part this is due to his perceptions of his kinship history that tell a tale of a people poised between clashing economic and cultural conditions. The 'Migrants' series of drawings brings this history together and vigorously claims the virtue of marginality in precipitating a vigorous and sustained creative force. The artist's path towards marginality was guided by his lengthy stay in the United States, where he studied. His 'American' paintings, exhibited in university galleries in Amherst, Boston and NewYork, are almost invariably figurative: they disclose an American underclass in the thrall of Hooper-like postures of still and quiet despair. During his American sojourn Wong Hoy Cheong galloped from one style of painting to another. His influences included Diego Rivera, African sculpture and Japanese woodcuts. Even so, the subject matter and the appearance of the figure as prime energy loomed over the chaos of eclecticism. On his return to Malaysia, Wong Hoy Cheong took up the cudgel of the dissident jousting against the hegemony of abstract expressionism in modern Malaysian art. In his paintings and writing he derided the sterility of abstract formalism that studiously cultivated attitudes which avoided pressing social issues. For Wong Hoy Cheong the disclosure of the social context argued for a return to the figure in local art, a venture that found him to be empathetic with a growing band of significant young artists, including Raja Shahriman, Tan Chin Kuan and Bayu Utomo Radjikin. The detention without trial in 1987 mainly of opposition politicians and social activists under the Internal Security Act evoked a series of paintings and a video that propelled Wong Hoy Cheong into the forefront of a burgeoning dissident movement in Malaysian art. Of this body of works, the large painting, Sook Ching (which literally means 'purify by elimination') is the most potently reflective. By inference, it connects two historical episodes of oppression: that experienced by the Chinese Left Some dreamt of Malaya, some dreamt of Great Britain (from 'Migrants' series) 1994 Charcoal and photostat collage on hanging paper scrolls 190x150cm Collection: National Art Gallery, Malaysia during the Japanese occupation, and latterly that suffered by those incarcerated in the 1987 Operation Lalang.The juxtaposition of a 'cool' stance, brutal imagery and vivid colours is made coherent by a focus upon the paradigm of oppression. The exhibition which included Sook Ching also included a video documenting oral histories of the Japanese occupation and a movement-based performance exploring a contemporary psyche towards historical oppression. The nouveau riche, the elephant, the foreign maid or the discreet charm of the bourgeoisie 1991 (the title is from a Bunuel movie) tested the parameters of interfacing visual texts, a technique that encompassed the 'Migrants' series of drawings. In the latter work, the artist's own family history is the source of the experiential data that coax ruminations about the global travail of migration and the discord and displacements resonant in tales of merging social classes.Wong Hoy Cheong has been diligent in unearthing images of historical objects laden with social contexts; the fervent task of concrete, 'scientific' documentation is a major trait of his recent work.The repetitive appearance of the images in the series give them the weight invested in codes of cultural meanings. One of the most powerful and frequent presences is the twinning of the rubber tapper's sickle (signifying the family's labouring class antecedents) with the socialite's horse (indicating the unseemly act of aspiring after a higher British culture). These motifs ••Hoy Cheong Lives and works in Kuala Kuba Bharu, Selangor, Malaysia Right Marriage of arubber tapper to agirl dressed as the Virgin Mary in aschool play (from 'Migrants' series) 1994 Charcoal and photostat collage on hanging paper scrolls 190x150cm Collection:National Art Gallery, Malaysia cannily invite us to ponder upon the bonding of class and culture.The artist quotes Marx in claiming that 'The tradition of the past weighs like a nightmare on the brain of the living'. Science and technology in the form of computer– programmed windows are further serviced and domesticated by the act of interactive categorisation, crystallising the narrative strategy of the series. As Wong Hoy Cheong explains: 'The rectangle ... is the main window. Within it are smaller "windows" ... opening into a different time, space and subject matter. These "windows" are fragmented realities which are interconnected; they activate and transform each other's meaning.' This strategy induces us to perceive Wong Hoy Cheong's people as archetypal, decontextualised beings who are as ubiquitous as the blade grass or lalang, nature's plenty which is so integral to the artist's mythology. The history of migration in Malaysia as perceived in literature and art is frequently burdened by sentiment and prejudice stemming from constrasting political agendas. The unrelenting 'objectivity' disclosed by Wong Hoy Cheong's tale of migration, precisely the mark of the outsider, is a bracing antidote to the flood of emotions hitherto expended on this traumatic global issue. Krishen Jit, Head of the theatre department at the National Arts Academy, Kuala Lumpur, Malaysia ART I s T s : sou TH AN o sou TH - EA s T A s I A I 107