The Sixth Asia Pacific Triennial of Contemporary Art

173 Shooshie Sulaiman Who’s afraid of the dark? My father, of Scottish heritage, is a great storyteller, and I have many eloquent memories of him telling stories about his life. My parents have always been very open and no question was taboo in our household. There was, however, one question I never posed — about my mother’s life in Malaysia. She was born in Malaysia to Chinese parents and came to Australia to attend university in the 1970s, but all other details are shrouded in darkness. I was the only child with Chinese heritage at my small primary school in far north Queensland. Apart from my mother’s face, the faces on the nightly news were the only representations of Chinese and Malay people that I was familiar with. Many years later, I still feel a sense of the unfamiliar while viewing Shooshie Sulaiman’s Darkroom 2009, an installation of photographic portraits of men and women from around Malaysia, posed alone, in pairs and in groups. Sulaiman found these portraits of nameless people in second-hand stores around Malacca. The portraits, dating from the 1950s and 1960s with their sepia tones, reference the time preceding the 13 May 1969 race riots. 1 Sulaiman was born after the riots, but lives with their legacy as a person of both Malay and Chinese heritage. In Darkroom , she brings together approximately 50 portraits, transforming the faces of the portrait sitters using flower petals, collage, ink and paint, and mounting the images in found frames. The petals of pressed lily, lotus, poppy, tulip and, particularly, the hibiscus are used to soften the faces of the male figures. Hibiscus rosa-sinensis is the national flower of Malaysia, although it is not native to the country. Its five petals represent the nation’s five principles: belief in God, loyalty to king and country, upholding the constitution, the sovereignty of the law, and good behaviour and morality. These were first announced at Independence Day celebrations in 1970 in response to the events of 1969. Sulaiman’s use of single hibiscus petals in Darkroom is thus a subtle device through which she questions Malaysia’s national principles and laws. Women are chronically under-represented in some aspects of Malaysian society, especially in politics, where they make up only ten per cent of parliament. Sulaiman counters this by using flower petals to soften the dominant representation of men, and brings women’s issues to the surface by painting over the women’s portraits with red ink, with titles like ‘menstruation’. Sulaiman is also interested in the slippage that occurs in the process of trying to define genders, which, like race, dominates identity politics. She creates ambiguity by partially covering female portraits with paper laden with text and titling them ‘masculine’, and using flower petals as a mechanism for feminising the male portraits. My parents, sister and I have very rarely been captured in the same frame. Our collection of photographs of us in pairs or trios is better able to represent my family as a group of related but independent people. Single group photographs tend to display a false sense of unity; although the family is all smiles, many other frames reveal frowns and tensions. Portraits of a nation also tend towards a false sense of unity. The Malaysian Government describes the nation as a place where ‘Malays, Chinese, Indians and many other ethnic groups . . . have influenced each other, creating a truly Malaysian culture’. 2 It may be argued that Darkroom , as a collection of nameless faces, is better able to display the diversity and multiplicity of stories — as well as hint at the lost ones — that create the Malaysian national portrait. The portraits of these nameless faces are installed in an ‘open house’, a replication of the library in Sulaiman’s former Kuala Lumpur residence, a small wooden building behind the National Art Gallery and the National Theatre — two of Malaysia’s major art institutions. The ‘open house’ is an ongoing metaphor in Sulaiman’s work — she makes herself and her work accessible via open spaces. She opens her home for art exhibitions, in keeping with the Malaysian festive tradition of opening your home to family, friends and strangers to celebrate cultural or religious festivities. For Darkroom , Sulaiman opens the doors of her library to us, inviting us to join her in celebrating the ambiguous and fractured nature of Malaysian identity. Ellie Buttrose Endnotes 1 On 13 May 1969, following the 10 May Malaysian general election, Chinese–Malay race riots broke out in Kuala Lumpur. A state of emergency was declared, and there were officially around 200 deaths, although unofficial figures are far greater. 2 Tourism Malaysia, <http://www.tourism.gov.my/en/about/culture.asp> viewed October 2009.