The Seventh Asia Pacific Triennial of Contemporary Art

Phuan Thai Meng makes paintings that pose conundrums. His enormous canvases detail the landscapes of contemporary Malaysia, but he shows them in decay and ruin, as if prophesying a less prosperous future. The paintings are meticulous photorealist representations, but strips hang down from the canvas, ruthlessly exposing the painterly artifice that has imposing concrete freeways covering modest plywood supports. What seems most solid and enduring in the world — whether the actual built structures that are depicted or the artist’s capacity to paint convincing renderings of them — is shown to be illusory, or even worse, a delusion. This is a profoundly critical enterprise. Like many younger Malaysian artists and intellectuals, Phuan Thai Meng is unsparing in his views of the way society is structured, or literally, in this case, how it is built; by implication, he takes issue with the entire edifice of development. This ruthlessly analytical account is on a massive scale: the work Phuan is making for APT7 measures three by ten metres, and so slyly (if openly) appropriates something of the physical scale of the massive constructions he is examining. The artist has stated: ‘This particular dimension aims to create a physical tension through scale, allowing viewers to both locate themselves within the landscape and be dwarfed by its monstrous urbanism’. And, as writer Simon Soon astutely observed about earlier works: ‘Thai Meng’s paintings take after the scale and composition of a mural. In this fashion, their narratives possess distinct qualities of mural paintings, which are ethical, instructive and exhortative.’ 1 Here, a canonical example of graceful modern freeway construction, usually celebrated as an engineering marvel, is shown cluttered with untidy constructions and advertising. If the late-model cars parked underneath are evidence of wealth, they are not zooming along these freeways but, ominously, are parked and empty. Indeed, Phuan’s entire landscape is a perfectly framed inversion of the accepted order: the monument in the sky presses down on the urban scene, and the foliage hangs in a verdant jungle emptied of human habitation. Like previous, similar, oversize landscape paintings, such as The Road to . . . 腐 2009, The Luring of [] . 流水不腐 , 户枢不蠹  2012 was first meticulously painted from a collage of various photographs of Malaysian sites, then deliberately sliced away. 2 To again quote the artist: ‘Such a gesture aims to go beyond the surface of both painting and subject matter, searching for hidden truths beneath the veneer of progress and materiality.’ 3 These interests have been evident in several recent solo exhibitions. In ‘Made in Malaysia’ in 2009, the paintings Bait and Rewards , both 2009, showed lurid, sticky pills and sweets, painted in a cheerfully post-pop idiom, but evidently toxic. They are grossly magnified to emphasise their threat: Rewards , with its huge lollipop, measures nearly two metres by three metres. Paintings of faceless politicians were featured in the 2011 solo exhibition ‘Mapping The Homeland: We Are Proud of You (?_?)’, amongst other more pointed visual denunciations of current development. As curator Eva McGovern commented: ‘Phuan Thai Meng is known for painting an unsettling picture of our contemporary experience.’ 4 Paradoxically, this super-realist painting has emerged from a flourishing post-conceptual art practice in Malaysia, especially in cosmopolitan Kuala Lumpur. Rumah Air Panas, or R.A.P., the influential artist collective of which Phuan Thai Meng was a founding member, comprised a number of younger artists. 5 The name of the group is richly evocative, translating from Bahasa Malaysia as ‘home (or place) of hot water’, and refers to the hot springs at its original site, the government-sponsored postwar settlement of Rumah Air Panas. This was one of a number of housing developments intended to be a bulwark against social unrest, prompted particularly by the fear of Chinese Communism in Asia. With the group’s name knowingly inflected by the history of their home base, the members of the group have worked in a variety of artistic modes and media, but often with an emphasis on exploring current social issues through their art — hence the catchy acronym R.A.P. Malaysia is a developing country, with all the stresses and strains that this implies. Phuan Thai Meng’s project opens up fault lines in the nation’s relentlessly optimistic narratives. Papering over the cracks in the body politic only to expose its fundamentally shoddy construction, Phuan Thai Meng calls into question the purpose of much contemporary painting, and thus holds all artists, himself included, to account. The Luring of [] . 流水不腐 , 户枢不蠹 demonstrates that skill is always directed to ends that must be scrutinised, and that every citizen has only to look closely to see what is hidden behind society’s facade. Julie Ewington 1 Phuan Thai Meng, APT7 Proposal, Valentine Willie Fine Art, Kuala Lumpur, 2012, unpaginated. See also Simon Soon, in ‘Returning to painting as painting’, in Tukar Ganti: New Malaysian Paintings [exhibition catalogue], Valentine Willie Fine Art, Singapore, 2008, <http://www.vwfa.net/sg >, viewed 15 August 2012. 2 Snow Ng, Valentine Willie Fine Art, email to the author, 8 August 2012. 3 Phuan Thai Meng, APT7 Proposal. 4 See Phuan Thai Meng, Mapping The Homeland: We Are Proud of You (?_?) [exhibition catalogue], Valentine Willie Fine Art, Singapore, 2011; and Eva McGovern, ‘Your country needs you’, unpaginated essay, kindly supplied by the author. 5 Originally formed in 1997 as a loose group of artists, R.A.P. maintained a space in the Rumah Air Panas area of Kuala Lumpur’s Setapak district from 2000. See R.A.P. , <http://rumahairpanas.wordpress . com/a-brief-history-of-rap/>, viewed 15 August 2012. For a thoughtful discussion of photorealism and post-conceptual currents in Phuan Thai Meng’s work, see also Suraya Warden, ‘Reality: Recent conceptual adventures of Phuan Thai Meng’, in The WE Project [exhibition catalogue], Richard Koh Fine Art, Kuala Lumpur, 2010, <http://rkfineart.com/past.html >, viewed 15 August 2012. PHUAN THAI MENG Papering over the cracks 179