: LIEW KUNG YU EXHIBITION

The ‘Cadangan-cadangan Untuk Negaraku’ (Proposals for My Country) collection, by Liew Kung Yu is an outstanding representation of photographic artistry at a very high level. The larger than life multi-coloured, expression is a captivating collection of abstract representation of Malaysia. Liew uses methods he had picked up in years as a photography student and scholar to construct this masterpiece in its own right. One cannot but draw similarities from this works and that of his mentor and teacher Fern Helfand’s 1986 work ‘Tourists at the Great Wall’ (Langenbach 2009), where she used pictures of tourists at the Great Wall of China taking pictures and combined them in a panoramic collage and giving an eerie feeling of being watched by the work as much as you are watching the work. Liew, so as not to be accused of mimicry used this influence of collages and developed his own mastery and style. He inculcated jigsaw cuttings, scratching, painting, sculptural constructions, and stitched photo-costumes for street performances (Puteri Oriental) into his expressions. The amalgamation of all these techniques when looking upon the finished works, gives a sense of life to the pictures which have a 3 dimensional illusionary perception to it. Most obvious in his works is the photo-landscaping he employs to tell his story which at first glance resembles a simple celebration of the diversity, history, cultures and classification of modern day Malaysia; but at a closer glance the abstract cannot but be insinuated of the works. As stated in Ray Langenbach’s article ‘Staged and Askew: Liew Kung Yu’s Interrogation of the Lens’ (2009), “The modernist kitsch of Komtar has led him to other manifestations of political, monumental and architectural kitsch”, referring to Liew’s earlier work ‘Komtar’ which at first glance comes off as a “paeans” to Komtar but is actually a parody or “humorous critique of urban decay”.

When interpreted in the context of Anthony Milner’s ‘Historians Writing Nations: Malaysian Contests’, you may appreciate the abstract ideology behind his works. Milner tells of Malaysia and its fight for and eventual achievement of independence (Merdeka) and what it meant to the different stakeholders, beneficiaries and citizens of the Malaysian Nation (Bangsa Malaysia). He speaks of the unification of a nation but the inconsistency in the narration of the sequence of events that led to the ultimate goal, indirectly referring to the division or segregation among the different races that share a common history and homeland. Different races of the Nation-state have different interpretations of the roles that each race played in the establishment of the state which still reflect in the social and political status that each race holds even in this modern day. In Liew’s work, he distinctively envelopes Malaysia and its people in a frame in each photograph but the irony is within these uniting frames there are still individual envelopes and groups used in classifying the populace. A good example of this is in the piece ‘Bandar Sri Tiang Kolom’; he celebrates the aesthetic in the less glamorous in his four different collages. One shows the beauty of royalty, another the lavish, a third the middle-class and then the rural and finally a fifth dedicated to his vision of the future.

All-in-all, the Liew Kung Yu exhibition portrays impressive qualities and when closely studied, you cannot help but notice the humour, witty sarcasm, a uniting message and is a typical kitsch of an artwork.