We're really enjoying reconnecting with KL. More on all that soon.

In the meantime, I thought the excellent exhibitions we saw today at Ilham Gallery deserved a post of their own. This is one of the places I've missed. I don't think I've ever visited without being moved or inspired or informed (or all three).

There are two things on at the moment. The first is the inaugural Ilham Art Show, "an exhibition platform initiated to give artists in Malaysia the opportunity to experiment and make new work".

No particular theme was suggested or requested. And yet clear themes have emerged.

One is ancestry, often meshed with migration pathways and colonial exploitation.

Dhavinder Singh, for example, pays tribute to the work his grandparents did as night watchmen in Chan Sow Lin:



This is Tan Kian Ming's The Ancestor, commemorating the adoptive great-grandfather who came from mainland China as a migrant:


I have no photos, because I didn't try to capture the moving images, but Eddie Wong's Portrait of the Jungle People also commemorates his grandfather: "All we knew about him was that he left his family and 'entered the jungle' to fight the British. We call him a 'jungle person' -- san ba lou, a Cantonese term used to describe the communist guerrillas." The images are flowing and hallucinatory, complementing the unspeakably sad narrative, which commemorates the bravery not only of the fighter but also of the woman he left behind.

Ivan Lam's Unforgettable X pays tribute to his late grandmother, who was born in Guangzhou, China, but worked in a textile factory in Ipoh for most of her life:


Mimi Aslinda also creates using cloth. Born in Malaysia to Sumatran parents who migrated in the 1980s, she still finds doors closed to her because of her heritage. This work uses scraps of cloth from her parents' hijab factory to recreate a family portrait in front of a famous waterfall in Padang: "The use of the material signifies the family's livelihood and struggles over the years, her strong connection to her Minangkabau heritage, as well as the sacrifices her parents made in coming to Malaysia over 30 years ago."


Chang Yoong Chia's batik collection, meanwhile, offers "a glimpse into the landscape of profit, invasion, colonialism and exploitation as well as migration... The latex flowing out of the skin of the rubber trees is like the wax of the batik, which is paramount in forming the patterns on the cloth, but is removed once it has served its purpose, like the rubber tappers. I want to re-build a rubber plantation out of batik cloth and rubber tapping knives: a monument for forgotten rubber tappers."


There's much angst apparent in some of the works, their creators clearly expressing concern about some of the developments in contemporary Malaysia. Minstrel Kuik, for example, looks at the changing parameters of the house: "In Malaysian politics, the house of the people is in jeopardy... Now more than ever, we need to reimagine our broken house":





Unsurprisingly, the pandemic haunts the work of many artists. A group of woodcarvers from the Mah Meri group of Orang Asli, for example, have attempted to make some kind of compensation for the impossibility of holding funeral rites during the various lockdowns. They carved a sampan, incorporated into which are small figures representing those who died during covid's vicious progress. "The sampan is also symbolic of the 'sending off' of the covid-19 virus with the hope that the pandemic will come to an end." May it be...



Tetriana Ahmed Fauzi also created her flowing circles piece partly as a way of coping with the pandemic and MCOs, and it was produced in collaboration with students as part of an art therapy course at Universiti Sains Malaysia:




Haris Abadi's Surrender, meanwhile, references the "White Flag Campaign", which encouraged families who were struggling with severe financial problems during the lockdowns to ask for help by displaying white flags (the white flag video has turned out blue in my photo, for some reason):


Other pieces touched us because they reference places that mean something to us. Leon Leong's piece focuses on Kampung Baru, which we often walked through on our Sunday morning marches from Pekililing. His exquisite miniatures beautifully portray the culture of the area, and the threat that hangs over it:




From Borneo (although not our bit) came Living Light, by a village community from Ranau, about 200 km from Kota Kinabalu:


Yet other pieces were simply beautiful. Haffendi Anuar's Sites, for example, was inspired by memories of playing underneath his father's kain pelikat, and seeing how different the world looked from that place:



And another whose moving images I didn't attempt to photograph, Azzaha Ibrahim's After Monsoon, was a wonderful reminder of how everything -- even the random debris that arrives on beaches -- can be beautiful.

The other exhibition to be found at the Ilham at the moment is Ahmad Fuad Osman's Skola Gambar: Enrique de Malacca.

We've all heard of Ferdinand Magellan, of course, who has gone down in history as helming the first circumnavigation of the earth. Except he didn't, really, as he was killed on Mactan Island before actually completing the full circle.


Someone who perhaps did complete the full circle, however, is rarely talked about. He's Enrique, an enslaved Malay sailor who came into Magellan's service during the Portuguese conquest of Melaka in 1511, and provided the explorer with an important bridge between languages and cultures. We don't know -- but did Enrique make it back to Melaka? If so, then HE would have been the first person to truly circumnavigate the earth...

Whichever way, this was a great afternoon. Thanks to the Ilham Gallery, for again helping us to see things differently...