Datum:KL 2011 Kuala Lumpur Architecture Festival

re: VIEW KL, Constructing Urban Perspectives is a group photo exhibition organized by Datum from 3-18 July @ Map KL, including works from photographers Eiffel Chong, Erna Dyanty, Lim Thian Leong, Minstrel Kuik, Nadia J. Mahfix, Nikt Wong and Shafina Sheridan.

Taman Seputeh, 2011

100x150 cm Hand with a Brick@minstrel kuik
I am not architect. 
I am photographer who lives in the space created by unknown architects. 


Technically, a photographer deals with light and color, frame and viewfinder, composition and structure. Philosophically, a photograph is a building for time and space.

A photographer looks for landmarks for the memory but he or she knows that such effort will be eventually in vain.
Someday, a building will fall.
It is a myth to see how man’s ambition leads to sculpt the Nature, and romantic beholder to create postcard views from the landscape.

If cars stop for the pedestrians and no acid-splashing motorist attacks the innocents, then walking will make sense in this city.


 
150x100 cm Worker@minstrel kuik


20x30 cm Gated@minstrel kuik
 
I live in Taman Seputeh at a double-storey terrace house. My room is on the third floor and its balcony has become an open-air studio in which images are constructed with the consideration of the background: the balcony and the view it provides. My living environment has longtime played an important role in my photographic practice because it challenges me to look at the everyday space and to see how new possibilities of thinking could actually escape from the routine of seeing and doing of a photographer.So far, the buildings are there.

I am not architect. A photograph is not a building for time and space.
A photograph is only a temporary tent for visitor like Time.  
 
 
100x150 cm Guard@minstrel kuik  



 
20x30 cm Gated 2@minstrel kuik
installation view

Where you are is not where I am.

OPEN STUDIO - STUDIO 18

Gertrude Contemporary presents work by our current Artist in Residence Liew Kwai Fei.

DATE: Saturday 28 May, 11.00am – 4.00pm
PLACE: Studio 18, Gertrude Contemporary

Exhibition Title: am.a.teur
With work by guest artist Minstrel Kuik

Liew Kwai Fei’s residency has been supported by the Australia-Malaysia Institute (AMI) Visual Arts Residency Program.
The artist would like to acknowledge the following individuals and institutions for their generous support: Gertrude Contemporary, Australian High Commission, Rahel Joseph, Anthony Pelchen, Minstrel Kuik, Valentine Willie Fine Art, Taysy, Leon and Chee

My new series "Gold Changed Everything" besides Liew's work.

Gold changed everything.

In the month of May, Melbourne's weather reminded me of Brittany with its four seasons in a day. Thus, there was very little possibility for me not to look at Melbourne with prejudices. But then, I was in the city for the first time in my life, deeply touched by the beauty of trees in the gardens and parks. In the Royal Botanic Garden, Egypt has been successfully relocated to the southern land by a postcard view of palm trees. The magnificent weeping pine was planted by the Iranian queen in 1974 during her visit. For years, plants from other continents have rooted in Melbourne and managed to adapt themselves to the unpredictable weather. The Japanese banana tree suffered quite a bit though.

All the new worlds have been mapped by man's curiosity and reproduced in miniatures in his immortal gardens. I find it impossible for my mind to rest upon the virgin landscape because gold has changed everything.


It starts with a "M".




The month of May is full of surprise.

The queen has no reason to be depressed.







I thought I knew his name.

靜物 Still Life

Hao Ming, December 2010

Street Scenes, Market Place in Pantai Remis, 2008

merry christmas happy new year ! 聖誕節快樂 新年快樂 !! joyeux noël bonne année !!!

Xiao Hang is 18 years old.

The March, 2010

Please go to the website http://www.vwfa.net/3YC2010/ for further information about the show.

Curator’s Note:

minstrel kuik as a photographer continues to create a personal community of images that looks at individuality and collectivity as well as the past and present through the lens of Malaysian cultural identity. The March and Radical Chic Collar focus on such concerns through photography and textiles, the latter representing an experimental phase of the artist’s practice. The March is a new body of work that runs in parallel to the minstrel’s ongoing series Mer.ily, Mer.ily, Mer.ily, Mer.ily which looks at Chinese Diaspora as well as individual experiences of place and family in the artist’s home town of Pantai Remis. The March lifts 4 sets of images from Mer.ily and configures them in a long line that traverses through the gallery space. Running sequences of couples and friends -- mainly women-- walking in front of the soon to be demolished Pudu Jail wall murals, or riding motor cycles returning home from a fireworks festival, are interspersed with shots of the artist father’s mango tree in Pantai Remis and images of a photocopied drawing of Astro Boy flying against a blue sky. Her human subjects were unaware they were being photographed as the artist hid behind trees or stood in the distance randomly taking images. This spontaneity of process hints at a type of anonymous human fragility as well as the artist’s own isolation from her subject and personal loneliness at that time. minstrel states that anxiety can be comforted by populated public spaces but the work in the gallery addresses the context of the exhibition space itself. Looking at form and sequence she attempts to transform the mode of photography into a more objective experience of art. The succession of the figures and the title The March allude to a politicized notion of conformity and link to notions of social restraint that continue in her textile piece. Radical Collar Chic a series of hand made collars hung from the architectural beams of the gallery punctuate space even further, in order to reinforce notions of collective control and individuality. Ideas surrounding blue-collar manual workers and white-collar professionals are subverted to become a humorous take on the masses and the constraints of social and economic structures that reduce the personal to the public. Journalist Thomas Wolf coined the phrase radical chic itself in the 1970s in relation to the shallow adoption of political causes by high society in order to appear fashionable. This reference easily translates into a Malaysian context but comments upon the gallery space itself as a decadent or safe space that allows for such types of ambiguous juxtapositions. The playful prints of human butts on the fabric of the collars are an allusion to many Malaysian social taboos and political events. However through playful strategies overt references remain under the censor’s radar and become yet more subtle metaphors in contemporary art.