Fyerool Darma at ASIA NOW Paris Asian Art Fair: by Roger Nelson

2023年10月10日 - 10月22日
  • Fyerool Darma’s elegantly cacophonous practice—which spans video, painting, sound, text, sculpture and installation, as well as a growing panoply of craft techniques—is concerned with asking questions about and making sense of life, both online and offline, in a techno-tropical postcolony that is both beautiful and dystopian. The artist weaves together comedy and critique, and examines the interconnections between aesthetics and politics at the local (Singapore) level, as well as in regional (Southeast Asian) and global (contemporary) contexts. He has presented works at the Singapore Biennale (2016) and Seoul Mediacity Biennale (2023), as well as at major museums in Australia, Korea, Malaysia, the Philippines, Singapore, and the United States, and at galleries and fairs in the United Kingdom, Indonesia, and elsewhere. Fyerool’s work is held in major private and public collections across Southeast Asia, including at the Singapore Art Museum. He lives and works in Singapore. 

  • 0. A Mistake

    When asked “what is a pantun?” Fyerool Darma modestly defers to the internet: “according to Google, pantun (Jawi: ڤنتون) is a Malay oral poetic form used to express intricate ideas and emotions; an intangible heritage recognised by UNESCO.” ¹ For readers in Paris, the Malay pantun may be less familiar than the poetic form called pantoum, popularised in the mid-19th century (an age known for its defiant romanticism, daring realism, and of course diabolical colonialism). Fyerool calls a pantoum “a misspelling of pantun by Victor Hugo, Charles Baudelaire, and the Western world,” but tempers this chastising of the antiquated spelling error with a gesture towards its generative and poetic potential. Fyerool proposes that a pantoum may also be considered “a sample of a pantun” or even “a placeholder for the fluidity and malleability of words, which (just like images, objects and even subjects) are constantly sampled in a web of circulation.” ² Baudelaire’s misunderstanding of the Malay verse form called pantun was—like many failures—oddly productive, Fyerool suggests. 

     

    With these ticklish statements about pantuns, the artist registers the dynamic cross-cultural flow of languages and aesthetics, while also speaking from an unambiguously and unapologetically local and regional (geographic and epistemic) position. For Fyerool, this is not a contradiction, but rather a celebration: of the possibility for looking at and thinking about phenomena that are global and historical from a standpoint in the contemporary and in Southeast Asia. The artist embodies a kind of post-crisis contemporary cosmopolitanism that the curator Karin G. Oen has described as a commitment to “care about the idea of a universal community, and to embed compassion and open-heartedness for others, for difference, in one’s worldview.” ³ Charged encounters between the past and the present, the here and the elsewhere underpin and animate Fyerool’s artistic practice.
  • 1. A Feather

    1. A Feather

    Several motifs recur in Fyerool’s works. Alongside images of palm trees and other tropical vegetation, sunsets, and graffiti, he regularly incorporates fabulous fashions into his projects. Often, these elements are combined to poke at the tensions between what the curator Wong Bing Hao calls “the cliché of Singapore, and Southeast Asia more broadly, as an idyllic tropical getaway” and a sense of these environments as “radioactive and alien.” ⁴

    For centuries and more, fantastical costumes have often been a source of fascination, adding both dramatic flair and semiotic sumptuousness to many charged cross-cultural encounters. Southeast Asia—a region known for its cultural, linguistic, and geographical diversity, as well as for its tropical abundance—is no exception. When the celebrated Melaka-born scholar and educator Munshi Abdullah (1796-1854) wrote about his experience seeing English ships stopping in the port city of Melaka during the time of the bloody Java War (1825-1830), he described “styles of clothing that I had never seen before in my life,” noticing that “the English officers wore various kinds of uniform, some having tiger skins, others hats with cock-feathers dyed pink and black all round the brim, others trousers of animal-skins, and tunics made of cloth striped like a tiger.” ⁵ As well as being exotically unfamiliar (and amusingly impractical in Southeast Asia’s tropical climate), the Munshi saw that such outlandish attire conveyed both the pretensions and the power of the white colonisers; living in the postcolonies, we know that their flamboyant finery was backed by their violent force.
  • 2. A Cloak

    Almost two centuries later, Fyerool Darma is also drawn to garments both garish and gorgeous, as signifiers of intricate and intersectional personas and ideologies, in history and today. Indeed, his playful yet politically pointed artworks metaphorically (and often literally) weave figures and tales from the past into the fabric of the present. 
     
    For Fyerool, obscure historical references and ubiquitous contemporary cultural phenomena are co-eval and equal co-conspirators. We see this most clearly in Kitschmensch with many failed flags of 1963 Maphilindo Confederation (Reworked) (2021-2023). The work takes the form of a patchwork spacesuit, in which generic 21st-century touristic images collected from various sites in Southeast Asia are stitched together with flags proposed for Maphilindo, a union of the Southeast Asian nations of Malaysia, the Philippines and Indonesia which was mooted in the 1960s in the context of the Cold War and decolonisation, but was never realised. Perhaps the work may provoke questions; could it be that travelling to the moon or other planets has proved an easier feat that effecting lasting transnational solidarities between decolonising neighbours within Nusantara, the Malay world? The Poseur (After Ballads) (2019) is a digital video which centres on a single human figure whose clothing changes incessantly, ranging from quotidian 21st-century fashion to ostentatious precolonial regalia. In one moment, he looks like a friendly neighbour, in the next, he is a vagrant; he is dressed like a sultan, then dressed to go fishing; he looks like an alien, then like an apparition. 
     
    History, for Fyerool, is a living thing, a mask or a cloak or a spacesuit which is made anew each time it is worn. The artist takes seriously the guiding intelligence of his moyang or ancestors; with humour and humility yet with a hardened resolve, Fyerool’s practice positions Southeast Asia as a fertile site from which to theorise the complexity and globally interconnected community of the contemporary. 

    In recent years, scholars across Asia and its diasporas have increasingly called for knowledge production to be decolonised, arguing that an over-reliance on Western philosophical ideas hampers our understanding of the ideas, art and culture of today’s world. ⁶ Yet old habits die hard, and for many contemporary artists (in this region as elsewhere), canonical European thinkers remain touchstones, even for projects that seek to speak from another geographical, cultural, or ideological position. Resisting—perhaps disobeying—this tendency and imperative, Fyerool is steadfast in his efforts to learn instead from local lore and regional epistemologies. Beneath each of his artworks is a tightly woven tapestry of citations of his moyang, who he places in unexpected dialogue with contemporary mass culture, memes, and the artist’s other chosen teachers. In The Poseur (After Ballads) (2019) and Poietics of Pantun/Pantoum (2021-2023), the names of the artist’s chosen ancestors and inspirations are literally paraded across the screen, like the lyrics in a karaoke video, in jarring yet exhilarating juxtaposition with the digital images that coincide with these talismanic texts.
  • 3. A Stitch
    Installation View: To A Faraway Friend: Beyond Afro-Southeast Asian Affinities, 2 July—2 October 2022, ASEAN Culture House, Busan, Republic of Korea

    3. A Stitch

    Many of Fyerool’s bodies of practice unfold over many years; many of his works reanimate previous projects in new forms. Parts of Kitschmensch originally appeared as an earlier installation in an exhibition that foregrounded research on “affinities” between Africa and Southeast Asia, during and after the Cold War period. ⁷ His moving image works—including both The Poseur (After Ballads) and Poietics of Pantun/Pantoum—have been exhibited online and offline, both as standalone videos and as components within a larger installation. From 2017-19, Fyerool was artist-in-residence at NUS Museum, developing a project called After Ballads which seeded many of his subsequent works that engage with poetry, textiles, and Southeast Asian historical figures. Since 2019, in his l入ndsc_p€$ project Fyerool has been investigating th military and industrial histories of vinyl and other polymers and plastics, as well as their contemporary uses in art and commerce, through formal play. 

     
    This durational texture in many of Fyerool’s works foregrounds the labour involved in making them. This labour comprises not only the kinds of “artistic research” that are celebrated (and perhaps implicitly gendered as masculine), but also the kinds of supposedly menial or unskilled endeavour—sewing, stitching, cutting, editing—that are usually made invisible (and perhaps implicitly gendered as feminine). To make art, for Fyerool, is to resist but also inevitably and inescapably to participate in late capitalist production.
  • 4. A SOUND

    Often, the internet is the arena in which the artist sees different historical moments converging and merging, like the threads of warp and weft, or like the tunes of melody and harmony. Fyerool describes online discussions of historical phenomena (such as the failed Cold War-era Maphilindo proposal) as “not an echo but more like a reverb.” ⁸ The artist’s chosen metaphor is rich and complex. In sonic terms, an echo trails after an initial sound, and diminishes in intensity over time; an echo is a naturally occurring phenomenon. By contrast, reverb contemporaneously accompanies whatever sound it embellishes, adding a richness and fullness that is electronically produced and can resonate for as long as desired. Fyerool’s suggestion that history when discussed on the internet becomes “not an echo but more like a reverb” implies that online chatter—which is often anonymous and deterritorialised—can be understood as a living force that does not follow after history but instead participates in and makes it. 

     
    As well as being durational, Fyerool’s practice is tirelessly collaborative. The full title of Poietics lists all the many individuals and collectives who helped the artist make the work; throughout Poseur, Fyerool’s collaborators are credited in a looping scroll of text. These gestures decentre the artist and honour his creative interlocutors and co-labourers; they highlight a communal approach to making. 

    The artist’s interest in collaborations extends from the way he chooses to make work to the stories he chooses to research. Speaking about the Kitschmensch spacesuit with its geopolitical references to the optimism of decolonisation in the face of the Cold War, Fyerool says: “I was really inspired by this idea of the collective moment in that period also where states…within Southeast Asia [were] working towards independence.” ⁹ Similarly, writing about the place of poetry in contemporary culture, he affirms that “Pantuns no longer belong to a specific community, like other remixed things.” ¹⁰ For Fyerool, the collectivity of the moyang or ancestors guides and graces collaborative approaches to contemporary artistic practice today.
  • Installation view of ‘Poietics of Pantun/Pantoum (featuring b*ntangLV786, berukera, jaleejalee, Lee Khee San, ToNewEntities, @sgmuseummemes and moyang from NUS Museum’s South and Southeast Asia Collections and Autaspace)’, 2022 

  • 5. A Void

    Kitschmensch with many failed flags of 1963 Maphilindo Confederation (Reworked) [featuring Tasyo, Nyai Ontosoroh, Efund, tatteredemalion and Exoducks and Manni Wang], 2021- 2023

    One of the first works which won Fyerool acclaim in Singapore was The Most Mild Mannered Men (2016), commissioned for the Singapore Biennale. The installation comprises two plinths. On one sits a sculpted bust of a British white man named Stamford Raffles; the other plinth is empty, save for the inscribed name of a local leader, Sultan Hussein Mua’zzam Shah. Together, these two men signed a treaty which led to the founding of modern Singapore; in most historical accounts, however, Raffles is given much greater prominence than Sultan Hussein. 


    The Kitschmensch spacesuit—which is anthropomorphic in form, yet empty—brings this earlier work to mind. Like The Most Mild Mannered Men, this ambitious new work juxtaposes an anthropomorphic presence with an absence, a void. The presence of a figure shows us the absence of a body. Seeing that we still prize space travel (and Raffles), we realise that we have discarded the utopian dream of Maphilindo (and the legacy of Sultan Hussein). For Fyerool, the formal juxtaposition of presence and absence dramatises the conceptual interplay between remembering and forgetting. 


    Two centuries ago, Munshi Abdullah composed a pantun, which opens with the following lines: 


    Of what avail a coloured dress 
    If the pattern’s ill designed? ¹¹ 

    Fyerool Darma offers no answers, only more questions. Within the emptiness lies cacophonous possibility.

  • Dr. Roger Nelson is an art historian and curator, and Assistant Professor of Art History in the School of Humanities at Nanyang Technological University, Singapore. He researches modern and contemporary art in Southeast Asia, with a recurrent concern with questions of historiography and method. He was previously a curator at National Gallery Singapore. He was the 2022 recipient of the A.L. Becker Southeast Asian Literature in Translation Prize, and is currently working on a book about artistic art histories. He is co-founding co-editor of Southeast of Now: Directions in Contemporary and Modern Art in Asia, a scholarly journal published by NUS Press. Roger has worked with Fyerool Darma on commissions for exhibitions at National Gallery Singapore (2022), ADM Gallery at Nanyang Technological University (2023), and MAIIAM Contemporary Art Museum (2024). Roger’s essay on art and literature in Southeast Asia, which centres on Fyerool’s work, is forthcoming with Routledge (2024).
     

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    ¹ Fyerool Darma, “Fyerool Darma,” interview by Roger Nelson, in Living Pictures: Photography in Southeast Asia, ed. Charmaine Toh (Singapore: National Gallery Singapore, 2022), 272–273.

    ² Ibid. 

    ³ Karin G. Oen, “My Own Words: Cosmopolitanism as Pandemic Response,” Art & Market, 1 October 2020. https://artandmarket.net/analysis/2020/10/1/my-own-words-cosmopolitanism-as-pandemic-response-karin-oen [accessed October 2023]. 

    ⁴ Wong Bing Hao, “Fyerool Darma: Another Day in Paradise?” Frieze, 5 July 2019. https://www.frieze.com/article/fyerool-darma-another-day-paradise [accessed October 2023]. 

    ⁵ Munshi Abdullah [Munsyi Abdullah bin Abdul Kadir], The Hikayat Abdullah [1849], trans. A.H. Hill, Journal of the Malayan Branch of the Royal Asiatic Society 28, no. 3 (171) (June 1955): 81-82. 

    ⁶ See, for example, the works of Dipesh Chakrabarty, Syed Hussein Alatas, Kuan-Hsing Chen, and many others. 

    ⁷ See: http://afrosoutheastasia.com/ [accessed October 2023]. 

    ⁸ “Artist Interview with Fyerool Darma,” Konnect ASEAN, 13 October 2022. https://www.konnect-asean.org/resources/to-a-faraway-friend-artist-interview-with-fyerool-darma/ [accessed October 2023]. 

    ⁹ Ibid.  

    ¹⁰ “Fyerool Darma” in Living Pictures.  

    ¹¹ Munshi Abdullah, “Hikayat,” 78. https://ia800304.us.archive.org/27/items/autobiographyofm00abdu/autobiographyofm00abdu.pdf