Dr. Choong Kam Kow

I am delighted to write a few lines about Ms Anna Chin and her works as she is teaming up with her colleague, En Norlisham bin Selamat, to hold a joint exhibition at G aleri MIA in June 2017 in conjunction with the 50th anniversary celebration of Malaysian Institute of Art (MIA). Anna was a colleague of mine lecturing at the Foundation Studies Department when I was the President of MIA. I have since retired in 2009 but Anna continued to remain as a lecturer in MIA. With a fine art background (BFA, Oklahoma City University, USA) Anna has dedicated herself as an influential lecturer inculcating her students towards creative development. When she was attached to the Foundation Studies Department, she has imparted her knowledge on art fundamentals to her students and guided them to develop creative skills and know-how which are so important in their fine art and design course training. She is now the Head of the Fine Art Department and I believe she will continue to work closely with her colleagues to impart creative principles, skills and knowledge, and guide the students in their career development as future artists of our nation. I always believe that as an effective lecturer, one must practice what he/she preaches. A lecturer must pursue or engage in his/her professional practice actively besides performing the teaching duties so that he/she can be a good example or role model for the students. This means that, as a fine art lecturer for example, he/she must remain working actively in painting, drawing, sculpting or any creative works with frequent participations in both local and international art exhibitions. The art lecturers must also actively attend exhibition openings and art forums so as to keep abreast with current art development and happenings outside the campus. The students are and will always be inspired by their lecturers’s professional practices and achievements, and look up to them as role models in the field of their studies. Anna has been a practicing artist besides her teaching engagements ever since she first graduated from MIA. She has been actively taking part in exhibitions both locally and abroad as recorded in her curriculum. The evolution of Anna’s creative path began in the late 1980’s. The series of early works produced before and around 2000 conveyed Anna’s engagement in family affairs, her initial parenting with her children and the bondage with her parents, her father in particular. This series of works showed dominant images of young girls of different races sitting on swinging board (‘Urban Trap’, 1998-2001), swinging around a post and floating in the air above the playground (‘Birth & Growth’, 2001) or resting on trunk blocks against the sea and sky (‘Two Sitting Malay School Girls’, 1998) which denoteds happiness and cuteness of children in our multi-racial society. There were two other important works portraying dining tables; one of which was covered with the national flag (‘Lunch over National Flag’, 2001) with display of a plate of fish and a can of longan. And the other in dominant chrome red against blue shade background (‘Dinning Table’, 2001), on the other hand displayed an assortment of food, stuffs, vegetable items, a herbal kettle and even image of a live rooster. In these works, as I can understand she was making attempts to covey her efforts in building and maintaining a happy family environment. All her works have shown undertones and flavor of Expressionism and Surrealism. Anna’s works produced around 2010 and thereafter have continued to show further development along the path she started earlier. She has further deepened her visual thoughts and broadened the complexity of composition. She moved on to deal with psychological aspects of empathy, love, spirituality, anxiety and challenges faced by her as a single mum in the process of parenting and raising her children as well as expressing her thankfulness and appreciation to her late father who remained as a figure of authority, wisdom, power and guiding force in her mind. As a single mum, she must shoulder all the responsibilities, face challenges, fought against odds and hardships. And yet at same time, she must unconditionally render love, care and made sacrifices to pursue family happiness, financial sustenance and parenting besides the heavy teaching workload as a lecturer. All her works are centered around these human nature of psychological complexities. In her works, Anna attempted to reflect the psychological complexity as stated above which I must say is very challenging to deal with these psychological aspects in paintings. However, Anna has managed very well in dealing with these aspects visually as seen in her series of works in this exhibition, in particular the ‘Toleration’ series. Formal elements were well handled where contrasting elements of organic and geometric forms and shapes are juxtaposed to convey the notion of contradictions, conflicts and discords as experienced in our materialistic world. Colours were rendered in the Expressionistic manners (like Edvard Munch in ‘The Cry’, 1893) to reflect the passion of love, happiness, excitement, ecstasy, hope and/or anger, sorrow, anxiety, confusion and disappointment as a result of personal experiences in the real world conditions. The treatment of forms has leaned towards the Surrealist and Expressionist approaches on one hand and structural geometry of Hardedge painting on the other; as to further symbolize the notion of contrasting events, forces of confrontation, challenges, fighting, push and pull, solid and void or ying and yang relationships. Surprises and shocks, sometimes pleasant and sometimes disturbing, are often found in the canvases where the viewers will see frequent appearances of unexpected events or illogical situations which could not have happen in conventional paintings. In ‘Toleration 1’ , the side-view skull of a portrait was hacked open with the inter-locking tube-liked brain exposed and air-liked curvy shapes flowed out from it and then turned into something else such as the shape of heart, fruit, eye, etc. A cubic box containing a sea shell was hanging in the air over the landscape background which does not harmonize, in the conventional sense, with otherwise the domination of organic shapes. In ‘Toleration 3 , sharp edge divisions are seen with facets of geometric and organic shapes juxtaposed to serve as background to a dominant profile of human portrait presumably the image of her late father. A geometric shape was fitted into the head which again, was cut open and exposing a mushroom like brain. Air-liked curvy lines flowed out from the back of the head which moved upward to form a half-cut hollow shell–liked thorny form containing the image of a baby. Bloody colour of fluid in organic forms flowed out from the throat to cover the chest area, a shocking scene indeed. The daring combination and juxtaposition of organic and geometric forms together with passionate imaginary forms and cold rational hardedge construction may be interpreted as an attempt to express the psychological complexities of the artist. The viewers may be drawn to associate themselves with the works by Marc Chagall (‘I and the Village’, 1911 for example and Salvador Dali. There were even greater shocks, unexpected events and fantasies as the viewers may see in ‘The Persistence of Memory’, 1931 by Salvador Dali. Just like Salvador Dali, there are illogical placement and discord combination of objects here and there in Anna’s works. However, logical and non-rational appearances are tolerated and accepted in visual arts when dealing with sub-conscious phenomena like dream and fantasy. According to Sigmund Freud, the time and space relationship and sense of position/direction in dream are not in the some order as in our conscious world. This is why illogical placements and combination of objects and forms are acceptable in works of visual arts. ‘The Growth Within’ is another interesting painting. The portrayed images and forms in this painting were intended to symbolize the contradicting or confronting relationships between the negative and the positive, the soft and the hard, the fluid and static, the vulnerable and the invincible phenomena. Brilliant hues and tonal values were employed to create the contrast effects of the fluid organic shapes and static geometric forms, the textural and plain surfaces, the soft and hard masses which in turn appropriately manifested the co-existence of opposing and confronting phenomena in the materialistic world. The overlapping of forms and shapes has further enhanced the spatial effect and depth which helps to unite the configuration. According to Anna, she intended to interpret the beauty of the inner emotion, passion and states of spirituality that she gained and held throughout her personal growth as a woman and later as a mother for the last 40 years. In this painting, she symbolically portrayed the beauty and greatness of women’s, mothers’ and single mums’ fighting spirit against odds, challenges and pains with sacrifices and unconditional love to pursue happiness for their loved ones. By sharing these notes, I believe the viewers, the students in particular, shall be able to understand and enjoy Anna’s paintings on display in the exhibition as much as I do.

The Writer: Dr. Choong Kam Kow, Hon. Doctor in Arts (RGU. Scotland, UK), MFA (Pratt Institute, USA), BFA (NTNU, Taiwan).