Liza Ho and Collaborations through The Back Room
A year of vivere in Kuala Lumpur
By Ong Kar Jin
Vivere pericoloso—living dangerously, borrowed from the Italian, was declaimed by Indonesian President Sukarno in 1964 on the 19th anniversary of the nation’s independence. It was only one year before the ill-fated 30 September coup which would dethrone the charismatic president, install General Suharto in power, and spark bloody purges across the archipelago. The phrase was later picked up and popularised in the West through a novel, The Year of Living Dangerously, chronicling the story of expatriates in Jakarta witnessing the coup. Since then, the phrase has been used to mean an annus horribilis, a year of catastrophe and misfortune.
Liza Ho. Image courtesy of Paulius Staniunas.
2020 is an easy candidate for this with the pandemic, recession, and political turmoil. Liza Ho, the gallerist behind The Back Room, has perhaps increased exposure to this owing to her cosmopolitan coming-of-age across three countries. In Guatemala where she grew up, the Congress is in smoulders, torched in anger over police brutality and a controversial budget that saw cuts to health and education, even as politicians’ meal stipends were increased. In Hong Kong, the birthplace of her parents, protests have rocked the city for years and now pro-democracy activists are being jailed. In Malaysia, where she is now, political crisis after political crisis has destabilised government and put everybody on edge. Vision 2020, the grand masterplan articulated by strongman Mahathir Mohamad in 1991 that projected Malaysia to become a “psychologically liberated”, “economically just”, and “fully moral” society by this fateful year is in shambles.
In the art world, this year has seen great temptation to consolidate and fortify bases; a great turn inwards that emphasises a “core” group that will help galleries ride the volatility. In many cases, the pandemic has only seen divides grow between gatekeeping galleries and struggling artists, between powerful collectors and small-time buyers, between well-funded institutions and intimate collectives. Everybody is trying to answer the question: How do we survive in dangerous times? Even as artists struggle and small spaces close, some collectors continue to make big purchases, and international auction houses are reportedly doing more business than ever. For some, they seem to have found the answer in emulating the expatriates in The Year of Living Dangerously—to pack up what one has and get as far away as one can from the chaos.
If this is the new normal, then there is truly nothing new or normal about it.
James Seet, 'Memories', 2019, exhibition installation view. Image courtesy of The Back Room.
But there is more within vivere pericoloso than just danger. When originally uttered by Sukarno, the phrase carried with it risk, but also promise, of transformational potential. To Sukarno, tahun vivere pericoloso was what could propel the nation forward to something more than the sum of its parts, to something more than a bunch of islands united by a history of Dutch colonialism.
2020 was, in many ways, preceded by disappointment for Liza. Our Arts Projects (OAP), the previous project she co-founded, shut its doors in 2019. Amidst the casual nonchalance of the Zhongshan Building, where Liza is Creative Director, OAP stuck out like a sore thumb. I remember being struck by the white walls and hushed silence, in contrast to the jovial shouting and sticker-adorned stairwell beyond its glass doors. OAP was a white-box gallery attempting to do the work of a collective; its aspirations were at odds with the actual practice of running a traditional gallery.
The Malaysian art market is notorious for being conservative and exclusive. Contrary to “common sense”, The Back Room made it explicit that it wished to target budding art enthusiasts rather than established collectors. With sticker prices to build a new art-buying public, The Back Room also built on Liza’s experiences of managing the Zhongshan Building, an urban renewal project that has transformed low-rise residence into an arts space. Here, she saw the rise of a young, affluent middle-class interested not in buying art as a commodity, but in learning about art.
Gallery space. Image courtesy of The Back Room.
In truth, Liza was tapping into an already shifting tide in the wider ecosystem of art production outside the closed circuits of galleries. In recent years, many younger artists have eschewed the format of the gallery in favour of selling their work directly on Instagram, focusing on corporate sponsorship as well as building their social media audience. These artists are understandably reluctant to participate in the intimidating art circuit and the rodeo that is the art show.
But the role of a gallery is not simply as a marketplace. It is a platform to connect artists with a wider network of curators, writers, collectors and dilettantes. In other words, the gallery is concerned with both commercial and intellectual production, especially important in a country with a relatively small public-funded museum infrastructure. What is missed when an artist chooses not to participate in a gallery is the discomfort of continuous exposure to new ideas, and the rigour of sustained and directed critique. What is sacrificed is an anchor to art not as market, but as discipline.
“What is missed when an artist chooses not to participate in a gallery is the discomfort of continuous exposure to new ideas, and the rigour of sustained and directed critique. What is sacrificed is an anchor to art not as market, but as discipline.”
The Back Room thus combined the experimental spirit of the collective with the no-nonsense savvy of a gallerist’s ability to be a platform and connector. Rather than being a power broker, Liza’s approach has instead been a nod to the mixed heritage of the back room. It alludes to the tucked away cramped small space where “whispers” are heard, but also refers to a place of documentation and administration, where the “back-room staff” have resided.
Whisper: A place for experimentation, for the emerging, for the alternative, for conversation. The Back Room is not a loud space, but revels in the intimate, the personal, and on connection.
Back-room staff: A repository, an archive, where the gallery provides support, institutional memory, gossip, and a friendly face to navigate the corridors of the art world.
‘Carving Reality’, 2020, exhibition installation view. Image courtesy of The Back Room.
This dual role for the Back Room has been evident in the various exhibitions the space has taken up in the past year. In ‘Carving Reality’, the space drew from regional networks to bring together the woodcut prints of various activist and artist collectives in East and Southeast Asia. Art Gallery Weekend 2020 was also a highlight in fostering close collaboration, where 5 galleries in Kuala Lumpur distributed the works of 5 artists across 5 locations in the city, creating a sprawling art journey for interested visitors to traipse across town. These exhibitions were fine displays of the philosophy of the Back Room at play, as a space where threads can converge, and cooperation is favoured over competition. Liza says this simply, “We should be able to grow together. I’m not trying to be the exclusive hotshot thing in town.”
Salman bin Soon, ‘The Tyger and the Navigator’, 2020, exhibition installation view. Image courtesy of The Back Room.
Liza is often quite happy to step back from the spotlight and to be flexible to artists’ vision of their work. Liza quips, “I don’t want to just hang works and be done with it. People should feel very different, and almost be confused as to whether it’s the same space as the last exhibition.” In ‘The Tyger and the Navigator’, art historian Simon Soon takes on an alter ego Salman bin Soon, reimagining The Back Room as a staging ground for a wayang, pulling together digital detritus across the public domain to construct a visual barge that floats across long winding histories —colonial, indigenous, and in between— of the Nusantara region. The Back Room is not a white box gallery; each exhibition carries with it a unique sense of space, and the venue is reborn each time in a different mould.
Perhaps the most striking exhibition was ‘Rasa Rahsia’, a solo exhibition by long-time visual artist and former university lecturer Riaz Ahmad Jamil. It marked his first solo in 20 years after a hiatus from the public eye. Part of the same generation of artists as Ahmad Shukri, Suhaimi Wahab, and Jeffrey Idrus, graduating from Universiti Teknologi MARA (UiTM) in the 1980s, Riaz’s influence has been understudied and next to his peers such as Jalaini Abdul Hassan, he is virtually unknown. ‘Rasa Rahsia’ allowed the gathering of a creatively charged community that recognised his enduring influence, and also provided space for the veteran artist to express novel predilections.
I have often fondly thought of the “back room” as the back of shoplots in Chinatowns across the world, where relationships are forged over day-to-day interactions and in the quiet moments between hectic bursts of energy. I believe it is no coincidence that Liza’s father ran an eatery selling chow mein and chop suey in Guatemala City among a small community of Chinese immigrants.
The Zhongshan Building community. Image courtesy of The Back Room.
Of course, it takes a community to make a Chinatown: The Back Room is merely one lot in the ecosystem of The Zhongshan Building. Liza built upon her experience in the art world to bring together an idiosyncratic but strangely complementary set of tenants. “There are very few places in Kuala Lumpur that are truly diverse, not just in their makeup, but also in the way different groups interact with each other,” says Liza. “We have a lot of fun here at Zhongshan, and it’s a real community where we laugh, play, and work together all the time. I feel like that really shows in the work the Back Room produces.” Here, punks share cigarette breaks with sourdough bakers, art historians clink beers with human rights lawyers, and of course, artists spend late nights building communities. Liza sees such intersections as core to her work.
The Back Room is no doubt a product of that synergy and is now more than a year old. 2020 has been tough, but it has also held promise. This year has only heightened the need for the gallery to understand its role in the ecosystem and to create spaces for the growth of both emerging and established artists. The new normal cannot be defined by a turn inwards, towards consolidation or isolation, but instead needs to expansively build connection and community. It is in this spirit that in 2021 the Back Room is collaborating to work on “gallery takeovers”, taking its cue from Instagram takeovers, by artists, academics, and others.
“The new normal cannot be defined by a turn inwards, towards consolidation or isolation, but instead needs to expansively build connection and community.”
Chuah Chong Yan, ‘27 Years of Lazarian Delights’, 2020, exhibition installation view. Image courtesy of The Back Room.
The first of these takeovers will be by Chuah Chong Yan, a multidisciplinary digital artist who previously exhibited his explorations and documentations of his fictional universe at the Back Room in ‘27 Years of Lazarian Delights’. Continuing to inhabit characters in his vast worldbuilding exercise, Chuah plans to turn his eye from drawing to text, using OpenAI’s GPT-3 algorithm to generate text, thereby inviting 3 artificial writers with distinct AI personalities into his mini literary festival.
Also in the works is a collaboration with Studio Kanta, a design studio situated in the Zhongshan building, which will turn the Back Room into a showcase of interior and furniture design. After design, the Back Room will turn to history—an as-of-yet untitled exhibition of historical prints, images, and paraphernalia of Melaka’s legacy by the sea put together by historian Felice Noelle Rodriguez, architectural researcher Lim Sheau Yun, and myself.
At heart, what differentiates these takeovers from regular exhibitions is Liza’s willingness to surrender the space to collaborators while still providing her expertise and network. “I want to tap into the energy of Zhongshan and how different kinds of people gather here”, she says simply with a shrug. “The Back Room is small, our costs are lower, so we are more flexible.” It is this flexibility that lends each takeover transformational potential: The Back Room can be designer home, literary festival or time machine.
By letting go of control, we can create new possibilities. Sometimes, vivere pericoloso is not only peril, but potential, propulsion, and progress. Ars longa, vita brevis.
About the Author
Ong Kar Jin is an independent writer and researcher based in Kuala Lumpur.
