Orawan Arunrak, Lêna Bùi, Agus Suwage and more at A+ Works of Art
By Denise Lai

This is an opportune moment for us to consider what assumptions we carry about the mediums we neglect. In the case of watercolours, it can be hard to focus on how things have moved on since we were first introduced to a Constable landscape, or the exoticising landscapes of Malaya produced by British topographical watercolourists for the colonial eye. In the present exhibition, much of this is left behind for a partial to complete uphaul of the medium, looking instead to its potential to speak to contemporary concerns and to wring new and exciting forms out of its composite parts.

Across the exhibition, watercolour is now facing unexpected encounters with other materials including but not limited to gold leaf, flower dyes, silk screen, tobacco juice, and mini freezers. The medium is dragged from the representational to the somatic, where we see watercolours negotiating its presence under the influence of other art forms. Others take it as a springboard for looking at watercolour through the lens of its composite parts — water, pigment, surface, and artist — to experience our time in bits and to variously emphasise or erase our entanglement with each. Much of their reflections on this time carry forward these themes of stasis, frustration, repetition, and yearning for change that define the unstable imaginary of being in the present day. Here are multiple forms of the quarantined artist playing out their efforts to challenge what we take for granted, to pour over and to mark time.

New Attitudes

Orawan Arunrak, ‘Crossing’, 2021, watercolour pencil on photo, cardboard paper, transparent polymer paper, and metal clip, 29.7 x 42cm. Image courtesy of A+ Works of Art.

Orawan Arunrak’s drawings are sensitively rendered marks of watercolour pencil tracing grayscale photographs beneath. Her treatment of the medium is a suggestion for attitudes in coping through the stasis of our present day: the purpose is not to seek an end-goal or to penetrate the image, but to hover in that space between our gaze, the artist’s marks, and the photograph beneath, where the act of crossing occurs. Arunrak insists on this in-between place by presenting two photographs shrouded under a layer of ultramarine watercolour pencil marks, with analogous subjects depicted in a state of waiting. These are two photographs captured in January 2020 at Cái Bè, Vietnam, where the artist observed boats transporting flowers across to cities for the Vietnamese Lunar New Year. Slowly, she runs across the photographs with her pencil, and in doing so relives the event of waiting at the edge of the pier. Viewed from behind, we join her subjects in anticipation of that moment of crossing the river, but also that ideological crossing into that space between Arunrak’s marks and her photographs into which we can potentially advance. The gift of her paintings are to freeze us in anticipation, to remind us of the rewarding qualities of luxuriating in and contemplating over the experience of looking forward.

Lêna Bùi’s two watercolour paintings on silk and paper also demonstrate this intriguing renewal of the watercolour medium by observing its effects when applied on layered materials. In both works, the artist paints on a layer on thin silk with glimpses of colour from the painted paper below floating to the surface. Such an effect is used here to materialise Bùi’s thinking about past and future in relation to the ecological matters of our present, by creating, like Arunrak, this suspended gap between two surfaces: of air and of different times. The present series continues the artist’s recurring fascination with water and botany, and the various rituals, myths, and speculative fictions that emerge from people’s relationships to and actions upon them. Bùi turns to the subject of water and palm trees, to envision new protagonists conjured from their beings and the emancipatory potential of their histories.

For the artist, the story of water and the palm tree, a versatile genus speaking to a breadth of contemporary and global ecological issues — water salination, rising sea levels, industrial scale agriculture in oil palm plantations — offers the perfect springboard for this line of thinking. The fictions she conjures are auratic counter-parallel universes where motifs of palms and bodies of water evolve into ritualistic charts, beginning with the alchemic grey matter at the centre of both compositions from which explodes Bùi’s synthesiser-fused waves pulsating towards the edges of the composition. The results are splendidly rich and bizarre, testifying the possibility for watercolours to hint at the possibility for new systems and mythologies of nature. In the layering of their translucent murmurings, these watercolours also carry with them that awareness/fusion of past, present, and future, and the seeds of modern age’s destruction on our ecological systems.

Lêna Bùi, ‘Unwritten’, 2021, ink and watercolour on silk and paper, 60 x 80cm. Image courtesy of A+ Works of Art.

For Kentaro Hiroki, a shift in attitude involved looking up. Four watercolour paintings depict the changing composition of the sky above his neighbourhood in Thailand, captured with his iPhone and re-examined in the confines of his home. The slow, careful intricacy of Hiroki’s practice typically manifests itself in colour-pencil recreations of found objects, with particular attention to his observations of such objects and idiosyncrasies marking the passage of time. In contrast, he sees watercolour as a forceful reversal of this process: he now has to observe how the medium reacts to his movements on the surface, with its essential unpredictability and its yielding of results both lawless and unanticipated. But this time, representing his first serious experimentation with watercolours, Hiroki sees its redeeming qualities: its proposition to challenge the artist in overcoming stasis and to look elsewhere for signs of the insuppressible, sites of exchange, and common ground.

His skies are reconciliations with such ideas, the dwelling place of myriad determinations and histories of art. If he was to start afresh and to put aside his identity as an artist, which he could no longer sustain in this time, perhaps the sky with its absolute neutrality (i.e. the difficulty of referring it back onto ourselves, evading description through its infinite conceptions at all times) would act as the perfect foil for such a letting go of the ego. This resignation to time and to material occurs also on the acid-bound paper that he consciously chooses as his surface: impermanent and decayed papers aged-tinted with brown stains. This overwhelming convolvuli of whites, blues, greys, and yellows against the paper’s mottled imperfections re-enacts Hiroki’s submission of control to the irreducible particulars of the exchange between body, pigment, fibre, time, and the meteorological.

Rejecting Dilution

Another segment of this exhibition reveals how watercolours, when applied with a dry brush or layered intensively on the surface, can be built upon to produce a finish that is both thick and resilient. This method of application opens us up to histories and narratives that reject dilution.

Agus Suwage, ‘Borneo - The Missionaries and The Hornbill’, 2021, watercolour, ink, tobacco juice, acrylic on old note student book, 113 x 137cm. Image courtesy of A+ Works of Art.

We see this in the built-up fluorescent yellows of Agus Suwage’s ‘Borneo - The Missionaries and the Hornbill’, where the artist re-examines the history of the large-scale Christianisation of Borneo’s indigenous communities. Christianity first entered Borneo in 1847 with the arrival of Rajah James Brooke, who gradually established an Anglican mission loaded with “civilising” aims to morally and materially uplift the Dayak communities. In Suwage’s telling of the story, six indigenous youths are painted behind a yellow hand on the left, a nod to Michelangelo’s God in ‘The Creation of Adam’ with its index finger pointed in judgement. To the right, a half-hornbill, half-human figure, representing the symbol of the highest goddess for the Dayak peoples, turns towards the hand whilst gesturing in the opposite direction. Suwage’s message is clear: this is a time for countering ongoing processes of erasure and dispossession. With a surface composed of forty sheets of annotated sheets from a student’s notebook tied together with thread, Suwage transforms this palimpsest of thoughts and memories into a claiming space for autonomy and self-determinacy.

Chang Fee Ming’s two works, ‘In Search of Native Bandanese’ and ‘Remembering 8 May 1621’, likewise demonstrate the potential for the intense and solid application of watercolour to assert the imperative of remembering and retelling colonial histories. In both paintings the sizzling red of nutmeg skin and clotted touches of sweat on his figure’s foreheads offers us these histories with a startling realism. They elaborate on the history of Pulau Banda in Indonesia that marked the beginning of Dutch colonial expansion in Southeast Asia and the massacre of the Bandanese Orang Besar in 1621. ‘Remembering 8 May 1621’ weaves the story of the day where forty-four Bandanese chiefs were beheaded or quartered at Fort Belgica at Pulau Banda, placing in the foreground the island’s flourishing nutmeg trade which was claimed by the Dutch VOC and for which the Dutch continued the systemic decimation of the local Bandanese. ‘In Search of Native Bandanese’ jolts us to the present day where the artist presents portraits of locals living in the islands, captured during his trip in 2019 in his search for the dwindling native Bandanese population amongst the islands’ multiethnic population today. Chang’s visceral treatment of his subjects with their steroid veins and saturated skies is an urgent plea for our attention and consideration for the lessons we have gained from this history and, today, how we reflect on the actions of our former colonisers.

Chang Fee Ming, ‘Remembering 8 May 1621’, 2021, watercolour and silkscreen on paper, 56 x 76cm. Image courtesy of A+ Works of Art.

In Soe Yu Nwe’s multimedia painting, we see the potential for watercolours’ soft exterior to be built on the surface of the paper and combined with other water soluble media to create sharp and blunt forms. This method is applied in Nwe’s ‘Gunshot’ to support its gritty subject - the contemporary military atrocities in Hakka, the capital of Chin state in Myanmar. The present work continues the artist’s recent exploration of ink and watercolours representing her confined state, affected by both the pandemic and Myanmar’s military coup. Eight months into the coup, Myanmar continues to face unrest with a series of bombings occurring across the country (including one recently in her neighbourhood). ‘Gunshot’ is the artist’s startling and urgent document of her country’s grave reality, inspired by a photograph from a ‘Chindwin News Agency’ article depicting a cracked glass window pane punctured by bullets in Mindat Town, Chin State. Nwe’s recreation of the scene is equally documentary in its violence as it is hopeful; her addition of blood red to the original photograph as crisply smeared onto cracks as the glimmering streaks of white and gold leaf. It poses to its spectators an important question: are we inured by the documentation of not-so-distant violences of our times, or are we compelled to act because of it?

Conclusion: Stillness Spoils Water

Finally, we end with Chan Kok Hooi’s dramatic re-presentation of the watercolour medium in ‘The Song of the River’ and ‘The Spring in Winter’. Chan’s revaluation of the medium lies in his attention to the medium’s reaction to time, gravity, temperature, or the changing of seasons. In thinking about the properties of water, Chan turns to the saying “流水不腐”. Stillness spoils water. In order to become a painting, watercolours, to whatever extent, will need to flow. His horizontal cobweb of primary colours in ‘The Song of the River’ are results of him dripping paints from the stretched canvas standing vertically from the ground, which he then shook to control the flow and rhythm of each trail. The painting acts as a record of the painter’s optimism about the future and the possibility for further movement to be enacted by art and the artist.

Chan Kok Hooi, ‘The Spring in the Winter’, 2021, mini freezer, watercolour in watercolour palettes, paintbrushes, 47 x 48.5 x 44cm. Image courtesy of A+ Works of Art.

But it is with ‘The Spring in Winter’ where the artist makes his most extraordinary response to the medium. Two palettes, shaped like flowers with yellow and pink petals, are arranged inside a mini freezer with ice-buildup offering a snowy cushion for them to lay. The artist’s intentions were to explore the medium’s new forms and the alternatives and possibilities that arise from a radically different treatment of its material. The effect is hauntingly beautiful; here they are frozen in eternal time, forever firm and hopeful yet hiding the swelling and transforming of pigments underneath. It’s also fun to imagine the installation’s afterlife: the various moments the freezer will be unplugged from its electric source, when the watercolours resettle into their original forms and the process repeats. In water, composition and decomposition are working in perpetuity. When asked if he experimented with the material post-thaw, the artist commented that he did not find them to have changed at all. Perhaps we are more resilient than we give ourselves credit for.

‘This Time: Contemporary Watercolours’ provides a survey at once challenging and comprehensive of contemporary efforts to move forward. It speaks to a breadth of new ideas of what contemporary watercolours may be, using a medium at once familiar in its forms, but which, with attention to time and in dialogue with other art forms, becomes something with radically unfamiliar meaning.

“What we can be certain about is that such a gathering of artists consciously stretching the possibilities of the medium can offer some clarity of the familiar spaces where we can realign, recalibrate, and push on. ”

How have watercolours evolved with us and with our time? This is the question at the heart of this exhibition. Do contemporary watercolour’s forms merely mimic cultural trends and fashions in art, or was there something urgent about the need for its recalibration as some of these artists seem to suggest? What we can be certain about is that such a gathering of artists consciously stretching the possibilities of the medium can offer some clarity of the familiar spaces where we can realign, recalibrate, and push on.

This is an excerpt from an essay for the exhibition, ‘This Time: Contemporary Watercolours’, at A+ Works of Art Gallery, Kuala Lumpur, running from 30 October to 27 November 2021.