Weaving with Yee I-Lann
By Lim Sheau Yun

This is a winning entry from the inaugural Art & Market ‘Fresh Take’ writing contest. For the full list of winners and prizes, click here.

Yee I-Lann, ‘Borneo Heart’, 2019, off-set print, 59.4 x 84.1 cm. Image from https://borneoheart.yeeilann.com/.

Central Intelligence Agency, ‘Azimuthal equidistant projection centred on Kuala Lumpur, Malaysia, 3⁰10ʹN., 101⁰42ʹE. 10-71.’ (1971). Image from the Library of Congress.

‘Borneo Heart’ begins with a provocation: to posit Borneo at the centre of the world. In a print from 2019, the artist Yee I-Lann collages an anatomical heart over a crude (like oil) Google Maps screenshot, bisected by a shaky red line representing the equator. Borneo is the locus of enunciation; its audience is the world.

Yee has long articulated the multiple dispossessions of Borneo, certainly by colonialists, but also by the extractive Malaysian nation-state and its stranglehold on borders and citizenship. Her photo-media works used collage to collapse hegemonic time and space: in the case of her seminal 2009 ‘Study of Lamprey’s Malayan Male I & II’, she literally puts herself in an image of a Malayan man as a critique of colonial empiricism. But in 2016 and 2017, Yee took the step of relocating her practice from Kuala Lumpur to Kota Kinabalu, Sabah. It was then she began this radical world-making project, collaborating with dancers, videographers, and especially, with women weavers from inland Keningau associated with Pusat Kraftangan Sabah and from maritime Pulau Omadal. In Yee’s explorations of the medium of weaving, her work has found a renewed exuberance.

Yee I-Lann, with weaving by Kak Sanah, Kak Kinnohung, Kak Budi, Kak Kuoh, Kak Turuh, Makcik Lokkop, Abang Barahim, Abang Tularan, Adik Darwisa, Adik Alisya, Kak Daiyan, Adik Dayang, Adik Tasya, Adik Dela, Adik Enidah, Adik Norsaida, Makcik Bobog, Kak Roziah, Abang Latip, ‘TIKAR/MEJA’, 2020, Bajau Sama DiLaut Pandanus weave with commercial chemical dye, variable sizes. Image from https://borneoheart.yeeilann.com/.

‘Borneo Heart’ sets up a series of dualities – Tanah/Air (Land/Water), Tikar/Meja (Mat/Table), Figure/Ground, Here/There, High Art/Low Art, Artist/Collaborator – and proceeds to unravel them. In the sprawling 60 pieces of ‘TIKAR/MEJA’ (2020), vividly coloured neon mats are displayed like paintings on a wall, each with the single figure of a table woven into its grid. If the Old Masters maintained that vertical painting represented a world, then the vertically hung tikar is a sign, drawing from its dual association of the tikar as a space for communities to gather and the table as a sign of patriarchal, administrative bureaucracy. The strongest pieces in the series are less Rorschach and more rippled moiré, the overlapping grid lines forcing the viewer to squint to make out the blurry figures and ground, each contained within it its negative. While one could be tempted to read these works in easy opposition pitting one form of knowledge against the other, the weave forces the viewer to engage in the space of the blurry in-between, not purely of one world or the other, but entangled, embroiled, and always in the making. The parallax is both visual and cultural.

Yee I-Lann, with weaving by Julitah Kulinting, S. Narty Raitom and Julia Binti Ginasius, ‘3 hovering Louvres’, 2019, split bamboo pus weave and matt sealant, 193 x 320 cm. Image from https://borneoheart.yeeilann.com/.

These collaborations do not seek to smooth the process of art-making in establishing one party as expert and the other as maker. Rather, in coming together, the works generate productive obfuscations, where personal history, cultural meaning and form are explored through the act of weaving. The dream-like ‘3 hovering Louvres’ (2019) suspends louvred windows of tropical homes in axonometric, indexing both the familiar windows of a childhood bedroom and the famed European cultural institution. The windows are set against a meandering weave pattern invented in 2018 by Julitah Kulinting, Lili Naming, Shahrizan bin Juin and Yee they named mansau ansau, Dusun for “to walk and walk, not knowing where you are headed.” The weave repeats but is uneven and differs at every turn, an apt metaphor for this spirit of fellow travelling.

Yee I-Lann, with weaving by Kak Roziah, Kak Sanah, Kak Kinnuhong, Kak Koddil, ’Tikar Reben’, 2020, Bajau Sama DiLaut Pandanus weave with commercial chemical dye, 22 x 6,279cm. Photo by Andy Chia Chee Shiong. — Yee I-Lann, with weaving by Kak Roziah, Kak Sanah, Kak Kinnuhong, Kak Koddil, ’*Tikar Reben*’, 2020, Bajau Sama DiLaut Pandanus weave with commercial chemical dye, 22 x 6,279cm. Photo by Andy Chia Chee Shiong.

To insist on weaving is also to resist the encroachment of the peninsular, where the federal government accorded batik and batik painting the status of national art forms, spreading them throughout the nation as gospel cloth in a time of cultural consolidation. Weaving heals. ‘Tikar Reben’ (2020), a narrow tikar measuring 62.79m long, is a physical list of Bajau weaving techniques. But it is also a bridge between worlds. In a 2021 video, women carry the tikar in a procession between Kak Roziah’s house on Kampung Darat Omadal (Omadal Land Village) to Kak Budi’s house in the Kampung Air Omadal (Omadal Water Village), where most stateless Bajau Sama DiLaut weavers working with Yee live. Wading waist-deep in water with the ribbon held over their heads, these women weavers remake borders, etching neon lines that connect in a time of division.

While Yee’s political and historical concerns still shape her work, there is an unguarded intimacy to these works – emojis and karaoke classics alike find their place on mats – moving from the realm of critique to the utopian space of possibility. On the eve of yet another lockdown in Malaysia, in times of death and isolation, ‘Borneo Heart’ is an inexorable shout of joy.

“While Yee’s political and historical concerns still shape her work, there is an unguarded intimacy to these works – emojis and karaoke classics alike find their place on mats – moving from the realm of critique to the utopian space of possibility. On the eve of yet another lockdown in Malaysia, in times of death and isolation, ‘Borneo Heart’ is an inexorable shout of joy. ”

An ‘&’ icon on a tikar ends the exhibition. The top curve of the ampersand is exploded, bisected by a Google location mark. Unlike loom weaving prevalent in the West, where the warp is held rigid in a frame as a weft is passed through, inland weaving in Sabah starts from the centre and expands outwards in an ‘x’ or a ‘+’ grid form. Borneo is where we begin. The ampersand beckons; this is just the start of this tikar.

The opinions, findings, and conclusions or recommendations expressed herein are those of author(s) and do not necessarily reflect the view of the ASEAN Foundation, ASEAN Secretariat, and ASEAN-Korea Cooperation Fund.

The views and opinions expressed in this article are the author's own and do not necessarily reflect those of A&M.