Strange Bodies by Jerome Kugan & Yang Zhongda [2020]
[20.08.2020 — 15.10.2020]
Strange Bodies is an exhibition of two suites of new drawings by two artists, each taking up the polyvalent possibilities in chimeric figurations of the human body. Chimeras frequently connote the mythic and the godly; we think of fantastic creatures, the Tengu in Japan or the Garuda — a humanoid body with a beak and wings — as well as monkey gods and other depictions of enlightened beings. The Hayagriva in Tibetan and Japanese Buddhism, for one, is sometimes described as a horse-head avalokitesvara, one that in some depictions bears one or more horse faces upon their visage. Yet historically chimeras were visual designations of the foreign other, the stranger encountered on distant sojourns and carried home in travellers accounts. Pliny the Elder described 'a tribe of human beings with dogs' heads, who wear a covering of wild beasts skins, whose speech is a bark and who live on the produce of hunting and fowling' encountered in India, as well as in Africa.
Rather than staying safely outside and apart in ways that permit us to think of our domestic environs as a welcoming inhabitation, safely familiar and monocultural, the other has a way of showing up in our fundamental definitions of home and country. Thomas Hobbes uses the metaphor of the canine man to describe his conception of inter-human relations in a state of nature prior to society and government, a view of man as wolf to man that Jacques Derrida has examined as a self-eradicating figure that at once configures the human as a bestial species, a political animal, while at the same time politics producing a hierarchy that marks the human as a superior force of life. Hobbes' frontispiece of the Leviathan demonstrates this hierarchy, the absolutist power that governs all is drawn as a monarch with a body composed of hundreds of citizens turned towards the face of that power.
The chimera crosses and unfixes the human/non-human divisions - between the human and the non-human animal, between the landbound and the aquatic, between the creaturely and the vegetal. But the Leviathan frontispiece also points out those chimeras that confuse the embodiment of one human person with another. A man named Chris Long from Nevada, USA was found to have two sets of DNA in his cells - his own, as well as those of the German man who provided his bone marrow to Long in a transplant that was crucial to Long's treatment for leukemia. People may also exhibit a micro-chimerism, when a pregnancy initiates a process when small numbers of cells migrate from the foetus into the bloodstream and travel into different organs of the pregnant body. Chimerism pushes us to rethink the singularity of our bodies and selves, and offers an awareness of how our description of bodies as porous and multi-being are made in the language of fear and warfare; our bodies are 'under attack', 'fighting' an 'invasion' of foreign bodies. Chimeras, drawn from myth, medical case studies and history - demonstrate not only a re-working of our expectations of the dis-ordered and the natural, but also an imagination of bodies that survive, evolve, and energetically inhabit a post-crisis future.
In his suite of six drawings, Kugan takes his cue from our historical misapprehension of the merlion as anything more than an inventive representation of a tourist-friendly island, and reinterprets the names of actual creatively life with deadpanned wit. These creatures, mostly of marine and oceanic origins, become portraits of sardonic misunderstanding; the upturned sightlines of agony that a Jesus figure bears transformed into an eyeroll at the indignity of wearing a crown of dishevelled tentacles. What is crucially at the centre of Kugan’s wit is disbelief, not only with our expectations of normative sense but also with the literalism that extends out from the proselytizing schools of religious hermeneutics into public life.
For Yang, his seven new works are cheeky re-visualizations of slang, insults and queer codes as differently formed bodies. Yang makes tongue-in-cheek observations of ‘new and weird bodies’ influenced by the aesthetics of the macabre, the fetish, and the surreal. These works reference the culture of plagues, LGBTQI and kink subcultures, human fears and stupidity, as well as pandemic-related events during this year of global crises. Deploying visual hyperboles and unexpected juxtapositions - one drawing features harnessed muscular shoulders and neck attached to swollen mammaries often seen in male pregnancy kinks, accompanied by transformed, over-extension areolas - words and codes take on new absurdities.
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Jerome Kugan was born in Kota Kinabalu, Sabah, in 1975. Over the years, he has worked as a writer, musician, event organiser, and activist. He was one of the co-founders of Seksualiti Merdeka, a sexuality and gender rights fest in Kuala Lumpur, which ran from 2008 to 2011, when it was infamously shut down by the Malaysian government. He also co-edited, with Pang Khee Teik, “Body 2 Body”, the first anthology of queer Malaysian writing, published in 2009. He also co-organised “KL Sing Song”, an annual concert series featuring Malaysian singer songwriter, from 2005 to 2010. In 2012, he founded Rainbow Rojak, an independent monthly queer dance party in Kuala Lumpur, which is still active.
Yang Zhongda believes that a strong technical facility and sincerity are the foundation of all good artworks. He studied Western Painting at the Nanyang Academy of Fine Arts, Singapore. He has exhibited in group exhibitions and art fairs including “Affordable Art Fair” (Singapore, 2013), “Expression” (Dahlia Gallery, Singapore, 2012), and “Primeval: A Group Exhibition” (Goodman Arts Centre, Singapore, 2012). Zhongda’s paintings serve as a visual response to the evanescence and growing nihilism of our time. Beginning from abandoned places, prosaic objects, and decrepit memories, he re-constructs these forgotten or neglected visuals as a means to record and reaffirm their existence and also his own.
Strange Bodies was a part of Grey Projects’ programmes under the ‘Proposal for Novel Ways of Being’ initiative.