Sembelit
Solo Exhibition Lim Keh Soon
Sembelit (literally means “Constipation”), normal on the outside but unhealthy on the inside. My work is a constant search for the best way to interpret and express the ideas .I have about my life and its surroundings. In my art, I use metaphor and metaphysicsto express ideas in ways that are reflecting the current state of our society. For me, “Sembelit” symbolizes the state we’re in.
The very first time I found myself in Kuala Lumpur a couple of years ago I was able to pay a visit to a collective-run art space called 無限發掘 Findars, a venue that is considered as one of the few influential pockets of indie art in the city. One can easily get a sense upon stepping inside that this establishment has no concern whatsoever for commercial appeal and that it is indeed disconnected from the conservative public and commercial sectors.
Coming from Canada, where the contemporary art establishment (universities, galleries, government bodies such as the Canada Council for the Arts) has almost completely banned painting in favor of multi-media installations and performance/action art—the kind of stuff that, more than anything else, very often turns people away from contemporary art—it was a relief for me, then, to find myself surrounded by so many wonderful and exciting paintings…
Their author, Lim Keh Soon, is one of the founding members of Findars: a painter who strikes you immediately as extravagant and eccentric, and an artist who has played and still plays an important role in the local counterculture movement. An essential player in the present-day Malaysian art scene—and what an exciting phase in its young history it has reached!— Keh Soon belongs to this new generation of Malaysian artists who seem to have every intention to succesfully turn high-art upside down.
The myriad of characters cramming his paintings are eating each other, smoking, running somewhere, shouting, puking; they drive sputtering motorcycle, Malaysian own Proton Sagas, lorries and buses…Teachers are throwing rubbish on their students’ heads; there are Japanese troops invading Malaysia on their bikes; there are British soldiers and British warplanes from the colonial era attacking heroes from Keh Soon’s childhood; there’s people dressed up as Superman and people with green skin, giant vaginas and porn actresses andactors transformed into everyday objects.
Exploding heads and severed limbs, giant rabbits, men and women swimming or drowning in pools or at sea: they all collide and commingle in highly idiosyncratic “bastard paintings”, where the real and the imagined, the past and the future, the communicable and the incommunicable, the high and the low, cease to be perceived as contradictions and simply co-exist in order to depict today’s Malaysian society.
Keh Soon’s art is discordant, restless; his paintings honk and skronk, bleat and scream. They are panoramic compositions that suggest an insightful and universal vision of the world where countless spellbinding fragments and signs from a tropical, psychotronic, Manga-eater present-day Pieter Bruegel incessantly pile up, accumulate, crash. They are stills from cine films of induced psychoses plentiful of hidden symbols, to be fully experienced in glorious Merdekascope.
”I use comic forms as a sort of language,” says Keh Soon. “And I use memory, emotions, doubt, and contradictory feelings towards today’s living environment and transform these into sarcastic, weird and symbolic imagery. My works generally favor figurative subject matter, which is fragmented by my imagination in conveying our living environment. My style can be described as scratchy and estranging, and my works are open to various responses as they aim to trigger memories and thoughts.”
written by Fabrizio Gilardino
co-assisted by Rini Hashim
Bio
Born in 1980, Lim Keh Soon graduated from the Malaysian Institute of Art in 2003. He is one of the founding member of Findars Art Space. He has been participating in group shows since 2007 and two years later he had his first solo exhibition, “Junkie-Monkey”. In January 2015, he gained his experience of exhibiting abroad- a solo exhibition in a cafe and gallery located in Tokyo, Japan. In addition to painting, Keh Soon is involved in the comic book scene; he recently gave birth to Huaguoshan, a publishing house for which he curated “POop Vol. 1”, an anthology featuring a group of contemporary Malaysian comic artists.
Date
12 – 28 May 2016
Time
1.00pm- 7:00pm
Venue
Lostgens’ Contemporary Art Space
