Order and Chaos: Interview with Shooshie Sulaiman

Subtle and difficult to describe, the works of Shooshie Sulaiman are archival yet immediate; delicate yet powerful. They engage the viewer with their intellect through a provocative blend of theater and installation. Sulaiman was born in Malaysia in 1973. After receiving a BA in Fine Art from the MARA University of Technology (UiTM) in 1996, she was given the National Art Gallery of Malaysia’s prestigious Young Contemporaries Award. Currently based in Kuala Lumpur, Shooshie also runs 12 Residence, an exhibition and project space and art-infused guesthouse.

Shooshie’s latest work, “Sulaiman itu Melayu (Sulaiman was Malay)” (2013), presented at Tomio Koyama Gallery, is the artist’s first solo show in Singapore—in fact her first solo exhibition in a gallery. In it, she evokes the legacy of her late father’s rubber plantation in a ritualized homage to his memory, as a means of coming to terms with his tragic death when she was 22. Visitors enter a small room where nine sheets of rubber hang from a line like loose, supple Dali clocks, each molded with the image of her father. Carvings of his face were cut into several rubber trees on the family’s land, and sap collected from this process was used to create the flat, honey-colored rubber portraits that are strung across the room and emit fragrance of fresh rubber.

 Last week ArtAsiaPacific chatted with Shooshie at Tomio Koyama Gallery just hours before her exhibition opening.

Does “Sulaiman itu Melayu” revolve around memories that you wish to explore, or that you wish to purge? While it appears to be a portrait of remembrance about your father, could it more accurately be described as a self-portrait?

I’m trying to put a certain kind of order to these things, to show a pattern. I’m half Chinese, half Malay. This abstract, mixed parentage is difficult to analyze, but it’s easier for me to celebrate the Malay part of myself, rather than try to analyze the duality. My own intangible, vital spirit is the Malay part of me, and I feel this is the spirit of my father. This work is intended to put a certain closure to the arc of my work so far. There are certain memories that you try to erase, but you have to confront them. I have to somehow understand a certain format, and so have created certain rituals to do this.

There is a separate, smaller room within the installation called “The Room of Knowledge.” Inside hangs a large portrait of your father, a certificate and a newspaper clipping. What rituals have you called upon here?

I used a wall from my studio as part of my installation at the 2011 Singapore Biennale.  Afterwards I burned this, along with portraits of my father painted on joss paper. I mixed these ashes with soil from my father’s grave to make charcoal, and used it to paint this large portrait of him. The certificate and clipping refer to specific events in my father’s life.

You started out working as an accountant. How did that particular mindset of organizing and quantifying influence your work . . . or is your work more truly a reaction against such thinking?

After high school, I took a job in accounting—the kind of normal job every parent wants their children to have! But I was exploring graphic design software at the same time, and someone who had studied art in London suggested that I explore art—I could work as an accountant, but I felt I needed art to balance my “order.” Order is so fundamental to everyday life, and accounting is very opposite to making art, but I took up the challenge. I studied art and began to realize that you need to live with both chaos and order together. 

When you incite chaos, you need to apply order so it can be understood; often when working within a sense of order, some element of chaos can actually help enlighten it. You need to use this inverted, overlapping dichotomy in order to celebrate contradiction, and I believe that contradiction is a major element in contemporary art. 

In art schools in Malaysia and Southeast Asia, we explore more formalist aspects, rather than conceptual appreciation. We are taught to create very highly finished, beautiful products. Yet as I explore and learn more from other artists and curators, I realize it’s important to understand that from a formalist order, we must evoke some looser sense of context. There is an essential interdependency.

What’s it like for you working with a commercial gallery?

This is a very new experience for me—I’ve never understood how to put a value on pieces of art. It’s very intense, but I want this experience, I want to understand the power of this direct kind of commercial thinking. After 16 years, I’ve become totally free in what I want to produce, yet this experience casts a totally different context on the finished work.

Kendai Runcit No. 12 (Sundry Shop) (2011) and Kendai Gambar Goldie No. 12 (Photo Booth) (2012) were immersive works operating within parameters of nostalgia. 12 Residence is a quiet guesthouse filled with vintage furniture and collections of ceramics and patterns from your own life. What are your intentions? 

I want the experience for my guests to be a natural kind of flow. Everything carries meaning. The furniture there, for example, has journeyed with me for some time. When I curated my first show [“Apa Gendai? (What Is Contemporary?)” (2000)] in an abandoned courthouse, I found a judge’s chair and repaired it; I bought an old chest as junk, and in collaboration with my carpenter, with whom I’ve had a long friendship, renovated it. Everything is about an experience. Framed floral patterns on the wall were excerpted from the dress of a deceased friend. The collection of broken ceramic dolls represents a memory from childhood—we had plastic dolls like this in the ’60s and ’70s. They were pink-skinned, blue-eyed and blonde-haired. We knew these creatures were not part of our own culture, and were afraid that the spirit of a white child might be locked inside. So we would pop off a leg or arm to release the spirit, then join it back again before we played with it. I remember that moment in my life: you see something very beautiful . . . you look in the mirror and your own eyes are not blue.

I had these ceramic dolls made, painted blue eyes on them, dropped them so they broke into pieces, then reassembled some of them. In the Residence, I put out some glue beside the broken pieces, so guests can choose to put some back together—or they can ignore it.

How does exposing personal memories make “art”?

I don’t want people to just go see art in a gallery; I think people have to experience art. It’s important to educate everyone about art . . . as an artist my responsibility is to produce knowledge, for myself as well. I need to educate myself, and understand my own experiences. If you start to fix these dolls, there will be a different awareness or memory for each person. In the Residence there is a collection of books and materials about art that guests may choose to read or not. As with the dolls, my intent is to share my knowledge, but not to impose that intent on anyone.

“Sulaiman itu Melayu (Sulaiman was Malay)” is on view at Tomio Koyama Gallery, Singapore through December 8, 2013.

12 Residence opens in Malacca, Malaysia from the end of October.

Marybeth Stock is a writer and researcher based in Singapore.