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When Malaysian artist Eiffel Chong (b. 1977, Kuala Lumpur) showed his images to the top gallery in KL, he

was told that anyone with a mobile phone camera could do his work. The underlying assumption, that photographers who set up or manipulate their work with Photoshop produce more conceptual work than those who just take on-the-spot photos, dismisses the full spectrum of photographers from Henri Cartier-Bresson to Daido Moriyama. The narrative of contemporary photography is thus narrowly framed by technique and technology. Ironically, this notion is not unique in Malaysia, given the dominance of salon photographers and amateur photo clubs. Comparing camera equipment is an important pastime.

Thankfully, there has been a modest increase in exhibiting opportunities for young contemporary photographers in KL over the last few years. Several of the artists featured in this overview were participants of the short-lived Kuala Lumpur International Photography (KLIP) Biennale 2005, which predates the Francophile Angkor Photography Festival in Cambodia by several months.1 The subsequent founding of the non-profit Central Market Annexe on January 2007 has made it easier for local artists to showcase their work, hosting several photo shows a year. Its program director Pang Khee Teik is also a serious photographer.

A much-heralded addition to the Malaysian art calendar, CUT: New Photography from Southeast Asia premiered in the early part of 2008 at Valentine Willie Fine Art. In the essay accompanying the 2009 edition of CUT, curator Simon Soon hopes that the exhibition will ‘present a sophisticated range of responses by artist

photographers in the region who seek to complicate what we know of ourselves and our society, arguing that photography, no longer a tool for mere documentation, has become an increasingly important and relevant medium to provoke thought on contemporary issues’.2

It is a passionate pitch on behalf of the medium, although photography has never been used as ‘mere documentation’ in Southeast Asia, even when it was first introduced alongside (and to reinforce) colonial conquest.3 It is natural to assume that young photographers from the region would refrain from perpetuating colonial narratives. Such a claim is premature however before the histories of non-Western photography are more fully studied and analysed. The documentary photographers featured in this overview do seem to be conscious – though not necessarily from an academic standpoint – of this pitfall.

Trained as a labour economist in Australia, Azrul K. Abdullah (b. 1975, KL) is now one of Malaysia’s leading architectural photographers. Separate to his day job, Abdullah has shot many old and functional buildings in KL, and because these images have since been used to fight for heritage preservation in KL, he has been tagged ‘the accidental activist’. In fact, when Abdullah returned from Australia in 1998, documenting built heritage was not on his agenda. Malaysia was then in the midst of the Asian Financial Crisis and he was unable to find work. He started noticing that the bulk of KL that he had previously known had already been destroyed or refurbished beyond recognition. That was the catalyst for his personal work, which is shot only in natural light and largely

New Malaysian Documentary Photography

ZHUANG WUBIN

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with black-and-white analogue photography. The concept of heritage in Malaysia is generally limited to

colonial buildings, which makes structures built in the 1960s and 1970s particularly fragile. Abdullah elaborates:

With functionality in mind, many of those buildings were designed in the language of Brutalism or Internationalism, which are now seen to be ugly and unfriendly. In fact, these buildings are landmarks of our post-independence history, when Malaysians were trying to break away from colonialism.4

The International style fitted the spirit of the times because Malaysian designers, like their peers in the West, saw architecture as an agency of social change. Housing for ordinary people became the vehicle for great architecture.5 This is why Abdullah is particularly fond of shooting these functional structures. In Four Buildings (2000-04), he examines the elevators and walkways of four nondescript buildings in KL. Presented in a series of triptychs, Abdullah looks at how people live in poorly maintained spaces. One site is the Sun Complex at Bukit Bintang, KL’s premiere shopping district, a building notoriously associated with the sex trade; another not far from Bukit Bintang is the Blue Boy Mansion along Jalan Tong Shin, a quaint residential project that has aged fairly well.

While human presence is absent in most of his personal work, Abdullah is ultimately interested in human existence – how people live in such spaces and the scars that they leave behind. This is also evident in Pekeliling (2004 - ). Built in 1967, Pekeliling was the first public housing project put up by the City Hall of KL. The flats were built quickly and made to last; there is always enough light in each unit without making it too hot, thereby fulfilling the demands of tropical architecture even before the idea became in vogue. Over the years, the flats have also become a popular spot for committing suicide. In fact, the residents have created an informal committee to deal with such incidents.

‘From an academic standpoint, the flats don’t hold a lot architecturally – their value goes back to the stories behind them’, Abdullah explains. ‘And these stories are linked to the demographics of the residents. How does a family of seven live in a flat of only 400 square feet (around thirty-seven square metres)?’ To date, more than half the flats have been torn down. Abdullah is waiting for the final demolition to complete the project.

Like Abdullah, K. Azril Ismail (b. 1977, KL) is drawn to the heritage of KL in his documentary work but the spaces that fascinate him seem to be more culturally and historically charged. A graduate from the Columbus College of Art and Design in Ohio with a photo major, Ismail trained under Duncan Snyder, who specialises in large-format photography. Snyder has been a major influence on Ismail’s artistic practice:

He would force us to stand in the damn winter to finish his class. Our light meters would start to fail and a classmate of mine even lost his ear! But there is no way you can be more focused than that! While waiting for each exposure, it gave me the opportunity to be alone with my thoughts. That is when you start to see everything – how the light shifts and how the environment changes. This is what I can’t find in any other artistic discipline.6

What Ismail yearns for is the ‘meditative quality’ of photography, an idea difficult to realise in Malaysia where the photographic commodity comes cheap and fast. Returning to KL in 2002, Ismail became ‘a gun for hire’, shooting everything from event photography to editorial work. Emptiness eventually engulfed him; to get himself out of this rut, he set his sight on Pudu Jail, the oldest and largest prison in KL.

Started in 1891 and completed in 1895, the ten-hectare Pudu Jail consists of a three-storey prison block of 240 cells, a hospital, an administration building and an execution chamber. It has been used to intern criminals, prisoners-of-war during the Japanese occupation, and drug traffickers.7 Designed for 600 prisoners, at one point in time there were around 6000 prisoners and they had to take turns to sleep.8 It was vacated at the end of 1996.

Armed with a Bronica SQ-Ai medium-format camera and 100 rolls of Ilford film, Ismail embarked on the four-month project that would lead to Pudu Jail’s Graffiti: Aesthetics Beyond the Walls (2002–03). Broadly speaking, there are two groups of images within the series: one focuses on the architectural details of Pudu Jail; the other, clearly the highlight, records the prison’s graffiti. Ismail recalls:

Wandering through the cells, I would zone out by reading the graffiti. The words had a different authority and power off the prison walls. The graffiti included drawings, poetry and reminiscences written with blood and bodily fluids, some of which were etched onto the soft plaster walls.9

One of his photos features an elaborate drawing of the Hindu god of Ganesh. Another includes a sketch of Zhao Yun, a popular character from Romance of the Three Kingdoms (the 14th century Chinese historical novel), on the stark prison wall. Drug culture becomes the focal point in a photo of the Malay slang ‘Pilihan Ubat Utara’, which literally means ‘Choice of the Northern Medication’. Seen together in a series, Ismail’s photos of the prison graffiti present an ironic utopia where ethnicity and religion are no longer divisive.

In his subsequent work, Iron Dragons of Malaya (2008), Ismail turns his attention to the Sentul Depot, the largest railway workshop in West Malaysia constructed between 1904 and 1906.

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Ismail’s high dynamic range (HDR) pictures provide a detailed inventory of the architecture, equipment and rolling stock of the Sentul Workshop.10 Inevitably, they evoke a strong sense of nostalgia which is certainly infectious going by a report of his show in The Star (Malaysia’s leading English language newspaper) which describes the work as a ‘whisper’ that draws viewers in with curiosity.11 By contrast, the works’ nostalgia can be overwhelming at times, especially within the context of its exhibition at KL Performing Arts Centre in January 2009, which featured MediaStorm-style projections and dramatic music. The catalogue works better in terms of linking Iron Dragons of Malaya with his previous work on Pudu Jail. Despite having ‘an ingrained sense of belonging’, Ismail writes of his ‘love-hate relationship’ with KL.

Like Abdullah, Eiffel Chong has also shot in the abandoned flats of Pekeliling. These images make up one of the sub-series in This used to be my Playground (2005 - ). Furthermore, Chong’s pictures are also devoid of human beings. He is though fundamentally drawn to human presence and the memories of spaces, but it differs from the socio-political perspective adopted by Abdullah. Chong’s work is clearly ahistorical. Influenced by Roland Barthes’s Camera Lucida (1980), Chong’s photographs are essentially about death, which is implicit in the act of photography.

Apart from the Pekeliling flats, This used to be my Playground consists of self-contained sub-series on the vacated campus of Limkokwing University, the tin dredge at Dengkil and the Lady Templer Hospital in Cheras. What draws these disparate venues together is their abandonment. Chong is not trying to make a case for heritage preservation but is led by these spaces in their process of becoming something different.

The place guides me to shoot certain things ... What I want is ‘honest’ images in which nothing seems to happen on a ‘visual’ level ... I usually start by collecting images without having a clear idea in mind. Only when I review my contact prints will I develop feelings for certain photographs.12

Ironically, before doing his BA in photography at the London College of Communication, Chong was a fan of street photography, very much in the tradition of classic Magnum photographers working with 35mm cameras. His lecturers though dismissed that kind of work as uncritical and unintelligent. For his MA in International Contemporary Art and Design Practice from the University of East London, Chong made Institutionalized Care (2005-06), his first major work back in KL. Shot using a Mamiya 6X7 camera, the series took him into clinics and private hospitals where he documented the equipment and settings to articulate his ambivalent attitude towards these facilities. It has since been shown in the first edition of CUT and at the Singapore International Photography Festival. To explain his work, Chong references a horror book he read some years back. The protagonist was expecting his first child in the same hospital where his father was dying from

cancer. As he went back and forth from the maternity ward to the intensive care unit, his feelings oscillated.

While death is implicit in photography Chong also sees life in it. This tension becomes the central theme of his most recent work, A Matter of Life and Death (2005 - ) in which he addresses mortality in more open spaces and other countries (Thailand). The earlier images in the series were shot in medium-format while the more recent pictures are made with the Shen-Hao large-format camera. A Matter of Life and Death may be seen as Chong’s most politically conscious work and his most literal, having decided to name all his images. For a child, the amusement park in A Promise that cannot be Fulfilled is the attraction for visiting Genting Highlands. But he is there only because his father wants to try his luck at the casinos, the betrayal spelt out in the image’s title.

Unlike Chong, Tan Chee Hon (b. 1975, Muar, Malaysia) is more a street photographer in the traditional sense. Born into a Hokkien family of rubber tappers, Tan moved to the Malaysian capital in 1995 to study at the KL College of Art. A painting major, he also took foundational modules on photography. Since his graduation in 1997, Tan has been trying to eke out a living as an artist focusing on painting and photography. Between 1999 and 2000, while working as a stall keeper for an artist at Central Market, Tan collaborated with a writer for a weekly column of his KL snapshots in China Press, a local Chinese paper. It forced him to think of new ideas on a daily basis and further heightened his understanding of the medium. This experience was not enough to dampen his intense curiosity about his environment. Over the years, Tan has become one of the most consummate diarists of his adopted hometown, even though his starting point was never to create a portrayal of the city. He elaborates:

I don’t go out shooting with big topics in mind. I just shoot. The categorisation into different themes comes later. Like André Kertész, my subjects are right in front of me, just outside the door … KL is a metropolis with people from around the world. Things are developing very quickly and old places are being torn down. If you miss something today, it will be gone by next week. Somehow, I feel responsible to document these things.13

Shot in black-and-white using a 35mm camera, most of these images have become part of his long-term project, aptly titled Kuala Lumpur (2004 - ). In Tan’s later series, Nostalgia (2007-09), his interest is still the same but the photographs are now shot in colour using his friend’s second-hand Yashica-Mat, and with some images achieved through cross-processing with out-of-date slide film. As a painter, Tan likes to experiment, and this is especially evident with the medium-format ‘fuzziness’ and surrealistic look of his Nostalgia series.

Walking in the city and taking pictures in the morning has become part of Tan’s daily routine, a dedication shared by Abdul Rahman Roslan (b. 1985, KL), one of Malaysia’s rare

Galnyan YakurrumdjaCurated by Megan Cadd and Lee Darroch25 May – 11 June 2011An exhibition of artwork by Victorian Aboriginal Elders699 Doncaster Road, Doncaster p (03) 9840 9367 www.manningham.vic.gov.au/gallery

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photographers who tackles difficult issues. Roslan’s primary mentor is Shamshahrin Shamsudin, a European Pressphoto Agency photographer in Malaysia. For nine months, he allowed Roslan to tag along during his assignments and taught him the basics of photojournalism. Participating in the workshop at the Angkor Photography Festival 2006 nudged him closer towards documentary work. Since his graduation in 2007 from the Alif College with a Diploma in Interior Architecture, Roslan has been freelancing for wire agencies, NGOs and editorial clients around the world. At the same time, he has been doing his personal work in Malaysia and Indonesia.

PATI (2007 - ) grew out of a shorter project on the Chin refugees who fled Myanmar for Malaysia. It is actually the acronym for Pendatang Tanpa Izin, which means ‘illegal immigrants’ in Malay. By some estimates, there are as many as two million illegal immigrants in the country, including refugees from Myanmar. The Malaysian laws, particularly the Immigration Act 1959/1963, do not make a distinction between a refugee and an economic migrant. As such, refugees are also taken to be illegal immigrants.

Roslan’s starting point for the project was a sense of curiosity about the fate of these migrants. Since he was in primary school, the PATI would make the news headlines for all the wrong reasons. Naturally, the actual situation is more complex. In some of his images, Roslan documented the Bangladeshi migrants who live under the Damai LRT (rail station) because they have no place to go. Others show the acculturation process that has taken place in KL due to these illegal immigrants. The most obvious sign is the proliferation of eateries catering to the taste buds of Bamar, Nepalese or Pakistani customers. At the same time, Roslan is mindful of the security issues in having such a large population of PATI in Malaysia. In Sabah, for instance, about 800,000 MyKads (Malaysian identity cards) have been issued to PATI who would eventually leave the state. Clearly, Roslan’s work is in the tradition of humanist photography:

Whether it is in a big or small way, I want to do something that can contribute to humanity. This is why I am interested in documentary photography. I want to witness history. At the same time, when people share their lives with you, it makes you a better person.14

Halal (2008 - ) is another project close to Roslan’s heart. As a Muslim, he finds the coverage of Islam by world-renowned photographers like John Stanmeyer and James Nachtwey to be superficial. Abbas did a better job in the Middle East but when he shot in Southeast Asia, the work was also not terribly profound. ‘Islam is not one plus one’, says Roslan. ‘You cannot reduce it into something simple.’

In this sense, Halal is a reaction against these observations. For the past few months, Roslan has been documenting the different facets of Islam in Malaysia. The title of the project works as a pun. Most non-Muslims know the word but they usually associate it with the prohibition of eating pork. It means more than that. It is actually used to define what is permissible under Islamic law in terms of dietary issues, conduct, clothing and conduct, for example.

Having a personal connection to the work means that it is harder for Roslan not to pass judgments about other Muslims. For instance, he has done a small series on punks who are practicing

Muslims. However, with tattoos on their body, it is technically impossible for them to touch their skin and perform the ablution properly before prayers. At the end of the day, Roslan does not preach through his documentary.

It is difficult to make sweeping statements about the works of these Malaysian photographers as a whole. Compared to colonial photography, none of the highlighted projects seem remotely exotic, nor do they make a telling case for one kind of authority or hegemony. In fact, these documentary photographers seem to operate from different reference points – both local and foreign – and this is their common thread. u

1. Since its inauguration at the end of 2005, Angkor Photography Festival has maintained the myth that it is the first photofestival in Southeast Asia. Its first edition did not feature any exhibition by Cambodian artists, as though senior photographers like Heng Sinith and Mak Remissa are non-existent. 2. Simon Soon, About CUT09: Figure, http://www.vwfa.net/CUT09/aboutus.html. 3. See, for example, John Falconer’s From Bombay to Shanghai: Historical Photography in South and Southeast Asia, Stichting Fragment Foto, Amsterdam; Museum voor Volkenkunde, Rotterdam, 1994. 4. Azrul K. Abdullah, interview by author, KL, Malaysia, 9 February 2009. 5. Patrick Nuttgens, The Story of Architecture, 2nd ed., Phaidon Press, London, 1997, p. 266. 6. K. Azril Ismail, interview by author, KL, Malaysia, 8 February 2009. 7. Channel NewsAsia, ‘Uproar over Looming Demolition of Historic WWII Jail in Malaysia’, 29 May 2008, http://www.channelnewsasia.com/stories/specialreport/news/350669_59/1/.html. 8. Lam Seng Fatt, Insider’s Kuala Lumpur, 2nd ed., Times – Marshall Cavendish Edition, Singapore, 2004, p. 202. 9. K. Azril Ismail, interview by author, KL, Malaysia, 8 February 2009. 10. High dynamic range (HDR) pictures require a lot of time to create one composite image so in this sense Ismail is using digital technology to replicate what he has learnt from Snyder. 11. Amy de Kanter, ‘The Past in Perfect Clarity’, The Star, 11 January 2009, Arts section. 12. Eiffel Chong, interview by author, KL, Malaysia, 8 February 2009. 13. Tan Chee Hon, interview by author, KL, Malaysia, August 2007. 14. Abdul Rahman Roslan, interview by author, KL, Malaysia, 20 April 2009.

Zhuang Wubin is a Singapore-based researcher specialising in the contemporary photographic practices of Southeast Asia (ASEAN). He is also a photographer: wwwseasiaphotography.wordpress.com; www.last-harbour.com

P14 (clockwise from top left): 1/ Abdul Rahman Roslan, image from the Halal Project, 2008 - ongoing: a young girl wears a headband inscribed with the word Allah and holds a toy rifle during a protest in KL against the Israeli attack on Gaza, Project.

2/ Azrul K. Abdullah, Dead buzzers, from the Four Buildings Project, 2000-04.

3/ K. Azril Ismail, The Warrior, from the Pudu Jail’s Graffiti: Aesthetics Beyond the Walls Project, 2002-03.

4/ Abdul Rahman Roslan, image from the PATI Project, 2007 - ongoing: Muhamad, an illegal immigrant from Bangladesh, suffers mental disorder after

being cheated by an agent who promised him a job in Malaysia. After spending all his savings and sacrificing his family land for his trip to Malaysia, he found out

that it is a scam. He’s now stranded in KL without his passport and a job.

P15: 1/ Eiffel Chong, A Promise That Couldn't be Fulfilled, from the A Matter of Life and Death Project, 2005 – ongoing.

2/ Eiffel Chong, Untitled from the Institutionalised Care Project, 2005-06.

3/ Tan Chee Hon, Untitled image from the Nostalgia Project, 2007-09. Images courtesy the artists.

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