THE IMPETUS BEHIND Sharon Chin’s installation Boats & Bridges is the artist’s recent homecoming from overseas study. Boats & Bridges is a poem in two parts. In the corridor of Reka Art Space, the installation titled Bridges, there are plaster casts of plastic bags laid out in groups on the floor. These plaster sculptures appear to anchor streamers made of barricade tape that gather at the top of a large pillar at one end of the corridor. In the main room is the installation titled Boats. The entire floor is covered in a grid drawn with chalk, with each grid containing a letter of the alphabet, like a word puzzle. Interrupting the grid are irregular shapes that echo the plaster sculptures in Bridges, on top of which viewers are to stand.

The whole work is deceptively happy and serene: The plaster casts sit still and rock like cradles when touched; the streamers rise up joyously from the ground; the gridded letters drawn with chalk on the floor imply a fun game to be played.

However, there is a great underlying struggle going on in the work, a nagging unsettledness. It does not arise out of the expected feeling of displacement the artist felt upon her homecoming to KL. Two main themes in the work reflect this inner struggle. The first is the idea of flux, that matter and identity change within time.

The second is the sense of desire that permeates the work, from the personal desire of the artist for her vision, to social desires like consumerism, to the general desire of a nation to develop and progress.

FLUX

One cannot help looking at Bridges without considering its process. You can almost hear the gloop gloop as you imagine the artist pouring plaster into a plastic bag. The plaster solidifies until the bag becomes a membranous sac, which she then peels off to reveal a perfect cast of an enclosed space which existed at a specific point of time and which exists no more. A perfect cast of a Moment.

The notion of space-time being petrified as such would not be as prominent if the casts were of a solid object. No, it is the literal flexibility of the plastic bags, of the plastic space within them that makes every unique wrinkle and crevice in the casts so poignant. Plastic bags are always between destinations, hence it makes sense that this work is placed in the corridor, for it is a moving space, a funnel. The barricade tape also lends to the idea of flexible space because its usual function is directing traffic and shifting the perimeters of a space.

Boats installation
in the main room

Iconographically, the bridge is a neutral territory. Think of what it’s like to drive along the Causeway; there’s no feeling of harassment, paranoia, of being under any authority or scrutiny. For a short while, you are in a place that is defined by negation: not-Malaysia, not-Singapore. Similarly, the corridor is not a true place because it is in flux. To Chin, such a space is perfect for stopping to contemplate.

The bridge is also a site of struggle, traditionally a contested place of challenge. What is the artist struggling with? Chang Yoong Chia writes of the work as being "deeply poetic and meditative" (1). It is both these things but never serene.

DESIRE

My Island
Inside, drawing

Malaysia is a country undergoing great change, forecast by the Deutsche Bank to be the third fastest developing nation after India and China. This change is signalled by ubiquitous cranes, barricade blocks, barricade tape, unfinished lebuhrayas and so on. Chin borrows these signifiers of construction and architectural development and brings them into an emotional realm.

Consider, for instance, the work’s optimism in that the ominous AWAS wordings are subdued and the red stripes are emphasized to become celebratory, overall forming a welcoming curtain.

At the same time, the optimism is a resigned one, because of the overriding abjection in the installation. The barricade tape reaches longingly upwards from the weighty plaster blocks and clings desperately to the large, solid, and inert pillar. The tension between the barricade tape, the plaster blocks and - their fulcrum - the pillar illustrates an ambiguous desire, perhaps for stability, be it on a personal, social or national level.

Amazingly, the plaster sculptures in Bridges are not a critique on the wastage of plastic bags or of commercial consumption. Instead, they are commemorations of the individual Malaysian’s daily life, his/her wants and desires that drive the bustle of Malaysian life, and that get this country going. Not since that famous scene from the film American Beauty has a plastic bag been looked at so lovingly, but the sentimentality is forgiven, embraced even.

Both themes of flux and desire are interlinked, because desires are in a constant state of flux. Meanwhile, it is this continual change that produces desire. The two spiral together as in a whirlpool.

This is the homecoming that Chin presents to us, a feeling of being consumed by the vortex and the struggle to simply be in its calm eye. But one suspects that she thrives on the struggle. One might go so far as to say it’s neither boat nor bridge that she wants - it’s a bloody surfboard.

Boats & Bridges: A First Solo Exhibition by Sharon Chin was shown at Reka Art Space in August.

Footnotes:
(1) Chang Yoong Chia, Boats And Bridges: First Solo Show By Sharon Chin, on Reka Art Space website, 2005.