"The past is still, for us, a place that is not safely settled."
Anil’s Ghost, Michael Ondaatje
WE first met a decade ago, and our paths would cross intermittently over the years – at art exhibitions mostly. It would have been mad to decline the opportunity to write about his latest exhibition, and after making sure it was not 3am in Melbourne – it was 2.19pm where he lives with wife Inpa and daughter Rupa – I rang.
What I did not expect was that feeling of joy the moment he answered. Anurendra Jegadeva and I are not close friends. It was his voice… it felt like home.
Another sad/joyous example: Lim Wei Ling, at whose eponymous gallery the show is running and whom I have not seen in years greeted me, one metre away, with mask intact and wearing a beautifully-casual neutral pantsuit. (I appreciate fashion).
The instinct was to hug, to spend the next five minutes just doing that. Of course, it did not happen – we spent the interview on opposite sides of the sofa, drinking tea.
Speaking with her, and with Anu, who seemed a trillion miles away, feels like speaking to exquisite ghosts.
Writing about art has always been exhilarating, frustrating, boring, numbing, depressing and at times, one chews Xanax like candy, and chases it down with Bourbon just to get the writing done.
Not this time.
But you do write on this particular subject for one reason – painters are also writers, and vice-versa – whatever the words and visuals, both need to be heard and seen. And viewers and readers will decide.
Now, back to the future – Scream Inside Your Heart.
There are 25 works on display, reachable via flights of stairs. That says plenty – you have to “acquire” the right to gain access to his works, and only because that journey towards “loneliness” must be earned.
The works were arranged in a solitary sense, that what the world is going through must be emphasised; and the first I locked eyes on was ‘Nowhere to Go’ – Rupa, the artist’s daughter, lightly holding a helmet, wearing a fabulous sarong, hand casually on her thigh, looking at her beloved pet companion as though saying, “Hey Frankie, am just going to rev the engine, want to come along?"
This beautiful creature does not seem to show much interest, but she keeps at it, and if Frankie the Pug complied, it might very well be because he loves her so, and where else is he supposed to go?
“I created Scream Inside Your Heart while being at such a colossal distance from my mother. Her resilience and strength, tinkled with her unique kind of insanity is a constant inspiration. The dynamics have changed now, in terms of how we think. I miss home, and think about it all the time,” said Anu.
The works may appear desolate, but there is love in each piece amidst the despair and all the isolation. When asked about the glaring vividness of hues, Anu simply said he is mad about details, and loves contemporary objects. But he is in a "bubble", wishing he was present to witness people’s reactions to the works.
Grey Dancers I, II and Orange Dancer (stand-alone paintings in a triptych) hypnotise. Anu’s first exhibition was of his cousin, dance extraordinaire Mavin Khoo – the latter practically evolved through Anu’s 30 to 40 renditions over the years.
Scream Inside Your Heart is also a tribute to the characters the artist has incorporated into his past works, only this time it is within the pandemic sphere our world is facing. Orange Dancer is a Bharatanatyam dancer whom Anu equates to an actor – this specific reincarnation is emblematic to solitariness. She continues to dance, and she dances for herself.
“Where performances are concerned especially, it becomes redundant when there is not an audience present; so who is he/she performing for? Where the arts are concerned, the Government has not seriously looked into it," said Anu.
"So it is these wonderful beings I wanted to celebrate particularly, like The Trials and Tribulations of Wuhan Wendy and Shanghai Sally – Chinese Opera being a perennial topic in my work. The painting is one of sorrow, a sense of vacuity, but they are in full costume nevertheless, ready for the stage.”
Well, Mavin might not have a physical audience, but in both paintings, though the high-end gas mask conceals his face, his soul is bared. Those “hundred” beguiling hands knows no panic, and if we were created to cannot help ourselves but look at others, it means nothing to him; he reigns supreme, existing in a realm outside of man-made allegory and moral percept.
Love’s Requiem is a portrait of Rupa’s boyfriend attending a funeral of the artist’s father who passed away last year. The painting of the sitter is encircled by three of the artist’s ancestors, who sit in judgement.
This painting delves into the colonial pasts and how succeeding generations of chiefly Anglo-Saxon youths bear the weight of their national and ethno-cultural histories within their psyches. It is a painful yet formidable piece, a crystalline probe into idiosyncratic cores.
Anu reveals: “The starting point of Scream Inside Your Heart, where the works really began to take shape, was when Tun Mahathir stepped down. That is when I painted the two warriors, in Javanese dress. It is this whole idea of political retribution. I also used the symbol of Queen Elizabeth in various works because, well, if you look at every ‘troubled’ region in the world, the British were there, brought their own troubles and then left.
"And [trouble] at the centre of the world right now is caused by the legacy of the British Empire. It is this whole idea of history repeating itself. Scream Inside Your Heart is a commentary on all these things, and more. My work has always been about the search for heroes, and most of them are foreign. So, the two Malay warriors mean so much. But of course, it has a sinister undertone as well; these are messy times.”
The two Malay warriors Anu spoke of is 'IN-OUT'. It examines political systems and democracy. The painting discusses the concept of “sheathing and unsheathing”, the idealisation and portrayal of the Malay Warrior class; a rite of passage amongst some painters of Malay ethnicity, the in and out of the keris symbolises a nation divided. Anu painted it from his vantage point as an outsider, to see if he too, could “own it.”
Each of the paintings in this exhibition is accompanied by a QR code, so one gets to listen to Anu’s voice describing his works in detail. I did that, and each time I would look over my shoulder, thinking he was actually there.
Scream Inside Your Heart says so much, expresses more, it starkly unclothed Anu’s vulnerabilities, yet in a beautiful way, we see the artist as “whole”.
Anu’s Scream Inside Your Heart are deeply intuitive works which make you tremble with emotion, the messages are "just scream already" so you could do the same. The show is of course witty, whimsical, and brimming with acute sensitivity. But let us not paint it all bleak. There is Anu’s incredible sardonic humour peeking through each work. Not many artists could pull that off –but Anu does.
But it still did not answer my own question, albeit after immersing into his works, which escalated into an “implosion”.
Am I still here? Then it hit me. Anu is asking the same thing.
We all are. – The Vibes, October 25, 2020
Sarah NH-V is a writer, curator and editor
*The QR codes can be found through this link:
https://drive.google.com/drive/folders/1uhuZbblEw1IJNuBeI6f9dKZ-UntEQ0hq?usp=sharing
'SCREAM INSIDE YOUR HEART – New Paintings from Solitary Confinement' ends October 31, 2020. Exhibition is open by appointment only.
Wei Ling Gallery,
8, Jalan Scott, Brickfields,
50470 Kuala Lumpur.
T: +603 2260 1106
W: www.weiling-gallery.com
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