I’m looking at a dead rat and Kenny G is playing in my head
Exhibition essay for My heart will go on and on and on
By Yeo Tze Yang
I’m walking from a metro station in Kuala Lumpur. The afternoon sun is scorching, but there’s no shelter anywhere nearby, so I continue to walk. I walk across an open-air carpark, an expanse of asphalt with nothing but a few old cars parked, some of which have been parked there since time immemorial. From the electric lines, pigeons flock down to the carpark and gather around. Someone had dumped a packet of rice in the middle of the carpark, and the pigeons have come to feast.
As I walk past them, I notice the corpse of a dead pigeon. It looks flattened, probably by a car. Its wings are spread out; the way angel wings are usually illustrated in art. Its body is fast decomposing as it bakes under the sun. Its bones have become exposed. They look like those of a chicken; the only bird corpse I encounter on a regular basis. The other pigeons seem oblivious to their dead friend, or maybe we humans are just unable to understand what they are thinking. I continue walking on, past a plastic wrapper of Twiggies and a squashed plastic bottle lying on a patch of weeds, branches, dirt and concrete.
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This was just one of many encounters I have had while walking around in cities. Wherever I’ve been, given my disposition to notice things I’m not supposed to notice, many of these things I’ve spotted by chance become the things I make art about. They are chance encounters whereby meaning always come in hindsight. This has been a constant throughout the years of my artistic practice.
In this series of works, I had primarily made paintings of things I saw on the ground. These things tend to be rubbish, already broken or flattened, their original function long lost, and they lay there, whether to rot in the sun and rain in days and weeks to come. I photographed them with my handphone for painting reference later. I preferred the view of these things from above, and the way they looked flat from that angle. I felt like I was doing an autopsy or analysis from above; but alas, I’m not the most analytical or careful painter, and the “analysis” by painting becomes more of an exercise in form and colour, and with time and labour, these artworks become homage to these unwanted, unimportant things.
This series of works also comes with some changes in the way I think about art and painting in general. I find myself wanting to challenge the perception I have of my own work; I want to break down the walls that I had built up over the years. I don’t wanna get stuck in repetition. It comes with asking myself “so what?” constantly and going ahead with things I usually hesitate doing. This time, I have paintings on wheels, on stands, as banners, as objects in themselves and ventured into sculpture. I have let my fascination in how small businesses advertise with signs and banners come through in the final presentation of these works.
Before making these works, I would have constantly berated myself for having such “gimmicky” ideas. It’s the burden of being a painter I suppose; there’s always a kind of conservatism when it comes to art-making when one sees painting as both the means and the end. But I needed to dismiss the naysaying in my mind and just go ahead with these ideas. So what if they were gimmicks? It was fun making these works. I felt free.
As I told Stephanie, who had noticed parallels of my past works to this new series, my fundamental preoccupations as an artist have not changed drastically over the years. It has always been about things I see around me in everyday life. I have painted singular objects I had encountered on the street and very flat things before, albeit amid a series made up of other subject matter.
But this time, it’s about bringing it all into focus; if not just a visual focus then one of mood, feeling and an idea too. It’s about the singularity of unwanted things, paying attention to not just the everyday but things we would rather avoid. It’s about no longer wading casually on the surface of “paintings of daily life”, and instead diving deep into the less certain territories of art-making.
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In the midst of the many artworks I encountered during a visit to Musée d'Orsay in Paris in June 2023, a small painting left an impression on me. It was The Lemon (1880), one of Édouard Manet’s lesser known works. It is what it is: a life-sized luminously yellow lemon on a silver plate and against a dull grey background. The brushstrokes are fast and wet; the painting felt like it was made yesterday. The painting was framed ornately and hung on a large wall on its own with lots of space around it, alongside many larger paintings in the room. It was a purposeful decision by the curators I suppose, to express a certain cheekiness and matter-of-factness: “I’m small but I’m important too.”
143 years ago, an artist felt a lemon was important enough to paint on canvas. It’s not his most famous work as it lacks the bombastic controversy and flippant attitude of his more famous Luncheon and Olympia paintings. But nonetheless, The Lemon moved me, and many other viewers, I’m sure.
This exhibition takes those sensations up a notch. It is about an undying love for unloved things. The exhibition title, My Heart Will Go On And On And On, is a play on the title of the cheesy love song by Celine Dion, made famous by the movie Titanic (1997). At this point in global pop culture, it’s difficult to take this song seriously anymore. And yet, it’s hard to deny that, beneath all the sniggering, is probably very sincere emotions. Irony often is a way to hide one’s vulnerability. The sincere truth and humour can be both true at the same time.
Art is a way for me to memorialise what is otherwise ephemeral. My Heart Will Go On And On And On is me telling you to look at that flattened eggplant, the loanshark and callgirl advertisements strewn across the floor, the condom packets left behind in the weeds. These works look at these things with unsentimentality and poetry, humour and sadness. They are equal parts Kenny G and Nirvana. They are a teary-eyed chuckle at a reality we may not like, but have to live with regardless, and perhaps will even grow fond of.
Tze Yang
Ampang, December 2023