In Rolling, Rolling, Action! Tsai Ming Liang’s directorial hand gesture is framed against the backdrop of a graffitied wall found on the riverbank of the Klang river in Kuala Lumpur. Cover-ups, conspiracies, intrigues, forgotten atrocities, surfaced and beamed across the wall as coded messages exist as a texture on the surface – impenetrable and mysterious.
Resonating with Fee Ming's earlier concerns for the lives of the ordinary people across Southeast Asia, the socio-political history that impacts upon the everyday sphere of living is also explored in VISAGE. In La Vache! (Holy Cow!), which features an expression of an aged French actor Jean-Pierre Leaud seemingly shouting across a desolate landscape, the wall adjacent to where he stands also hangs the famous sculpture by Picasso, Bull’s Head (1943). Referring to the parading of a slaughtered cow head as an act of protest against the relocation of a 150-year-old Hindu temple in a Muslim majority neighbourhood, Fee Ming connects the aggression with Picasso's Bull’s Head to examine the question of representation and symbolism and how it plays out in the political arena.
Similarly, inspired by Jiang Rong's best-selling novel Wolf Totem, Fee Ming found resonance between the totem animal of the Mongolians with the mystery behind the murder of Mongolian model Altantuya in Malaysia. He plays them out in a dark cavern where the source of light that shines through crevasses illuminates the texts on the papers covering the window as those taken from French journalist Arnaud Dubus’s highly controversial reportage of the incident.
On another note, in Sautez, Grenouille! Sautez! (Jump, Frog! Jump!) the currently popular “defection” game played by both the ruling and the opposition parties in Malaysia, which led to the 2009 Perak constitutional crisis and sparked a nation-wide debate on the issue of ‘party hopping’ symbolised in the national imagination by the frog.
These issues, coming into play in VISAGE, hint at how truth when repressed are transformed into barely audible and legible signals that continues to encode itself in an arena where the possibilities and probabilities of its discovery continue to haunt our consciousness and conscience.
Moreover, what came out from VISAGE as it dipped itself in another locale and challenge our familiarity with both the subject of Fee Ming's paintings is that it casts the genre of realism in new light. Previous writings such as the essay by Christine Rohani Longuet have considered 'light', 'movement' and 'transparency' in Fee Ming's works or artist Wong Hoy Cheong’s acute observation on Fee Ming’s ability to skillfully maintain the equilibrium between translucence and materiality through his painterly techniques in his unique handling of the watercolour medium. However by turning his Parisian experience into a surrealist tableau where the Malaysian stories emerge through its film setting, Fee Ming seems to have highlighted the constructedness and the cinematographic language of the genre itself, how realism is never synonymous to en plein air painting despite its naturalistic style of representation, but requires the artist to compositionally frame, direct and stage his paintings.
Take L’Appat (The Bait) as an example, which shows a tightly cropped torso of a man wearing a codpiece. Next to this hangs a bait with an eggplant hooked onto it. There is also a black and white photo in the background, taken from a film
location in the Jardin des Tuileries (Tuileries Garden) next to the Louvre Museum, which is known as a popular cruising ground for homosexuals. Finally, a writing on the wall boldly reads in French a translation of a highly contentious headline in a local newspaper, ‘I don’t want to be sodomised again’, These elements fall into place in order to suggest the homoerotic undercurrent and violence that permeates Fee Ming’s allusive pictorial narrative of the sodomy charges against the opposition coalition political leader Anwar Ibrahim.
In Le Victime (The Victim), the figure of actor Norman Atun playing Jean Baptiste crouched in fetal position in a dungeon resonated with the death of Teoh Beng Hock. The outline of Teoh Beng Hock in the position of his death as he mysteriously fell off the Anti-Corruption Agency’s building can be made out on the dungeon wall. Here Jean Baptiste’s incarceration throws into light the abuses of human rights through a biblical narrative.
Perhaps what makes VISAGE such an interesting project is that it is a kind of bifurcation - the splitting of a single substance into two different eventualities. By working on the same material as Tsai Ming Liang, Fee Ming seems to have cinematographically directed his own 'film' in his paintings through a grammatical inflection that responded to Tsai Ming Liang’s surrealist spin on the subjects the latter works with.
This playful recoding brings to light what Fee Ming understood to be Tsai Ming Liang's method of working, dialoguing with it in painterly terms just as much as it deconstructs the genre he works with. Materials opening up towards different streams of possibilities and potentialities, yielding narratives that are have been taken to their absurd conclusions, result in a much more rewarding kind of comment on the contradictions of our reality. It rewrites what 'realism' is, beyond our commonplace understanding of its naturalistic impulse, by placing importance on the cinematic values that come to bear on how we frame our everyday, how we tell our most gripping, nasty, dirty stories about ourselves that need to be communicated to the world.
