3rd Pyongyang International Arts Festival in Kuala Lumpur

Nobody Nobody but Il, by chitoo

Interview on BFM by Organiser #1, Organiser #2 and Organiser #3

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Poster by Fahmi Reza

Project managed by Tshiung Han See, Simon Soon, and BASITU

Photos (below) by Munkao

3rd Pyongyang International Arts Festival in Kuala Lumpur Facebook Fanpage

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Comrades!

The 3rd Pyongyang International Arts Festival arrives like a punch to the face! It has arrived three times!
There is no need to mark June 5th on your calendars—it has already been marked for you!
The 3rd Pyongyang International Arts Festival features a hensem dictator, hot chicks performing mass games, MK-0 Dong tiger missiles, anti-American love, Korean diplomats, celebrities, ChatRoulette, karaoke, DMZ table, and more!

Through the medium of dance, video, performance art, music, we hope to share with the people of Malaysia, glorious works of art from the international second world and demonstrate a refreshingly new direction in the art of satire and parody, which KL has yet to experience.

Don’t miss The Wonderboys, a brand new band that will be performing for the last time, before its members pursue lucrative solo careers. Join The Best Art Show in the Univers, CIPLAK, Mark Teh, Fahmi Fadzil, Ray Langenbach, Wong Siew Jye, Daniel Chong, Jun Kit, Sharon Chin and other state-approved artists in a beautiful and stirring tribute to the Motherland. After curfew, let the fond sounds of Flica wash over you, accompanied by a video installation by Fairuz Sulaiman.

The 3rd Pyongyang International Arts Festival will illegitimately occupy a derelict town house in the heart of KL. It will also illegitimately occupy your heart. Attendance is required. Admission is free.

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Line-up include:
CIPLAK
The Best Art Show in the Univers
Mark Teh
Fahmi Fadzil
Daniel Chong
Ray Langenbach
Sharon Chin
Wong Siew Jye
Jun Kit
HKPT
and other state-approved artists
Also, special appearance by ABANG GUARD

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Many diaspora comrades from Malaysia come

Datuk Ray Langenbach’s ribbon cutting ceremony after his stirring and educational lecture/speech

Fire breathing pet dragon courtesy of the Dear Leader and Ciplak

Ciplak’s gig, playing to anonymous Chatroulette attendees projected on the wall behind

Chinese comrade Wong Siew Jye soothing tired-of-WTF audiences

The Wonderboys, a group of South Koreans who defected to North Korea and formed an amazingly successful band, however, this is their last performance

Daniel Chong’s serenade to the Dear Leader

The Abang Guards of Prevention plays to a roaring crowd and a blonde boy from god knows where who stayed on ChatRoulette just to watch them play and gave two thumbs up!

Junkit’s interactive ikebana/disco performance

Near the end of the night, The Best Artshow in the Univers closes the event with a bang in their participatory fireworks performance

Daniel Chong posing at the DMZ table in his staring performance/competition titled “The Game”

Mark Teh and Fahmi Fadzil’s World Cup Challenge performance, Mark played as the North Korean team and took on all challengers as Fahmi provides live commentary

Princess Leia and Obi Wan with a Korean made lightsaber

Obi Wan as one of the bartenders

HKPT's video installation/performance. Carbonmarrow

Soft sounds waft from Fairuz Sulaiman/Flica’s music/installation room

Dill Malik’s paintings of our greatest and dearest leaders

The festival is a resounding success! Shieko and Munkao’s tourist trap. Now everyone can feel like a north korean. Long live the revolution!

Satirical Souls

Satirical souls by Adam Lee
(Taken from Time Out KL)

Adam Lee speaks with three comical young Malaysian artists who claim theirs as the best art show in the universe.

Behind the yellow façade of a new studio, where young artists Chi Too, Dill Malik and Munkao work, is a naked interior in stark contrast to its joyful outer appearance. The three young artists have recently moved in and are in the midst of setting up their workplace. 

To begin with, I have no expectation of what the artists would be like, but soon witness their lively behaviour. The three tease and poke fun at each other. Their routine conversation consists of verbally assaulting each other and laughing at each other’s comments.

Before the interview could commence, Dill Malik kept returning to work on her wall, unbothered by my presence. The petite artist was hurrying to finish painting her deep pink wall, because this month the comical gang unveils their works in an exhibition curated by Simon Soon of Arteri (a web portal that highlights contemporary art and culture in Malaysia and Southeast Asia). Entitled ‘The Best Art Show in the Univers’ [sic], the exhibition puts together works including video and photography, performance, installation and paintings – an eclectic mix of artwork by the three artists.

‘I approached Munkao to do an exhibition but we came up with the idea of a group show. Chi Too, Dill Malik and Munkao are friends and have been hanging out at Central Market Annexe,’ Soon says. ‘So, I sat them down and brainstormed about an exhibition and came up with everything from performance to installations.’ He explains that he wanted to showcase the work of younger artists. ‘Most of the young artists that I know are boring. These three are different. They have very different characters,’ Soon explains. ‘It is my hope that through this exhibition the National Art Gallery will consider them for future exhibitions.’

Suffice to say, these three are artists to watch. Childlike and satirical – their jokes, conversation, body language, paintings and drawings are byproducts of excessive exposure to pop culture and wild imagination. When I ask the three young talents about their own artwork, it proved more important to note their body language than their actual words.

Munkao, who is known for his outrageous artwork (which he showed me through his iPhone), would respond to my questions with sentences filled with jargon and gobbledygook. Ultimately all I could get was: ‘vegetarian’. Not unexpected for someone whose profile reads: ‘choirboy, wolves, regrets, money, and sewage control’. Even more unusual was his collection of paintings of Ultraman and Godzilla – that depict the loving relationship of the two pop icons.
Dill Malik, on the other hand, is like the windows she draws – interesting features, but shut. She exudes a sense of anonymity; you wonder what is beyond the closed windows. ‘They were inspired by Microsoft Windows,’ Chi Too jokes.
‘It was the windows from Central Market Annexe,’ Dill replies. Her work incorporates both abstract and pop culture references, and this student of Lim Kok Wing even runs her own personal blog with satirical content.
Chi Too is also an activist, and filmmaker, and handles my questions in a more receptive manner. But when asked if he uses his paintings to communicate a message, he insists that, ‘art is just art and there is no message that any one of us was trying to communicate.’ The filmmaker also has a blog where he uploads his work.

Quirky and unapologetic, the combination of these three bright young talents is going to make the exhibition a tour de force.  Still concern goes: Is the superlative title necessary and will this showcase really be the best art show in the universe? ‘The three of them came up with the title,’ Simon says. ‘It is self-explanatory. It invites people to take a second look. And it also shows that these guys are confident and cocky.’

*Pictures by Adam Lee

The Best Art Show Preview In The Univers!

The Best Art Show Preview In The Univers! by Zedeck Siew
(Taken from KLue)

On Tuesday afternoon, two days from opening night, the three artists that make up The Best Art Show In The Univers (1 to 24 October 2009, 67 Jalan Tempinis 1) argue about how to properly frame and hang a number of their works. The gallery walls around them are still bare.

The pieces currently under scrutiny belong to Dill Malik: they are 1:1 scale prints of her friends' Facebook profile pictures. As of this point, they exist only on Dill's hard-drive; she is still trying to determine where to go to get them printed.

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Why haven't you hung your work, Dill?
I just came back from college. I had a presentation this morning. It's my last year in Graphic Design, and I had to make a poster that sells cars.

So college is more important than The Best Art Show In The Universe?
My parents will kill me if I don't finish. I've got my priorities right.

Aside from the Facebook profile prints, what else are you doing for the show?
I'm doing a series of Abstract Expressionist paintings. These paintings have come from the visions I see. In my mind.

What do they look like? Which Abstract Expressionist most influenced your paintings?
Oh, they resemble - Rothko? Jackson? Pollock? Jackson Pollock? Yeah, them. All rolled into one.

Why is your "Univers" spelt without the "e"?
It's the Malay-language spelling. We are spelling it that way out of respect for the Malays. Hopefully, by mixing Malay and English, we will get more people to come and see the show.

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Simon Soon (or, rather, Noos Nomis)'s joke essay on the The Best Art Show In The Univers's website - "Anchored Configurations of the Everyday" - is an inscrutable mass of art-speak. It styles the show as:

"a Lacanian postulation that seeks to reenact the maddeningly complexity of contemporary art tropes creating a clinical language through which the formal performance and innovation was to attend to symptomatic language - reflecting upon the arch-myth of the conflicted desires rooted in an Oedipus struggle against the father authority."

The what the what? Thing is, that's only slightly worse than the typical, unnecessarily dense - and totally serious - curatorial essay that comes with every art show, these days.

At a very basic level, the show is satire: a lampoon of the contemporary visual art world's inability to not take itself seriously. Even Marcel Duchamp (with his commode) and Damien Hirst (with his dead shark), while they criticised the highfalutin mores of the art world, did so with an air of academically-justified discourse. Flippancy has always been taboo.

Even at this late juncture, the artists of The Best Art Show In The Univers are remarkably casual, more inclined to mess around than to nail-bite about their work.
Filmmaker and dilettante chi too is contributing installations to the exhibition, so - while his video / photographic / miscellaneous components are already sorted out - these will not be put together until the eleventh hour.

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Why are you making installation work, chi too?
Because I'm bored with video. I don't want to be a filmmaker any more. I'm so jealous. Why do people like Liew Seng Tat get to go to Korea? Why wasn't I invited to be part of 15Malaysia?

So why are you in The Best Art Show In The Univers?
I think I add a lot of value to the show. I also think I'm a piece of art, myself.

You mentioned, earlier, that much of your stuff is influenced by your relationship with your Spanish girlfriend ...
Yes. She is away, and it feels like we've already broken up - even though we haven't, yet. I'm channelling that energy. So a lot of my work is tragic. Romantic tragedy is my theme du jour.

Does your Spanish girlfriend actually exist?
Yes, of course! Why do you think I'm single? Is it just because I'm so monogamous?

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The only works now on-site belong to illustrator and painter Munkao. One of the works sport text - from a comment thread that followed one of art-blog Arteri Malaysia's posts - superimposed on the painting of a parrot.

The comment thread in question was a moderately-sized flame war, in reaction to Natural, a joint show by Munkao and Saharil Hasrin Sanin in May 2009. Both artists had produced visually clever, easy-to-like, and perhaps discourse-bereft paintings. After a photo-gallery of that show's opening, artists Daniel Chong and Vincent Leong wailed against the stuff, calling them "twatty triptychs" and "gimmicky crap", styling painting itself as the "most boring art form out there".

"don't do paintings just because u think that will make u an artist!" Vincent cried.
See what we mean by flippancy being taboo?

It is difficult to judge how audiences and critics will take to The Best Art Show In The Univers. People don't like to be made fun of, after all. The fun of the exhibition - its wit and smiling rebellion - may be lost, on some.

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What is the point of this show, Munkao?
We want to honestly represent everyone's opinion of each other, and accommodate the various belief-systems in visual art. It's 1Malaysia via art; it fits right into the Malaysian narrative.

What are your painting about? What issues do they explore?
These paintings explore my love of parrots. You know how parrots copy whatever you say? So parrots represent our tendency to copy each other.
Also, you'll notice that the text is written in cursive. You know how cursive handwriting is always connected? That's a literal symbol of our connections with each other.

Have you decided what to call it?
Dill and chi too are also collaborating in these works, so we will have to decide together. We are friends, we talk.

Are you going to decide by committee? You know: vote by raising your hands?
We don't restrict ourselves. We are like dolphins. We just want to swim in the ocean. If we are kept captive, we will hammer our heads on the walls.

What if I give you some fish?
Fish? But I'm vegetarian ...

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(The Best Art Show In The Univers will open on 1 October 2009, 8pm. There will be a vegetarian cooking show hosted by Munkao on opening night - though he hasn't decided what dishes to present. The Best Day of Your Life, a "tastefully curated all day art bazaar" will happen on 17 October.)