In 2021, Five Arts Centre members and collaborators were invited by researcher-curator Stephanie Sipei Lu to participate in 穿针引线: Threading Through the Eye of a Needle, an exhibition at the Art Museum of Guangzhou Academy of Fine Arts, China. Featuring arts collectives from across Southeast Asia, the project explored approaches of self-education and publication, collaborative practices, and artmaking-as-research.
The exhibition was part of the larger First Trans-Southeast Asia Triennial Research Exhibition Series #3: Does it matter that we’ve just met, if our hearts understand: Two responses to social practice, which ran from 21 November 2021 to 20 March 2022.
For the exhibition, Five Arts Centre members Anne James, Faiq Syazwan Kuhiri, June Tan, Mark Teh, and Syamsul Azhar together with friends Fahmi Reza, Imri Nasution, and Wong Tay Sy contributed a video installation highlighting keywords that articulate their shared practice together since the mid-2000s. They also worked with the exhibition planning team to make available documents related to Five Arts' work since 1984: posters of past works; a video reflecting on 37 years of the collective; and writings on non-formal arts education, socially engaged art, and moving to a new home during the Covid-19 pandemic.
On 11 December 2021, the eight artists joined Stephanie Sipei Lu in an online talk to reflect on their collaborative ways of working. During the session, they individually expanded on keywords such as 'Through My Eyes', 'Counter-Narrative', 'Evidence', 'Poly-Perspective', 'Belief', 'Trust', 'Social Actors', and 'Witness/Witnessing'. They also discussed projects that excavate the afterlives of the Malayan Emergency (1948-1960), as well as a number of other performances that speak to speculative futures and histories.
You can watch the video recording of the session below.
Stephanie Lu Sipei has also kindly collated and translated into Chinese some of the documents that were made available during the exhibition into a publication, 五艺中心和朋友们: Five Arts Centre and Collaborators (2023). Edited by Stephanie with Yanxin Chen and Junhua Fung, it brings together transcripts of the online artist talk, Mark Teh's 2021 goodbye letter to Five Arts's old studio space, the collective's Code of Conduct relating to Discrimination, Harassment, and Bullying, as well as an essay on the development of non-formal arts education in Malaysia. The publication features a beautiful cover by Feihong Ou, and is published by Transport Hub Project with support from Research Centre for New Art Museum Studies and Art Museum of Guangzhou Academy of Fine Arts.
You can download the e-book version of 五艺中心和朋友们: Five Arts Centre and Collaborators here.
We would like to register our deepest gratitude to Stephanie Sipei Lu and her collaborators for the research, exhibition, and publication projects for their tremendous care, curiosity, generosity, warmth, and friendship.