CV

Bio

Two things happened during the stay in Tokyo in 1986 that were going to have long-term consequences. By the time I reached the Japanese capital, I was pretty clear about the multi-disciplinary nature of my work. I had actively practised painting, photography and performance for many years and was even beginning to sell my writing to magazines. From Marma, the artistic collaboration with my childhood friend Jean Jacques Martin, I had adopted the name Ma and defined my practice by saying that I worked "on the space between things". 

Amazingly enough, I was soon to learn that one of the concepts central to Japanese aesthetics is called ma and that it describes precisely the notion of space or moment between things. Whether it is the empty space in a painting, the silence between two musical notes, the void between two stones in a Zen garden or the moment between two poses of a kabuki actor, what truly makes the value of artistic expression to the Japanese mind is the ma in it. It doesn't matter if it is about time or space, ma is the 'nothing' that makes the 'something' exist.

Far from feeling the urge to focus on what I was supposed to be best at as people often suggested, I looked at these disciplines as complementing one another in the expression of my full personality. I thus began defining that personal approach to creativity as a work taking place in the space between disciplines, rather than within the disciplines themselves. I was "Ma, the in-between".

Another timely event brought new elements to my research on time and space, painting and photography. The spring issue of Vogue is traditionally edited by a personality of some sort. In 1985, it had ben handed to David Hockney who presented a portfolio featuring and explaining his latest photo montages. They were based on the notion of "reversed perspective", a photographic version of the Cubist representation of space. What struck me most was that the graphic he had done to illustrate the opposition between the two notions of perspective strangely resembled the one I had done to conceptualise my seminal 1977 drawing (click here to see the drawing). I loved Hockney's works but I didn't feel the call to embark on a similar research right away. Things were to happen in their own rhythm.

A couple of years later, these cubist photographic collages became the inspiration for a series of work on Kathmandu and initiated a whole new interpretation of the time-space/painting-photography exploration at the heart of the 1977 drawing. This  research lasted for most of the 1990s and took the form of exhibitions inspired by the architecture of the cities I could visit as a travel photographer and writer; exhibitions in which the modernist photographic approach contrasted with a sort of naive pictorial style. Baffling even to me, this shift from my earlier surrealist inclination had mysteriously appeared in my travel sketchbooks to express the human dimension of the same cities. Meanwhile it became clear that the magazine articles I enjoyed writing the most generally dealt with history, art and cultural studies. With the new century, the three years spent on writing, photographing and designing the book Bintan, Phoenix of the Malay Archipelago brought the revelation that I enjoyed serious academic research tremendously, a life-changing and timely realisation that happened to coincide with my new position as an art lecturer in LASALLE College of the Arts. This new direction in professional life was certified by the stamp of academia with a master completed in 2006. In it, rigorous historical research formed the base for a widely speculative and fictional artistic exploration. These two sides of my personality had joined hand. I was indeed Ma and had bridged the space between intellectual and artistic realms to make reality and fiction reflect one another in the mirror of photographic simulacra. 

Since then, the scope of my exploration and playing around with ideas, forms, emotions, and intuitions has continuously widened its horizon, at time focused on ethnographic analysis, at others investigating historical interpretations or developing widely speculative theories, at yet others freely performing to the deceivingly superficial tune of pop culture. But I know that all the while, and no matter what might be the medium or the field in which I use it, it all is about connecting the dots that have so persistently demarcated the perimeters of my being an accidental citizen of the world, a stranger in a strange land who in the process of distancing himself from home became aware that home was indeed where the heart was: in a space between worlds born out of his displacement and had all the unsettling characteristics of time.

Today, writing these lines at the close of 2017 as I do, I find myself having gone back to painting in yet another layering of the dialogue between medium started forty years ago. I paint to explore the nature of possible photographs: the probability of veracity; not quite this nor that but both at the same time, and only one of the two as a result of choice. This is indeed a quantum world or so are we told. But this time the questions asked in 1977 seem to have found some answers; answers born out precisely of an exploration that can be perceived as haphazard if one only sees the "full" and not the "space in-between; if one can not tune into the absence of things that seem to not "exist" but  makes the world do so in doing so. The void that differentiate and allows individuality to exist. The Ma.