KUALA LUMPUR, Feb 3 ― Peruse the perimeter of the inaugural KL Biennale’s Be Loved (Heritage) section at the National Visual Arts Gallery and you will pass a scattering of tiny lights nestled just off the ground.
No, these are not guide lights for the dimly-lit exhibition.
They are the award-winning miniature works of Shin Pui San, who goes by Novia.
The Ipoh-born’s aptly named series, Not So Far Away, is made up of seven small recreations that capture a Malaysian variety little histories — a typewriter service at Batu Pahat, kampung hut being moved by villagers, and several natural landscapes.
Most are replete with her indelible sketches of buildings, animals or, most importantly, people, which bring the materials to life — watercolour, artline pen, light and paper.
“I manifested the littleness of these assets by making them very small scale,” said the Limkokwing graduate.
“The audience is surrounded by big art pieces in the gallery. They experience the size of the miniature artwork by contrast and with greater intensity.
“Everything is small, including the artwork as well as the stories that live within the assets.”
Shin captures flickering aspects of the surface that makes up Malaysia, elements that perhaps run deeper into the nation’s identity than most would give credit for.
She magnifies — literally, the dioramas in Not So Far Away are viewed via provided magnifying glass — the important, mini historical “assets” for one simple reason:
“We see them disappearing one by one as time goes by.”
Shin began putting together Not So Far Away in 2014 before taking a two-year break to conduct research.
She experimented several methods to tell historical stories, including giving tour guides, producing cultural maps and, of course, illustration.
This made it possible to meet “interesting” characters who were truly from different walks of life.
They all had an influence in some way or other, be it the signboard maker; paleontologist who taught Shin how to look for fossils; archaeologist researching Tambun Rock art; “the former robber selling petai at Kinta riverfront” in Ipoh; a friend from the Lundayeh tribe and her grandmother’s, yes grandmother’s, history teacher.
The artworks sat in a box until 2016 when Shin heard about the gallery’s Young Contemporaries Award exhibition.
She entered and, just three years after her first solo exhibition in KL coincidentally titled Not So Long Ago, won joint first prize.
Recently, she also showcased a handful of works for a month over December and January as part of 3Belas, displayed in the gallery’s Creative Space.
3Belas focussed on the theme of being loved in a fast-changing world. Fellow artists Shaliza Juanna and Elaine Wong made up the trio of contributions.
But it was the consistency of Shin’s subject matter that was most compelling.
The four installations created last year called Not So Far, Far Away drew more acutely on the country’s plight of dehistoricisation, or in a broader sense, things that were once there that aren’t anymore.
“There are a lot of conflicts in the world that are partially due to the lack of historical understanding,” she said.
“When everyone is fighting to be the first, the oldest, the biggest, the smallest, but perhaps not so far away, there are some little historical stories shining in their own way.”
The star of the show was an interactive piece.
Visitors are invited to peep through a hole in the wall no bigger than the circumference of a ping pong ball where, enclosed, is a cylinder shape representing a road flanked by trees with caricatures of animals — tapirs, tigers — in the middle.
It is the viewer’s task to rotate a knob outside the wall which causes a car to crash into the animals, which rebounds back into place as the carousel-like fixture is turned over and over.
The scene represents an “endless cycle” of “carnage” common in Malaysia. Shin feels the need to emphasise is the problem of roadkill that “we can’t help.”
“I feel the movement makes it more painful,” she told Malay Mail a few days prior to 3Belas’ conclusion on January 16.
The remaining parts of the collection were also fixed within the wall, including reimaginations of 1,200-year-old ruins at Bujang Valley, Kedah that were destroyed in 2013 and a rambutan tree from childhood dug up by her grandfather last year.
The other was an iPad with a rolling 30-minute documentary on night soil workers in Penang.
In Lee Cheah Ni’s Purge: Documenting The Labours Of Penang’s Night Soil Workers, Shin’s sketches were turned into animation to create a picture of a culture she felt insufficiently detailed by the state’s archives.
The impressions were formed from oral accounts of some of the former workers’ later generations.
Shin’s Not So Far Away exhibition ends March 30.
