Front Row

Artist Wong Chee Meng’s latest series of work began with a question, “Have you ever wondered...?” He joins us to speak about how his vibrant paintings, laden with unusual metaphors, get the audience to re-examine perceptions and consider different points of view by stepping out of their comfort zone. He tells how an accident which compromised his eyesight launched him to become a visual artist. 

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The bassist,based in Denmark, began his musical journey from Mali, and even though he left the country to seek his music fortune outside of Africa, the land of his birth continues to feed his creative soul. Moussa Diallo, who also writes and tells stories has recordings made especially for children. He tells how his various interests all dovetail.

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Art that shows the indigenous perspectives and functions as a caution against the rape of the land by oil palm growers, developers, miners, timber merchants and those who do not see the sacred in the land where their beds are not. Because of local indigenous art’s limited presence within the visual language of the more dominant cultures, it is  not only misunderstood but misrepresented. The curators represent to clarify and help understand. 

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The musician-poet-artist is here for the third time, and there’s more urgency in his voice, in his music and in his engagement. He was last here in August 2016 before the new US President’s edicts to bar Muslims from several African and Middle-Eastern countries. Baraka Blue writes: “In a forest, each tree appears a unique entity, separate from all others. Yet, below the surface, their roots are intimately interwoven, and more importantly, they are all woven into—and out of—the ground of being itself. We are souls of the same soil."
You can find his first interview with us here, and his second here. 

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This lady sings a blend of  Jazz, Soul, Neo Soul, rhythm-and-blues and blues. She shares her journey from Africa to Malaysia and the evolution of her sound born of warm humid climes.

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The young artist, who has all the trappings of religious orthodoxy and traditionalism, explains her realistic oil-on-canvas paintings of young women--with arms, necks and feet exposed--in soft flowing, translucent night clothes. She tells about the tension between how she herself appears and the images she depicts and why realism fascinates her and best captures her intent.

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The young artist holds a debut solo exhibition of more than 80 prints created between 2013 and 2017. He tells of his serendipitous journey which started with chanced opportunities and an inquisitive and exploring mind. His present concerns and inquiry are into memories--how the mind surveys, keeps, selects, rejects, fades out, rearranges in order to create. Memories are constructed, fluid and indefinite rather factual and fixed.

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The theater practitioner shares his journey from the stage into corporate spaces to facilitate training in as diverse areas as human resource to branding and marketing. He tells about the value of storytelling not only to engender products in the form of student-essays and marketing collaterals but also to individuals as they look at their lives.

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A Singapore-play that explores how people in relationships with each other develop a language of their own. A kind of  code. A shorthand for subconscious language; a language where words are not necessarily articulated. We read their minds, we understand their body gestures and we watch their tone of voice. The producer and actor tell how this latest reincarnation, the third time in KL, is different. 

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This is the third locally-devised play being staged this year, manifesting a desire to tell local stories and in the vernacular, The performers share the devising process and also tell about the differences between acting in English-language plays and vernacular ones. They also give some insights into gamophobia.

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