The works in the “Monsoon Song” series are witty pieces, as is typical of Singaporean artist Fyerool Darma’s oeuvre. They represent a sly, canny play on the semiotics of the signifiers of both contemporary Malay popular culture, and so-called Southeast Asian-ness. In other words, the idea of the pre-nation state – of a Nusantara before the independent countries of Southeast Asia today came into being – informs the conceptual logic here, a historical and cultural interrogation that transposes itself into an iconography that foregrounds traditional motifs and processes, and more recent cultural phenomena as well. The three bleach paintings, for instance, were produced to resemble batik fabric, but was made by bleaching out colours instead. To put another way, the process stands as the exact opposite of the mode of batik-making: where the batik artist uses wax to prevent dye from penetrating the cloth, leaving “areas of black space in the dyed fabric (an additive process), Fyerool bleaches out colour from the pre-coloured fabric he utilizes to create the desired images (a subtractive process). In the two “Those who linger” works, the stencilled image palm trees serves as a clichéd, overused signifier of tropical Southeast Asia, a mainstay of images designed for tourist consumption, here repeated over and again to suggest its hollowness. “We resign ourselves to a long wait” is a wall-bound sculpture that takes the shape of the bunga manga, or the follower of the coconut palm. Artificial tinsel replicas of the bunga manga is mostly utilized today in wedding processions of the Malay community, where in the past actual flowers were used. Historically, the bunga maga was used as signifiers of the arrival of royalty, and was celebratory in the nature. “For an auburn moon” is a sonic collage comprised of the music, sans lyrics, of three Malay songs from different eras, from 1960s to ‘80s. As the artist puts it, these are familiar tunes throughout the Malay-speaking world, and in their reimagined rendition here are imbued with a sense of mourning – for lost cultures, for broader cultural assimilation.
