Balai Seni Negara has gone virtual! By and large, that’s an incredible achievement for an institution with a 63-year history and a collection of over 3,600 individual works in storage. The closing of its doors in August last year for a round of major renovations (no doubt also affected by the ongoing COVID-19 situation) felt sad and heavy. For a lot of us casual art enjoyers, we simply didn’t know of many other places to go, unattuned as we were to the complex word-of-mouth network of galleries, curators, and artists that always seemed to have juuust gotten done with an exhibition by the time we heard about it.
So it’s encouraging, then, that BSN returns to the public eye with a virtual exhibit of Minta Perhatian: Media Baharu (aka Attention Please: New Media), curated by Tan Hui Koon, in a form that is easily accessible, freely available, and above all, safe. Featuring 29 different works, made by Malaysian new media practitioners between 1987 and 2016 and sourced from the National Collection, it feels like part history lesson, part art show, and part tribute to a diverse, innovative milieu of Malaysian artists across the last few decades.
Even so, it’s not a perfect experience, and some of its issues, both technical and curatorial, speak to the messiness of the organization and the problems that arise when it tries to engage with the intensely nuanced, political nature of Malaysia’s artists.
One of the first bumps I ran into was that I could barely find the exhibition, with the only mention of it I could find being a paywalled article on The Star. It wasn’t on the National Art Gallery’s homepage, nor anywhere else. It’s clear that a lot of love went into preparing the panoramic photographs that make up the exhibit, but I do wish that there was more attention drawn to it.
Lim Jack Kin is a participant of the CENDANA - ASWARA Arts Writing Mentorship Programme 2020-2021.