Teng Beng Chew, Malaysian Genius of Papermaking: Artist as Researcher

Dr. Teng Beng Chew, noted Malaysian artist, has a distinguished career as an important artist, one of the six artists chosen in 1993 to represent Malaysia at Queensland Art Gallery Asia-Pacific Triennial of ContemporaryArt, with numerous exhibitions of his paintings throughout the world. Almost single-handedly, he established art education in Malaysia, leaving a rising career in the US to establish the first art education program in his nation at the Universiti Sains Malaysia (USM), where he was Chair of the Fine Arts Department until his retirement in 1998.

As a child he painted people and the country-side of the remote, unspoiled Terengganu region where his family lived and his father worked as an artist. Chew's mentor was his father, and in his formative years he developed a passion for his work that has persisted throughout his life.

As his work matured and he became more widely known, Chew attended New York University where his passion took up the cause of fusing the "canvas" with the painting, a quest that formed the basis for his doctoral research. He was intent on creating a special paper where the medium itself was the artwork.

This led him to the jungles of his native land where he lived and ran numerous tests on the indigenous plants of the forest, living in the wilds as he created new papers with phenomenal textures. He spent months in the wilderness, keeping meticulous records much the way an empirical researcher would, noting the fibers, the techniques, the process of mixing and drying out, the exposure to elements of the weather, etc. on hundreds, perhaps thousands of new papers, all original and brought into existence for the very first time. The secret to such abundance was extensive variation of the process, carefully recording each differing version so that the process could be replicated. This resulted in many different papers of wildly varying textures and colors from the same basic pulp.

Chew brought to this research a skill and sensibility that the typical empirical scientist would not have, or that would be bracketed out to preserve the scientific "integrity" of the research: the sensibility of the artist to notice what the scientist would overlook. This artistic noticing created papers of exceptional expressive originality. When he returned to New York, he brought four volumes of new papers that did indeed achieve the goal of his original quest: every paper was a work of art to see and touch, the marvelous textures and colors exuding an impressive presencing of an indigenous art.

After receiving his Ph.D. in 1987, Chew returned to Malaysia, where his research formed the basis for a cottage industry producing exceptionally fine paper from the indigenous plants of his homeland.

The abstract of his dissertation succinctly summarizes the research but fails to communicate the passion and scope of Chew's achievement:

Title: PAPERMAKING FROM SELECTED MALAYSIAN FIBERS: AN INVESTIGATION OF ITS ARTISTIC POTENTIAL THROUGH CREATION OF ORIGINAL PAPER ARTWORKS
Author(s): CHEW, TENG BENG
Degree: PH.D.
Year: 1987
Pages: 00472
Institution: NEW YORK UNIVERSITY; 0146
Source: DAI, 48, no. 03A, (1987): 0495
Abstract: The purpose of this research was to utilize selected tropical plants of Malaysia as a source of raw material for papermaking, to develop tools and techniques for the production of the investigator's own artwork, and to discuss the aesthetic implications.

The investigator sought to find out if the cellulose fibers of the agricultural residues of the bananas (Musa sapientum) and the pineapples (Ananas comosus) were suitable for the production of the pulps, to determine their characteristics, and their results.

The study focuses on the historical development, aesthetics, production of pulps, sheet formation, discerning paper characteristics, and the extension of pulp as an artistic medium.

The elicitation of the fibers involved in cooking and maceration. The variegated pulps were then used in several ways to handmake paper and paper artwork. Of myriad approaches employed in creating artwork, six were the researcher's invention that have not yet been expounded in any related literature thus far.

Aesthetic inquiry was based on phenomenology, to discern as yet unseen aesthetic properties imbued in the chosen fibers.

Primarily, the research was qualitative, employing aesthetic and descriptive procedures. However, quantitative method was also applied to record the experiments and tests. Research techniques included both traditional and contemporary phenomenological research and methods.

The results evinced that both plant fibers were strong, elongated, elastic, and indissoluble, easily extractable, pulpable, and malleable. They were susceptible to dyes and intermix exceptionally well with recycled paper.

Of the two genera, the pineapple fiber seemingly appeared to be tougher. In the pineapple species, it was found that Nanas Bukit is stronger than Nanas Mauritius. While in that of the banana, Pisang Awak is superior to Pisang Mas. Hence, more time was consumed in cooking and macerating the pineapple fibers. By varying the time duration in cooking, beating, and aging, the character of the fibers can be altered to effect different grades of paper.

The research concludes that not only are the fibrous pulps potentially suitable for papermaking, but are equally versatile and fascinating as an artistic medium. Undoubtedly, the materiality of the fibers embodies wide ranging phenomenal features sui generis.

Chew has given us remarkable model of an artist creating a new indigenous artform and tradition. Work of such power and originality abound in the work of those pioneers of the International Society for Advancement of Living Traditions in Art (ISALTA).

Sandro Dernini: Art Eating Impresario

Aside from the fact that Dr. Sandro Dernini holds doctorates in Art and Biology, he is one of the most astonishing figures in the world of arts and research. He happens to be extremely original, and thus is slightly incomprehensible to the ordered worlds of academia and society. His ideas have resonated across continents since the 1970s, and the emergence of PLEXUS INTERNATIONAL coincides with those years and was extremely effective in establishing startling collaborative efforts through numerous exhibitions, happenings, lectures, and showings of artists of all media.

Sandro Dernini is a mercurial spirit that inspires much of the work of Plexus, but perhaps his greatest gift is creating working networks among artists that lead to new creative activity, and his fierce determination to restore art to the community. Indeed, the arts have been skillfully hi-jacked and institutionalized by critics, historians, and an inner circle of anointed artists. This began in the 20th century with the rise of commercializing "high" art and has continued in this century through the institutionalizing of the past and using the past to control the future.

However, Sandro is a knight errant, keeping the art establishment off-balance, and taking on incredible adventures that are largely misunderstood because of his unique inventiveness. Yet he has impact that comes from the energy that radiates from his activities. Although the establishment has tried to marginalize him, in the spirit of Derrida, Dernini has expanded the margins so that the true substance of artistic creativity is discovered in the margins.

Recently he published his doctoral research as Eating Art, a book that is a sweeping gesture of crossing boundaries, indeed, of demolishing the borders that separate human disciplines and activities and replacing them with the organic flow of intensified moments. Such a combination of nutrition and art emerges naturally for Dernini, for food and art have long been intertwined in the Italian culture. Printed by the Beniamini Group, a private publishing house for specialized publications, Eating Art is not yet available through Amazon.com, an oversight that surely the author will rectify.

This is not the place to enumerate the countless happenings and art events instigated by Dernini, a magical impresario who has continued to cause gastric distress for the art establishment. The number and quality of events will astound you. Dr. Dernini subtitles his book "Artistic Practice and Creative Process as Qualitative Problem-Solving for Individual and Community Well Being."

Now Dernini has emerged as a contributing member in ISALTA (International Society for Advancement of Living Traditions in Art), a website that has brought together the work of artists largely mentored as artist researchers by Dr. David Ecker at New York University. The collective work of these artists are on this new website, the inspiration and work of Dr. Carleton Palmer, which celebrates ISALTA's renewed mission deserving wider recognition.

Eating Art has the look and feel of a happening of the moment, a newspaper of the last four decades. It is a book to be consumed with leisurely and casual excursions which will ultimately grab you, and rivet your attention in the conscious acknowledgment that you are indeed uncovering something significant and worth knowing.

Old Wine in New Bottles

Dr. Carleton Palmer has responded eloquently on behalf of the International Society for the Advancement of Living Traditions in Art.

Many thanks for the insightful observations about ISALTA. Technology has made practical what was unreachable twenty-five years ago because of logistics and cost. The ideas of an encyclopedia of living traditions in art, research journal and artist/researcher magazine might now be realized as interactive, co-operative projects along with enhanced communication tools at a single website. The existing site, isalta.com, is merely a sketch, and definitely a work-in-progress that can be continuously reshaped by the artist/researchers themselves.

An excellent vision now requires a renewed commitment and a new membership. The achievements of the past are impressive and serve as a road map for new generations of artist researchers from all disciplines and should now extend beyond text. But attracting this constituency may require more than a website, as was suggested in Navigating Global Connections.

While I agree with Dr. Palmer's claim that artistic problem solving is inclusive rather than exclusive, transcending media and materials, I also believe that many may still regard ISALTA as the domain of visual artist/philosophers. Yes, this is not accurate, and no one is more persuasive than David Ecker in using music, dance, theatre, or even food to make some of his finest manifestations of phenomenological description. Even so, many in the academic world have made a clear distinction differentiating art and arts in an oversimplification of categories. This schism is evident at nearly all colleges and universities. Traditional names of colleges or schools as Arts and Sciences reinforces this perception and perpetuates this artificial distinction. Even at New York University the separation and isolation is underscored with a Department of Art and Art Professions that deals only with visual art, while other arts disciplines reside in a Department of Music and Performing Arts Professions. The conditions at NYU mirror a common perception among professionals and non-professionals.

The underlying concept of art as qualitative problem solving transcends medium and material; it is inclusive rather than exclusive, and challenges preconceptions about art and empty definitions that drain art of meaning. The dissertations whose abstracts are available through the site encyclopedia, and the varied art they discuss give some idea of the breadth and utility of this idea, although they do collectively reveal a visual bias, that is the product of historical circumstances not philosophy. Discussion of "a performance-based conference aimed at attracting thinkers and practitioner's from all media, intermedia, mixed media, and multimedia" excites the imagination and would be a highly desirable development.

As attractive as Dr. Palmer's rationale for inclusion may be, it is not convincing in the context of the common perceptions I have described. Living Traditions in the Arts could open the terrain dramatically. I am suggesting that ISALTA might take an aggressive stance that could prove irresistible for 21st century artists. There are many obstacles, including lack of funding and insufficient personnel. Yet, the very emergence of ISALTA is like a beacon flashing in the wilderness.

...the philosophical groundwork for those particular dissertations lies to a greater or lesser degree in Dr. Ecker's work (some of whose papers are being digitized and made available on site as quickly as possible), but he would agree that they represent only a small part of a story yet to be written. Serious contributions and documentation are requested for inclusion in the Encyclopedia and publications. It is hoped that ISALTA will be a place where that story can be written, seen and heard, and every interested artist/researcher is invited to the space.

I would suggest a more open architecture, a Wikipedia conception rather than encyclopedic. A moderated Wiki might have a greater chance of attracting younger generations more attuned to structures where the readers are the authorship, where knowledge is created in a new platform of users who generate knowledge through creative inquiry. This argument was the main point of the commentary at Web Arts Collaborative (ISALTA.com Still a Web 1.0 Website?) ISALTA may be putting old wine into new bottles, and today, it may be even more true that "appearance is everything." The old wine of past decades is now decanted in the rarefied atmosphere of cyberspace, in the splendor of a new technology, but maybe it is time for new labels, new vineyards.

Great news that more of David Ecker's brilliant work will be made available on the ISALTA website. His is among the supreme gospels of phenomenological practice. Serving as his colleague at New York University, my real education began when I collaborated with him and his students on incredible projects that continue to resonate today.

ISALTA for the Twenty-first Century

Remembering the spectacular vision of David Ecker in the 1980s, I find the emergence of the International Society for the Advancement of Living Traditions in Art as a presence and project on the web to be a promising leap into the future. Spearheaded by Dr. Carleton Palmer, many of the practitioners of ISALTA of the past thirty years now have a home and a multifaceted voice that can extend some of the most original ideas of all arts into an energy for preservation and change.

In a world that treasures modernity over substance, ISALTA offers a vision that extends to the spiritual and aesthetic foundations of creative work. Yet, the organization, born out of the momentum of 1981, is in need of renewed vision and energy. ISALTA's website is an impressive articulation of a vital spirit, but now that this sleeping giant has emerged in cyberspace from the collective of artists that spawned world wide research and arts events, it seems to have nowhere to go. Yet, if I Google "living traditions in the arts" I find more than 22,000,000 hits, and ISALTA does not emerge as a prominent player.

ISALTA is aware of its plight. Visiting the website reveals a globe that serves as a link to this message:

ISALTA is changing. Since 1981 Members of the Board of Directors
and members have passed away, retired and moved on to other
interests. It is up to the membership to set the direction for ISALTA,
in this century, and all input will be welcomed at isalta@optonline.net.

ISALTA needs more than new ideas. It needs artists from all media with vibrant passions about the past, present, and future. The strength of ISALTA in the past is that its members had strong convictions about the present and the vision to shape the future.

If you examine about 30 pages of the 22,000,000 hits for living traditions, you are struck by the obsession of those websites with the past. This is certainly admirable and consonant with an objective of ISALTA in the 1980s, but ISALTA also was intent on creating tradition and bringing the latest technology and arts practices to bear so that boundaries were broken and crossed and new affiliations and collaborations emerged, sometimes with breath-taking speed. One such artist is Sandro Dernini, a contributing member, whose monumental work Plexus spanned Time and Space in an elaborate ongoing collaboration of artists and performers. Dernini was also an important figure in the initiatives surrounding the 500th year of Columbus' voyage to America which led to the creation of Navigating Global Cultures at NYU. NGC no longer exists, but as Web Arts Collaborative suggests, a new era for interactive creative work has emerged, and ISALTA might seize this opportunity for its own initiatives.

ISALTA needs to extend beyond the visual bias that presently is reflected in its membership, research, and coursework. Perhaps a performance-based conference aimed at attracting thinkers and practitioner's from all media, intermedia, mixed media, and multimedia could provoke a new revolution of thought. ISALTA's phenomenological-based stance is most welcome in this new world of quantitative dominance. Whether David Ecker's work is enough to propel this facet of ISALTA may not be relevant. Ecker's work is important and significant, although lately somewhat overlooked. But there are many others such as Don Ihde, Merleau-Ponty, et al., who philosophically underpin the work of this organization and embrace its raisone d'etre.

Yet, one cannot help but admire the tenacity of ISALTA. After all these years, its efforts and work have coalesced, and it can manage to somewhat defiantly shout in the wilderness of the 21st Century (with apologies to Sondheim):

Good times and bum times,
I’ve seen them all and, my dear,
I’m still here.

The Wizardry of LEMUR

LEMUR (League of Electronic Urban Musical Robots) brought the full resources of its technological wizardry to bear on a concert which emerges as a milestone event for that organization and for new music. Performed May 31-June 2 in the transformed space of 3LD (Three Legged Dog), the concert was curated by Eric Singer, the guiding guru of LEMUR, bringing together distinguished composers and performers from the full spectrum of contemporary music practice.

The spectacle of technology as intelligent machines fashioned out of materials which might have otherwise been sentenced to the junkyard or may have been spawned from the debris of the trash heap, provided an array of "robots" poised for action. These robots are functional contraptions focused on their capacity to deliver sounds with precision and energy beyond the reach of their human counterparts. Guitarbot was a tunable string robot that shook passionately as it meted out its sound with almost raucous joy.

Some thirty robots were mixed with humans in this extravagant display of mechanical alacrity. They clung to the ceiling and floor with fierce determination, jiggling, swaying, and dancing to the tunes of a million different drummers. Robots were at their best when they were banging themselves in a clutter of notes cascading throughout the space, shaping the moment with different densities and textures where energy was palpable as explosive resonance reverberating in perpetual bliss.

The evening was saturated with outstanding talent and musicianship. They Might Be Giants wowed their fans with songs With the Dark, Vestibule, and Our Cannibal Friends. The Lemur robots churned along with them, but their efforts seemed more or less peripheral. The songs were just too good and didn't really need that support.

George Lewis, a trombonist, composer, and improviser, provided a stunning performance, his instrument resonant and strong, adding to the texture of the Bots with exciting timbres and musical riffs.

JG Thirwell's Prosopagnosis pitted a string quartet on collision course with the Robots in a tour de force that rocked 3LD and the surrounding area of Greenwich street. The Modbots were equally matched by processed string sounds, and the result was an exciting deluge of sound shifts, tears, eruptions, and tumbling, collapsing sound debris, volcanic and magma-like. Prosopagnosis is a condition where you cannot remember faces likely because that area of the brain is damaged. The notion of motivic structures collapsing on themselves seemed to match the imagery of the concept.

Clearly, the most musical event of the evening was Morton Subotnik's extraordinary With a Little Help From which explored the timbres of the Bots in a slowly emerging improvisation, gradually picking up speed and density, with overlapping textures, percussive and lyrical. Ably assisted by percussionist Tom Beyer, the piece gathers momentum until Beyer begins to move his feet, almost dancing. Eventually the listener realizes his "dance" is transforming the texture of the music, and finally Subotnik joins Beyer in something of a foot duel that leads to a rousing climax of the work.

Such events as this concert as a large scale celebration of new music mixed with mechanical wizardry are all too few. Thanks to the League of Electronic Musical Urban Robots. Thanks to the vision and determination of Eric Singer. They are in a league that is a special world of contemporary musicing to be applauded and appreciated as the new musical prophets and wizards.

Carving Clarity: Ben Munisteri's Dance Projects

Ben Munisteri Dance Projects performed at DNA (Dance New Amsterdam) May 31-June 3, presented three very different glimpses of an artist who establishes an authentic clarity in his work even though often layered with myriad contrasting effects and technique. Regardless of the complexity, you are never lost.

Munisteri's dance concert was reviewed by Roslyn Sulcas in the NY Times as "Ballet and Headstands, and Other Quirky Contrasts," a fair review, if not insightful. It seemed odd that a dance critic appeared surprised that "ballet" might comprise part of the substance of modern dance as though this was something new or even out of place. Even so, we might question the accuracy of her observation that implied some conscious artistic process on the part of Mr. Munisteri to mix "ordinary" human movement with ballet.

There is no question that Munisteri's work celebrates the human body and transforms "ordinary" movement into the realm of the extraordinary. His eclectic taste in sound and music also contrasts the classical sensibility of Stravinsky's Capriccio in his 2006 work Tuesday 4 a.m. with a score of processed sound and dialogue by Evren Celimli for Smash Through to Sunlight (1999) and a collage of Placebo and Bjork for Terra Nova (2007), an encounter with motion capture which at times echoes the dancers on stage and at other times anticipates the shape of movement through Time. The animation developed from the motion capture by Peter Birdsall, Ted Warburton, and Timothy Jordan was poetically subtle, an extension of a changing horizon of clouds, rain, water, and constellations. Even though derived from the movement of the dancers, the animations seemed oddly distant and disconnected, almost like a separate entity commenting on the movement on stage, but the dancers and the animations never really notice each other.

Yet the star of the evening is Munisteri's celebration of human movement and his ability to express an infinite gradation of perception and feeling. Pattern and repetition add to a vocabulary by juxtaposing what has become familiar with a new irony. We recognize an immediate past even as we see it dissolve into the uncertainty of Now and anticipate its reiteration in a new context. This approach to movement undoubtedly creates formal structural devices, and Munisteri's grasp and manipulation of form is masterful, but it always seems couched in expressive irony. The Time's reviewer called it "quirky" but for me it was as though the predictable had been transformed into the unpredictable, the common becomes strange as we enter into the movement imagination of Munisteri's world. His is a world of variety and surprise, but always threaded through the clarity of his vision.

His dancers brought a range of versatility to the movement and this mixture was integral to the integrity of the Munisteri's vision. DNA is a wonderful venue for Munisteri's work. His audience seemed revved up, perceptive, and responsive to the challenge of his works.

Darha Nopigom: The Mastery of Byungki Hwang

The long awaited new album by Byungki Hwang, Darha Nopigom, has been launched by a tour of the Northeast, with lectures and concerts in Boston, New York, and at the Smithsonian in Washington, D.C. This was something of a whirlwind tour fr0m May 30 through June 5th.

Hwang is the consummate quintessential Korean composer and performer, a highly original voice whose work achieves the immediacy of a masterpiece possessing a timeless and permanent presence. In his work we relish every pitch, every nuance, every texture that seems to resonate on a canvas of time and space, all the more precious because of its fleeting temporal existence emerging from and disappearing into silence.

This paradox of permanence and ephemeral transiency defines the special quality of Hwang's poetic vision. His body of work seems integrated and whole, much like the way Walt Whitman's Leaves of Grass embodies the work of the poet throughout his lifetime. All of Hwang's work seems related, serving as a remarkable index into the sensibility of an artist who has journeyed through uncharted regions and left a path for us to follow. His musical works transcend performance, existing as enduring soundposts of life deeply engaged with the essence of the world and committed to sharing it with us if we are willing to embrace it with our full attention.

Although we often associate his music and performance with Traditional Korean Music, he is in fact one of the leading composers of contemporary music in Korea. His conceptions incorporate and extend tradition, establishing a new frontier for the Korean Identity. This new CD, Darha Nopigom, provides eight compositions(Darha Nopigom, Sigyetap [The Clock Tower], Hamadan, Jasi [Night Watch], Nakdoeum, Moon of My Hometown, Chahyangije [Two Poems on the Frangrance of Tea], and Chucheonsa [Swinging Song]), 23 tracks of music so original it will challenge you to engage with musical expression on a personal level, assimilating a sensibility that has something profound to say about the world that the composer inhabits.

It is impossible to single out highlights. Every work is distinctive, and one might add, definitive. The beauty of the Gayageum tone with its expressive accents and sliding pitch reveals an instrument of intimate emotional power, but also tones of such elegance that we are captured in the sheer splendor of the sound itself.