It was in 2020, in the midst of the various lockdowns in K.L. that I made No Signal. But I didn't think much about it at the time. By that point, I have been trying to develop a painting show for a few years. Half-heartedly, to be honest. I was painting all the time, but I was making exhibitions with my video works.

Tell us a little about how you got to where you are today. What drew you to art-making?

My interest in art started from childhood. I’ve always been interested in how parts can come together to make a whole; I had many badly reassembled toys. Making art also involves stitching together diverse visual elements to create the final work.

As the world tentatively emerged from the pandemic, the arts and culture scene in the Klang Valley also found its rhythm this year with a number of bold, engaging and forward-thinking public events.

Earlier this week, my students organised a screening and talk by multidisciplinary visual artist Gan Siong King titled: My Video Making Practice.

We are also tennis buddies, although we haven’t hit the court since 2013 due to our own different professional paths, but also owing to an injury on my part.

After my last painting show in 2015, I felt there isn't much more I can do with painting as a form. 

​

It became too quiet, too still. 

Gan Siong King is a Malaysian artist, born in 1975, and living and working in Kuala Lumpur. He has been making paintings since the 1990s, and videos since 2009. His work, he says, tries to unpack and rearrange “expectations,” probing art and its capacity for meaning-making. His video essays are often portraits of others and of himself, while his painting practice is mostly invested in testing its own parameters. In 2020, he was invited for a residency at Koganecho Bazaar.

This brief report is the result of my reflections on making an exhibition during the Covid-19 lockdown (2021 - 2022) in Kuala Lumpur, titled All the TIme I Pray to Buddha, I Keep on Killing Mosquitoes. It’s a subjective impression of a semi-complicated project by a rookie writer.

錄像文章（video essay）在數位時代演變得逐漸不再有創新性，更多的是奠基於網路知識生產的挪用；經常運用或消費Youtube的馬來群島藝術家在錄像文章的創作邏輯為何？似乎是未來值得我們觀察的方向。早在這波疫情發生前，顏常慶就經常在網路展示影像，而他堅持反傳統電影語彙創作，不斷追尋非商業與非藝術電影的語彙，影像藝術對他來說就像科學實驗的探索過程，創作之於實驗如同藝術工作室之於實驗室；即使影像永遠像是未完成的狀態，這些實驗也是最珍貴的過程。

"The pandemic has forced us to put ourselves in a confined space while constantly on the edge of a mental breakdown. “New Normal” has become a familiar catchphrase to ease us into accepting reality. Our urge to assemble, gather and reconvene with others is part of our psychological need—thus prompting us to look towards technological solutions to complement what we lack."

"We live in uncertain times. Politically, economically and, ecologically, it’s easy to feel we are helpless victims, on the brink of a catastrophe caused by others. And the first instinct is to demand sweeping and revolutionary changes in the world. But even with the best intention, changes often have unintended and disastrous consequences."

"我大部分的「錄像論文」（video essays）作品都是關於遊戲的、詩意的過程，不同類型的作品和遊戲有著不同目的和方法。這就是為什麼作品都具備工具性的圖像並描述過程的原因，每個事件只要經歷一段過程後就會變成另一件事。我的創作實踐方法圍繞著解開現有系統中的傳統結構／期望，以其他方式重新排列後去想像不同的觀看方式。"

“In his own words, this is a story of influence and connection across space and time. And in my mind, it is also a story about making connections and expanding our identity beyond race, religion and nationality,” says Gan, 47, who was trained formally as a painter before...

Video is hardly cutting-edge technology – not in this day and age – but for visual artist Gan Siong King, it has provided him with the ideal medium to “disrupt” art exhibitions as we know them.

It was a night filled with the hubbub of a small party. It began with the festive opening of the popular art exhibition in town, then the group moved to an open-air restaurant for supper. After feasting and drinking, I drove Gan Siong King and Chang Yoong Chia home. When we arrived at Gan’s door, his neighbor’s five dogs started to bark; this somehow extended the festive mood...

There is a line in a book written by one of our local pioneer abstract artist that was published more than ten years ago where he audaciously claimed that an artist without a studio is like a surgeon without an operating theatre. Of course, on first reading, one may understandably be put off by the sheer arrogance of that statement, made by someone who, unsurprisingly...

Even though the title of this original text is in English, it was originally written in Malay language. It is generally said that language shapes the way of thinking. Each language, whether speech or writing, has unique structures which differentiate between action of thoughts and understanding of its practitioner. This essay does not aim to tell the long tale of language, and in fact...

On 20th August 2017, four friends, Wong Tay Sy (TS), Chang Yoong Chia (YC), Tan Sei Hon (SH), and Gan Siong King (G), came together to record a conversation about some of the art projects they collaborated on 15 years ago (circa 2000 - 2004).

Hour zero I’ve smoked one hundred thousand cigarettes. A ratherconservative number. –I smokedhalf a pack in Gan’sstudio. When was this? Last month? –One hundred thousand in a decade, too much, too much of the same, which comes at a price. By now, I could have bought a painting by Agus Suwage, non? But that’s too literal –monetary –I meant, actually, the price of addiction...

The exhibition setup is simple. A much smaller white cube is constructed inside an empty warehouse to facilitate the viewing of the paintings. The scale of the white cube is dwarfed by the much larger space in the warehouse. Each of the twelve paintings shown inside, which exhibit qualities of repetition and sameness, are faithfully painted copies derived from the same photographic...

At the back of Feeka Coffee Roasters on Jalan Mesui, a staircase leads you upstairs to a new art gallery. In recent weeks, this unexpected location has drawn many art enthusiasts. The gallery’s current exhibition is Gan Siong King’s latest solo show, The Pleasures of Odds and Ends – Landscapes, Figures and Still Lifes.

Our contemporary relationship with art cannot, therefore, be reduced to a “loss of the aura”. Rather, the modern age organizes a complex interplay of dislocations and relocations, of deterritorialisations and reterritorialisations, of deauratisations and reauratisations. What differentiates contemporary art from previous times is only the fact that the originality of a work in...

'I don’t consider myself a painter,' said Gan Siong King. Yet, how elusive is this statement, when presented as a prefatory remark, it risks understating his oeuvre? It is all the more mystifying when the works exhibited in The Pleasures of Odds and Ends are all painted. But they are paintings only as they can be called ‘paintings’, and Gan is a painter only as he can be called a ‘painter’. Likewise, as suggested in the subtitle...