membangkit batang terendam

Membangkit Batang Terendam (Rising Submerged Stems) is a mixed media artwork on eight different canvases in total connected by a series of tangled yellow strings. The title was derived from an Indonesian proverb that means "to bring up something that has been long gone." That something can be anything, a people, a history, or even a name.

 

A name is something that 'labels' us as people, it's something that other people will remember or had a first impression on. The artist, living as an Indonesian born Chinese has two different family names that intertwined with each other. The Indonesian family name is 'Hasan' and The Chinese family name which is 'Huang 黃'.

 

The artwork itself talks about the relationship between those two names, where the Indonesian family name is very familiar to the artist because the name itself was attached to the artist's birth certificate. Despite given the Chinese family name, it sounds very foreign when it rolls off from the tongue because of how barely the artist hears or even uses the name. The sense of familiarity and foreignness is connected through these entangling series of strings as the other given name is slowly fading from the artist's identity.

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membangkit batang terendam was shown at The Ngee Ann Kongsi, Bencoolen Gallery, Singapore as part of NAFA Student Showcase.